Looking Back, Moving On: Memoir as Prologue (Second Edition)

By Janice Rubin

It takes courage and perseverance to revisit the days and nights of our lives and write down what we find to make a record of our lives. Looking Back, Moving On provides the guide to begin the adventure and helps us through the pleasures and pitfalls, the joys and the sorrows that may be encountered. Rubin enables us to discover that, ultimately, the project is the gift of self-discovery we give to ourselves, which enables us to go on to enjoy life to the fullest. Excerpts from her students writing contribute to our feeling of being part of the creative community

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 18, 2003
• ISBN: 9781462836345

Janice Rubin

Janice Rubin never thought of herself as a teacher until she began to write her memoirs and a friend suggested she teach others how to write theirs. Now in the tenth year of a teaching career, the award-winning former reporter/columnist, who has a Masters in psychology, offers an enlarged second volume on the autobiography workshops she developed as a synthesis of her psychology and journalism skills. The mother of two daughters and a perennial student, she lives with her husband and two cats in the foothills of the Ramapos and is learning Buddhism via Thich Nhat Hanhs order of Interbeing.

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Copyright © 2003 by Janice Rubin.

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Stanzas from the poems Message and Recommendation are reprinted from Call

Me By My True Names: The Collected Poems of Thich Nhat Hanh (1999) by Thich

Nhat Hanh with permission of Parallax Press, Berkeley, California,

www.parallax.org.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

FOREWORD

CHAPTER ONE

Retirement Can Be Detrimental to One’s Mental Health

CHAPTER TWO

Back to School

CHAPTER THREE

Getting Down to Work

CHAPTER FOUR

When the Going Gets Tough

CHAPTER FIVE

Just the Facts, Ma’am (or Sir)!

CHAPTER SIX

The Product and the Process

CHAPTER SEVEN

Gathering Material: Who’s Got the Knowledge?

CHAPTER EIGHT

Resonance and Dissonance: Editing

CHAPTER NINE

Let us Continue

AFTERWORD

The Past as Prologue

CONTRIBUTORS

BIBLIOGRAPHY for AUTOBIOGRAPHY WORKSHOP

TO MY HUSBAND DONALD,

FATHER OF MY BELOVED CHILDREN,

MY DEVOTED AND CHERISHED FRIEND,

FOR HIS UNFLAGGING ENCOURAGEMENT OF

MY INTERESTS, HIS REDOUBTABLE KNOWLEDGE OF

COMPUTERS, AND HIS READINESS TO ASSIST IN

THE PREPARATION OF THIS BOOK AT EVERY STAGE.

IN GRATITUDE TO OUR TEACHERS

AND OUR ANCESTORS AND TO ALL THOSE WHO WALK

THE PATH OF PEACE EVERYWHERE.

Life has left her footprints on my forehead.

But I have become a child again this morning.

The smile, seen through leaves and flowers,

is back to smooth away the wrinkles,

as the rains wipe away footprints on the beach.

Again a cycle of birth and death begins.

From Message by Thich Nhat Hanh.

FOREWORD

Your students must think a lot of themselves, said my neighbor Rosemary, as we ambled along our little dead-end road one balmy spring day. A contemporary of my daughters, she had grown up alongside them and still lived in the house her parents had bought, now with her husband and child.

Walking up the road, Rosemary pulling her young daughter in a wagon, I gathered she was implying that people who write their autobiographies think themselves somehow superior to the rest of us, believe that the lives they’ve led were in some ways more interesting, exemplary or noteworthy than the more humdrum lives most people lead. Her comment didn’t surprise me. I had heard the like so often. Some of my students had reported similar reactions from family or friends when they announced they had begun to write the story of their life. Interviewing me for a feature story on my classes, a young reporter said in complete innocence, I thought only famous people wrote their autobiographies.

I had attended her mother’s wake a few years before Rosemary married, and her father’s several months after her child was born. Having lost my own mother while I was in my teens, I knew what it felt like to have no mother when facing the momentous occasions in my life. I recalled having wished at times that my mother had written her story so that I might have had her guidance as I made my way.

Have you never wondered how your mother felt when she married, had her own home for the first time, became pregnant, had her first child? Wouldn’t it have interested you to learn more about the person your mother was through reading her own words? I asked Rosemary.

She said she had never thought about it, but conceded that if her mother had written the story of her life, she would have read it avidly.

