Carolyn Meyer

I haven't written in this journal for almost 21 months. My excuse is that I've been too busy writing. GIRL WITH A CAMERA came out earlier this month, but long before that I had begun work on the next project, a novel based on the life of the American painter, Georgia O'Keeffe.

But that's not all I've been doing. I've been coming up with ideas and having them shot down almost as fast as I put them out there. This is something every writer deals with at some point in the writing life: you have ideas, you draw up the proposal with sample chapters, maybe you even write the book, and then you send it to your literary agent, or to an editor you've worked with for a long time, or maybe somebody you don't know at all, and you hope for the best. Sometimes it works. Many times it doesn't. So you try again--submit it to a new place, or try a different idea. You try not to get discouraged, but it's hard not to.

A couple of my ideas are out there now. Maybe they'll be accepted; maybe not. Whatever happens, I'll try again. That's what writers do. Read More 

I was cleaning out a box this morning when I found a silver ID bracelet, heavily tarnished, so scratched and worn that I could hardly make out the engraved initials: H.V.M. That would be my father, gone now for fifty years. On the back are more initials, L.B., with decorative curlicues. That would be the girl who gave it to him, eighty years ago: Lavinia Buckwalter. But he didn’t marry Lavinia. He married my mother instead.

I know a little about Lavinia. In 1929, Vic Meyer had graduated from college with a degree in engineering and gotten a job with the telephone company in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was certainly not cut out to be an engineer. In college he’d been active in the theater group, and in Harrisburg he joined the local company and played leading man roles. That’s when he met Lavinia. I was about twelve when I found some of the love letters she’d written when he was about to go on stage in a new production. I don’t know if she was an actress, but on that occasion she was in the audience, silently cheering him on. The letters were stashed between the leaves of a photo album, along with her photograph—she was a stylish beauty—and newspaper clippings about his performance. (Check out his photo on the “My Life” page.)

At some point she cared enough about him to give him the engraved bracelet. And at some point they broke up. The telephone company transferred him sixty miles away to Lewistown and he met a church organist named Sara Knepp and married her. Lavinia, oddly, also moved to Lewistown; she married a man who sold tombstones.

Decades passed, and my parents lives ended. After my mother died, I found a trunk with some of my father’s old belongings. The silver ID bracelet was among them, and something even more interesting: the diary he kept when he was a college student and in love with a girl named Peg McGeary. Peg didn’t love him as much as he loved her, and toward the end of his senior year she told him she was going to marry a med student from Pittsburgh. He didn’t know that Lavinia would come along and mend that broken heart.

I used my father’s diary as a basis for my novel, THE SUMMER I LEARNED ABOUT LIFE, published in 1983. Now I’ve polished the silver ID bracelet and fastened it on my own wrist. There must be a story here somewhere. Read More 

I was sixteen when I got my first job, a typist at a radio station for fifty cents an hour. I got the job because Lewistown, Pennsylvania, was a small town where everybody knew everybody and my dad, a businessman, knew the manager of the station.

My job was to make copies of the commercials that were being run on the air; I think it was a government requirement. In the process of copying them, I learned what a commercial was supposed to be, and after a couple of weeks, my boss suggested that I try writing some of the ads myself. If Wolf Furniture was running a special on dining room sets, I’d get the information from their newspaper ad. By the end of the summer I could knock out an acceptable advertisement for almost any client who bought airtime.

The job ended when school started, but the next summer I was back at the radio station. A woman named Rita had an afternoon program in which she reported birthdays and anniversaries and other bits of small town news; she also called on sponsors and collected the information for their ads. When Rita went on vacation, I took over her job—visiting the customers, writing up the birthday news, and then reading the news and the ads on the air.

The summer I turned eighteen a new radio station opened in a nearby country town. I was hired to write all the ads for the new sponsors, who turned out to be businesses that catered to local farmers. I wrote ads for manure spreaders and egg washers and chicken feed. That fall I left for college, certain now that my future lay in advertising—maybe in television!

