There’s no such thing as gender neutral. Or what hair salons like to call UNISEX. And don’t try to tell me there is. Boys and girls get treated differently. It starts in the family. Take mine for instance.

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Our dad almost never talked about THE WAR. The few times I remember him talking about it he said he was at “The Mop Up At Guadalcanal.” Maybe everyone called it that because that’s what it was called. But since I never heard anyone else talk about it, I always thought that was HIS name for it. As a kid I always pictured him with a big bucket and one of those Navy swab type mops, my dad standing in some muddy canal pulling that mop from side to side, swabbing like crazy but never able to get all the mud up and out of there. (more…)

“The Mop Up At Guadalcanal” was a strange description for what he actually had to do in “The Pacific,” another phrase that went with his almost never told war stories. It seemed to me that the generation that fought in World War II always referred to where they were sent by continent. Thus his friend Jack Shapiro fought in “Africa” against Rommel (ThatGoddammKrautSonofabitchRommel, as Jack often said, as if it were one word). (more…)

I had been to summer camp in Maine for two years starting when I was seven. Since many of the girls came to Camp Minnehooha from cities like Pittsburgh and New York, swimming was a really important part of the first month there. Because I had spent six months a year in Florida since I was two, I was one of the best swimmers at Camp Minnehooha. I had been swimming nonstop for years by then. At the edge of the lake they had roped off swimming pens and designated these by cap color. White Caps were the kids who had lived their entire lives in a city and were afraid to go in past their knees. Red Caps were beginning swimmers. The doggie paddlers. Blue Caps were accomplished in two strokes, and Gold Caps (there were only a few) could go anywhere they liked in or out of the pens and swim freely at any time. These girls could do every stroke including that most underused (for good reason) of all swimming styles, the butterfly. Now, if you had a shark circling you in the water I maintain that the butterfly would not be your first line of defense.

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Sailing school lasted two weeks – ten mornings in all. We spent nine of those days practice rowing. I dutifully went through the same exercises I had learned at Minnehooha. On the final morning, all nine of us climbed aboard the Sea Snake, a sixteen-foot sloop, and putt-putted out to the open Long Island Sound, leaving the many pleasure craft on Five Mile River behind peacefully bobbing at their moorings. Nobody but kids ever went out during the week. Besides Captain Bill and his “mate,” a nineteen-year-old boy who had obviously given up a Supreme Court summer clerking job for the adventure of the unbridled sea, the eight other young people aboard were all twelve or thirteen. (more…)

© Nancy Scola

A year later my father gave me a sailing dingy. Well, it was actually the dingy that went with the thirty-foot Egg Harbor that he bought, but he paid someone to outfit it with a centerboard and detachable rudder/tiller combination. And a mast and sail. No jib. Just the one sail. I tell you this because it has important implications. This sailboat, and I am stretching it to call this craft anything other than a dingy with a lot of chutzpah, was not a great challenge to racing vessels of any class. Mainly because when the wind took that little sail and the tide was anything but dead low or full high, in other words when the tide was running at all, that little sailing dingy, which probably weighed no more than a hundred pounds, went straight sideways. But fast. (more…)

My father had never learned to sail. If he had I’m sure he would have made the connection between a jib and being able to come about neatly without losing ground or running sideways against a strong current. For that is exactly what this new craft did. Very much like the dingy. Only faster still. So I could get even farther out into the Sound than with the dingy. I can still see him standing at the end of the dock, me way out near the entrance to our cove heading in at sunset, his arms folded at the waist, his legs slightly apart, just waiting to see that I was coming back. As soon as he spotted the white styrofoam ball at the top of my cat’s mast, he would turn and walk back up the hill to our house. He never said a word about where I had been or how long I’d been out or why I didn’t let them know when I was going sailing or anything like that. He just wanted to know I was safe. (more…)

I was in the fourth grade when I first fell in love. It’s doubtful that it lasted very long but it seemed an aching eternity. He seemed completely oblivious to my existence, probably the major reason I had any feelings at all towards him that fourth-grade year that was so full of complexity in my tenth year of life. His name was Mike. Funny thing was, a lot of other girls in Miss Hammernick’s class were intoxicated with the mysterious Mike, who was about as short as anyone in the class and extremely skinny. Soon I would affix my affections to another Mike, an older Mike, a much handsomer Mike, a friend-of-my-brother’s Mike and therefore even more out of my league. Mike II and my brother were in seventh grade. That meant they had graduated to junior high. Exalted. Independent. Almost-high-school Mike. Tall, lean, blond-haired, freckled, soft-spoken, elegant Mike. Who never ever said a word to me no matter how many times he came over to our house to do boy stuff with my brother. At ten, I was simply “the little sister” and there was nothing about me that would have interested any boy. But I had no idea why not.

