At Seventeen.

The year was 1955. I thought I knew everything.

In this picture I look like someone who is sure of herself, when my memories suggest something far different. I worked at it, as all girls do, but the truth is I had little self-esteem, little ability to see any beauty in that face or in that body. Yet, at seventeen, I know I wanted to believe in miracles. I wanted to believe that someday I would overcome that big nose, that lazy eye, those teeth that crumbled and had no strength.

This picture showed up only recently when a cousin unearthed it and sent it to me. I had never seen it before, and my first thought was that I didn’t know that girl at all. How could I ever have looked like that?

I know I had to be around seventeen because I’m in my aunt and uncle’s house and they moved the following year. I don’t remember ever wearing my hair in that style. I do remember the dress. It was brown cotton sateen. It required a strapless bra and it felt strange but nice having my shoulders exposed. You can’t see my small waist but this dress showed it off. My waist measured 22 inches, and I was pretty proud of that until I read that the actress Vera Ellen’s waist measured 17 inches. (I didn’t know the term ‘anorexic’ until decades later.)

I’ve never thought of myself as vain but in those early years I guess I was. I see I plucked my eyebrows. I know I kept a supply of Maybelline mascara, but this was before shadow and eyeliner, so lipstick, mascara and an eyelash curler was about as near as I came to ‘making up’. I had good skin so I didn’t need a cover up. I might have added a dash of rouge now and then. I washed my face with Ivory Soap.

Because I’d developed early, I’d had my share of run-ins with boys who wanted to grab and grope and conquer. Even then I knew it wasn’t because of my looks or my mind. It was the boobs. Some of those run-ins were scary and could easily have turned to rape. I wasn’t always careful about locations and found myself more than once fending off a boy who decided now was the time for me and realizing there was no one around to save me. It might have been sheer luck that I either talked my way out of it, fought my way out of it, or the boy stopped when he should have.

I was wary but not afraid and there were times when I should have been.

In high school I had a steady boyfriend who was nice but bland, not exactly dumb but not especially interested in anything I might be interested in. He was on the football team. He was safe. And I would have been nobody in high school without a boyfriend.

But who was I as a person? What did I want? What did I believe? Did I think about my future?

Could I imagine that little more than a year later I would be engaged, and six months after that I would be married, and nine months after that, still a teenager, I would become a mother?

At seventeen I had visions of a man with olive skin and dark hair, Someone exotic and a bit mysterious. Someone who would sweep me off my feet. Someone like Ricardo Montalban…

I had visions of a career as an actress and a singer. I do know that. I was quiet in crowds but I was a movie and stage play junkie so I thought I wanted to be on stage. I could sing well enough to make my cousin cry, but I had such stage fright when it came to singing in front of strangers my vocal cords would twist and clench and what came out was anything but pleasant. Oh, and I couldn’t act. Not at all. No matter how hard I tried to make myself sound like a real person. I could do it in practice but not on a stage.

But I wanted it—badly—and I might have pursued it if I had been prettier.

If there were feminists, we didn’t have a name for them yet. I wouldn’t have been one. Not at seventeen. In my high school we girls were getting giddy over hope chests and visions of frothy wedding gowns. We were already looking for husbands, which almost guaranteed we were going to be making some huge mistakes.

Because I knew my dream husband would never become real, I settled for thinking my high school boyfriend would be the one. But he graduated a year ahead of me and went into the army and while he was gone I found I didn’t miss him. I told him when he came home on leave and I remember walking with him down our road, trying to explain that it wasn’t him it was me, except I had no idea what I meant by that. I only knew there was something I was getting ready for and it didn’t include him.

I was seventeen.

We’d petted but hadn’t gone there. That made it much easier. If we had, I’m certain I would have married him, even if it didn’t feel right. It’s what girls did in the fifties. If they slept with a boy even once the guilt alone would bond them. Unless it was the boy who ended it. Which almost always happened. It would be unnatural in my circle for a girl to sleep with a boy and then end it. More power to her if she did, but the road ahead would be a rough one when he told.

At seventeen we learned to live by rules. We didn't deviate. I wanted to be that person who was popular. I hung around with the girls who were popular, and of course that had to include those who were only popular because they were pretty or had money. Their main goal was to stay pretty and to stay rich. We had nothing in common. Nothing.