I began my autobiography simply to leave for my children a record of whom their mother was and how people and events had shaped her life. I did not suspect I would be opening the door to undreamed-of adventures in my September years. Now, well along in my story, in the tenth year of a teaching career I had not foreseen, having observed the effect of memoir writing on myself and others, I can confidently endorse it as the cerebral equivalent of a magical mystery tour: you don’t know where you will end up when you begin, you can’t be sure what means you will use to get there, and you may not be the same person at journey’s end as you were when you started out!

Rosemary’s comments had caused me to feel somewhat defensive, but they provided the impetus I needed to get to work on this book. Of course Rosemary was correct; my students and I were involved in a self-centered activity. Ours was an autobiography workshop; its aim was to facilitate the retrieval of memories and encourage people to write about themselves and how they were affected by the life around them. Wasn’t that what we would have liked to know about our forebears?

My daughter, Rena, had planted the germ of an idea for this book several years before. I had shared with her my admiration for the quality of work my students were turning out and expressed regret that the audience was so limited.

I would love to see some of these pieces in print! I said. She suggested I begin collecting the writings that I thought were especially fine with the idea of putting together an anthology one day.

So I began, with no particular motif in mind, to gather the essays and vignettes and chronicles that I thought were evocative or representative of a period in history or of a universal sentiment, and often of all three. Rereading them as I placed them at the ends of each of the chapters, I knew full well why I had chosen them. Who could remain unmoved by Peggy O’Hea’s tales from the orphanage? The inability of Ginny Michel’s parents to hear her out still tugged at my heartstrings. June McLaughlin’s imaginative children’s games, and the portraits of days gone by of Fred Zuendt and Kevin Loughlin were as charming to me as when we’d first heard them. The first-hand accounts of the horrors of war and occupation by Bill O’Connell and Karin Pessa made us more intimately aware of the suffering war brings not only to our so-called enemies but ourselves as well. Dan Oliff brought to life the Depression’s despair and Prohibition’s speak-easy life.

My daughter, Ann Elise, read and vetted the first few chapters. Her imprimatur was all the encouragement I needed to see this project to its end.

In the years since the publication of the first edition of Looking Back, Moving On, I collected many more fine pieces of writing. I couldn’t help myself; I had become a memoir junkie! When a student reads an essay, story, poem or vignette that resonates with me, I must have it. That is why I asked Stephen James for his poignant piece on shining shoes and Pamela Grant for her touching history of a ceremonial gown and Erna Trocola for the story of her wonderful Papa. That is why Winnie Kelso’s tragicomic tale of tender devotion to her failing husband could not go unmemorialized. That is why Frank Lucibello comes of age on these pages; Denise, his wife, revisits the forest home of her childhood; Frank Dobrowolski’s miracle drug is acknowledged, and due notice is paid to Philip Walker’s cure for agita. John Galvin sensitized me to the suffering of the children of alcoholics, as others increased my awareness of the grief of barren couples who want children. Kathryn McGrath made me aware of the second-class status of southpaws, in a world that caters to the right-handed, to such a degree that I can no longer undo a twist tie without thinking of her. In all, forty-two students have contributed fifty-nine stories to this volume.

I had no idea what I was getting into when I first began teaching. I was more than sixty years old and had never thought of myself as other than a student. While writing my memoirs, I developed my own guidelines, which I later copyrighted as a syllabus for autobiography workshops. I had found nothing that might teach me how to encourage others to review their lives and to persevere when unpleasant memories were encountered that threatened the continuation of the project. My training in psychology and my own experience had made me aware of the benefits of writing my story and sharing it in a non-judgmental setting. I was also aware that, like me, others might eventually come face-to-face with painful episodes or periods in their past that would be difficult or impossible to share or that might even cause them to abandon their quest.

In spite of everything, I went to my first class feeling certain this was something I could do well. Looking back, I think of it as the confidence of the inexperienced and, although at the time I didn’t know where it came from, I was most grateful it was there when I needed it.

As the years went by, I understood that the workshops have special meaning for those people who return semester after semester to continue their explorations and share their findings. Some say they know they are not sufficiently disciplined to write unless they have a deadline to meet. They return for as many semesters as they feel they need to complete their stories, beginning each where they left off the previous term.

Many discover early on that the supportive atmosphere that prevails in the classroom allows them to retrieve, examine and share memories they had been unable to confront before. As they read, sometimes stopping to wipe a tear or swallow a sob, I see heads nod and I know others comprehend the feelings that are being expressed even if they have not had the same experiences. Bonds form among writers as they continue to examine and share, sometimes for the first time, events or situations that had been too fearsome to deal with alone. By the third or fourth meeting, almost like magic, we discover the class has become a supportive community that embraces each member. Enthusiasm for their own and others’ works is high. It is unusual for a student to come to class unprepared to read and absences are rare.

