Eating my words

a dispatch from bewilderness

In my first life, I freelanced writing for antique things called magazines, which had glamour then. I spent decades telling folks how to prevent everything bad, protect everything important, and procure everything good.

All they wanted or needed to know, have, want, wear, buy, try, lose, use, taste, sip, skip, slip into or out of.  Then I got hit by a drunk with a truck.

In my second life, I was parked at a table pounding pegs in boards and rolling Play-Doh balls. This was called Brain Training. I didn’t understand what people or signs or books or TV or movies were saying. Everyone talked too fast. Way too fast. They all wanted something.  I didn’t know what.

I started working at Time in 1972. I was a token “female professional” among troops of perky typists and hordes of preppy males. The executives wore Cartier cufflinks, engraved with initials and numbers, like GSW III or CMJ IV.

One was Henry Hall Something-Or-Other, the Seventh, one short of Henry VIII. My bosses were George the Third and Christopher the IV, while I was J, the only.

They went to Princeton or Dartmouth. So did their dads and granddads, who may have endowed a building or two. All the guys in my position had a wife, a nanny, and 2.3 kids. The nanny made meals and took care of the wife. Also the kids.

While they lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, I lived over a cab garage in a crumbling neighborhood with no trace of college grads. I climbed up and down stairs each day, through hordes of hacks, a word which then meant “drivers of metered vehicles.”

This was before Macs and PCs and laptops and tweets, cellphones, email or internet. We used typewriters; computers were kept in ice-cold rooms the size of stadiums. When we made a mistake, we did not hit the “delete” button. It had not yet been devised. Women were being paid 57 cents on the dollar compared to men.* 

Then I began freelancing. My clients owned Oprah and Elmo and Mickey and Bambi and Kermit the Frog. They got the credit and I got the cash, which was fine with me. Freelancers got paid more. We ate my words at every meal.

*Fifty years later, women are paid 67 cents on the dollar. Just a half century to earn an extra dime.

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