READ
My Life in 100 Words
I write bite-sized memoir. Each one is exactly 100 words. Not 99 and not 101.
Here are a few of them. For more, please subscribe to my Substack: https://rebeccakalin.substack.com
GRAFFITI •
My career as a graffiti artist never really got off the ground. Like Banksy, I was secretive and anonymous. But unlike Banksy, I never moved beyond a single signature image and no one ever paid me a dime. Armed with a pocket full of colored chalk, I would dawdle my way home from grade school, always on the lookout for a dull, empty stretch of sidewalk that I could dress up with a top-to-bottom, full color, life-size illustration of the human digestive track. I pulled it off dozens of times without ever once being caught by grown-ups, fortune or fame. (100)
MY MEDICAL CAREER •
One summer, I was Director and Chief Medical Officer of a small hospital located in a dusty, unused backroom of our basement. Such a bustling place! There were beds everywhere: some as small as a Barbie, others big enough for a child since they were occupied by patients with paper-bag heads and bodies made from pajamas stuffed with rags. Scarcely a day went by without some kind of terrible emergency! Nonetheless, no patients died. The hospital closed in early September after a neighborhood child declared it unsanitary, my parents claimed the room for a workshop, and I started third grade. (100)
SILVER DOLLARS •
My parents liked to cut and paste. They liked to make stuff. They had a lot of imagination. So, after they won the Best Costume Award at the 1953 NY Artists Ball, they brought home 200 silver dollars. Being good liberal parents, they let us, the children, play with them. We rolled them across the floor. Tossed them down the stairs. Hid them under cushions and behind radiators. In calmer moments, we used them as plates for dolls and stuffed animals. When it was time to pay a few bills, they rounded up what they could find: altogether, maybe fifty. (100)
THE STREAM •
The stream was all ours. Adults stayed away. Before the hurricane, we knew its banks and bends. We knew which rocks hid frogs and which enticed lacewing dragonflies. It was a kids-only paradise. After the hurricane, snapping turtles the size of frying pans sailed through a breached upstream dam. I was standing on a submerged rock. My brother saw the open mouth stealthily moving toward my toes. He shouted. I jumped. The turtle disappeared. Someone tracked down him with a shotgun. Just as he was gone, so was our paradise, smothered by surging water. The stream was never the same. (100)
FINGDALE •
Here’s an unsolved mystery. I was four years old when my mother left for the grocery store without me because, she said, I was too dirty. I decided to find her and started walking. When the policeman found me, I was three miles from home. He gave me a candy bar and a ride in his car. When the grownups asked how I got all the way to Springdale, I said, I didn’t walk, didn’t wide. I just disappeared to Fingdale. My parents never found out what happened that day and I never found out who ate the candy bar. (100)
THE DAINTY CLUB •
While the Dainty Club was not exactly elitist there was, as its marching song made clear, no better club around. The Dainty Club, the Dainty Club, the best club in the world! We were a half-dozen 6-11-year old girls, self-appointed organizers and overseers of such important neighborhood functions as spying on mailmen, yelling snazz-jazz at teenagers, burying time capsules, administering bravery tests, picnicking in forbidden places and staging ballets, plays and street fairs with prizes.We had just three Club rules and, as such, they were non-negotiable. Have a boyfriend. Know his name. Find the boy’s fort and smash it. (100)