From time to time, members of the group have asked me to read from my memoirs. With the exception of two small pieces included in Chapter One, each of which I’ve read on occasion, I have refrained from doing so. It is not that I think of myself as a private person or am reluctant to open up to the group; I do not hesitate to inject incidents from my life into discussions when it seems appropriate to do so. It is simply because the two-hour sessions are hardly long enough to permit each writer the opportunity to read and receive feedback.

Like most authors, until I see a manuscript in print, I make changes each time I have it in hand. This book is no exception. In this final revision, with a nod to my students, I have added two pieces I wrote during the past year.

As I finished the last chapter and wrote the Afterword, it amused me to realize that the project, begun as an anthology of my students’ writings, had become, in turn, an apologia for memoir writing and a how-to or self-help manual. How appropriate that it too should be the result of a process. After all, our autobiography, begun with the intention of leaving behind a record of who we were, had become an instrument for discovering who we are as a first step in moving forward in our lives.

CHAPTER ONE

Retirement Can Be Detrimental to One’s Mental Health

I left the newspaper for which I had written for more than twenty years and was beginning what I thought would be my retirement, the time when I would live the life I had promised myself when my working years were over. I spent almost a year of days with few self-imposed deadlines, catching up on all those small household repairs and sewing projects that had awaited spare moments, reading, writing, visiting, entertaining house guests, enjoying luncheon dates with friends and savoring bubble baths accompanied by Grand Opera or Bach oratorios. Little by little, I was forced to conclude that these activities were fine as occasional interludes, but were not sufficiently gratifying as standard fare.

I had retired from journalism, but I had not retired from life. I was in good health and viewed my newfound freedom as an opportunity to do with the rest of my years whatever I wished. My children were grown and on their own. My husband had retired from his job but continued to work steadily as a consultant in his field. There were no elderly parents requiring care. I was freer of obligations to others than at any time in my adult life. Except for emergencies, when my children or husband might need particular attention from me, my life was my own!

For me, the essence of living is doing work, paid or volunteer, that I find challenging, creative and fulfilling, and believe to be of value to others. The fifteen years I stayed home raising my children while creating and maintaining a home had met those criteria, as had the score of years I spent in journalism writing news articles, op-ed essays, investigative series, and enterprise reports. Now I had to find other work to which I might look forward or the years ahead could become a burden rather than an adventure.

I had been an adult equivalent of a candy striper in a community hospital when my children were very young and a volunteer in the hospice program of our regional hospital for several years while I was working for the newspaper. Because I felt especially strongly about the need to aid victims of domestic abuse and to prevent it by providing good parenting from infancy, I volunteered my time, successively, to a shelter for abused women and a parenting-education program for teenage mothers. Neither, apparently, needed my assistance.

I was feeling at loose ends. I needed to feel I was worth my salt, but without regular, useful work, I felt I was simply killing time. Writing had been a source of satisfaction to me since the publication of my first papers in scholarly psychology journals when I was a graduate student and it continued to be an important creative outlet. I decided to review my life, partly to leave a record for my children, partly as a therapeutic exploration, and partly to figure out how I wanted to spend the remaining years. Why did I need to do useful work in order to feel worthy? How would I feel if I were to become infirm and unable to make a contribution?

One of my former editors at the newspaper had often urged me to write a novel; he believed a short story I had written would make a fine opening chapter. Unlike my colleagues, I was one of the few people in journalism sure there was not a book inside me screaming to get out—some short stories, maybe. I registered for a class in fiction writing at The New School and for two years went to New York once a week for short-story and fiction workshops.

Like many beginning fiction writers, I made liberal use of autobiographical material. The more I wrote about people and relationships, the more aware I became of how little I knew about my own family. How I wished my parents had kept journals or written their stories, or I had been sufficiently prescient when they were alive to ask the questions I’d like answered now. Comparing notes with my contemporaries, I found few who knew more about any generation of their family before their parents’, but many who wished they did.

I decided to leave short story writing to William Trevor and Alice Munro and do the kind of writing I did best. I would return to the role of investigative reporter and write for my children the story of my life, and my memories of my parents and grandparents. I would give them what I wished my parents had given me: a self-portrait in prose with relevant information about the people, events and influences that had shaped my life. I would attempt to anticipate the questions my children might have after I was gone.

