writing

For me personally, writing is healing.

Quoting is informing but writing is healing.

So, I write to heal myself and the world around me.

In the 1950s when I grew up people were very wounded from World War II and the Great Depression.

There was a popular saying from my mother's and father's era. it was: "Do what you can and the rest can".

This just meant "Do what you can in life and stuff the rest". I understood this too as a child and learned to become stoic while my grandmothers competed for my attention and fed me candy until my teeth rotted out and I had to have most of my front teeth pulled by a dentist without Novocaine at age 4. My father told me to sit quietly while the dentist pulled out my teeth one by one. I dutifully did this because you had to be very strong (even at age 4) then in 1952 or else men would think you were a girl. So, being wounded without crying or even flinching was how you were thought well of by other men even then. However, I really didn't get to know my father very well until I was about 10 because it was thought unseemly then for men to spend much time with children. So, I learned to get attention more from my mother and grandmother growing up until I was 10 and became my father's best friend after that. He did teach me how to drive a car by the time I was 6 years old and I remember steering the car from about age 4 on long trips while I sat in his lap too then.

This was a very different era than now as you can see. I was driving my father's truck in the country by the time I was 12 long distances on weekends too. But, then again I went from 5 foot 2 at age 12 to 5 foot 10 by 13 so I looked like an adult then too by 13. I learned to drive my father's work truck which was like a pick up truck with a utility body full of electrical Contracting equipment like ladders and fittings and plugs and lights and wire and boxes and electrical panels and the like as my father was an Electrical Contractor in Los Angeles County. Summers after I was 12 to 17 I worked with my father and made a lot of money (enough to buy SCUBA lessons to Catalina Island) and my first car by age 16. So, this was a very different time than now in many many different ways. We often worked for famous people like actors, directors and producers of TV and movies too then. They were some of my father's best customers that we did electrical work for because they had a lot of money for kitchen and room additions to their lavish homes from 1960 to 1965 when I worked for my father growing up from age 12.