A musty smell floats in the air as I flip the pages inside
the maroon covers of my high school yearbook. Cathy sits on my left, Julie on
my right on my living room couch, all three of us reminiscing about people and
events more than forty years ago in a small, Midwest town. This year, everyone
in the Class of ’71 (the three of us included) turned sixty; last winter we
three cooked up the plan to celebrate this milestone in July at my home on
Lopez Island, WA.
Living as I do nearly two thousand miles from the home of my
youth in Southern Illinois, and with no family members still there to pull me
back, I’ve returned just a handful of times since moving west in 1981. The two
women poring over the yearbook with me are the only people I still have regular
contact with who knew me and my parents well during my teen years. From our first meeting, we three shared
the bond of being only children and formed a kind of sisterhood. Now, we scrutinize
pictures of the concert band, in which we all played the flute; the Top Hatters
precision dance team with us kicking our black, fishnet-stockinged legs high;
the Foreign Language Club (I studied French; Julie and Cathy took Spanish); and
the 219 portrait photos of each of us in the graduating class.
I’m surprised by the column published a week after the first
Earth Day in 1970. I have no
recollection of being aware of that event or of the research I obviously did to
be able to quote an article in the April 19, 1970 Chicago Sun Times:
Not
a river or stream in Illinois is safe for swimming.
It
will cost $6 billion by 1980 to clean up the state’s waterways.
I’m surprised by the prophetic warnings I quoted from Paul
Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb:
It
may be too late, no matter what we do, because we’ve already added so many poisons to the ecological
systems of the planet.
We
may, for instance, have already started changes in climate which will destroy so much of our food-growing ability
that we may be inevitably on a downhill trend
that cannot be reversed—at least not until a terrible cataclysm takes place.
I’m surprised that as a high school junior I used (at least
sometimes) my writing to raise awareness about social issues.
Most of all, I’m surprised to discover that writing really
has been a throughline for me. Russian actor and theater director Constantin
Stanislavski coined the term in the 1930s to help actors explore the central
impulse or desire that connects all of a character’s individual motivations and
objectives together. The term also is used to describe a theme or thread
that runs through the plot of a film or other dramatic or literary work.
As my two friends and I continue to turn the pages, I come
across a photo of me with other members of Quill
and Scroll (international honorary society for high school
journalists). I remember the
profile I wrote for the school newspaper of a classmate who collected antiques
(a foreshadowing of my book, Hands at
Work?). Memories of the newspaper I helped produce at Vincennes University
journalism camp the summer before my senior year re-surface, too. More evidence
of this thread of writing running through my life.
Throughlines. I
suspect we all have one, whether we know it or not. For so many years I
believed that nursing was the single thread that connected all of my actions,
but perhaps, unlike novels and plays, we can have more than one. Although I’ve
identified myself as a writer for only the past fifteen years, these musty
newspaper clippings, the yellowing yearbook pages, and high school chums remind
me that the writing throughline reaches back to a much earlier time in my life.
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