I had always been reasonably open with my daughters, answering their questions as they arose and volunteering information I thought would be timely. I am aware, however, that there are different levels of understanding; people receive and process information when they are ready for it. Incidents I had described to my children might have been comprehended intellectually long before they were ready to empathize with the person who had experienced them. For that reason, I decided to go back to the beginning even if it meant repeating incidents I had already shared with them.

I began my story with my earliest memories, which carried me back to a two-family brick house in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn owned by the Greenbloom family. I lived in the first floor apartment with my parents and sister for two years, from the age of three and a half. It was during that period my father taught me the dead-man’s float in the bathtub and I learned to assume a bravery and insouciance I did not feel as a cover for the fear of which I was taught to feel ashamed. It was during those years, too, that I learned that the expression of anger was unacceptable if I wanted my parents’ approval.

As I placed myself in that setting, more and more visual impressions came to mind, one growing out of the other. I could see the steps of the brick stoop on which I sat waiting for my beloved Uncle Lou on the days my mother told me he would visit, and the kitchen sink where my mother stood washing dishes when, in answer to my question, she told me I would not be seeing Uncle Lou again.

I could feel anew the succulent leaves of the sedum plants that grew in the grey concrete planters that flanked the steps. I remembered how I would compress a leaf by pinching, thereby separating the outer membranes, and create a pseudo-balloon by blowing air into it. I recalled a dream in which my parents bought me a red toy fire engine and hid it in the kitchen broom closet to surprise me, and my disappointment in the morning at the perfidy of the guardian of my sleep.

I wrote about my life in that house—the joys, the griefs, how I felt about myself and others, what I learned from my parents’ tutelage and what I assimilated from listening to and observing myself and others. Writing lubricated the connections not only between incidents during that time period, but to earlier and subsequent experiences as well.

In time, I recalled a backyard incident when I was even younger, living in the second-floor-rear apartment of a four-family house in which my cousin Ev and her family occupied the second-floor-front apartment. I lived in that house until I was three and a half and the incident must have occurred shortly before we moved because the weather was warm. My friend at the time was Savina Corrado, whose parents occupied the first-floor-front apartment and had a new baby boy. I recalled Mrs. Corrado’s lovely flower garden, and that memory led me to the equally lush garden of Mrs. Wiener, who owned the six-family house to which we moved when I was five and a half and began to attend kindergarten.

It was easy for me to attach ages to incidents and locations because my family, like many city folk during the Depression, moved every two years. To keep their apartments occupied, landlords frequently offered prospective tenants a month or two rent-free in freshly painted premises. We generally moved on October first.

I wrote regularly for several hours each day, one age period following another. When memories were painful, I sometimes found myself feeling weepy and sad for days, but I was determined to continue the exploration and to look at and understand the memories that had always been with me but may have remained unexamined because of shame or fear. The happy memories were savored and then enjoyed again when I shared them with others who might have had the same or similar experiences.

There was a time during the writing when I reached a period in my chronology that I dreaded exploring. I had shared everything I could remember about those days with my therapist, but I found it too distressing to submit the incidents and feelings I had dredged up to the discipline of expository writing. (I had begun working with Hope, a clinical social worker in private practice, when I realized my depressing loss of connection was related to my retirement, and I needed help in exploring the options that might enable me to continue to lead a life that was satisfyingly productive and populated.)

I wrote about the pleasant, creative parts of the dreaded period, intending to go back to the situations I was avoiding, but I could not do it. I refused to give up and go on to the next period, so I took a different tack in an effort to discover the bugaboo blocking my narrative. I would try a different way to tell my story. I would trace the history of the early relationships in my life: the four people whose formative influence had colored my self-image. Perhaps by so doing, I would be able to understand why certain memories were too painful to confront and, with the new perspective, I would be able to exorcise the ghosts that still haunted me.

I examined and wrote down my memories of my mother, who had died when I was nineteen; my father, who married again shortly thereafter and lived until I was forty-six; my Uncle Lou, who reentered my life when I was fourteen, after a nine-year absence, and was then still alive in a nursing home at ninety-five, and my sister, five years my senior and in apparently good physical health. As I wrote, I began to understand what these people had meant to me at different ages. I looked at those characteristics and judgments I had introjected from each of them, decided which I would retain because they were life-affirming, and which I wanted to alter or discard because they prevented me from being the person I wanted to be.

I read somewhere long ago, and have believed ever since, that to understand all is to have nothing to forgive. By the time I finished this version of my story, I felt I knew these people in a different way than I had before. I believed I had a deeper understanding of the forces that made them who they were and began to feel more magnanimous toward them as well as toward the child who had survived their authority.

