My posts for the next few days will be devoted to my upcoming 80th Birthday

Turning 80 years old. Begun October 30, 2025

Friends my age are surpised that we have gotten old. Each of us has faced it in a different way. Many cling to what I think of as a kind of disguise: they color their hair, wear make-up, and some have cosmetic surgery, face lifts, injections and so on. I choose to dig into the reality of this moment. To me, increasingly, it feels like an accomplishment to have survived for 80 years. Each day I read reports in my e-mail news feed about people half my age dying from cancers, drug overdoses, murder, automobile accidents. And heaven knows there have been plenty of oppportunities for the death dealer to call in my note: traveling in dangerous places with my ex-husband in Europe (Morocco, Turkey) even just riding with him on some of the dangerous highways we traveled. And of course the classic death notice for women - domestic violence, childbirth! I survived plagues - polio, the Corona Virus Epidemic, (the influenza epidemic after WW1 killed my biological grandmother) and a cardiac event a few years back plus a severe Diverticuitis hospitalization - so many ways to die and yet, here I am two weeks away from my 80th birthday.

So with Marcel Proust in mind, I decided to slip around into the past and also, in the very modern way, to kind of document the two weeks leading to my 80th birthday - my favorite form, the JOURNAL. Along with the blog posts, I will be doing this in a paper book format; I have a very nice hard bound Art Journal that will be perfect for this, but I will also do it here.

The mental onstruction of this literary project really begins with lunch on Thursday with two friends, Nancy and Barbara. We ate at Maritsa's in Maple Shade which is a good place to start because it is located in Maple Shade, where I lived my teen years, on Roland Avenue in the 1950's.

The more I contemplate my life, the life of an ordinary woman, the more I see the significance of it. Perhaps because I studied journals in college and saw history from the eyes of real people living ordinary lives in what is perhaps NEVER ordinary times! Interesting to read the journal of a Hessian soldier in an army rented by his German overlord to the British to fight in the American colonies during the Revolution, and two or three journals of American colonists during the Revolution; Joseph Plum Martin's being the most famous. Also a young man from Greenwich on the Cohansey River who died in service from a camp disease, and a middle aged wife evicted from her home because her husband in Philadelphia was a loyalist. He fled to Britain and she was forced to take refuge in spare rooms from kind friends throughout the City of Philadelphia.

My life begins on November 13, 1945, the year World War 2 ended, and spans the last 50 years of the 20th Century and the beginning 25 years of the 21st. Talk about interesting times! I made a scrapbook during my scrapbooking period about my life from 1945 to the age of 70. To my disappointment, my friends for my birthday lunch on Thursday had no interest in looking at it, though their lives spanned the same period and it was, after all, a decorative illustrated scrapbook! During the scrapbooking period, I made one for my sister's 50th and my daughter's 30th, but I think I may have been the only person interested. I made one for myself at 70. I loved doing it because it blended collage, autobiography, history and a contemporary art form the scrapbook.

It was a dark and rainy day that we met for lunch on Thursday, October 30th, so the pictures on the sidebars are cloudy and gloomy looking. When I go to Maritsa's I always drive to my old homes, our last family home on Linwood Avenue, our first family home in New Jersey on Roland Avenue, the Pennsauken Creek which bordered our development and our cul de sac, Roland Avenue. On the way home, I pass my old high school which isn't even a high school anymore.

On that subject, so many of my schools are defunct: Merchantville High School, Mary Ethel Costello School in Gloucester City where I taught for over 25 years, the University of Arts in Philadelphia where I also taught for about 25 years, first in the Saturday Lab School and later in the graduate seminar as an adjunct professor. I was very proud of that and here is the reason: I was a grade school misfit - I was a tramatized, eotionally disturbed pants wetter, selectively mute, and when I did speak it was crazy nonsense of a panic stricken child. For example one incident I remember was that I raised my hand to go to the lavatory, but when the teacher called on me I was so ashamed and embarrassed I told a crazy tale of having a 'butterfly collection' which she then invited me to bring to school for 'show and tell.' Then I wet my pants in my seat. To go to the bathroom, you had to raise your hand, go sit on a bench in the front of the room facing the 40 or so overcrowded post World War 2 baby boom class, and wait for the paddle to come back. I just couldn't do it. After all, children in my age group were punished severely for 'accidents' and bed wetting so we were intensely indoctrinated with the shame of going to the bathroom.

Grade School was a nightmare in a brick factory school followed by our move to Maple Shade, NJ and a pretty, new school on a side street off the main street. One thing I remember from that time in the new school was a boy pulling up a root ; and telling me to smell it because it was 'root beer' - sassafras! It was deliciously fragrant. Another thing I remember was a bad boy named Cody who would grab my chest on the way to the pencil sharpener and stab the cactus on the window sill beside me on his way back to his seat. The best and most wonderful memory however is planting trees on Arbor Day and singing out the open window "Poems are made by fools like me but only God acan make a tree." Those trees we planted still stand in red and gold leafed spendor outside that little school. I had a kind teacher there, Miss Heal. And she did heal with her soft voice and her kind and dignified demeanor. She played piano for us and we sang. Sadly, Miss Heal was murdered many years later in her old age by a mentally ill man who robbed and beat her and threw her body down the cellar steps.

My chronic truancy in Philadelphia became sporadic truancy in middle school, so suffice to say I was a school failure.

Things didn't improve much in High School although I began to recover emotionally and I was able to clear the cobwebs from my eyes and see something of a path forward. I did poorly and was tracked into the business career path, which was actually quite beneficial because it prepared me for work and money to get out of the house and become independent. I became a truant with a good excuse, hepititis which I got from swimming t=in the polluted Pennsauken Creek and contracting the disease from the sewage dumped into the water. I was out of school ost of a year and bedridden on home bound instruction after months in the hospital at Lady of Lourdes.

This segment seems to be devoted to the early years, so I think I will stop here. There comes Dating, My first job and apartments, Marriage, and Europe in my 20's. Home, college, Divorce, Single Motherhood, College again, Career, Retirment, Volunteering and the History World, then the present moment. >p/> Like my historic joural writing friends, I don't imagine anyone will care about this record of an ordinary life, but like them, I feel compelled to write it.

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com