Category: Over age fifty

The Barbizon Years

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Recently I have reconnected with a cousin who has opened the box of memories of my life with her mother and my early years in New York City. She has taken me back to earlier times and memories of good friends.

February 1960…….

Strange how I remember so much about my life in New York and living at the Barbizon Hotel for women, but for the life of me, I can’t even envision what the lobby of that hotel looked like. I close my eyes and try to take myself back, but it has no memory photo shot of the space I walked in and out of for a year. Nothing. A total blank. Pale overly thin models walked about, in and out with their black portfolios, I remember that, but I don’t even have a clue to what that space looked like.

I remember my room in great detail. Actually, not hard because the room was just a bit wider than I was tall and not much longer. One window overlooking Lexington Avenue, a single bed against the wall and a dresser on the other that I probably could access from my bed it was so close. A sink and small closet at the end of the bed. The showers and facilities were down the hall. Basically it was my expensive closet my parents paid for so that I had secure living in New York while attending the Katherine Gibbs School on Park Avenue.

But I was not alone. That’s the way we all lived. My room was not unique. Nancy DuPont, my neighbor, Alice Blair, from Los Angeles down the hall and close by to Lynn’s room, (MCA Lew Wasserman’s daughter). They were all the same. Glorified closets.

Alice would get visits from home, her mother, and high school classmates including Nora Ephron but, for me, other than my parents once, the only other visitor I had now and then was my older cousin, Carolyn, who grew up next door to me in Steubenville. Without notice she would appear.

Carolyn lived at The Barbizon when she came to New York from Ohio and was first a Conover model and then signed with the prestigious Ford Agency. So, in my eyes, she was always the celebrity in our family. I always felt special when she came. Never a hair out of place and always dressed to perfection. She made elegance look so easy. I just remember that Carolyn was so beautiful and how important she made me feel with each visit. But looking back I now realize those visits were in between times for her. She was on her way to somewhere and needed to fill those empty minutes. Why not at the place with which she had comfortable memories and a relationship. At The Barbizon with her little cousin from Steubenville.

Over five decades have now passed for all of those mentioned in my Barbizon memory box. Each would have a story, yet unfolded, yet unscripted in that year of 1960.

I have often thought if I could, if it were possible, would I want to know my future? My answer is always the same. If I had known then all that I and the characters in my Barbizon life would go through after leaving that hotel, I may not have left.

I, for one, certainly have had my struggles as chronicled in my writings. Alice has had a wonderful life, but also with a few hiccups along the way. Carolyn was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and her glamorous life evaporated. Her mystic unveiled to the world by the worst human betrayal possible-and her life ending in poverty and pain. Nora Ephron received such great heights with her talent that was cut short too soon. All things to come in the future that perhaps had we known would have paralyzed us from going forward with our unthetered souls and hopeful plans.
Copyright 2014 Sandra Hart. All rights reserved

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Memories In A Box

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In an old Balfour box (from my college jewelry days) I found a group of long-forgotten time weathered envelops addressed to me in Ohio and posted from Berlin, Germany. Letters that took me back into a world that was about to change, way beyond the innocent exchanges of my new pen pal, Ursula Thie and I. We became pen pals through a program at our Methodist Church.

February…..1953

The beginning year of our childhood correspondence was 1953. I had just turned 14 and was enjoying the freedoms of Junior High and life in a thriving Ohio Valley Steel town.

Berlin, den 27.2.1953

Dear Sandra,

I thank you for your letter. You have it write in the december and I have became it now in february. With your letter together I have become three table of chocolate, about these I was very glad. My name is Ursula Thie.

We girls here in Germany are not how you Y-tem. Our name is young community of evangelist church. In our group we are girls between 14th and 20 years. I self am 17 years old…..

I live in Berlin with my mother and my brother. My father was falling in the contention 1945.

I am 1,70m great, have blond hairs and blue eyes. When you have a photo from you please send it me.

In the winter I am going several times into a teatre, In the summer I travel out of Berlin.

Please write me in your next letter many things from you and your live. I please you, to excuse my base english. The name of the flower at this letter is bell-flower-glickenblume.

Sincerely yours,
Ursula Thie
Berlin

In my world, we had just elected a new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower and my family in January was glued to our television set watching I Love Lucy give birth. In February our president refuses clemency for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and Walt Disney’s 14th animated film, Peter Pan, arrived at our local movie theater.

