A movie can change your life.

In 1984, my friend Robert took me to see a film called  28 Up, when I was visiting him in New York City. (To the shock of friends, family and the world in general, we got married 18 years later…) The film is part of an English documentary series that follows a group of children from different levels of society.  Every seven years since 1964, the same individuals are re-interviewed and an updated version of the film is released.  The director, Michael Apted, originally intended to use his film to test Francis Xavier’s premise about education, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.”

I don’t know what the film says about the English educational system or the class system.  What struck me was realizing that no matter what changes in attitude or plans the participants make, the ones who seemed happiest to me in the film were the ones who ended up doing what they said they wanted to do when they were seven.

So I asked my mother about my childhood aspirations.  Apparently, I gave up on my first plan (to be a kah-bai and ride a hoh-see) early on, and decided to be a writer, like our family friend, Dirk Gringhuis.  By age five (before I knew how to write) I was already binding my own books made out of folded sheets of lined paper and safety pins.

Later on I was a news correspondent–a reporter for the High Street Holler, The Basement Press, and other short-lived newspapers published from the basement of our old Victorian house on High Street.  Here are a few stories that stunned the neighborhood:

As a poet, I wrote such things as the illustrated epic, “Lady Bainswaiter” ( a name chosen because it rhymes with “alligator” and “see you later”), about a gallant horse grieved over at death by her owner and her faithful stable boy.  Here are the last heart-wrenching stanzas:

I am telling this certain story

Just like it was told.

And poor little Johnson

Tried hard to be bold.

And Nellie May, her owner

Cried, cried and cried

Couldn’t control  her tears

Though she really tried.

I was digging by that tree

‘bought ten years later

and to my awful sirprise

I have the skull of Lady Bainswaiter

I started keeping diaries in the first grade (a practice I still continue today). The early volumes memorialize family vacations, as well as every mean comment Marilee Cheney ever said to me at school and the sadistic acts of my junior-high gym teacher, Mrs. Eckenrode.  I recorded these assaults at the top of the diary page and reserved the lower half for descriptions of happier things, such as fab shopping trips with my then boyfriend, Paul McCartney.

As a youthful playwright, I penned that popular Christmas pageant favorite, “Santa Comes to a Lonely Dwelling,” about a poor little Hindu girl, Rontu Casheevi, who freezes to death in the alley behind a Rexall Drug store after seeing a vision of Santa, the Holy Family, and angels. Later on,  I actually won play-writing prizes and ran a theater company for three years, but THIS play shows my true dramatic genius, I think…

My first career was as a legal aid attorney in inner-city Detroit. Then I saw a movie.  Now I write books. I paid attention to my little self, and I’m happy. Next month I will be 63. That’s nine times seven years.