French Stew

    In childhood and much of my adult life, I lived in the shadows of shyness. Whether an innate personality trait or an offshoot of my retreat into a dark closet when Mother died, I cannot say, but the affliction nearly suffocated me in social and classroom settings. 

    The inner awkwardness was compounded by the outer visible response of my face turning beet red, a symptom known as blushing and I hated it. I lived in dread of the next time my face would let me down. Later in life I would overcome some of my shyness and eventually outgrow the turning-red syndrome, but only after some uncomfortable occurrences.

Momentarily Detained

     My sister Phyllis and I used to pack our suitcases and head to the beach for the weekend. Those were the days before husbands and babies, and even boyfriends. At the beach we lingered over hamburgers or pancakes at Mammy's Kitchen, baked in the sun with no thought of our skin one day being sixty years old, and walked for hours to the pier and back, sidestepping tides and picking up shells.

    Most of those memories are buried underneath a tall stack of years, but one trip peaks over the top, not because of something that happened at the beach, but because of the nerve-racking start.

On Pins and Needles

     One summer during my high school years, Aunt Bernice offered me a job in her drapery shop. She had been a dressmaker until her work evolved into more lucrative window treatments. Then she bought the house next door to hers and converted it into a workshop/office. She and several employees covered fancy cornice boards and sewed custom drapes for those who could afford such luxuries.

    I accepted my kindhearted aunt's offer. Considering that years later the art of sewing would, in a sense, claim my soul, I could not have been more suited to the job that had fallen out of the blue.

    Aunt Bernice paid me a dollar an hour, a shocking wage compared to today's standards, but this was the late 1960s, and to a ragamuffin like me, forty dollars in cash at the end of a forty-hour week looked like a gold mine.