Prompt: Biography. Use personal history to bring a person to life, and to comment on character and its sources. You may choose someone you know as a subject, or you can choose someone you don’t know personally but whom you are interested in. Consider bringing in documentary evidence of some kind---quotation, a photograph, a recording.
Mary’s parents divorced before she moved out of the high chair. Her mother moved to Buffalo, while her father, a hospital administrator, chose to stay in what Mary would later call the “boondocks wasteland of Upstate New York.” Her father quickly remarried, while her mother, scarred by the rocky marriage, did not. This being the fifties, her father easily gained sole custody.
And so Mary grew up as a migrant, moving year-to-year following her father’s promotions to different psychiatric hospitals. Often her house would just be outside the barbed wire of the facility that her father managed; at night, she would hear the screams of the patients. Her father, consumed by his job, exerted little influence on Mary’s home life. She was left with her stepmother, Jean, whom Mary invariably described as “evil.” As soon as Mary was old enough to do her own laundry, Jean would make her walk one mile up and down the hill to the Laundromat in town, even though there was a washer and dryer in her house. Jean always mocked Mary’s fire-red hair – her favorite insult was “clumsy carrot-top.”
When it came time for college, Mary applied to Cortland State, miles and miles away from Jean and her father and the screams. She got in, but her father prevailed upon her to attend the local community college; Mary transferred to Cortland after two years. Upon graduation, she felt the pull of the big city – Buffalo, that is – and soon found a job as a speech therapist. She met a guy, and soon there was another kid in a high chair – me.
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