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Melinda Iuster is a speech pathologist and writer, living in Santa Cruz, who was dedicated to finishing college no matter what it took. She is a long-time member of the Tuesday evening writing practice class. She wrote this piece in response to the prompt, "Something I Did to Make Ends Meet."
It started out so little, just a few computer cards. Just a box or two of used computer punch cards. I guess they were used to program very early computers in 1978. The boxes of used computer cards were stacked on the loading dock of the UC Davis physiology building... building 700. My boyfriend Dave swiped a couple of boxes occasionally as he left his lab, and brought them to a recycling center where he was paid about eight dollars. Eight dollars was a lot of money. If I try to correlate those eight dollars with today's money, it would be about eighty dollars. On those eight dollars we could either go out to dinner, or to a movie. I could afford a movie about twice a year.
"Take more cards," I would beg.
"No, Melinda, it makes me nervous."
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Enid Brock is a member of the Wednesday morning women's writing practice circle and also attends the Friday feedback class where she regularly produces wry, thoughtful essays on food, parenting, families, and domestic life. Her article, "A Real Life Reality Show" appeared in the Creative Solutions column of FamilyFun Magazine in June, 2009. This is her response to the prompt, "My Mother's Closet."
My Mother's Closet
She wasn’t a clotheshorse, my mother – still isn’t. When I was a girl, she mostly wore shorts and tee shirts and sandals she had made at the Sawdust Festival in Laguna Beach. No bra, ever. She kept her red hair short, refused to pierce her ears, and wore no jewelry at all for many years, except for the silver bangles all the women in our family wear. She didn’t even wear a wedding ring, because the jade one my father had married her with was broken beyond repair. At UC Irvine faculty parties, my father -- who was a Physics professor -- always introduced her as his friend, and people who didn’t know better assumed they had an open marriage, which they did not. But this was the 1960’s, and that is the way things were then, in the academic world.
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Gilda Zelin was a long-time member of the Wednesday morning writing practice group. She joined the group shortly after the death of her husband, Joel, and wrote her way through her grief. She published the resulting book, A Widow's Journey: A Story of Love, Loss, and Letting Go, in 2008.
Gilda wrote this piece in response to the prompt, "Tell me about a time you were in the middle of something--in the middle of sex, in the middle of the night, in midlife, in the middle of a divorce, in the middle of childbirth."
Caught Between Two Worlds
Way back in the turbulent 1960's-70's, I found myself caught between two cultures. Do I listen to my mother's advice about bringing up my children, go with my gut feelings about motherhood or tend to the yearnings of my children.
My mother, while a thoroughly modern woman in many ways, had never been able to free herself from the confined upbringing of her youth. Families must stay together. Children should live with their parents until they were married. If they wanted to go to college, definitely never out of town. Once you send your children away, you lose them. These were her beliefs. I, for one, was not allowed to go to camp, not allowed to sleep over at a friend's home, not allowed to go to an out of town college.
My children were starting to think about colleges. The heated conversations about keeping them home and their desire to break away were becoming more frequent. I was caught in the middle.
My first child, a son, won out and went to a school in Ohio, met a woman, married, raised a family and has lived there for thirty-five years.
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Gail Burk is a long-term member of the Friday morning feedback group. She is an avid genealogist and many of her stories center around family history. This piece was written in response to the writing prompt, "Hand-Me-Downs."
No matter how much money I have, and it’s generally not all that much, I’m drawn to hand-me-downs. There’s something appealing in acquiring and using things that someone else once treasured. It’s a little like cruising the bookcart of returned materials at the library, where I’m in the habit of serendipitously stumbling across items first discovered by other patrons. Not that I don’t savor the thrill of first discovery . . . it’s just the randomness of it that I like. How else to explain the wonder I felt upon first hearing the Mongolian throat singers CD, or the visceral comfort I’ve taken from running my fingers over the smooth sides of a piece of black-on-black Navajo pottery picked up at a rummage sale.
Hand-me-down living is not about the filling of closets or the accumulation of material goods. It’s about finding happy surprises in unexpected places. It’s as much about handing things off as it is about bringing new objects in . . . maybe the things I have decided to send on their way will make some other explorer smile. It’s like those paperback books travelers leave on the bench in a foreign land, to be found and perhaps read by a person unmet, then left behind on the metro, or tucked away in a night stand drawer at a rustic pension. I’ve never gone to the website that tracks these things, but I understand there is one. It’s like the sisterhood of the traveling pants so beloved by teenage girls, or a message in a bottle tossed into the sea, where it might cross paths with errant Japanese fishing floats headed for the coast of Oregon, or that crate of rubber duckies that fell off a commercial freighter several years ago and broke open, releasing the toys to bob about in the ocean, across international datelines, the equator, and even somehow navigating the arctic waters of the north pole.
In a literal sense, we hand down to our children and grandchildren the very traits that define us, and them. Our frizzy hair and double-jointed thumbs, the pug nose, the pervasive left-handedness. The thing that would tempt me most to have ten children would be my curiosity to see how many different combinations of physical characteristics and personality traits could be handed down from a single set of parents.
And maybe we hand down some of our talents and passions, too—the artists’ sense of line and color, the musician’s ear, a love of dinosaurs, the unquenchable springtime wanderlust that can only be assuaged by taking to the open road and roaming where the highway takes you until, spent by the quest, you have to stop, eat, sleep, in order to get up the next morning and do it some more. We may not always recognize these hand-me-downs, either in ourselves or our children. Mutations occur along the way, altering things just enough that they feel new and unfamiliar.
When I think about it, we are all the products of hand-me-downs. We’re the recipients of the political ideologies and religious tenets of our parents and grandparents, which we can choose to use and hand down, or elect to jettison to float away like the rubber duckies while we embrace something else. We can, and do, try to reinvent ourselves, and to some extent, we succeed. But I suspect we can never absolutely empty our metaphorical closets of all the handed-down oddments we’ve amassed. Without even thinking about it, we fold our towels in thirds because it is how we were taught, we perpetuate colloquial expressions from New England, Canada, or the Midwest, without ever having lived in those places and without knowing their origins. Generations later, we’re still using the old idioms, which imprint us with a sort of ethnic and cultural DNA which we, in turn, continue to hand down.
Maybe these intangible hand-me-downs are the most intriguing and beautiful of all; they make each of us who we are.
Gail Burk is an enthusiastic mother and grandmother. She is an artist, writer and genealogist. Gail lives with her husband in the Santa Cruz mountains. When pressed, she works part-time as a library clerk and paralegal.
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