February 19, 1965

He don't; let the misery begin.

February 19, 1965

he don't

I dood it - I went to a dance - and wasted a quarter! He doesn't like me! (That's V, I mean!) He teased me - silently, of course! He danced with just about every girl in the room except me and then would come over near me - and get a drink of water! I'm so mad at myself! I met a fellow-sufferer - another girl who likes V. Oh, I just want to cry! I love him so much and I'd give just about anything to dance with him. Just to have his arms around me.

I LOVE HIM

February 19, 1997

Did I have a happy childhood? Yes, no, and sort of. On the surface, to my friends and teachers, my life had its ups and downs, neither very large of completely insignificant. Pleasant, challenging, ordinary. To those who knew my secrets - my family and closest friends, the answer was often no. My mother’s illnesses and neediness, my father’s infidelities and anger, my great feeling of loss when removed from Nebraska, my anguished yearning for love and acceptance, the answer may be that I had more misery than joy. 

But my inner life - the life of imagination - was wonderful. My ability to “lose myself” in books was a blessing. I imagination - aided and abetted so often my my brother’s even more fertile brain - took me out of my unhappy home life so often!! So I think of myself as a child, and I want to go back and tell her that things will work out, and that her life will be even better than she imagines.

February 19, 2023

You knew how the saga would end, didn’t you? Didn’t we all? If he told the story, he might remember me, as the girl who spent the entire dance standing by the water fountain and stared at him every time he stopped for a drink. He danced with the girls he knew, mostly seniors. Perhaps the “fellow sufferer” I met went home and wrote in her diary about the humiliation of finding someone else crying in the girls’ room and realizing they both had a crush on the same guy. So begins weeks of angst, torment, and awakening. 

And yet beneath all of this adolescent anguish, which seems so laughable almost sixty years later, was the reality I wrote about in 1997. Notice that in the midst of the worst decade in my life, life was good. I was learning!

A few hours after I wrote that, I wrote this:

The Middle, take two

My father died at seventy-three,
My mom at seventy-five.
In May this year, I’ll be seventy-four.
The middle again, and alive.
(So far)