Now, as I continue this very long story about my life, it is the 29th of February, 2000. I noticed that this narrative was started in July, 1982. I’m not the speediest writer in the world…

Today I wrote this poem:

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In looking backwards to a remembered life
The scenes are altered with passing years
Perspective, like skin, changes with time
And a history of self becomes partly fiction
with some residual truth
Then we place our experiences in categories
For ease of retrieval
So that long years become compressed
Into neatly sorted files of information tinged
with memories of regret.

January 2001

Today is the 2nd of July, 2001..This is autobiography is beginning to seem like a time machine. Only it is on fast forward all the time.

Dick and I have just returned from Tar island where we spent two great weeks with Audrey and Ben. Who, according to this account, haven’t been born yet! So I will try to return to the past with some semblance of order.

I really must try to condense some of this long account into segments of some importance. Life in the city, in an apartment, in the 1930’s was an ideal time for children. If one could avoid Polio, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, lockjaw and all other varieties of viruses and injuries.

We were a hardy group. When you got sick you went to bed without antibiotics and were coddled by mama. Another perk was listening to the soaps on the radio: Our Gal Sunday, Ma Perkins (“You’re my daughter Effie, as far as I know…”) Stella Dallas, Mary Noble: Backstage Wife..and in the evening: The Lone Ranger, I Love A Mystery, The Green Hornet, Little Orphan Annie. What amazes me now is how I remember that we stared at the radio- we not only listened, we looked! Was this an unconscious insight into the future? Were we training ourselves to look into the all-seeing eye of television?