The story that grew from following the particular theme I chose was a more narrowly focused and more intimate self-portrait than that which emerged from the chronology. I was able to explore events and the feelings related to them in greater depth. I had begun the hard job of working through unpleasant memories I had earlier avoided facing and was making some strides in the effort to get beyond them.

In writing both the chronicle and the thematic narration, incidents came to mind that merited a more detailed telling than seemed appropriate in these forms of my story. I did not want to interrupt the flow of either to tell the tale of our landlady of sixty years ago, whose bountiful garden was due in large measure to the fact that visiting tradesmen came by horse and wagon. Yet the story, when told, would surely contribute to the portrait of the era and the memoir writer as a small child.

A life story told in a series of such vignettes or essays can lay bare the writer’s inner life, interests, and career as well as his or her relationship to the cultural, political, religious, and intellectual life of the times, world events and so much more. It can combine the breadth of the chronicle and the depth of the thematic tale.

So I came to a third way of writing one’s life story: by means of vignettes, that focus on significant moments, capturing in words what photographs achieve visually, or through essays, that deal with particular topics from an individual point of view.

Since I did not intend to publish my autobiography and believed I had many years before the inevitable deadline for completing my tale, I had the luxury of writing as much for my benefit as for my children’s. There were no shortcuts I knew of that would enable me to find out whom and where I had been, whom and where I was at that moment, and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I had to experiment with methods and face down my demons, giving credibility in print even to those matters I thought I could share only with Hope (and might delete from the finished work) as I sought to find a means of carving out a path for myself.

It was during the experimentation with chronology, thematic history and the many vignettes and essays that cried out for recognition, that I began to understand how valuable each of the facets of the enterprise was to me. I was sure others would also find that memoir writing could produce not only a thoughtful gift for their children and grandchildren, but might help them come to terms with distressing episodes in their past and aid in charting their future as well. Hope’s encouragement caused me to consider sharing what I had discovered with others and, in time, to believe that I would be able to do it well, even though I had never before been interested in teaching.

I developed a syllabus for an eight-week course, offered the workshop to two adult-education facilities in the county, and was hired by one. Now in my tenth year as a teacher, having given classes in four adult-school systems, a public library and community center, I teach regularly in several schools during the fall, winter and spring semesters.

It is work I enjoy tremendously. The fact that some students return semester after semester, to continue working on their stories and benefit from sharing them with others whose feedback is supportive, tells me the experience is a gratifying one for them also.

Following are two vignettes and an essay. I wrote the two smaller pieces as examples to my classes of how one may treat an incident remembered or a fleeting image returned. The essay was part of my examination of the pedagogic role my father played in my early years and its influence on me to this day.

PANIC IN PORTUGAL

The year was 1975. The month was May. In Portugal the dictator Salazar had recently been overthrown and the parties of the Right and Left were vying for votes in an anticipated election. My husband and I were in Lisbon on vacation, but I was a reporter in a hot news area even if my beat did not include the Iberian Peninsula.

En route to our hotel the evening before, I had noticed graffiti covering everything. No building, bus stop, statue, bench or tree had been spared the Reds’ hammer and sickle or the fasces of the Rightists. During the night, the sounds of gunfire and sirens kept me awake, but I could see nothing from the windows of our room.

Next day, in the plaza on which our hotel was located, I stood taking pictures of graffiti-covered statues when I noticed, from the corner of my eye, a tall, slim man in a trench coat striding purposefully toward me. He looked like a Hollywood version of a secret-police agent. My passport identified me as a journalist.

I’m in for it now, I thought, as the distance between us narrowed. Anxiously I anticipated a trip in a Portugese paddy wagon, an appeal to our embassy for help, and days of vacation time lost. When the mustachioed young man reached me, he raised the sleeve of his coat to reveal watches covering his arm from wrist to elbow.

Wanna buy an Onega? he asked. He was one of many peddlers by whom I was to be creatively accosted during my travels through Spain and Portugal. This one specialized in selling cheap knockoffs of the pricier Swiss watch to unwitting tourists.

GOLD IN THE STREETS OF BROOKLYN

We’ve all heard snickered allusions to housewives who bestow their favors on deliverymen or repairmen. When I was a child, I knew a woman who was the recipient of bounty from the milkman and laundryman with no quid pro quo on her part.

The widow Wiener, owner of the six-family Bensonhurst building in which I lived between the ages of five and seven, kept house for herself and her daughter, a teacher in the nearby elementary school. She maintained the cleanliness of the building