Saturday May 11, 2024

Peace and quiet and shocking revelations from my letters home to my parents in 1971-72!

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels.

In addition, now and again I will provide some of my fiction to read, for free, on this newsletter. Everything is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for the newsletter by upgrading to paid.

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Daily Diary, , Day 1348:

It is so pleasant not having anybody in the house today, banging and sawing and periodically turning the water or the electricity off. So quiet. I have been using the time to get caught up on cleaning and doing loads and loads of laundry.

So far, everything seems to be moving along the way it should now that the remodel is in the hands of the main company. On Monday, the only thing that is scheduled is an inspection by the project manager to ensure everything is ready for the next team of workers who will come in either Tuesday or Wednesday and start doing the drywall for the bathroom and the den ceiling.

I can tell that weekends are going to definitely be oasis both in terms of peace and quiet as well as trying to get domestic stuff done.

I won’t say that my various aches and pains are gone, but they have subsided enough so I can pretty much ignore, except to make sure I’m taking the various pain medications on time and not forgetting to get up and move (which the loads of laundry are rather insuring isn’t a problem.)

I am still trying to dictate these posts, so as not to over work my joints, and I also found a gentle chair yoga class that I downloaded at the beginning of Covid and never tried.  After Monday, the yoga teacher is going to be gone for two weeks, so I hope this class will substitute for it and maybe the Pilates I had been doing.

Otherwise, I am pretty much been doing a little work on my data and reading through letters. I took a break from reading the letters I sent my parents yesterday to read the letters my future husband sent me in the summer of 1970.

As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, we met in the fall of 1969. At that point I was a junior, and he was a sophomore, and at the end of that year I went home to Pittsburgh and he went home to Atlanta. We wrote each other at least 2 to 3 letters a week all summer. Since this was the last time we were apart for any length of time for the rest of our lives (except during the beginning of Covid when he was gone 5 months helping out our daughter and grandsons) this is a very precious resource and I’m so glad I kept the letters.

Today I am reading the letters I wrote in the academic year 1970-71. I had discovered the previous spring that with a few additional summer school credits, I could graduate a year early from Oberlin. And while the advisors suggested I not graduate early (my grade pt average in history wasn’t all that great), and I didn’t particularly want to be separated from Jim who had two more years to go, I couldn’t see having my parents pay for a fourth year.

So I had applied to Kent State to take a master’s program (MAT, Masters in the Art of Teaching). This let me take graduate level history classes and education classes (and a quarter of student teaching) so I would end up with a teaching certificate.

Some of you may notice that this meant I was attending Kent State the year after the killings by the national guard. I will do a post at some point about what these letters revealed about what it was like as a college student in this period of the anti-war movement, something that has become heartbreakingly relevant now.

Anyhow, in a lighter vein, my parents very generously took the money they had saved for this fourth year of college, and divided the it into 12 equal amounts, which let me practice budgeting as if I had a job, but meant I didn’t have to work that year. I was very proud that at the end of that year I became self-supporting from that point on, and I didn’t even end up with student debt for my doctorate. Such a blessing, when I see what a burden this was for so many of subsequent generations of students.

I was delighted to learn later that they took the rest of what they had saved so they could take a trip to London!

But back to fall of 1970. Kent State was only about an hour from Oberlin, so I pretty much commuted between Kent and Oberlin that year so I could be with Jim as much as possible.

This required a long heart-felt letter to my parents (which interestingly my mother did not keep!) letting them know that I was tired of pretending that Jim and I weren’t in fact “living together., ie sleeping together. My memory was that while they were not exactly thrilled, they were understanding and wrote some sort of joint letter that I reference  in one of my letters to them as having impressed my friends because the rest of them were struggling with keeping the secret of their relationships from their parents! 

I also just came across a letter where I asked how they would feel about Jim and I finding a mutual new last name, if and when we did get married. I suspect this was my way of letting them know that marriage wasn’t completely out of the picture. And, in fact, a year later (spring of 1972) we did get married, and I kept my own name. But that is a whole other story.

In short, I am still having a terrifically good time going down memory lane with these letters.

And here is a photo from last week, when I was walking. I hope that by next week, I will be out and about again before I run out of pictures!

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