What The Heck Is Happening ... is a writing style that would have resulted in instant rejection by the nuns who were trying to teach us good English back in my convent days in the 1930's. (If those same nuns were alive today, they would probably be sick with language-rage.) All generations seem to be hitting on our beloved language, particularly that used in today's films, plays, originally composed songs, and poetry, with the result that this language is bruised and hurting. At least most of the time.
At first, this blog will reference what is on my mind, a definite advantage for my side, but then, when I begin to reference what is on your mind, in an interactive exchange on line, the advantage might shift to your opinion and perhaps the 'twain shall meet.' There should be no topic easier for a writer to handle than his or her own life. That very special key should be found - the one that opens all closet doors, bureau drawers, boxes that have been slid under beds, home office file cabinets, and any receptacles containing material that have a valid reason to exist, other than total irrelevant trivia. (Example of the latter: this blogger's dance card for a high school dance of decades ago, showing the names of only two young gentlemen, proving that the possessor of this dance card must have spent a good amount of time sitting mortified in the Ladies Room.)
But what counterbalances the trauma of the dance card more lustily just a few years later than to recall the circumstances surrounding the arrival of that first check made out to this blogger's first article that was accepted, saturated in printer's ink, and published, proof that the writer would now actually be read by someone, other than his or her family?
Oh, glorious finale to that story!
The search for an author's basic keystone, or frame of reference, from which to launch any number of projects, sounds so simple. It is not. In the field of manners, lifestyle, morals and character, there are so many complexities, so much ego-involvement, it is a miracle that anything in these fields is ever finished, published or offered for sale on line. Certainly, there is no unanimity of agreement on how the author has handled the subject. I remember one of my Vassar professors in English, whom I happened to run into in a small town in Western Italy, two decades after I had graduated. He reminded me how lucky I was, first to have had the experiences in life that merited being written about, and second, how lucky I was to be standing there, in that picturesque square of that little Italian town at that very moment. Every year you live, he reminded me, you add to and therefore change the reality of the experiences you had.
Which part of my very interesting life, where my 'being in the room' was accidental, deserves the spotlight? To me, all of it deserves the spotlight, because, as with everyone else's life, one experience hangs upon the ones preceding and following it. No mystery there. I was lucky enough to receive an incredible education, and to be in war-torn Western Europe in the center of activities, such as the Marshall Plan, the growing trouble with the Soviet Union and the resulting Iron Curtain being dropped on a lovely world that desperately wanted peace and freedom from any future wars. There was so much emotion and no restrictions, really, on showing it.
The whole idea of using the summer mansion as a family's main residence was a new concept at the turn of the 20th century. Usually, a family 'of means' would inhabit a large summer residence at the shore, on the island, or, simply, 'in the country' (which could signify a mansion on a 50-acre farm, or a large farm complete with a 500-square foot little house tucked away somewhere in the local village.) To inhabit a grand winter apartment like those in the Dakota complex, in lieu of a mansion in the city, was a new and exciting idea, both architecturally and socially. It had already become a reality in New York by the late 1880's, but then living in an apartment idea floated slowly down to the District of Columbia. A Washington hostess in whom the American presidential family was not the least bit interested would never allow such an idea to go unchallenged, because it could definitely harm her image. And she can accomplish miracles with mirrors if, for example, she is spotted by a member of her ladies? luncheon group leaving the Southwest entrance of the White House, 'having just dropped by a letter for her good friend, the First Lady.'
The view from our kitchen windows in back is very boring and pedestrian, unless you like comparing your and your neighbors' waste receptacles. The view that really counts is from the front of our 1903 apartment building, one of the earliest residential buildings of its kind in our nation's capital. In those days, only the very rich had a palatial winter home in town, and the air was often filthy, even embellished with rotten odors. The interior of the grand town house of an obvious VIP was kept warm with many fireplaces, plus a staff to make it all work. There was always another mansion somewhere for the summer months, in a place like Southampton, Long Island, Newport, Rhode Island, or Bar Harbour, Maine. When Washingtonians packed up to take their summer leave, usually of a three months? duration, by the month of April, there would be a frantic rustling of engraved calling cards in small matching envelopes, sent through the mail, or preferably hand-delivered by the household coachman in his broughman. The cards were sent to good friends, business associates, or simply members of society. An arriviste is someone who would want everyone to think he was an intimate friend of a town?s social pariahs, because the latter would be 'genuinely' interested in the summer plans of the card sender, with the return-to-the-city-date included on the card as though it were a most important world news item.
I have lived all over the world, or more correctly, all over the civilized, gracious parts of the world, including in a city, Washington, D.C., that has been an important part of my life off and on, for over seventy years. A 'floor through', as our large apartment is aptly called, is spread out on the fifth and top floor of our 1902 apartment house. I feel we are living in one of the hill towns of Western Europe, but I also realize that is an overly romantic description of a place where the elevator of our apartment looks down on Massachusetts Avenue Northwest, an area often referred to as "Embassy Row." Foreign governments for years have been buying up the grandiose private mansions in this area, with their putti-embellished exteriors, carved by artists sent over from Italy to live in Washington and do the job properly.
The foreign governments would then transform the smaller buildings into multi-use consulates, to handle business projects with the U.S., and applications for visas. They turned the main houses into chanceries, and sometimes made consular offices from the rear remaining buildings that had served as garages, or more accurately, as carriage houses for the horses, chauffeurs, jockeys, and the various people-conveyers - no Fords or Chevvies, but buggies, carriages, phaetons, victorias, landaus, and the rest.
The whole area around us was so full of history and mystery, it was a year round puzzle of great mansions that had become embassies, as well as the Georgetown area, bursting with great oak and elm trees, and dotted with Federal houses, tall, stately and narrow. Tucked into this jigsaw puzzle of buildings, some endearing because of their history, some starkly contemporary and standing out rather nakedly in their blatant modernity, there is the occasional Old Stone House here and there of the smallest kind of shingle dwellings lived in by the slaves during the Civil War period. The windows in front of my desk allow me the joy of a landscape that slopes down past the noble White House with all of its adjacent historic monuments and parks, and over to the panorama of the soaring obelisk of a Washington Monument across the Potomac. Gazing over the treetops and down on such a patchwork quilt of dramatic architecture and gardens, can turn anyone into a dreamer, a political animal, or news journalist who records what he or she sees and hears with a choice of cameras, computers, or any number of recording instruments.
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