In Ursula’s world, she was learning English, going to festivals where she was singing jolly songs and eating pancake, enjoying her girl’s group where they visited various denominational churches including the Russian Orthodox and the Naumburger Dom and planning ahead for a summer away from Berlin.

Little did we both know that on June 17 of that year things would change for her in East Germany.

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Who Knew?

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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.

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Through A Child’s Eyes

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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

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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.

Copyright Sandra Hart 2014. All rights reserved.

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Memories Lost

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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.

Sandra Hart Copyright 2014. All rights reserved

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A GIRL WITH MOONLIGHT IN HER EYES

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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)

Starbuck’s Soliloquy

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“Miss, what time is it?” I turned my head to see sitting at the next table an LSU ball cap fitted snugly on the top of a graying senior sipping his Starbucks. It was the day before Thanksgiving and the perfect place to hide while my family shopped in the mega-retailer, Target.

In all honestly, had this stranger not spoken to me, I would have sat there completely happy, selfishly immersed in my own cafe latte, fascinated by Nashvillians fixated on buying early for Christmas.

“I’m waiting for my wife and daughter to finish walking the stores. I have a bad hip so I’m waiting them out.” He chuckled, “I forgot my watch.”

I gave him the time.

“You from Nashville ?” he said.

“No. Visiting my son here. New Jersey.” I honestly was not in the mood to chat with the LSU ball cap.

“How about that Sandy? Did you get hit? he asked.

“No. Our house is on a 266 foot cliff above the water. Luckier than most.” I returned to my latte hoping he would get the message.

“In Louisiana we get hurricanes and tornados. My mother used to call us in and get us all dressed up when one was comin’. After, we kids would just sit there in the house and wait. Wait until she told us it was over. ”

“Didn’t you have a root cellar, or anything?” I asked, my interest in him beginning to peak visualizing such an absurd scene.

“Nope. My mother went through the hurricanes in 1916 and she lost folks. We knew in case the tornado came, in case we died, we would look nice.”

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I was hooked. “Really? I mean, weren’t you afraid if you thought that? Or if you thought she thought that?”

“Oh, I can’t say, maybe, but I was young and lived on a farm in Louisiana. Things around me were dying all the time, so just was our way…. accepting…until I got older and went to Korea,” his voice trailing off as he swizzled his coffee.

“Korea? My late husband served in that war, though he was stationed in Germany. Easier duty. He drove for the generals, I think.”

“Yeah. Well I was in the heart of it. For me, there were really two wars going on. The Civil War and Korean one. I was only three months married when I was drafted and I was the only south boy in my barracks. I brought two things with me-a picture of my wife and a small confederate flag. Two things that were important to a Louisiana country boy. ( He chuckled a bit.) Well, that flag gave me a hell of a time the minute them northern boys knew I had it. I heard the talkin’, the whisperin’ at night how they were going to get it and beat me at the same time. The Civil War was still alive. They pushed me around. I had a few fights, but they never got my flag and it went all the way with me to Korea. I carried it in my jacket pocket all through the war. You know though, when we were fighting and things got bad….we were all brothers and the Civil War ended over there. It took bad things, stuff we never talked about, to bring us all together.” His voice trailed off and he adjusted the LSU cap just at the moment my son and husband came within view around the corner.

I said my goodbyes, gave him my card and walked out of Starbucks feeling I had just put a new marble into my bag. A chance meeting with a nice man with his own interesting story to tell.

I was a young girl when the Korean War was going on. I only lived it at a distance through radio and television reports, but it had little impact on my life since none of my family were called into the draft. It is a shame how disconnected we can become when conflict is not in our own front yard. If we couldn’t see it, we didn’t have to feel it. To me, it was just something that was.

This encounter, this chance meeting in Starbucks, for me, fortifies my belief that life is chocked full of serendipitous moments. What I call a grasshopper moment appears. It quickly hops into your life and then just as fast hops away unless you are smart or fast enough to catch them. In this instance, I was initially guilty of judging a book by it’s cover- but “good ole’ boy” LSU ball cap turned out to be one heck of an interesting guy. I am so glad I caught that grasshopper moment.

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Sandra Hart, former Romper Room teacher and talk show host is an actress and author who blogs about life over fifty.

