Commitment. Structure. Routine. These are the things that I lost in the last year. These are the things I'm giving back to myself now. I will be selfish and true. It took me years to find the value in these three words. As I'd grown up in a dramatic fashion where the value of these words were unfamiliar.
Being a bridge for myself will be renewed task and hopefully a successful one. You see, I've been a bridge person within my family when I was young, my peers as I grew older, with writers as an agent and now as a teacher with students. Now it's for myself I'm building a bridge: from aspiring writer to working writer. The work will be committing to a story, structuring it, making a daily routine and refining it over time. It's an art that I've dared not practice seriously, yet I've been helping others with the tools and craft for decades.
I learned to read and write late. Yet once I started, I haven't stopped. Story telling was a way of communicating in my household as a child. Music enhanced the stories with songs and we made up radio plays. My grandparents repeated stories to teach us our personal history and what they had learned from living the American Dream and traveling. My immediate family read books, wrote stories, listened to all kinds of music, went to concerts and stage productions of every sort. We painted, drew, burnt designs into driftwood with magnifying glasses.
My family started off small; mother, father, sister and me. After the divorce when I was 6, my mother remarried to a man with four children (two sons and two daughters), while my father remarried to a woman with two sons. Basically I went from being one of two children to being one of eight children, and from being the oldest to squarely in the middle of the pack.
We all lived in neighboring towns, Concord and Lincoln, in Massachusetts after I turned 10. From birth to 10 I lived in Bolton. The adjustment or bridging to the cultures of these two suburban towns was harsh. Instead of being judge by you physical abilities and common sense, you were judged by your wardrobe and vocabulary. During the summer we all went to Maine. In July, my sister and I were at my father's in Georgetown. In August, we moved to my mother's house in Harpswell. So six of us in July and eight of us in August.
During the school year, we went to my father's house every other weekend. Walden Pond, still a touchstone to my spirit, was the half way mark between my parents homes. My stepfather's kids lived half a mile from our front door and could come over whenever they wanted to do so.
From September to June there were lessons and classes and outings. During winter breaks we spent time skiing, skating and sledding. Traditional New England fair. In the summers we were free to explore the peninsula of Georgetown and the Island in Harpswell. We swam, sailed, rowed, kayaked, climbed, built structures, fished, picked berries and read books. With my father we sometimes climbed Katahdin and sailed on rented family friendly sail boats. With my mother,, for the first few summers we rented houses on islands in Penobscot Bay: Matinicus and North Haven. Later she bought a house on in Harpwell on Dingley Island. From there we went to see musical theater at Bowdoin and Shakespeare in Monmouth. If there was a raging storm or full moon low tide she may take us to the granite shores of Pemaquid Point or the sandbar at Popham Beach.
My sister and I bridged homes, expectations, abilities and ages. It wasn't easy. In hindsight, I see why it took us so long to form our own authentic identities. Unspoken rivalries between the additional six siblings, on top of our already fractured-by-divorce insecurities, stunted our development. Different sets of expectations in each household contributed to the internal schism. I was often either confidently carefree, manically macho, or silently pensive. My sister was better at expressing herself, and yet she struggled, too.
We have each chosen to live on the East and West Coasts during out adult lives. We've bridge and benefited by the two distinct cultures . We both were married and had out children on the West Coast, yet moved back East once our kids became school ages. I moved back to Massachusetts, after living in Maine, New York and California. She moved to Maine after living in California. I've been trying to move back to Maine ever since I left it 30 years ago (the last time I was paid for a byline). I still plan to retire there either in a small efficient house/condo or in a Golden Girl complex (Jennie and Nan, I'm not joking). My father and stepmother and one of my stepbrothers live there full-time now, too.
My mother and stepfather have retained the ritual of being in Lincoln during the Academic year, and in Maine the summer, and now some shoulder, months.
In High School I wrote about trying to bridge my different selves. The Karen of the Nazor/Murnik gang and the Karen of the Linnell household. Little did I know that in my mid-twenties, a family with six children whom we'd known since I was 7 or 8, which included a dear friend, would become additional siblings. Now I'd become one of 14 children with including the Lattimore family. Which was fine, as we were mostly independent by then, and only met for Winter holidays in Lincoln and Summer holidays on Dingley Island. But that didn't mean new kinds of bridges didn't have to be built, they did.
The dear friend was the youngest daughter, Rosette. We had chosen to bridge and weave our lives together since childhood. Through words and drawings sent through the mail we stayed close. Having six siblings each, we developed a coded language, so that nosey sibs couldn't read our letters; we each held the key for years. I still have bundles of the letters and cards in box in my room. She went to prep school with one of my Linnell sisters, and then we overlapped briefly in NYC after College. We both spent a lot of time in the Bay Area, and when I became engaged, she became pregnant and moved to Eugene, OR to be with the father. We resorted to mostly seeing each other in Maine in the summers and sending emails to each other. We coordinated being in Maine so the cousins could know each other and we could stay current. The last summer in Maine we kayaked around the island and the kids splashed about in the canoe. We shared bathing suits and clothes as we were the same size. She had always been a teacher, of music, and I was new to being and English teacher. She was very generous with ideas and praise. She was a phenomenal teacher, choir director, piano player, mother to her son and sister to all. At Thanksgiving we learned that she'd been sick and upon investigation, it was discovered that she had appendix cancer. She made it home for March, for her father's/my stepfather's 80th Birthday party. She never made it to Maine again. Having helped friend die (of Aids/Cancer/Heart disease), we had discussed me coming to her where she "felt the time was right". I went when she called. Our last outing was to a river, where we waded in the water and through our lives together. She asked me tough questions and I made her promises regarding her son, who I adore. She medically shouldn't have been alive for as long as she survived, but her spirit was fighting to reach her son's 16th birthday. After she achieved that, she died a month later (a month before Thanksgiving...she didn't want to taint the holidays).
Her friendship bridged all kinds of odds. One of the tough questions she asked in the river was "when are you going to let yourself be the writer, instead of helping everyone else"?
For my children, students and Rosette, I must start building/writing stories that can bridge my experience into something useful for others.
(I started this yesterday, but finished today. After grading, I may write a short piece just for today).
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