Okay. I promised to tell you the story of about the Barbara Cartland romance novel and why it is, in my mind and in yesterdays photograph, paired up with my yearbook from my junior year in high school.

I told you that my junior year was one of the worst years of my life up unitl that point....though I imagine everybody's junior year of high school is pretty rough. High school is hell, really, and I wouldn't go back and relive that part of my life for all the tea in China

But, of course, the problems of being a teenager, whatever the individual problems are for the individual teenagers, don't start overnight....

and my case was no different. In my case, I had health problems. I had always had trouble keeping weight on, and that started to become a problem in about the 7th grade.

My mother took me to Dr. Wolfe, the new pediatrician I liked ever so much more than the cold, detatched, and frightening Dr. Stambler who, I guess, had retired. Dr. Wolfe seemed to be aware that I was a human being, not just a set of developmental stages, which, in my own case were all sort of screwed up anyway. ( I can remember reading a book of my mothers when I was about 10 which had an essay by the child psychologist Piaget in it. In the essay, Piaget descibes why it is perfectly normal for a ten year old child to think that the moon is following him as he walks around the yard in the evening. "How could anybody be that stupid?" I asked aloud, "Don't they teach SCIENCE classes in France?!")

But, of course, I digress.

"Your mother tells me that you find it difficult to eat at times." Dr. Wolfe opened conversationally.

"I really do make an effort, Dr. Wolfe! It's just...I'm never hungry. My stomach just seems a little...I often feel like I might throw up. You know, I always have a cold and...it just feels like my throat is going to close up a lot of times."

"And your mom doesn't go in much for between meal snacks, right? Because of your brother. And the rules are that you have to eat what she fixes. Your father, I believe, is against the idea of cooking seperate meals for children."

God bless my poor mother. My brother had no trouble at all keeping weight on - he put it on too easily, having inherited those German genes out of Dad's side of the family.

"She wants us to be healthy." I said defensively, and, at this point, feeling I ought to pay a little more attention to the conversation, I let close the cover of the book I was reading. "My mother is not running a restaurant."

This last was a direct quote from my father, but if I was smart enough to read Piaget, I was certainly smart enough to know that it was no picnic getting a meal on the table for 3 people who each hated what the others liked best. Frankly I give my mother a lot of credit for not saying, "There's Swanson's in the freezer. Ya'll suit yourselves."

The book was Animal Farm by George Orwell. Dr. Wolfe's face registered surprise but not suspicion. He gestured at it, asking the question in his pro-forma voice. "What is your book about?"

"It's an indictment of communism" ( yes, I routinely used words like "indictment" when I was 12) "I'm not too far yet, so I can't figure out which animal is who, though I think I've got one of the pigs for Trotsky. I've just gotten to 'Some Animals are more equal than others'." And here I gave out one of my ironic looks over the tops of my glasses, which I did to amuse the adults who already knew I was a person and to frighten the ones to whom it was a shock. Dr. Wolfe was in the first catagory.

"Hmm. The last time you were in it was All the Presidents Men but I guess you finished that." he recalled with out consulting his chart.

"I can't help it, you know. I'm very interested in politics right at the moment. I think I'm a liberal though you ought not tell my mother. She's upset enough about me as it is."

Dr. Wolfe, whom I suspect may have been a liberal too, gave a little cough to cover the laugh that was popping out.

"You know, that's pretty heavy reading material. I mean, if I was thinking about Trotsky all the time I might find it kind of hard to swallow my dinner myself." Dr. Wolfe said, "Give me your arm, please, I just want to check your blood preasure."

"I know, but I can't help it! I've tried reading stuff for girls my age, but it's stupid. There's nothing to learn from it! It's not interesting."

"Maybe you ought to try gothic novels." he suggested.

"What's a gothic novel?" I asked. Pathetically, I was always read to try a new book.

"Well, they're actually romance novels, but they're generally set in the past. There's usually - er - a plot to them. Ghostly ruins, secret passage ways...120 over 80, well, that's okay. But, I mean, they're lighter reading. Nobody generally gets killed, except maybe an evil housekeeper getting tossed off the ramparts from time to time, but only because she deserves it. Are you still having trouble sleeping?"

I nodded. ( As you read this, please remember that these were the days before it was known, at all, that a child could suffer from depression)

"Your father doesn't encourage all this heavy reading, does he?" by which Dr. Wolfe was trying to discover if my dad was one of these nut ball parents who had their kid on a hopeless treadmill of schoolwork at a young age to fullfil their own frustrated desire for a scholarship to Harvard or something.

"No, of course not. I read what I want. But I could never sleep, you know. My mother only brought it up this time because I'm more apt to walk around now that I'm older."

