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Thursday, February 18, 2016

INTRODUCTION

      After my first book, Take My Ex‑Husband, Please‑‑But Not Too far, was published by Little, Brown and Company in 1991, I began to think about a sequel.  Readers said they enjoyed my memoir but some added that they were left with questions.  They deduced that a lot had been left unsaid, and they wanted to know more about the Malley family.
      My diaries and letters were a source of ample material for such a sequel.  In my opinion, letters have every bit as much sentimental and historical value as photographs or home movies.   When we take pictures of our family, we don't look at them and then throw them away.  We know they're a record of the way our kids and parents and uncles and aunts looked and acted at various ages. 
      Letters are more perishable.  The chances are that even the most provocative or humorous  or touchingly forlorn message will be enjoyed or wept over and then discarded.  The record is destroyed and soon forgotten.  But if you keep copies of your letters, both sent and received, you gradually accumulate an album that depicts your family in writing instead of photographs. Moreover, casting a letter into a mailbox is like casting bread upon the water.  With a little luck, your correspondent will keep flowing the exchange of ideas and adventures.
      My mother, children's poet Ernestine Cobern Beyer, was my first long‑term correspondent.  Later, daughters Kathie and Vonnie became faithful letter‑writers, adding their youthful  self‑ portraits to our family history.  Their brothers, Ted and Tim, also contributed letters from time to time—Ted’s, laconic and reserved, Tim’s, open and extroverted.      
     Vonnie was not a scholar like Kathie; she was twenty before she became an avid reader.  She had always had a flair, however, for dashing off breezy letters, original in content and spelling.  As she matured, so did her writing skills, blossoming into a style uniquely her own. 
     This manuscript might never have made it off the floor of my study if Kathie, a professor of psychology at Boston University, hadn't gone on sabbatical.  "How are those chapters coming, Mom?" she asked me one day.  "I'll be ready to start looking at them in two weeks."

     This was the impetus I needed to glue my nose to my computer  (in my day it was a grindstone) and begin assembling chapters for this new memoir.

Captured Music

Breaking upon the shore, the bright waves leap
And play until the ebb-tide backward wells,
Leaving the lonely sand in silence, deep,
Save for the captured music of the shells.
Thus long ago, my children came to me,
And stayed until life bade them to depart,
Yet still upon the sands of memory
Their vanished laughter lingers in my heart.
                                   Ernestine Cobern Beyer


     This isn’t what our house looked like when we moved in, after buying it for $12,500 in 1944. It isn’t even exactly what it looked like when we moved out, twenty-two years later. There was a time when I was sure I’d still be living there today. But it’s funny; life has a way of changing expectations.
     Welcome to Tears and Laughter at 90, where I peer back into decades of journal entries and letters and share bits from my book (Take My Ex-Husband, Please--But Not Too Far), plus a comedy co-authored by my daughter Kathie (The Tempestuous Triangle), plus my mother Ernestine's captivating poems (20 published in Poetry with a Purpose, Good Apple, Inc., 1987, an activity book available on Amazon), and excerpts from the Log of the Happy Days.
     The house on Sandy Cove was razed in 2002. When I heard the news I felt as if an essential part of me was gone, too. Our home for over two decades was replaced by a million-dollar edifice that dwarfed its neighbors  . . . even McKenna’s Mansion. Embellished with spires and turrets and pediments, it loomed over the adjoining homes that blended unaffectedly into their beach grass and scrub pine surroundings. In 2007, the alien sold for close to five million dollars. Kathie’s reaction: “I don't care if it sold for ten million dollars. To me, it will always detract from the beauty and charm of the Sandy Cove I remember.”
                                                               

      In the spring of 1944, my husband and I were looking for a house in Cohasset, Massachusetts. Our home in Waban was an attractive colonial we had purchased for $6500 two years earlier, after Ed got a sizable raise to $65 a week, but it lacked one thing he was determined to have: an ocean.
     The realtor was about to pass a long driveway lined with venerable elm trees, when she slowed down and said, "There's a nice old house back there, but it's rented for the summer. You might want to take a look at the outside.”
                                                              


      We followed the realtor, our toddlers, Kathie and baby brother Teddy, in tow.  We saw a rambling three-story shingled house with gables and ells, a large screened porch, and a shed covered with vines (watercolor by Mom's friend Ruth Yount). Beyond the front porch, beach grass edged a meandering path leading to Sandy Cove.  In the middle of the cove there were two out-croppings of rocks, one much larger than the other. The rocks, our guide told us, had been called "Big‑Big" and "Little‑Big" for as long as anyone could remember.
      We walked down to the beach, saw Minot’s Light flashing its “I love you” welcome, saw Ed’s ocean  stretching to the horizon, and were hopelessly seduced. How felicitous it seemed that this dwelling on Atlantic Avenue, echoing the lighthouse’s signal, was number 143.       
                                       
     In the fall, after we moved in, four-year-old Kathie solved the mystery of the tides. “Look, Mummy, the rocks have gone out again!”
   
     Our house was referred to as "the old Adams house" for most of the twenty-two years we lived in it. The key to a third floor bedroom was labeled "Uncle Charlie's room." Charlie, we deduced from local yore, was Charles Francis Adams, a descendant of John Quincy Adams and a frequent visitor to his relatives’ South Shore retreat. My mother, children’s poet Ernestine Cobern Beyer, lived with us in the summer and loved the view from Charlie's window as much as he must have. A trio she observed on the beach was the inspiration for "Sunbonnet Babies.”
                                 
                                  One wears a bonnet of organdy rose
                                  That hides her adorable bangs,
                                  And one wears a bonnet that shadows her nose,
                                  And one wears a bonnet that hangs.
                                  The first wears a pinafore (not very white!)
                                  The second, a dress that is tidy.
                                  But the belle of the beach is the third little mite
                                  With the slightly inadequate didy!
                                      (Ladies Home Journal, April 1949)
                                                     
  VAUGHAN AND VONNIE
   
     Opposite Mom’s bedroom lived Vaughan, my childhood caretaker, confidante, and faithful champion since I was eight years old. I thought of her as my second mother and had long ago promised her “a place by the chimney corner.” Although she was recovering from a double mastectomy, Vaughan couldn’t be deterred from pitching in when my current helper had a day off or went on vacation.
     She and Ernestine were devoted friends, although sweet dispositions could sour just the tiniest bit when one or the other won at Canasta unfairly often. When the weather turned cold-hearted, the two migrated to Florida and went their separate ways, Vaughan to a job in Miami, near her son, Mother to Orlando.
     The second floor had four bedrooms, a plus when our family expanded. The one to the left of the stairway was assigned to Vonnie (Stephanie Vaughan), who arrived two years after Teddy. Next came the bathroom, whose claw-footed bathtub we eventually replaced with a modern one, installed under a small, high window that overlooked the driveway. Many was the time I hopped into that tub to make sure the children had caught their bus or Kathie’s on-the-loose horse, Heidi, before she found her way onto the pristine lawn of our neighbor, Mr. McKenna.

     The bedroom across from Vonnie’s overlooked Sandy Cove and belonged to Kathie. The third bedroom also had a view of Sandy Cove and was outfitted with bunk beds for Teddy and Timmy, the fourth child in the family, blessing us in 1946, the year I turned twenty-five. When the brothers reached a destructive age, boy-proof linoleum was installed. In a matter of months, a chemistry experiment involving acid marred the flooring, which didn’t come with a warranty.

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