STORYTELLING

(Atlantic Highlands Elementary School is on our main street here in town and each time I pass I think of the wonderful foundation this little school with less that 300 students gave my children  when beginning their lives and still continues to do so with the children here in our Atlantic Highlands Borough. After attending a concert this weekend in New York where my son, Emerson, and the boys of Grammy nominated Tonic performed, I am remembered of the days when I waited in line to pick up my children and hearing of their adventures big and small within the rooms of The Atlantic Highlands Elementary School. I am moved to repost this blog written almost a ;year ago)

This Sunday morning on the CBS morning show, they had an interesting segment on storytelling and the resurgence of live storytelling with not only the baby boomers, but also the younger generation. More are are putting aside Facebook and other social networks to listen and create in real time.

Interesting how the universe kind of puts things in order in front of you when perhaps those things have been recently on your mind. Last week, at my son’s wedding I had been thinking about his life, the lives of my two daughters and the paths that they have walked. Whether it has been a curse or a blessing, my three children and I are creative beings, destined to create or dry up and blow away.

Sometimes, unless you get lucky, one’s creative life moves to the back shelf as an avocation instead of a vocation. Of the three of my gifted children, only my son has been lucky enough to use his creativity as his vocation.

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All of this takes me back to when he was in kindergarten. During my first conference with his teacher, I was stunned by her blunt revelation. My son was telling tall tales in school. Creating stories that were,to her, obviously untrue. I could feel the crimson creeping up my neck toward my face as I sat with my knees almost touching my chin in the kindergarten chair. It wasn’t until she continued that I became both intrigued and relieved.

“I decided that since Lee has such a creative imagination, I have given him the task of being the class storyteller. Each week I have set aside time for storytelling. He has never failed to entertain us,” she said with a smile.

Thirty-eight years have passed since that conference night. I now, so wish I could remember her name, because that was a great teacher. Instead of making my little son feel ashamed, she turned his childhood creativity and imagination into something special. And I can honestly say she was possibly responsible for the beginning of his confidence in his creativity and love of words to express his thoughts and feelings.

That young kindergartener has since grown up to be a twice Grammy nominated, Billboard Awarded, ASCAP honored singer/songwriter. A multi-platinum recording artist, movie and television theme songwriter and has been featured on over 40 recorded albums other than his own.

His genetic childhood love of storytelling grew into truths from his heart that have been embraced by millions of music fans.

This was the story I was thinking about sharing during the toast at his wedding last week, but I thought better of it. This was his bride’s day and her family’s. So I sat quietly with my heart filled with joy for all of them with my silent thoughts within my mother’s heart about that little kindergartener of mine with his entertaining imagination.

(Editors note: My oldest got into New York University through her creative writing. Brett has the special ability to write with a humorist edge and has also designed all of my book covers. Alison has written for equine magazines and is a wonderful writer and photographer.. Both are using their creative talents as avocations.)

New Jersey Myth Buster

Henry Hudson fresh springs where in 1609 entered in his diary that he and his crew drank from the water on his way up toward what is now Manhattan.

I always knew how beautiful Princeton was from my college years, but beyond that, when I thought of New Jersey, I pictured industry, smoke stacks and just plain urban industrial blight. So years ago it was with great reluctance that I gave up my career to follow my husband to New Jersey.

Well, that was forty years ago, and you will have to drag me kicking and screaming away from this Garden State. We have beautiful beaches, extensive rich farm land, horse farms, mountains for skiing and thousands of acres of trails for hiking and horseback riding. In other words, it is a hidden paradise just a few miles away from the Big Apple and all of the culture that it affords.

We live in a town that overlooks where the Atlantic Ocean and Raritan Bay meet at Sandy Hook and its hills mark the highest point on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. south of Maine.

For thousands of years, the original inhabitants were the Lenape, who lived in and along the cliffs and creeks of Atlantic Highlands. Henry Hudson and his crew drank from our springs and the Lenape traded with the Europeans and sold a group of English settlers an area that covered the entire peninsula, making them the first European residents of our present day borough. From that our borough grew into a 1.2 square mile paradise of church tent camps and eventually picturesque Victorian homes nestled among the rolling bucolic hills.

Today, from its hills and bayside, the Manhattan skyline can been seen. Out from its harbor, which is the largest on the East Coast, sail pleasure, fishing and commuter boats.

So, let those Jersey Shore kids who are not from New Jersey at all, try to give us a black eye in the land of reality television. We who live here in paradise know better.