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For the storytelling class, I had to tell a story, tell its history, and tell a personal story that related to it. I did King of the Cats, which you’ll find in the previous post. This is the personal story I told:
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The Secret Lives of Cats

I’ve always wondered what my cats do when I’m not home. Are they just moping around, waiting for me? Or are they plotting to take over the world? A few years ago, my cat Stripe escaped out the back door and didn’t come back for seven days! We searched the neighborhood, and hung Missing Cat signs on all the telephone poles. We searched animal shelters—looking in all the cages for Stripe. Every day, we walked around the block with a can of cat food, calling his name. And finally one morning, he meowed at our bedroom window. We asked him where he was, but he wouldn’t say. And ever since then, Stripe tries to escape… and when he does, he is gone at least a few days. One time he was missing during a hurricane. And when he returns, he never tells us where he has been… one of life’s mysteries is the secret lives of cats!

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Stripe, pictured in the previous post, was once called the Cat Who Would Be King. However, since we moved to this house, and we’ve limited his outside time (since whenever he goes out, he’ll go out for days), he has gotten kind of soft. In 2006, his left ear blew up with a hematoma and is now a shriveled stump. A few weeks ago, the same thing happened to his right ear. His breath is horribly stinky. He likes to lay on the dining room table, and shake his slobbery mouth all over everything. I was sitting on the couch (a futon), and it STANK of Stripe, so I pulled off the futon cover to wash it. In doing so, I found Lilia’s Phillies hat wedged under the futon mattress– it had has been missing for almost a month! So, Mr. Stripe, although your stinky slobberiness is annoying, I guess it was useful for something! I still love this darn cat!

Alright– here’s one of the personal stories I wrote up for class:

Mom was driving me to piano lessons, and as usual, I had my nose in a book. A string of geese flew overhead, and Mom pointed them out—“Laura, Look at the Geese!” I grunted and kept reading. Mom saw my reaction, and said, “You know what you are? You’re jaded!” Jaded? I looked up and asked, “What does that mean?” Of course Mom wouldn’t tell me—it was time to play “Look it up!” But this wasn’t fair—I had no dictionary, and was heading to piano lessons. I wouldn’t be able to look it up! What had she called me? I rushed through piano lessons, and we drove home. I begged Mom, “Please, what does ‘jaded’ mean? Does it mean I’m a bookworm?” But Mom just let me suffer. I pulled out Webster’s and went to the J’s…Jab Jac… there it was… Jaded: made dull, apathetic, uninterested or cynical by too much of something. What? Mom thought I wasn’t interested in geese? I cried out, “But Mom, I love geese! I’m not jaded!” And I’ve never forgotten the meaning of that word.

I just finished my first summer session course, Storytelling. For one of the assignments, I had to write up 10 personal stories from throughout my life. I wrote them up, and asked Joe to look them over, since he has heard most of them, and was there for some of them– they were too boring for him to get through! I submitted them without another pair of eyes looking at them. Fast-forward to yesterday… Joe was going through boxes of scraps of paper we’ve saved over the years… and he finds this story I wrote for a class I had in Fall 1995. He says, “It’s better than anything you wrote for your assignment– go type this up now!” I was on a self-imposed computer break all weekend, so I will type it up now.

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When I was growing up, my family didn’t have a lot of money, but my mother always gave me anything I wanted, from trombone lessons to tickets to see Rod Stewart when I was six. She also gave me everything she had always wanted, from dance lessons to the opportunity to be more than a nurse. In the summer between fifth and sixth grades, I hounded my parents to send me to a two-week camp. I think my mother worked over-time to send me. And the second I got there, I had one thing on my mind– going home.

I became hysterical. “I miss my mommy and I want to go home,” I’d wail. I knew if I just asked her, she would come and get me. My letter writing campaign began: Please, please come get me, I’m sick, my toe’s infected, my nose won’t stop bleeding, my head aches, my throat is sore, I hate swimming, I have no friends here, and I want to go home now!! For the first week, I was convinced she would come get me on Parent’s Day. Parents’ Day came and went– I cried to her all day long, but she held firm. One more week to go.