"Mmm. Well. She says you have nightmares...but were you...no, you wouldn't have been reading that other one of his- "

"1984? Actually, yes, though I tried to skip over the torture, which was, really most of it, at least the end. But, I felt I ought to read it, that's what year I'll graduate after all."

"For you, violent books are almost worse than voilent television." he said firmly.

"Oh, I never watch the news before bed!" I clarified, which brought on the sputtering cough again.

The visit ended with the idea that "an eye" would be kept on me. I really didn't want to be a worry to my parents, let alone an expense. Although my parents thought me quite rebellious, there were pleanty of parents of drinking-smoking-having-sex kids who would have been quite willing to trade with them. I still wanted to do what my parents wanted me to do. Aside from my burgeoning liberalism, I was ready to stay their course, straight and narrow as it was.

So, if changing my reading material was the 'party line' ( so to speak) on getting rid of the lump in my throat, queasy stomach and getting some sleep, as long as it wasn't more Judy Blume, I was willing to go for it.

Thus started four years of Barbara Cartland novels, like the one in the last photo. They were, as promised, light reading - and fast reading too. They were, very often, the same story over and over again. Very young woman meets handsome slightly scandelous older man whom she charms by her innocence and they live happily ever after in the castle/hall/keep after the evil stepmother/evil housekeeper/ jaded-already-married other woman falls off of the tower/ruin/horse. I understand that Barbara didn't even write all of them herself, she just sort of presented the outlines. The dialouge was abysmal, you had the sense the things were sort of writing themselves, but, nevertheless, they were full of interesting historical tid bits. For instance, in the book in the picture the heroine's gown makes a distinctive "frou-frou" sound as she walks, and Ms. Cartland, who, despite looking like a toad dressed entirely in pink in the photos on the backs of her books, didn't explain that to her readers any furhter. It was just the right blend of history and romance for me at the time. I even worry that her heroine's habit of trailing off into a series of ....dot-dot-dots....has influenced my writing forever.

Unluckily, it almost influenced my thinking. Because I spent those years getting sicker and sicker, and thinking that other people knew what was best for me. I came out of my scoliosis brace and was declared successfully treated ( having been told that the numbness in my arms and hands could not possibly have a thing to do with that) Astonishment was expressed when I grew another two and a half inches beyond what the oracle of the x-ray of my hands said I would. Nausea broke out into full scale episodes of vomiting, yet I tried gamely to drink milk, eat ice cream, red meat and whatever else I was supposed to be eating. For the first time in my life, I used discretionary money to buy ice cream after lunch at at school, and on Saturdays, desperate to gain weight. By 1983 - the year before George Orwell predicted the clock would strike 13 and the world would be at war -
I was in the midst of my own crisis. My doctors had given up on any soft options, I was taking medications with horrific side effects and it was strongly intimated to my parents that I must have an eating disorder ( these HAD recently been discovered - The Best Little Girl in the World had come out when I was 12) I was as tall as I am now, and I weighted 108 pounds. I passed out almost once a week. I caught everything, wandered the hallways of my high school in confusion and one day it dawned on me.....

These adults I trusted, well meaning as they all might be, had no idea what in the hell was wrong with me. But, it was my future, the course of my life they were guessing at.

So.

I stopped taking medicines abruptly, and I lied about it. I flatly refused to eat anything I had ever tossed up again after eating the first time, which meant I became a vegetarian. I wouldn't eat something that made me sick even to be polite. I began to walk, determined to build up my streangth through the only activity I could still carry on regularly. I called Planned Parenthood and found out it was NOT strictly speaking, normal, to be as sick as I was two days out of the month at about-that-time. A friends mother offered to take me - her daughter had gotten rid of a lot of similar symptoms by being on the pill, but I couldn't tell that kind of lie to my mother. "She'd NEVER believe it was only to quit barfing!" I cried.

Of course she would have. But teenagers are often sort of all-or-nothing kind of people. Having done what my parents, my teachers, my doctors all wanted up until that time, and seeing spectacularly bad results, made me determined to not have my soft spoken words trail off in a series of dot-dot-dots. I was on to my own devices, come hell or high water, and as for the trust and faith that it all worked out for the heroine because she was innocent and good - well, goodbye to all that!

I was lucky. As painful as it was for me and my family and my friends, it turned out that the tools my parents had given me in early life held me in good stead - the critical thinking skills, my mothers rallying cry of "Think For Yourself! - though I expect that there were times when they wished they hadn't taught me those things so well.

And there is the story of why the Barbara Cartland novel - the last one I have - now sits next to the 1983 year book. All in the past, like Trotsky, the frou-frou skirts, and the Cold War.