I Promise To Keep Quiet (After I'm Dead)*
by
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THE TRUTH ABOUT MY CAREER PATH
(You may call it a "Vocation" if you wish -- feel free)
This is one of the very few pictures taken of me recently where my smile didn't come out all funny. I thought I might need a smiling picture of me some day if I ever did something even a little bit serious. So here goes -- I'm about to launch into a quickie review of how I got to be that person in the photo -- that's about as serious as I can get.
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At the time I was born during FDR's second term in the year 1937, newborn girls of Jewish families were clucked over as though each of them was destined to be a future Queen of America, deserving of tiaras and velvet pillows. This was a lot of B/S because Americans never crowned any royal heads, at least not literally. I learned that all the initial excitement over my birth was part of a gigantic plot to fool little girl children into thinking that life would be beautiful. The whole thing -- all the adulation -- was just a ploy. As an infant, I never acquired a single tiara or velvet pillow -- only a few lousy pink rattles and a rash.
You have to understand my culture -- the ooh and aah crowd of Jewish drumbeaters in the late thirties. Some of them still thought that the next Queen Esther was just around the corner. We were expected to turn out gorgeous and highly skilled at homemaking and motherhood. If we were funny-looking, we still could be prettied up with nice clothes, nose jobs and cute hair styles, but then our credentials as homemakers and potential mothers had to be superb. There's a Yiddish term for what a young girl was supposed to become -- it is pronounced "balabuste." I have learned that Yiddish terms are spelled many different ways. It is characteristic of me that I didn't realize that earlier in my life -- I learned it last week. Oh well, let me get on with it.
We didn't acquire most of these "balabuste" credentials in school -- we got them from heavy-handed mothering. My own high school, where the percentage of Jewish girls was quite high, threw in a few "Domestic Happiness" classes as electives. I know what I'm talking about because I am looking at my high school yearbook while I am writing this. There, in that noteworthy record of my high school life, are pictures of my female classmates modeling dresses they had sewn and displaying cookies which they had baked. When Hilary Rodham Clinton made her well-publicized remark about baking cookies, I knew exactly what she was talking about, even though she is younger than I am, as are most people.
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About the Book
Maybe you saw the cover of this book on a shelf in a bookstore, and opened it, thinking it was the story of a former lady gangster with secrets to reveal -- or possibly the ruminations of a partially recovered escapee from a nut house. Well, tough luck, it's not. That book you are holding in your hand is just something I decided to write to get some old garbage off my mind. I'm not going to glorify it any more than that. I just happen to be an outspoken schnook raised by a pair of other outspoken schnooks, residents of an average neighborhood of nobodies, most of whose lives were pretty boring.
So why buy this book? I'm no celebrity -- I'm not even a genius or a compulsive gambler -- although I am compulsive. There are two simple reasons why I wrote it:
(1) Now that I'm a seventy-one year old lady, I can finally tell the truth about my undiagnosed insanity because all the other principal players in my personal drama are dead. I also thought it might be a good idea to put some of my childhood anecdotes in book form, rather than have them buried in some sort of time capsule. Knowing my history, nobody I know would ever dig it up anyway.
(2) The second reason is that I need your money. I want you to purchase this relatively cheap book as a charitable contribution to my personal fund, and, trust me -- it's not even tax deductible.
I'll let you in on a little secret -- I had a third reason. They say senior citizens who want to avoid memory loss should exercise their brains more. So by having to write in sentence form, in halfway decent English, I'm doing it. I am taking my brain out for a walk.
I'm a survivor, I think. Yes, indeed, I've just checked my pulse. After living through a tumultuous childhood, crisis-filled puberty, interrupted schooling, multiple marriages, childbirth, divorce, career revisions (I've even practiced law for thirty years), health issues and a few other bumps in the road, it's time for me to be able to let go of pretense and face reality. (Yiikes!)
Actually, I hate facing reality. It gives me the itches and takes me on that wild ride back into my past. All those memories are still vivid. When I was a four-year-old tomboy, I had a lack of well-behaved mentors to guide me. I was an only child until age eight of two working parents living in a storefront neighborhood where the only kids my age were rowdy little boys who were always dirty and played mean. I probably thought I was supposed to act like the little devils that they were.
Fortunately, this stage of my young life ran its course and I settled down to a relatively calm existence as a mere rebel. I never got over that stage, but I'm harmless enough.
I like the idea of starting a new project at age seventy-one, so I'm ready to reduce my craziness and compulsive behavior to a few chapters of light reading. I have tried hard to keep it light because my attitude is, if you want to get into something heavy, you're better off reading one of William Shakespeare's tragedies. I've had fun doing this project, so maybe you'll chuckle a little bit as you follow some of my antics. If you don't, well then, I've still got your money.
I have come to the conclusion that it's a mistake to take the road of life too seriously, so I simply view it as a scenic bypass carved out of the murky human jungle.
About the Author
Lea Hope Becker has been involved in various writing projects for years, but "I PROMISE TO KEEP QUIET (AFTER I'M DEAD)" is her first published book. She is a tax attorney, licensed in
She holds a B.S. in Accounting from
Lea is fascinated with the study of science and finds time to relax by reading challenging volumes authored by well-known physicists, although she makes no claim about understanding the math. It is her fervent desire to reduce the complexities of the universe to a few practical ideas for better living. Her advice to both young and old is: "Say something funny you can laugh at every single day -- it can even be silly and might be worth jotting down for future reference.