That is my Dickensian way of describing my life. It was truly the best of times and the worst. And to exorcise demons and leave a legacy for my children, I decided to write my memoirs. It is something so easy since one is speaking from their own personal frame of reference and can be so valuable to one's family members and friends. And to one's self. Many years after the fact, I still enjoy reading my book. If you follow me below the squiggle, I'll explain more and hopefully encourage others to write their memoirs.
When I sat down and wrote the following, I had no idea it was to become a whole book.
Today I am thirty-six years and six months old. It is February 26, 1981. Twelve days ago, when I was still only thirty-six years, five months and some days, it was St. Valentine's Day. No one gave me a heart-shaped box of candy. For that matter, no one gave me any kind of box of candy. I did not get a red heart, or a corny poem or flowers. It is not because I do not have a sweetheart, for I have three, in fact. It is because my sweethearts are all Israeli and Israel is neither a Catholic country nor a commercialistic Protestant one and they do not celebrate St. Valentine's Day. No matter that we all live in Florence, Italy, which is both a Catholic and a commercialistic country, where Italian lovers do give their girlfriends heart-shaped boxes of candy for the day of San Valentino.
See how easy that was? And any of you can do that. Hopefully, what follows will be unique to only me, however, one doesn't have to have bad things happen to write an interesting memoir. As I said before, I had demons to exorcise. My uncle was the first.
When I was young, probably less than age two, I began being molested by my mother's brother-in-law, my uncle. I can't go back to a place in time when it wasn't happening, is why I think I was less than two. He was retired and became my official babysitter when my mother and her sister went places - which was often. Shopping trips, bridge parties, lunches at the country club. And no one thought to question my uncle's ability to babysit. He had been president of the Pet Milk Company, a reader in the Christian Scientists and on the Governor's Staff of Tennessee. People spoke his name in the same tone of voice they used when speaking of God. When I was eight was when I found out it was wrong and he threatened to kill me if I told anyone. I didn't until after he died when I was twelve and then people had the audacity to still speak of him as if he had been some kind of hero. Sacrificial lambs and all that, I guess. He supported too many people financially I suppose for them to worry about one little girl. A girl who was aching and dying inside. A little girl who was scared to death of life and old men and hands and fingers and who cried herself to sleep at night.
And that was only the beginning. After my uncle's death when I was thirteen my mother, father and I went to my married sister's house in South Carolina for Christmas. One day I was out playing in the woods with a bunch of boys - climbing trees, chasing each other, just twelve and thirteen tomboy kind of things. When I went in my family except for my father had gone for a ride, which left my father and me alone. He told me I was becoming a young lady and, as such, certain things were to be expected of me. And he was going to show me what to do so I would know. He promptly took me iinto the bedroom where he undressed me and proceeded to rape me. This was, by the way, my biological father. No step-father excuse. In my memoir, when I began to write about my father, this is how I wrote:
I just cleaned my typewriter and changed the ribbon. I opened the drawer of my writing desk (which is really my only desk) to see what I could find inside. There were paper clips, staples, my Hebrew-English, English-Hebrew dictionary, light blue thread, a wedding picture of Kathryn and George, dental floss, a Maybelline medium brown make-up pencil (which I don't use and don't know how it got there), a drawing of Kate's, a letter from my mother (but not the one I wanted to save so put in a special place and lost), three matches, one thumb tack, a recipe for Christmas cookies. There are many other interesting items in this drawer that I would like to describe in detail. In over-detail. I want to talk about what's in this drawer for the rest of my life and only because I don't want to talk about the time I had sex with my father.
By now if you've guessed I suffer from PTSD, you'd be right. My uncle and father were bad enough, but then there was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. When my oldest daughter Kelly was four, I worked in Atlanta for Atlas Van Lines and one day was robbed and raped by a black man with a gun. Before I go on I would like to say my daughter Kelly just told me she loved it that no matter what had happened to me she was grateful she didn't grow up in a prejudiced household. I hold no prejudice. The reason I bring his race in was I was shunned in 1966 by friends and family because I had been touched by a black man. At the time, in Georgia, a black man could get the death penalty for raping a white woman and I was ever so glad he didn't.
I was at work on March 4, 1966, doing my job of answering phones and giving moving estimates. I didn't have much to do and was able to read in my spare time and was reading the worst possible book I could have been reading. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. The robbers had just had the husband and sons in the bathroom before they killed them and that's when this young black man came in and shoved me in the bathroom while he was looking in the office for money. It turned out he was actually my age and short, and the gun made him seem ten feet tall and old enough to be very menacing. I remember standing in the bathroom, my hand across my stomach looking in the full-length mirror across from me and saying over and over, "He can't kill me, I've got a four year old daughter."
After ransacking the office and finding nothing but my pocket book with two fifty cent penny rolls in it, he got me out of the bathroom and walked me out to the warehouse where we had a crated sofa. He had me lay down on the sofa, he took off my hose and underwear, he placed the gun on my temple and lay down and raped me. The freezing cold gun was burning a hole in my head and it's only through pure luck and perhaps divine intervention that I am alive today. There was another man in the car who was to come in after my rapist was finished and take the gun, rape and kill me. But, as the first man went out to get in the car, another car drove up and scared them off. I don't know who was in the other car that drove away when they did, but they saved my life. The rape was on a Thursday morning at ten to nine and by Saturday night at eight-thirty the Atlanta police had gone to an informant and found out who did this. He served fourteen years in prison. I don't know what happened to him, I do know I didn't have a four year old daughter at my house without a mother. When I wrote the first half of my memoir, my daughter Kelly was in a hospital four thousand miles away because she had tried to commit suicide and had written to me she didn't even know what to say to me when I came to the states to get her and take her back to Florence. And this is what I was moved to write:
Oh Kelly. First child of my heart. You who are so distant from me you do not know what to say. How did this happen when all I could think was, "He can't kill me, I've got a four year old daughter."
So now you've got the worst of times and after I grew up and moved to Florence when I was thirty-one it became the best of times. I hitchhiked all over Europe, met the greatest people from all over the world, lived in a house built in 1296, went to Thailand for three weeks, wrote an advice column for an English language newspaper published in Rome, had the most wonderful lover from Israel, I even hitchhiked highly illegally from Hamburg, Germany through East Germany and into East Berlin. I'd like to stress the best of times outweigh the worst. Oh, I still have PTSD, and I doubt I'll stop being afraid of guns and sometimes the dark or doorbells ringing or strange men, etc., but I've had a glorious life and people are enjoying reading about it.
I bet any one of you reading this could write a memoir that would interest people. Write from the heart and you will find an interest. Do like I did, write it for yourself and you may be surprised at what happens afterwards. Good luck and good writing!