The Cynosure of All eyes

As a youth I expected to be famous. Or rather, I thought it was expected of me. Much the same thing, really.

Being a sports hero was not in the cards. I couldn’t hit a curve ball, or even tell the difference between a curve ball and a wild pitch (no laughing matter in a town where farm boys threw a lot harder than they aimed.)

I drifted through a hapless adolescence, looking for alternatives. Eventually I decided to be a famous intellectual. The pay was lousy, but the perks were intriguing (Arthur Miller had just married Marilyn Monroe) and the work (making fun of Ayn Rand, for example) looked easy.

A lousy decision, as it turned out, for which I blamed my parents.. Not that I had mentioned it to them. In retrospect I can see that I was doomed from the start. Nobody in our family had ever been famous, much less intellectual. Of course, we all read a lot. Whatever came to hand. Dad subscribed to both TIME and LIFE, and Mom belonged to The Book of the Month Club, although she rarely had time to read the current selection. On Sunday mornings we read The Herald-Tribune (very inferior comics--no wonder that rag failed.)

Lamentably, both my parents were Republicans, although in those days Republicans were often quite sensible. Still, it was better not to mention my ambition. Intellectuals were known to be Democrats. Better to surprise them.

If I had been European, or even British, I might have understood how hopeless it was. In that case I might have written something 'edgy' to chop out a little niche in the second tier of fame, like the young Kingsley Amis:

"Another thing you'll find is that the years of illusion are not those of adolescence, as grown-ups try to tell us; they're the ones immediately after it, say the middle twenties, the false maturity if you like, when you first get thoroughly embroiled in things and lose your head. ... That's when you first realize that sex is important to other people besides yourself. A discovery that can't help knocking you off balance for a time." (from 'Lucky Jim' 1954)

By now I'd be a famous author, although no longer read by anyone but PhD candidates. As it is, my development was arrested just about the time you see me leaving Connecticut (more or less forever) age 17. That’s me with the ‘I’m not with these people’ look. We're at the train station. My father is the photographer, which accounts for the lack of focus and the obscured daughter. My mother is contemplating the greatness of all her children, as usual, and some of my younger siblings have come along to wish me well. 

Or, more likely, they wanted to see the steam locomotive--the last one on the Naugatuck line.

Bye bye, Mom.

Thanks, Dad. 

See you when I'm famous.