I started to be interested in girls when I was eleven years old and in the sixth grade.

We had a few parties where we played spin the bottle, and it all seemed very racy.

There was a girl in my class who lived on the next block, Wendell Street, in Cambridge, Mass.

She was attractive  and very nice, smart and articulate. She had dark, curly hair — sort of spiky. I don’t recall her name.

She told us her parents were divorced. This kind of shocked me. It was the 1950s. Nobody’s parents got divorced.

She said her father hit her mother in bed late one night and her mother left him. It must have been bad; she said he broke her mother’s nose.

I thought about this today and about telling my wife the story. I haven’t thought about it for years.

Sometimes one suffers an emotional blow or gratuitous insults and meanness, and it’s the last straw.

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   March 30, 2022