We formed a “sorority” in high school and gave ourselves a Greek name—Beta Omega Phi, or BOP.

Yes, I still have my sorority pin. Of course I do.

We had pins made, which we wore on our right breast. (The quill meant I was secretary.) We did a silly kind of hazing because we thought we needed that to be a sisterhood, a word we didn’t even know yet, but felt. Even then, no matter who we were or where came from, we were just girls, and every one of us knew the sting of being second class.

As part of our initiation, we, the founders, made ourselves eat gross stuff and feel things blindfolded that would ick us out but were really things like cooked spaghetti or squishy Jello. We, of course, tried to think of worse stuff for the new girls, but not so bad it would hurt.

We weren’t mean girls. We were too nice for that. We called ourselves a service sorority, we had bylaws, we did what we called ‘charity work’. We collected canned goods for food drives. But it didn’t occur to any of us that for every one of us who were ‘in’, there were many more we purposely kept out. We had meetings where we talked about who we should include and who we wouldn’t. It gave us power and we abused it, not ever seeing it that way, of course. Girls asked to join, and we had to sidestep them in order not to hurt their feelings.

Our pins gave us status and we would do anything to keep it, including kowtowing to the one exception to ‘nice’—the awful but beautiful rich girl who got in because we could use her spacious basement as our meeting place. She got drunk on the Senior cruise through the Great Lakes and got caught servicing a boy in a janitor’s closet on board ship. Her father had to pay to have her sent home. Her downfall felt like a guilty victory to the rest of us. We were ashamed to feel it, but not so ashamed we didn’t gossip about it.

Because we were kids.

I was still 17 when I graduated. I thought I was a grown up, of course. I wasn’t. Not even close. I lived with normal parents in a normal neighborhood where it felt like everyone was safe and, while nobody was wealthy, nobody was desperately poor, either. My best friend had a mean father and when she stayed overnight she wanted to spend the hours in the dark telling me how bad it was. But all I wanted was for her to stop. Misery was not my thing. I tried to convince her she should be happy.

I was seventeen.

I went to work at Bell Telephone as a long-distance operator right out of high school and, for a girl, it was a good paying job. It required some skill and for the first time I felt as if I might be smart enough. It was a revelation. All through school I felt dumb, even though I read a lot. Voraciously, in fact. I read beyond my capability because I loved words. I read to be enchanted, not necessarily enlightened. Books were my haven from a very young age.

At seventeen I was already writing but nobody knew it. I would have been mortified if any of my friends had found out. It was a separate part of me. The part I hid. I wouldn’t have been able to explain it, but, more than that, I would have been exposing something I loved to what I knew would be an unforgiving world. If I had told anyone I would have had to stop.

I felt too dumb to be a person who writes. It was my guilty secret.

I couldn’t memorize to save me, and all school was memorization. As if our lives depended on it. Every explorer, everywhere they went, every date. Every king, every queen in England, France, and Spain. The happenings of the American Revolution, the generals, the signers of the Declaration and the Constitution. The Civil War. The names, the dates. Always the dates. We couldn’t graduate without passing American Government, and American Government was almost solely memorization.

Then there was test-taking. I handled test-taking the same way I handled singing in front of people—I froze. What I knew the night before, during the wee hours as I studied, left me high and dry as I squirmed at my desk trying to make sense of the questions.

I graduated at the exact middle of my class of 140, still thinking I was dumb and would never amount to much.

I was seventeen.

I turned eighteen on September 17. Less than two weeks later I met Ed, the man I married and loved and lived with for more than 65 years. He changed me. He changed my life. He was five years older, just out of the Marines, and the smartest person I’d ever met. We’d sit for hours on my front porch, and he made me believe I was just as smart. We talked about things I didn’t realize I was yearning to explore, including the feelings we shared about race and poverty and inequity. Grown up things. Things that really mattered. Things I didn’t have to memorize in order to understand where they might fit in the scheme of things.

And I grew.

At our wedding shower in my aunt’s basement, 1956

Constant Commoner revolves around my thoughts as a woman who has aged and grown and learned by a process that feels miraculous considering I have no formal education or unique abilities. We the people are all commoners. We believe based on our own past and our own feelings. We choose a path we can live with and if we’re lucky we get to share our lives with people who care, who understand.

That’s what I aim to do here. I want to build a community where anyone can come and sit on our porch and grow along with the rest of us.