Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets and Growing Up in the 1970s

Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love Secrets and Growing up in the Seventies [ Margaret Sartor] on leondumoulin.nl *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers.
Table of contents

My father, a physician, was intelligent, capable, generous, and kind, but he was not a modern man; he did not discuss his feelings. The rare times Daddy demonstrated strong emotions of any variety are memorable. He never panicked, but under certain circumstances, he lost his temper.


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I could walk in the back door covered in mud and cradling a broken arm and my father would remain calm, but a boyfriend arriving on a motorcycle would bring his blood to a quick boil. He was the eldest of three sons, raised on a cotton farm during the Great Depression by a widowed mother who taught elementary school five days a week and Bible study on Sundays. Daddy and his brothers all attended college and medical school on loans and scholarships, then returned to serve the same population in the same hospital and local clinics. To distinguish them from one another, patients and nurses called them by their first names.

My father was Dr. As much as Daddy was an exemplar of solid citizenry, my mother, Bobbie Sue, was generally viewed as eccentric, a free spirit: She was also, in the opinion of everyone but herself, drop-dead gorgeous, always at her most beautiful when she made the least effort, which was most of the time. Mama was a decade younger than Daddy, unabashedly volatile, and she could draw and paint with near photographic accuracy. Even then I sensed that being a housewife and mother were roles with inherent limitations that did not naturally suit her.

It was her studio, a locked room near the back door of the house, that nurtured her best self. By the time I was a teenager, I finally caught on that at least half the time, Mama only pretended to leave the house so she could crawl back in her studio window to paint undisturbed. My mother was well known for her antics and tricky practicality. She was funny and frank and whistled with her fingers in her mouth, the kind of woman adolescent boys fantasized their girlfriends would grow up to be. For me as a teenage girl, this was both fabulous and often fabulously painful. Having two older sisters who regularly registered double takes among males of any age was annoying as well.

When I began the diary in , my socially gifted oldest sister, Mary, was away at college. My distracting younger brother, Bill, was ten years old, and I was in the commonly acknowledged worst year of life, the seventh grade. My parents were attentive, loving, and strict. There were rules, expectations, and consequences.

When I screwed up, I always started the confession process with my mother, which was risky and dependent on her mood, but better than conversations with Daddy, which were logical, and therefore hopeless. The end result, in either case, was usually the same: I was sent to my room.

When being sent to my room was extended to include days rather than hours, it was called being grounded. About the time I started being grounded, I started writing things down; it gave me something to do. Writing to and for myself had an acceptably low risk factor for feeling misunderstood or ignored, and it was a form of conversation I came to value more and more. My bedroom, aside from being a place of exile, was also a refuge.

The shelves were a cherished disarray of books, vinyl records, magazines, notebooks, and souvenirs. My walls were an evolving collage of drawings, lists, snapshots, and 4-H ribbons. The decorative centerpiece was a poster above my bed, an image I mulled over daily until it gradually etched itself into my subconscious appearing even in my dreams, my first template of romance and longing: The volume to which I could push my personal angst was, however, strictly limited by the black Rub-a-Dub laundry pen mark Mama drew on the volume dial of my stereo.

Miss American Pie : NPR

The faint odors of oiled leather tack, potpourri, paints, candy bars, skin lotion, dog hair, and dirty clothes were all of my own making, and I thought my room was an OK place to be. Mitch kept flirting with me and I kept liking it. Scratch the surface and the past was there. And the buried hurts and humiliations that hurt and humiliated me all over again. I have heard it said that there are two times in your life when you stand a chance, in the face of whatever social forces struggle to get you in their grip, of becoming someone new, of creating your own personal universe through the sheer power of imagination and persistence: Maybe this is hogwash.

I certainly make no claim to know.

Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets and Growing Up in the 1970s

What I do know is that very near my forty-third birthday, it dawned on me to look at the diaries I began when I was young. It was early October, an afternoon shrouded in unreasonable heat, and I was at home writing about a series of pictures I had made, over many years, in my hometown in Louisiana. I wanted to tell the story of my growing up, but just thinking about my childhood seemed to ignite an internal battle, to generate, simultaneously, both a meditative sense of calm and considerable irritation.

They were in the attic. Twenty minutes of sweaty excavation among old clothes, holiday decorations, and used camping gear finally yielded pay dirt. There, in the oldest box of various sized books, binders, and bad poetry, I found it: We went to the movies. Standing in the attic detritus of my adult life, I listened to my husband call my name as he walked in and out the back door with bags of groceries and heard the whoops of my two children competing in a ferocious game of Ping-Pong.

The exact age of my son. Among other things, like teaching for a living and getting my kids to the dentist twice a year, I make photographs, and sometimes I write, and usually in a way that scrutinizes life, offers up a version of the world that can be beautiful but also can, in its exactness, at times seem cruel. Diaries, on the other hand, are truly cruel.

Miss American Pie

If memory stores the spirit of our experiences, then a diary, in its bona fide physical existence, surely retains the flesh and blood. Some trips are worth a bumpy ride; some vaccinations are worth the risk of lifelong paralysis. I read my diaries. I read six years of them in two days. The earliest ones held few surprises and were somewhat discomfiting, but twelve-year-olds tend to be petty and thirteen-year-olds are usually self-involved. It was the diaries from age fourteen to eighteen that lay beyond tidy generalizations.

None of us is prepared for the hormonal heresy of puberty, and each of us finds our own particular way of getting through it. My strategy was to write things down.

Don McLean - American Pie

Whenever I felt trapped or bored and had a pen and a scrap of paper with a decent margin school handouts, church bulletins, discarded grocery lists, my diary , I wrote, to no one in particular, about what I thought, saw, dreamed of, overheard, worried over, and obsessed upon: If the circumstances of my life got particularly dire, I wrote directly to Jesus. The charismatic and where I grew up, common brand of Christianity into which I was reborn as a teenager was nothing less than my lifeboat, a kind of calm, steady source of reassurance that the creator of the universe was intimately involved with the ongoing struggles of my friendships, my hair, my love life, and the not insignificant concern I had for my family.

Eventually, it was the solace of prayer that gave me the courage necessary to abandon evangelical presumption, a leap that is not for the weak of heart. It was still some time before I began to understand that life is not inherently noble, that dignity is not guaranteed by piety, and that love, though the greatest of human virtues, is also the most elusive and inextricably connected to loss.

How long did that take? The whole of my life. In a town like monroe , children form bonds early and usually according to age, neighborhood, and how your family spends its free time. When I was growing up, loyalties shifted subtly from year to year, or sometimes week to week, but we were the same friends at eighteen that we were at age seven. We ate at the same burger joints, swam in the same backyard pools, attended the same birthday parties, and joined the same church youth groups.

About Miss American Pie

And we were all white. Some people, including my own children, have the mistaken idea that when the U. Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education in , things began to change. Not for a very long time and never in the ways that they could have.


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By the s, the public schools in Monroe were beginning to integrate, but cultural segregation remained as distinct as the railroad tracks that divided the white side of town from its mirror community of churches, homes, and shops on the black side. The black kids who sat next to me in the first integrated classrooms at Robert E. Lee Junior High surely had a wholly different view of our overlapping history and well understood the tinderbox of the historic moment we shared, but in the diaries, it is shockingly clear that I did not.

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