The next three days I continued the letter-writing, the complaining and the crying. And then I am not sure exactly what changed, but I did stop crying and complaining, and almost had fun (although I still won the camp’s homesickness award!) This is when I began to resent my mother and became independent from her.

I also started to notice the way the other girls dressed, did their hair and talked about boys. I was still wearing my older-by-eight-years sister’s hand-me downs. When I got home, my sister took me shopping at the mall and I bought fashion-conscious clothes.

Sixth grade started and my best friend and I became boy-crazy, period-anticipating mall-rats, who didn’t need parents to tell us what to do. When I was about 14, I decided to throw a lot of my things away. I came across a group of letters addressed to Pioneer Village– the letters my mom wrote me at camp! I might have re-read them at the time, I might not have. Even three years later, I was still very embarrassed by my actions at camp and extremely resentful towards my mother for not letting me go home. I threw out the letters.

Five years later, when my mother died, I came across a plastic bag marked “By ALL means SAVE!!!” Inside were the letters I had written to her. This time, I carefully placed them in a box with my first blanket and kindergarten drawings.

I grew up in a suburban housing development known as Cherokee Ranch, just north of Reading, Pennsylvania. One block away from our home was Cabot Berylco, a company that produced beryllium, a metallic element used as a component in steel. Our proximity to the plant was always a concern. My mother clipped and saved articles from the Reading Eagle/Times, which reported not only on the constant environmental violations of the plant, but more poignantly on the people affected by berylliosis, a lung disease caused by beryllium. The articles told of a woman contracting the disease after visiting the cemetery next to the factory every week, and of a young mother who contracted the disease after working as a secretary for another beryllium factory near Reading.

When my mother started coughing incessantly, her doctors performed a biopsy. The results were negative for cancer, but also negative for berylliosis. She was diagnosed with sarcoidosis, a disease that cannot be concretely diagnosed. After suffering with other illnesses most of her life, including kidney disease and myasthenia gravis, she lived for eight years with this diagnosis of sarcoidosis. Before she died at age forty-nine, she made me promise to have an autopsy done, so we would finally know what had killed her.

Expecting to hear that beryllium had been the cause, I was confused when the cause of death was ruled to be malignant lymphoma of the lungs. Experts reviewed her medical records and found that although she had lymphoma all along, it was impossible to diagnosis in her first biopsy. I wondered if the beryllium could be the cause of the cancer. Information I’ve found about beryllium disease does not link it to malignant lymphoma. In 1999, after reading yet another article about berylliosis in the Reading papers, I contacted a doctor at Penn who is a beryllium expert. He wished to meet with me to discuss my mother’s case. I regret that I never set up a time to meet with him. I had just returned to college full-time and feared that talking about my mother’s illness might interfere with the completion of my degree.

Now that I have earned my degree in American Studies, I am ready to focus on documenting my personal experience with my mother’s death and its possible connection to the toxic pollution in Cherokee Ranch. I find myself reading autobiographies looking for others who have experienced situations close to my own. I would like to develop an article, possibly for publication. In order to do this I need to become more comfortable with my own writing. I would like to learn interviewing techniques so that I can comfortably contact the physician at Penn, as well as the residents of Cherokee Ranch—although we were neighbors, we are essentially strangers that share a common bond.

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I wrote this for an environmental writing class I signed up for in 2001, but didn’t finish. I did however meet the Penn doctor for lunch one day. It was very awkward– when I contacted him in the first place, he suggested going out to lunch to talk– he was very interested. When we went out, we went to a place that was a little pricey for me (and I paid my share), and he acted like he didn’t know where Cherokee Ranch was, and essentially told me there was no connection between beryllium and cancer.