What IS Hallie Writing...

 

HALLIE EPHRON: It's WHAT WE'RE WRITING week... and my usual question: Am I writing? And if I am, then where is it?? 

The answer: ideas are swirling in my head. Which is a step forward.

I’m still disinterring and collecting the personal writing I’ve done over the decades and sorting. Since Jerry and I were married for more than 50 years, a lot of the writing is about him. I've been printing it all out, three-hole-punching, and putting the pages into a spiffy red 3-ring binder.

So it feels as if something is happening.

On a parallel track I’ve scanned the hundreds of cartoons he drew and saved, much of it from the cards he drew for me and capturing our family history. Every birthday, Christmas, New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving, Ground Hog Day, and once on Bastille Day I’d find a hand-drawn card in the bathroom in the morning when I groped my way to the toilet.

It started out with just us and two cats. Then us and a baby. Then us and another baby. The last cards include my daughter's handsome husband and their two delicious grandchildren. It was a sort of rite of passage when you assumed cartoon-character form in one of his drawings.

He was a lunatic who raised “silly” to a fine art. Who turned cartoon drawings into love letters.

Friends have urged me to use his drawings to tell a story.

I met Jerry in 1968. He was a graduate student in physics, living near Columbia, and I was a junior at Barnard. We were fixed up by one of his roommates. I’d just been dumped by Charlie; then, months later Charlie whistled and I dumped Jerry.

Jerry was persistent. He wooed me with cartoons. Here’s a postcard he sent me.

He’s Don Quixote and I’m one of the evil grimacing faces on the windmill along with Charlie. The text is from a poem by Frederico García Lorca. Jerry loved poetry and spoke pretty good Spanish.

When Charlie dumped me (again), it’s telling that I’d kept Jerry’s card. I must have known in my heart of hearts, that he was the one. And lucky for me, he thought I was, too. We got back together, and stayed that way happily (almost) ever after.

Here’s a picture of Jerry as he was when I first met him and again in 1990. Was he handsome or what?? I must have been out of my mind to dump him.

And here’s how he portrayed the change he’d undergone in those three decades. Cue: laughter.

Is your family history in photographs? Letters?? A recipe box?? A binder?? A book???