Why this blog?

Around 25 years ago, I convinced my grandmother to write a memoir. Naturally, it was in pen on (gasp) paper. That, of course, would never do. I was blinded by new technology. I was an idiot. I convinced (read "paid") my daughter, Miriam, to type Bubbie's manuscript up on my Commodore 64. Then, to make matters worse, I edited the typescript. Then I printed it out and had it copied and bound.

Now, the actual original manuscript, what Bubbie actually wrote with her own hand, is lost forever. It's probably somewhere in the house, but that pretty much counts as lost forever.

Now, I'm at that age. My kids have not asked me to do this, but I'm doing it anyway. I'm still amused enough by technology that I don't want to do a handwritten manuscript. I also don't think I can achieve the kind of dramatic impact that Bubbie managed with a formal autobiography. So, instead, I'm doing a blog with random memories from the past and the present scattered in a disorganized way.

This blog is linked to my two other blogs.

http://henryandcarolynsecondhoneymoon.blogspot.com/ is the blog I started when I came down with cancer and pretty much stopped when Carolyn died.

http://henryfarkaswidowerblog.blogspot.com/ is the blog I started after Carolyn died; when I decided to continue blogging.

For what it's worth, there's a search engine attached to this blog right below this intro. That won't be worth much initially, but if this blog gets long and stays disorganized, then my kids and their kids will be able to use the search engine to find stuff if they're interested.

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Thursday, July 1, 2010

Which Mask Should I put on Today?

Writing / Cancer support group 6/30/10

Topic: In the closet of my mind, I have many masks. Sometimes I wonder which to put on.
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Not sure if this is on topic, but it brings to mind an experience I had in high school.

I went to a high school that had many more girls than boys. Back then, there were four gender segregated high schools in Baltimore. Most of the boys in my neighborhood went to one or the other of them, City or Poly. I was uninterested in taking the bus to school. I'd done that for junior high school, and I was done with that. So I went to Forest Park High School which was around four blocks from where I lived.

I was invited to join a class, called the enriched class, for people who were interested in learning more than what was in the standard curriculum, and I joined that class. Because of the gender imbalance in the entire school, I was the only boy who opted to join that class. There were eighteen girls in the class, and me. We took most of our classes together.

Since it was a class for smart kids, and snobbery was rampant in our class, we all figured that we were smarter than all the other kids, but there was a smartness pecking order within our class, too. Carolyn was in that class, and she was in the top tier on the smartness scale, but you had to figure it out. She didn't flaunt her IQ. The girl who made it quite clear that she was in that top tier was Margie, and it was certainly true that she was in the smarter section of our smart group.

I was somewhere in the middle of the pack, and I found that a bit intimidating. I was also quite shy about talking to girls. Somehow, I thought they'd be bored with whatever I had to say. So the mask I wore was one of aloofness. I tried to make it seem as if the reason I wasn't talking to the girls much was that they didn't have anything to say that would be of interest to me.

Because we were snobs, we'd have class parties that included only the people from the enriched class so I was the only boy there. The girls would all be chattering away, laughing, and giggling in their high pitched high school girl voices, and I'd just sit around quietly and eat the party snacks.

The mask issue happened at one of those parties. Margie came up to me and started asking me questions about my life, and about my plans for the future. I was amazed that she was interested in anything about me. The mask came off, and I started answering her questions. Like most boys, and men, it turned out that I enjoyed talking about myself. Still do. Hence this blog. The party got quiet, and all the girls were listening to Margie essentially interview me. It was an amazing experience. It turned out that all I had to do to get girls to be interested in talking to me was to just take off the mask and be myself. What a concept.
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Off topic entirely, there was another of the class parties where we were all playing dodge ball in the back yard when, suddenly one of the girls on the other side of the yard sat down suddenly, a bunch of the other girls near her crowded around her, and one of them came over to me and told me to just stay where I was and sit down on the grass, which I did. Nobody was telling me what had happened across the yard, but, although I didn't have the terminology at the time, I figured it was a wardrobe malfunction. One of the girls went into the house, brought something to the girl sitting on the ground across the yard, and a few minutes later, the game started up again. What's mildly amusing about that episode is that Carolyn walked up to me after everything had settled down, and she said that she'd explain to me what happened in thirty years, after we'd been married for a long enough time.

I wasn't dating Carolyn, or anyone, while I was in high school. I have no idea how she knew we'd get married, but we did, and on our thirtieth anniversary, Carolyn did tell me what happened, and it was a wardrobe malfunction as I'd suspected.
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