The following summer I decided that I didn’t want to hang around Lewistown or my home. Instead I went to Ocean City, NJ, and got a job as a waitress in a diner near the boardwalk. It seemed exciting and possibly romantic, until the first morning when the cook loaded my arms with platters of bacon and eggs and side dishes of toast and sent me flying through the swinging doors from the kitchen to the table where my first customers—my parents—waited. Crash! End of job, end of excitement and romance, and back to my hometown, and another summer of working in radio.  Read More 

Efforts have been made to encourage me to become athletic, if not an athlete, and all of the efforts have failed. I did learn to ride a bicycle when I was a kid, , but I was clumsy on roller skates—there were no sidewalks in our neighborhood—and didn’t get any better even when skating parties were a part of junior high social life. I was terrible at anything that involved throwing, catching, or hitting a ball, and naturally I was never chosen to be on a team, even when the teacher said I should be allowed six strikes (there was no chance I’d hit it no matter how many strikes I was allowed). Also, I was a clumsy runner. All of this meant that I hated recess, because I was so terrible at the games other kids loved.

In junior high I was forced to take gym classes and did my best to find excuses for NOT taking gym classes. Scared to death of tumbling (I couldn’t even turn a somersault) and all forms of gymnastics, awful at field hockey and basketball. Then I heard a rumor that you had to be able to stand on your head in order to graduate from high school, and for years I lived in fear that I would be the first straight-A student denied a diploma for not being able to stand on her head.

I thought college would be better. It wasn’t. During my freshman year I aced all my courses except for a B in physical education. Sophomore year was more of the same. It ruined my GPA.

A few years after college I fell in love and took up skiing but never got past the bunny slopes. Later, someone talked me into trying ice skating, with predictable results. My mother had once sent me for golf lessons, which, naturally, didn’t take (she wasn’t good at sports either), and years later, still trying to find a socially beneficial sport, I signed up for tennis lessons. After a few weeks of whiffing the ball and hearing the instructor repeatedly yell, “Keep yer eye on the BALL!” I gave that up, too. Sometime in my forties I learned to ride a horse, sort of, but gave it up after I fell off and creaked around for weeks. I also swam a lot, but not very well, and developed a chlorine allergy.

But now, finally, after all these years—decades!—I’ve found something I like: walking. I walk every morning, usually close to four miles. I even have a Fitbit to keep track of my mileage, including whatever else I rack up on a treadmill at the gym. Yes, I go to a gym, an hour three times a week, and work in a desultory fashion on my abs, pecs, delts, glutes, quads. It’s mindless, and I like that. I admire the guys and their tattoos. I have a few gym buddies.

I wish my old gym teacher could see me now. Even if I still can’t stand on my head.  Read More 

I was a picky eater when I was a child. Most kids are. My mother didn’t like to cook and had no interest in trying anything new, so we ate well-done meat and I pushed aside the overcooked vegetables, except corn and tomatoes. Iceberg lettuce made an occasional appearance. Applesauce was acceptable, and I loved strawberries from the garden in summer.

Just don’t serve me anything strange—like spaghetti and meatballs. Too spicy.

Forget sauerkraut (too sour), a family favorite. On New Year’s Day my grandmother served it with roast pork. “A pig roots forward, and a chicken scratches backward,” and therefore on January 1st we ate pork (no chicken--not even an egg) for luck and prosperity. Sauerkraut was also on her table on September 29th, Goose Day, a feast peculiar to a very small area of Central Pennsylvania. Nobody could explain why, but I learned years later that September 29th is Michaelmas—St. Michael’s Day—when farmers paid their quarterly rents to the landowners. “Quarter days,” as they were called, originated in England, and apparently the custom carried over to Pennsylvania. How the goose got involved, I’m not sure—maybe the poor bird was part of the rent. But my Pennsylvania Dutch (actually Deutsch: German) family faithfully observed it, ate goose and wished for good fortune in the year that followed.

