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Excerpt by Joan Cartwright
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Rated "G" by the Author.
IN PURSUIT OF A MELODY - Chapter I
A run, run, run, run, run away!
Romance has consumed the better part of the 493,000 hours I’ve lived and there’s a song for every love in my life. My parents wrote love letters to each other, while serving in the Armed Forces. Mom let me read them and they were poetry! Their love letters were really beautiful and testified to the fact that they were in love with each other. As a child, I loved boys.
Georgie Porgie, lemon and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry!
• George, the white boy in our neighborhood always smiled at me and I back at him. He may have given me my first kiss.
• Bobby Blackburn died of leukemia, without knowing I loved him.
• Ronald, down the street, was always happy to see me when I could come out to play. His brother, Henry was cool, too. One of them is dead, though I’m not sure which one.
• I had a small crush on John Fong, the very tall Chinese boy that lived down the block on the other side. Of course, he never knew.
• Morgan Carroll shied away. After saying to me, “I like you,” all I said was, “excuse me, what did you say?” and he was gone, out of my life, forever! He didn’t come to the class reunion, 20 years later. Another school chum who had definitely kissed me while we were in the 7th grade, filled in, romantically, but he was a devoted husband, by then, and I knew it wasn’t going anywhere.
• Lacy lived in Rye, NY, where we visited my mother’s cousin for a summer. He had a crush on me and gave me the sweetest velvet pouch with perfume and powder in it that I think he lifted from his Mom. But he could have bought it at Woolworth’s. He was 11 months younger than me and I didn’t go with boys younger than me, at that time. I think I broke his heart. But, I’m sure he got over it. I was 11.
• Ralph Reyes was my first official steady boyfriend, when I was 14. That lasted a record four months. As soon as he found out I wasn’t putting out, he was out. He’s dead.
• My last dating exercise was with my kids’ Dad, Peter, who courted me for one year, until I decided I was ready to find out what SEX was all about. We found out and named it Michael, got married and lasted 3 years, long enough to have one more love child – Michele.
Darby and Joan, who used to be Jack and Jill. . .the folks who live on the hill.
The long march is what I was looking for, so I thought. But it turned out that each of the romantic episodes in my life were just that – episodes, chapters, one leading to the next with no obvious pattern. Four failed marriages and four live-in relationships later, I feel I’ve learned so much from all of the relationships I’ve had. I really wouldn’t have my life any other way.
I did it my way!
I’m free from the notion that some knight in shining armor is going to show up at my doorstep and sweep me away to some balmy island in the sun to caress me until I close my eyes for eternal sleep. I AM sure that it’s my responsibility to care for me. Romance or no romance, my happiness is my responsibility, ‘cause when you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you!
My life is a result of choices and decisions I’ve made, perhaps, in past lives, perhaps, in spirit, and in this present life situation. I don’t hold my parents, children, relatives, friends or associates responsible for any of the flack I’ve taken in life. These were situations that I chose to experience in order to learn the lessons I needed for personal growth. A jealous lover, a doting parent, a rebellious child all proved to be there for ME to learn something, even as those souls are learning, too. It’s not that I AM a ME, ME, ME type. It’s that I know I AM the creator of my universe and that no one can do anything in my Universe without my permission.
When I was 17, it was a very good year. . .
Of course, I didn’t know this at 19, when I accepted the first divorce papers from my brother-in-law. Happily, I divorced my first husband because he cheated and left me alone a lot with his two children and I just didn’t see the sense of that. So, I didn’t contest the divorce on the grounds of abandonment, which was real because the fourth time I left him was FINAL, in my mind. I’d taken a good shot at the marriage and it had failed, and I accepted that and moved on to the next EPISODE – a man in an unhappy marriage who adored me as much as I adored him. That lasted six years and died a horrible death, two weeks after we married, when I turned 25. Six years of bliss was followed by three years of miserable marriage. Yecch, marriage sucks. It was ten years before I entertained the subject, again.
The first two were older, one by two years, the second by ten. The third marriage, I was 37. Joe Louis Allen (Pete) was 16 years my junior. For six months, he lied to me about his age, until the day we got married, when he made a teary confession that he was only 21, not 25. I was stuck with him until his paternal urge pried him away from me and to the mother of his child.
The story of Ron Hull, paralyzed in a surgical accident back in the dreaded polio epidemic days, was able to overcome most of the stigma and stereotypes and "pass for normal" for 30 years. As Ron's paralysis increased gradually through the next 20
