The Story of my life
The Story of my life
My Journal At Forty
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
I started keeping hardback journals forty years ago, on February 1, 1977. I was at the beginning of my adult life and ready to take on the world.
Recently graduated from college, I had returned to Boston after a brief hiatus in New York. I had thrown my white suitcase into my AMC Javelin and zoomed up to Burlington, Massachusetts the day after a hurricane. I was going to stay at my friend Leona’s place until I found my own apartment. She was living with her boyfriend, anyway. Unfortunately, the boyfriend chose the night I arrived to give Leona the old heave-ho. I didn’t want to spend too much time on somebody’s living room couch, so I left the next day and stayed at the home of a virtual stranger for the next two weeks – until I got scalded in her shower and pissed her off by accidentally un-Koshering her kitchen.
While I looked for new housing, I started my first nine-to-five job, working as the assistant manager of a wholesale travel corporation down in Boston’s Combat Zone. My primary responsibility was cleaning up the manager’s morning nosebleeds, brought on by his daily dose of cocaine. The whole place turned out to be an international drug trafficking operation and my boyfriend was their fence. But, I stuck around long enough to travel and to make a life-long friend, Linda, who now lives in Trumbull, Connecticut.
I ended up moving into a house in Newtonville, populated by a variety of Brandeis students. The house was owned by an elderly Italian lady named Stella Iafrate. She stopped by once a month to collect the rent. We would sit at the kitchen table and talk. She once asked me if I would write her life story, but, apparently, I was only able to write my own.
I lived with two women on the top floor; there was a group of guys on the main floor; and there were two Puerto Rican sisters in the basement. When I first moved in, one of my roommates was living with a guy but he soon left for Quito, Ecuador on a Fulbright Scholarship. You never knew who was going to end up in your bed. Another life-long friendship was born on Walnut Street in the form of my roommate, Heidi. Heidi ended up marrying the guy with the Fulbright. He had the same last name as I. She went to medical school and became a pediatrician and he became an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank in Cleveland.
The fence from the travel corporation wasn’t my only boyfriend. I was also seeing a guy who was studying medicine at New York Medical School, whom I had met several years before. And some artist named Jeff. And some doofus named Marvin.
But, I wasn’t serious about any relationships back then. According to my first journal entry, “Work was my whole life. Work and chores and lunch hours.”
By the time I had started my first journal, I had already written a children’s book named Marvin Shudbee (inspired by my boyfriend with the same first name). Marvin Shudbee was about a rather depressed turtle in a three-piece suit who had a mental breakdown because every time he did something, he thought he “shudbee” doing something else.
Once I got to Boulder, my big plan was to relocate to the Rockies and develop my own charter company and have it subsidized by the travel corporation in Boston. My other goal was to get Marvin Shudbee illustrated and published. Jeff, the artist, was going to illustrate it for me but he envisioned Marvin as a frog instead of a turtle. We had creative differences. And publishers deemed the story too sophisticated for children. Jeff did give me copies of Stuart Little, The Phantom Tollbooth and The Wind in the Willows to inspire me further but I never wrote another story for kids.
I was getting marriage proposals but I wasn’t in love. One cousin was getting divorced. One great aunt, who was living with my widowed grandfather, had had a heart attack. My grandfather had phlebitis in one of his legs. One cousin was being tested for hypoglycemia. Another cousin was in jail. I was contemplating printing up a copy of Marvin Shudbee for my niece – if I could only find some typing paper. And I had had a strange dream in which I was about to absorb her and bring her back to life again.
I wrote, “My ideals slide up and down with my moods.”
And that’s where I was at forty years ago.
I never did move to Boulder, although I still go there regularly. I never did get Marvin Shudbee published. Within a month of my first journal entry, I left the travel corporation and began to write for Polaroid in Cambridge. As I left the travel corporation for the last time, I bought my first pair of overalls on Washington Street on my way to the T. Shortly after that, I left Newtonville and moved into my own apartment in Brighton. It overlooked the Charles River where I used to go to write and draw. I met my first husband, Geoff, through Linda’s brother, George, a recently-graduated law student who moved downstairs from me. Geoff was a writer and educator in the music business. We weren’t meant to be but I ended up joining him in Atlanta, where I needed to be for the next chapter of my life.
The next chapter included falling in love, losing my only child, getting divorced from Geoff and marrying my soulmate, Grant, losing family, watching too many loved ones die, building an excellent career, leaving Atlanta, moving to Santa Fe and writing books.
What would the older Mindy have to say to the younger Mindy? She would say, “Go the course, kid. Keep an open mind and a kind heart. Have courage and don’t commit too many sins of omission and life will take you where you need to go.”
I was going to stop keeping journals on February 1, 2017. But why would I do that? There’s still a world to take on.
Not only do my journals tell the story of my life, they have also saved my life over and over again. All that soul searching, all those confessions, all that pain and all those realizations brought me to a deep understanding of myself, even when I couldn’t stand to look. I’ve never had a better friend or a more daunting enemy.
© Copyright 2017, Mindy Littman Holland. All rights reserved.