My food pickiness continued unchallenged until my parents took me to New York City when I was in junior high. My father had come home from World War II with a taste for French and Italian food, and he proposed eating in a French restaurant. Somehow I was coaxed to order coq au vin—chicken in red wine with mushrooms and little onions. I ignored the mushrooms and onions, of course, and approached the chicken with trepidation. What a revelation! I was a convert. My dad bought me a little French cookbook, and although I didn’t attempt any of the recipes then, I started to see food in a new way. A revolution had begun. Read More 

My mother was a pianist, the graduate of a conservatory of music, and had several pupils. My father met her when she was the church organist and he moved to town and joined the choir. It was assumed that I would inherit their musical genes.

My mother was my first piano teacher. She showed me the black and white keys, told me their names, taught me how to put my thumb on middle C and play the scale. When her friend came to visit, I was invited to show off: “Play C scale for Aunt May,” she said. After a couple of failed attempts, it was obvious that I couldn’t find middle C for my starting point. Mother asked for an explanation, since I had known it only a day earlier.
It turned out that I had marked the key with a booger, and she had washed the piano keys and removed my marker.

Maybe, she decided, I’d do better with a regular teacher. Every Thursday I went to Mr. Prettyleaf’s house for a lesson. I practiced, and I improved. Then the time came for the student recital at the end of the year. I can still picture the hall with folding wooden chairs and a baby grand piano. I remember my yellow eyelet dress and my black patent maryjanes. I remember the song I’d worked hard to memorize, “Irish Pipers,” and my hands sweating as I sat in a little room behind the stage, waiting my turn.

I also remember that there was a point in the music when I was to repeat part of the first section and then take the second ending. But something happened; my mind went blank—I could not remember the second ending, and so I played that first section again, missed the second ending again, repeated the first section another time, my hands perspiring, the keys slippery with sweat, until finally I simply stopped, stood up and bowed, and promised myself I’d never again play in a recital.

I’ve kept the promise.  Read More 

My mother really knew how to dress. She wore elegantly tailored suits with hats and gloves and made sure the seams of her stockings were straight, and of course she wore a girdle. Several times a year my parents attended dinner dances, and I loved to watch them get ready for these events, my father in a tuxedo and my mother in a formal gown. My favorite was pale blue lace with an off-the-shoulder neckline. For such special occasions she stuffed "falsies" in her bra.

But my mother's excellent taste did not seem to extend to me. My clothes were ugly. I thought so then, and I think so now. My mother chose my clothes, and I always seemed to end up with something green or yellow and unflattering. Left on my own, I tended to go overboard. My mother had bought me a "Gibson Girl" outfit, a high-waisted velvet skirt and a plaid blouse with puffy sleeves. I decided that a lace handkerchief pinned to the sleeve would be a nice touch. The idea was promptly vetoed. (Okay, she was right about that.)

Here I was, at the start of seventh grade and begging for a brassiere. Mother argued that I had no need for one, but finally she relented and passed on some of her old ones, which I stuffed with hankies. I wore nylon stockings to church; on the Sunday I was confirmed I worried all through the service that my uncomfortable garter belt would fail, and my nylons would wind up puddling around my ankles.

And the hair? My mother had beautiful naturally curly hair, but mine was dead straight. Every night I wound my hair in pincurls held in place with bobby pins or settled for a home permanent. ("Which twin has the Toni?" was a popular ad campaign of that era, showing two girls—one supposedly with natural curls, and her identical sister with a Toni home permanent.)

Then I had a home ec course at school and learned to operate a sewing machine, producing an apron after one semester of stitching and ripping out the stitches. But I was not deterred. I bought myself a Singer with birthday money and set out to sew my own clothes. I don’t even want to think about some of the weird items I made and actually wore--until my mother intervened again. Read More 

The war was over, and our family got back to normal. I still didn't enjoy school. My fourth grade teacher terrified me, because she taught by whacking kids with a yardstick when they gave a wrong answer, and I didn't want to get whacked.

I still couldn't hit or catch a ball, or win a race, or hold on when the kids played "Red Rover." But, boy oh boy, could I read (the fifth grade teacher had me tutor kids who couldn't), do multiplication and long division, answer every question about the Boston Tea Party, and win spelling bees. Naturally, this earned me the derision of the other kids, who dubbed me "Professor Pisspot."

