Secrets

I RECENTLY SELECTED a large print (LP) novel from my library, Sam’s Letters to Jennifer, under the James Patterson brand. I first read the inside jacket and found the storyline appealing. It described compelling love stories in which secrets were shared between generations of women who had spent their summers on Lake Geneva in Wisconsin.

This had a familiar ring in my own life. I spent summers in Leelanau County, where I tried to charm a few ladies in my teenage and college years. I certainly have fond memories of these gals; we lounged by campfires on sandy beaches, joined by lots of laughter.

The storyline of the novel was the very private truths of a grandmother’s life as revealed in a collection of letters addressed to her granddaughter. The grandma was on her deathbed in a coma as the story unfolded. Pearls of wisdom abound in the handwritten letters she left to her granddaughter to read, where she shared her thoughts on living life to the fullest.

She further reveals secrets never told, especially her love for a man who was not her husband. It was a tearjerker with such realism in the narrative. Longing for someone is an all-powerful feeling, and it played its tantalizing melody throughout this novel and certainly has in my life.

I remember, as a young teenager, discovering a closed storage chest in my parents’ basement that contained a collection of letters. They were from my mother’s college days in Ann Arbor, just before World War II. I was curious about her early life before meeting my dad, and the letters and notes helped shed light on that subject. I couldn’t comprehend my mother being interested in anyone other than my father (Fritz and Lou in the above photo); it just didn’t make sense in my younger days.

I read a dozen or so letters from various men that were rather flirtatious. I remember kidding Mom about my discovery; I was met by her silence. We were not going to enter into that discussion, was my brilliant deduction. I remember wanting to share the discovery with one of my sisters a few days after, only to find that none of the letters remained in the chest when my sister and I searched again. Mom had acted. I had violated her privacy.

Years later, after my mother’s death, I discovered and examined a collection of her father’s diaries that revealed further insights about my mom as a teenager, at least from his point of view. I read the journal that was written on January 5, 1936, when she was fifteen years old.

The handwritten entry:

Louise is in her second year at Scarsdale High School. She receives consistently poor marks and has dropped Latin. She frequently comes home disgruntled with her schoolmates and wants to move away. She is boy crazy and quite brazen about letting objects of her successive infatuations know how she feels about them. Louise, who has taken piano lessons (without making much progress) since she was five or six years old, is now changing to voice lessons. She is neat and orderly, courageous, and a hard and efficient worker on things other than studies. She has a most difficult disposition, which we are doing our best at trying to smooth off.

Louise was sent to her room during dinner for being unpleasant.

H. B. Carpenter, Father

My grandfather’s comments on being “boy crazy” after all is a message that has been echoed for millennia from fathers with teenage daughters.

This journal entry brings such a smile to me because his comment about her “most difficult disposition” did not resemble the person that I knew. She was rock solid in her constitution and possessed a delightful disposition. As I have written before, humor did not appear to be her father’s strong suit.

We all play many roles in our lives, and each of us carries in our existence a point of view that is often hard to see beyond. I’m happiest when Louise is viewed as my loving mother, and I would like to leave it at that.

As for me, I have secrets in my life that I’m not ready to reveal. It is probably for the best that they remain right where they are.

That’ll keep you guessing.