By twelve, when I began to have the vaguest inkling of what did interest boys, it really pissed me off. Naturally I blamed my father. But not right away. I waited until my eighteenth birthday before starting my mass campaign of revenge for the way women were treated in Western society in general and MY society in particular, by arguing with him about everything and anything. These arguments included, but were not limited to, that most beloved of all our constitutional amendments, the very glue that holds our great society together, NUMBER TWO – the right to bear arms.

The year was 1967. Flower power was budding throughout the land. THE PILL had given women certain social options they had never known before. In three years I would be bringing four pounds of marijuana through Kennedy airport. Or two keys, if you prefer the lingo of 1970. (more…)

For the edification of the reader I will now place in evidence the exact wording of the second amendment, proposed by the Congress on September 25, 1789, and thereafter ratified by a bunch of states over a series of years until ratification of the first ten amendments to the Constitution was completed on December 15, 1791, with the last few holdout states finally ratifying on April 13, 1939, when Connecticut FINALLY put its John Hancock to the paper. By the way Connecticut is where Lyme disease was first identified in a family that had been suffering from some very unpleasant rashes, swellings, fevers, joint pain and other symptoms. So named for Lyme, Connecticut, where this family lived. Which is not far from where I grew up, presumably with some of the same tick-carrying deer. (more…)

At eighteen I decided I was emancipated.

And ready for love.

Although I did not find love right away, I did a lot of looking for it, and did find some approximations. I will share just one of them here.

I located him near the end of a summer stint at art school in Provincetown, a small hamlet populated by tenth generation Portuguese fishing families some of whom still fish while the rest ply the tourist trade in a variety of forms. (more…)

At the end of my summer in P-Town one of the other art students asked me for a ride back to New York. So I said yes. Well why not? He was the big cheese of our little summer school. Had a Fullbright for the coming year. He was going to Brussels. A country that is half French and half Walloon, whatever that is. It’s a very gray country. It always seems to be about fifty-two degrees (Fahrenheit, that is) and raining. At least that’s the way it is in Brussels. There are lots of bankers in Brussels. It doesn’t seem like a real center for the arts. But that’s where the Fullbright people sent him to paint for a year. (more…)

During the drive to New York this artist and I got to talking, which we hadn’t done all summer because of a lot of different circumstances. I will enumerate them:

1. He was dating another girl at the school.

A brief description of this other girl follows:

She lived in New York and was the daughter of a famous actor who had gotten himself killed in a car accident with his mistress. This girl’s mother had remarried a dentist or something. Anyway he gave her a more-than-comfortable life on Central Park West in one of those big old apartments that today cost about $20 million and he became a stepfather to this girl, who wanted to break into the movies but was at this art school because she also thought she wanted to be an artist. She was slightly plump but otherwise pretty. Isn’t it amazing that after all these years my claws are still visible? (more…)

My Lovegod did write. Often. And we hatched a plan for me to come to Brussels at Christmas for two glorious weeks of being in love. To me it seemed like the most romantic plan possible. What better way to, ahem, become a woman, finally? It never occurred to me that I could have saved a lot of travel time and money, not to mention the hassles I had to go through to convince my parents that this was a perfectly sane thing to do, by going to just about any bar in New York and putting up a red flag. Perfumed, of course.

Well, the first night there the deed was done and afterwards I looked around to see where this lovegod actually lived. (more…)

Now Lovegod had been a busy boy during my absence. He had taken temporary leave of his painting responsibilities, for which the people at Fullbright Inc. had paid him a meagre but prestigious wage, and attached himself to a traveling theatre troupe known as The Living Theatre. They had ended up being sponsored by a wealthy American woman who had bought a villa outside Rome, where she was now housing all eighty-three of them plus a few hangers on, one of whom was Lovegod, who had wheedled his way in as the troupe photographer. (more…)