I discovered boys, another lost cause, since in addition to my social liabilities I was the only child in my school with glasses, and I was going to have to wear braces to correct my buck teeth. Dreams of being a Cosmopolitan cover girl were doomed. My mother's ladies' magazines triggered romantic daydreams that involved white satin wedding gowns, and I wondered if I'd ever get a chance to wear one.

I'd gotten very curious about sex and asked a lot of questions that my mother wouldn't answer, and so I made stuff up and solemnly passed around my misinformation as scientific fact. Nobody else knew much, either.

I was glad to be leaving my country grade school but worried about what was coming next. My parents decided not to send me to the rural high school but to enroll me in the junior high school in town. At least I wouldn't have to ride a school bus--my dad would drop me off every day on his way to work.

Professor Pisspot was scared to death. Read More 

With no brothers or sisters, a father overseas in the Air Force, and not much skill at getting along with other kids, I might have been a lonely child. But I wasn’t. I had a dollhouse. I had a playhouse that had once been a chicken coop. I had a little dog, Domino, that I dressed in doll clothes. And I had a radio, and that radio—much more than books at that age—was a door to another world.

Every afternoon at 5 o’clock I tuned in to “Hop Harrigan, Ace of the Airwaves” and then acted out that day’s developments, embellishing them with my own ideas. In the early part of the war, a friend of my mother’s came to stay with us for a few months with her two daughters, both younger than I, and I enlisted them in my scenarios. I played the part of Hop Harrigan, of course, but Nancy, age 6, could be Gail Nolan, a nurse and possibly Hop’s love interest, or Tank Tinker, his sidekick. Linda, age 4, was always cast as the enemy, Japanese or German, depending, until we captured her and made her stay under the card table, a POW.

Later, there was “Baby Snooks,” played by Fanny Brice. My only cousin, Harold, in his teens, began to call me Snooks, a nickname that stuck for much too long. And Red Skelton, and Fibber McGee, and all those soap operas: Mary Noble, Lorenzo Jones, Ma Perkins. When I began to think about being a writer someday, it was writing radio scripts that I saw in my future—not books.

But meanwhile, we had a war to fight! I got a Junior Commando armband to wear on my snowsuit and tried, without success, to enlist classmates to march with me. I had a plane identification chart, so I’d know if our little Pennsylvania town was under attack from Zeros or Messerschmitts. I saved tin cans and used my allowance to buy 25-cent War Stamps to paste into War Bond booklets.

And then, at last, the war was over, and my daddy came home. Read More 

When I was a little girl, my father used to tell me bedtime stories, and that, I believe, is how I learned to make things up.

I didn’t much like kindergarten. I was an only child, wore glasses, and had no idea how to get along with other kids. At Halloween my mother dressed me in a clown suit, and I was put at the tail end of the parade through Miss Keller’s dining room and parlor and into the sunporch that served as our classroom. Leading the parade was pretty, curly-haired Janie, in a pink fairy costume with a little crown and a wand with star at the end of it. I dropped out soon after that.

First grade was also miserable. I hated recess and refused to go outside and play with kids who ran and yelled and threw balls. That was when I learned to read. I don’t remember, but it must not have been a struggle, like learning to ride a two-wheeler or to roller skate. I do remember the books I loved: "Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue," a series about insufferably good children; "The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew," a family that was poor but always happy, no matter what; and the "Uncle Wiggily" series, about an elderly rabbit with rheumatiz and his muskrat housekeeper, Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy. All of these books had been published long before I was born. Somebody must have given them to me—probably my grandparents, who also gave me a lot of Bibles (Pop-pop Meyer was a Bible salesman.)

I also remember learning to write—that is, to form big, squarish capital letters and then to string them together to form what I believed were words. My mother preserved some of those early attempts. A favorite word was “interrupted,” which I translated as INARAPDAD.

Then, in the middle of first grade, everything changed. We came home from church one Sunday and turned on the Philco radio to listen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It was “inarapdad” by news that upset my parents tremendously: the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I had no idea what that meant, but six months later my father enlisted in the Air Force and was gone for the next three years. Read More