Escape to Malibu, Part 4

I neglected to mention my name. It's Queen. Charity Queen. Actually my whole name is Charity Queen Ramlow & am known around the town of Malibu & Saint Charity as simply Charity Queen. That is because I'm a nurse. I go all over the city of L.A. working through agencies to seek out those who need my assistance. I leave my card in L.A. business fashion which reads Charity Queen, R.N.,Miracle Worker with my address & phone number for further referrals.

I consider myself a pioneer in this modern day of high tech medicine. I am forging a private, nonprofit nursing agency based in Malibu. It's my answer to the horrors I have seen & experienced in the health care systems we have today. I am reclaiming the independence of the home care nurse & rather than specialize I generalize.

But I promised I'd get to the meat & here it is before your start madly clicking through 87 channels of your magic T.V. wand.

I went to school, & graduated the elementary, high school, & college levels in the Boston area. I distinguished myself by earning a music award in the 7th grade & marrying a high school math teacher after my freshman year at Simon's College, a college for women professionals especially of the Jewish & retail management persuasion. Being a Swedish-American princess, I was in the minority, as I was not getting a nose job on vacation & ate bagels with raisins in them.

I dutifully ate my birth control pills while finishing my studies & walked to the podium to receive my hard-earned Bachelor's degree. My third bout with mononucleosis nearly set me back a year, but I wasn't having of that. I wanted to get out & get going. I made up the lost classes in Microbiology & earned an A by writing a research paper on Epstein-Barr. Nothing like studying one's own personal germ I figured. My husband Bernie & I rented an apartment behind the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum where I sometimes went to study & be inspired by her spirit. Once we attended a Sunday afternoon Chamber Music program. All very proper Bostonian you know.

The last year of school we moved out of the city to Concord, Massachusetts where the beauty & horror of my maternity collide. I had found an ad for a small farmhouse with an acre of land for 31,900.00 in the Boston Globe & cut it out for Bernie to read. Then I pursued the purchase relentlessly.

Seven banks later we finally got a first mortgage & moved in during the bleak New England month of November. It was barely more than a bungalow really, but it was ours & we had visions for the future. Plenty of land to plant a huge garden in the back. And I thought, someday a recording studio. Plenty of room to add on.

So for the time being we contented ourselves with defleaing the place, removing ugly asphalt shingles on the outside to reveal cedar shakes underneath, & insulating & installing a wood stove before the first baby arrived in May the year after I graduated from Simon's.

I planned this too rather neatly I thought. One year of pediatric experience & our beautiful son Joshua was born after both of us religiously attended the prepared childbirth classes given by a midwife in my home town, five minutes from Concord.

We had achieved it all, the Yuppie dream in one year after my graduation; a house in the suburbs,2 cars, 2 jobs, one perfect baby. And I as only 24. Bernie, ten years my senior, always helped surround us with his contemporaries so I was always being told how young yet mature I was. Ya, ya, ya. Too mature.

Having met him when seventeen I short-circuited my adolescence in favor of the independence of the apartment & husband. And we all need our adolescence. I played mine out later.