Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

First Dance image by Jacqueline Osborn Last Dance I wrote this short story after my dad died in 1992. It was published in SKYLARK, Purdue University's literary journal; I was so thrilled I framed the acceptance letter. I still have that letter hanging around someplace. Not literally hanging anymore, I packed it away in storage during one of our moves. Like my memories, it's in there somewhere. I wish I could give you this stuff in order, begin at the beginning. If I could do that, I'd write a book. Instead I have to grab at what glimpses I can. It's as though all the places and people stuffed inside my head are like yards and yards of once beautiful fabrics, ripped from their bolts and shoved into one large bin. Velvets, jewel-toned satins, richly-textured tapestries, billowy silks. Cotton, denim, gingham and chintz. They're all jammed in there together, some faded now, some in tatters, a loose thread here, a trace of a connection there. A smell, a smi...

#26: Gilmore Street, North Hollywood This story is #26 on the hit parade of places I've called home. I figure I've lived so many places, each house, each apartment has a story attached. I'm slowly unraveling them here on a blog I began years ago, and then let go by the wayside. I wonder, is that the story of my life?  Ben and I met when I was living with Ella on Bentley Avenue in West Los Angeles. Seven years, five apartments and a sad as-yet-untold story later, Ben's and my long and winding road ended up in a dead end. All those miles, gone to waste. That's a story for another time, here's where that road took me... The Sticky-hot Days of Summer When the dust settled from my breakup with Ben, I made my way across town and moved into the smallest bedroom in Candy and Tina's three bedroom apartment in North Hollywood. Candy and Tina were a couple of more experienced tour guides I met working at Universal Studios. Funny, isn't it? It was Ben wh...

Laughing with my baby sister. Izmir, Turkey/ 1957 My sister, in an adjacent dressing room at Ross, is as doubled over with laughter as I am. We're trying on dresses and as we both squeeze into outfits designed with her twenty-something daughters in mind, there's plenty to snort about. She's taught me a word I wish I didn't know. Gunt. The kind of fat that goes from your gut to your—ahem, I can't even say it. But that's Nancy, my younger sister. Brash, a little bit bawdy, she's always been the one that's more out there, unafraid to teeter on the edge of conventional good taste and expressing herself like a modern day Wife of Bath. Unafraid of being herself, while I shrink back, the good girl, wrapped up in gentility. Unless I've had a glass or two of wine, that is. Wine and my sister have always had a way of bringing out the naughty in me. Don't get me wrong; we're not the kind of sisters who talk on the phone every day. We don...

Yesterday was our friend Joan’s 94th birthday, and since she’s British by birth Mark and I took her to the King's Head, our favorite British pub here in Santa Monica.      Joan is one of the many children evacuated from St. Peter Port on the island of Guernsey in June of 1940 just days before the Germans invaded the island.  Nothing was planned out, announcements were made in the newspaper and on the local radio that school-age children were being evacuated with their classes, and mothers with infants were told to arrange to leave as soon as possible. That and nothing more but scores of children were sent to the harbor.   Just ten years old, Joan  was sent with her classmates across the channel on ships sent by the British to Weymouth, then to Blantyre, in Scotland where she stayed, living with a volunteer family until her mother could join her. She isn’t sure how long she was there but her mother sent for Joan to join them in Stockport, in the county of ...

You know those couples who say they can’t live without each other? Sometimes they mean it. Undying Love The Coleus under Bob and Helen’s front porch window look a little scraggly, nothing but tall leggy stems bending in their bed of dry cracked earth. The gardener would never let them go like that if Bob hadn’t been so sick. If Bob had been up and around, standing tall the way he used to, those plants would be standing tall too, their leaves firm and perky, the ground blanketed with a soft, moist layer of mulch. Well tended, that was the best way to describe Bob’s garden, and come to think of it, Bob too. I try to remember if I saw the gardener this past Wednesday, his usual day to mow and blow. Who will notice if Bob’s plants die now? Not Bob who is sick in bed. Not Helen who uses a walker and rarely ventures outside. Bob told me once that Helen wouldn’t allow him to get her a wheelchair. She couldn’t stand the idea of looking like an invalid. That sounds like Helen, the kind of w...