Excerpts from Paulette's Writing
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"I got my first cat when I was seven. I came home in my Brownie outfit, and my father was kneeling in the backyard, his hands in a cardboard box: inside were two black kittens. Tippytoes, because to me cats always seemed to be walking on their toes, and Tommy because my mother said Tommy could be either a boy's name or a girl's name, and we didn't know which Tommy was, yet."
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"I spent my twenties saying I'd never marry. Then I married with hardly a thought. It took only ten minutes. We were married in the courthouse of the neutral town in Washington State where we were living. Our next door neighbors were our witnesses. Later, describing it, Ted said it looked as if we were in traffic court. That was the way we wanted it; we didn't want much commotion..."
"My mother and father met in Marietta on one of the trips back to South Carolina that my mother's parents made from Texas, where they had moved shortly after they were married. My mother was sixteen, my father twenty-six. His first sight of her was her legs; he was lying under his car, tightening something up. He said he'd wait for her to grow up, and in the meantime, he drove to Texarkana to see her in his shiny black Model A Ford."
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"My mother was a more complicated case. Her mother-eyes took in everything - my clothes, my face, my posture, my purse, my shoes (were the heels run down?). I was being assessed, evaluated to see how I was doing, in more ways than one. How complex and difficult my mother was, how ignorant and wise, kind and mean, helpful and hostile, powerful and weak, loving and afraid - any daughter's dream of a mother!"
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"Our parents took us to the beach every summer when we were growing up. We'd rent a motel room along the strip at Myrtle Beach. The four of us - my mother and father, my sister and I - would walk across the black asphalt highway which was so hot it would blister bare feet. We'd wear rubber flip-flops and carry bright striped beach towels, straw hats, buckets and shovels, suntan lotion, T-shirts for Linda and me to put on when our shoulders started to burn."
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