A Balanced Life

THE BOOK: A Balanced Life

PUBLISHED IN: 2018

THE AUTHOR: Patricia Schultheis

THE EDITOR: Deb Harriss

THE PUBLISHER: All Things That Matter Press, a no fee, royalty paying, POD small press that seeks to publish those books that help the author share their Self with the world.

SUMMARY: A Balanced Life is a memoir using ice skating as a lens to examine life and loss.

THE BACK STORY: Since receiving a pair of second-hand skates from my uncle Leo when I was eleven years old, I have attempted to ice skate, a sport for which I have no inherent talent. A Balanced Life is my examination of why I expected skating to transform me into a creature of irresistible grace; why I expected that grace to make me lovable, and why, having found love, I felt constricted. Spanning decades of great social change, this memoir also is an examination of the impact of those changes on my life. But fundamentally, A Balanced Life is an examination of loss, and how loss, like skating, can knock you flat on your back, wondering if you will ever walk again, let alone skate.

WHY THIS TITLE: In my childhood, I experienced polio, crippling anxiety, and ADD. In adulthood, I experienced devasting grief. But I also experienced the love of a supportive man, the joys of motherhood, and the fruition of my dream to become a writer. In short, my life became balanced.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? Written in a lyrical, recursive style, anyone who enjoys reading memoirs will enjoy A Balanced Life. Similarly, anyone who has ever been transfixed by Olympians spinning through air will gain a greater understanding of the talent and dedication needed to defy gravity. And anyone who has been laid low by grief will gain a greater insight into the effort needed to get up and live again.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“A Balanced Life offers the kind of writing I love (and how my favorite ice skaters have approached their performances): rich with artistry while feeding the audience’s intellect and pleasing its senses, enriching its soul and acknowledging its heart.” — DM Denton, Author and Artist. A House Near Luccoli, To a Strange Somewhere Fled, A Friendship with Flowers; Without the Veil between; Anne Bronte: A fine Subtle Spirit

AUTHOR PROFILE: The middle of two daughters in a Polish-American family, Patricia grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In 1965, she graduated from Albertus Magnus College in New Haven and moved to Baltimore, where a week later she had her first date with the man she married. Having worked in public relations and dappling in free-lance journalism for several years, she turned to fiction in her mid-fifties after attending the Bread Loaf Writing Conference.

She the author of the award-winning short story collection, St. Bart’s Way, and of a pictorial history titled, Baltimore’s Lexington Market, published by Arcadia Publishing in 2007. A Balanced Life, is her most recent book. It was published by All Things That Matter Press in 2018. She has received awards from The Fitzgerald Writers’ Conference, Memoirs Ink, The American League of American Pen Women (2010 and 2020), Winning Writers and Washington Writers’ Publishing House

AUTHOR COMMENTS: I first imagined writing A Balanced Life when I was in my fifties and had been pursuing skating as a serious hobby for a decade. Because I have no obvious talent for skating, I imagined writing a book with an ironic, self-deprecating tone ─ Oh, the ridiculousness of someone my age spending so much effort on a sport and having so little to show for it. And, of course, such a book would have a countercurrent subtext designed to elicit admiration — “Look me . . . I’m a wife, a mother . . . plus, I skate. And I’m in my fifties! Wow, what a woman!”

And then everything crashed. A series of devastating, successive losses, followed by a deceptively smooth patch of time, first destabilized my world and then fooled me into thinking it had righted itself until I came to the chasm that split my life into a before and an after. My best friend, my life partner, my husband, died. And left me teetering on the edge of sanity, wondering how I was going to regain my balance.

I fervently hope that others will be moved and maybe enlightened by this account of my life’s journey. But most of all, I hope they enjoy it.

SAMPLE: From A Balanced Life

Water saved us.

On summer Sunday mornings, here’s what my mother does: Gets up before dawn; dresses my two sisters and me; hustles us and our father into our car; prays at seven o’clock Mass; directs my father about what to buy at the bakery; cooks a breakfast of juice, eggs, kielbasa, toast, and sweet rolls; washes the dishes; dries the dishes; packs a picnic lunch; packs a beach bag. And, last of all, puts the beef for dinner into the oven to slow roast while we spend the day at one of the beaches ringing Bridgeport, my Connecticut hometown.

In the minefield that is my parents’ marriage, the beach is a sanctuary. Neutral territory. In the backseat of our secondhand car, between my sisters, I can almost see the tension in our parents’ shoulders ease as soon as the salty scent of the Long Island Sound drifts into the Plymouth’s open windows.

Turning to us, our mother says, “Smell that, girls?” Doesn’t it smell clean?” She has a passion for clean.

Arriving as we do, before the sun has blanched the sky white hot and before the beach is thronged with crowds, we have our choice of “spots” for our blanket. In our family, self-endowed with a sense of its own exceptionalism, we know those who make up those crowds, know they’re the sort of people who hadn’t managed to get themselves up at first light, hadn’t gone to church and had probably lazed through breakfast, if they had bothered with it at all. But who, nevertheless, feel they have every right to get to the beach whenever they please and then spread out wherever they want to with their portable radios and noisy kids who eat hotdogs bought from the stand, not sandwiches like my mother makes.

Once our blanket is spread in our “spot,” here’s what she does: snaps us into bathing caps, brushes sand off the blanket, watches us swim, brushes sand off the blanket, wraps us in towels, brushes sand off the blanket, hands out sandwiches, brushes sand off the blanket, doles out peaches, brushes sand off the blanket, pours drinks, brushes sand off the blanket. Until the moment comes when she allows herself to stand at the shoreline.

I watch her gaze over the water, a spent wave’s foamy last sigh brushing her ankles, her trim little body shown to advantage in a halter-style bathing suit. She watches my father, slice the chill Long Island Sound, first one arm, then the other, like the dorsal fin of a shark. His head turning for a quick grab of air before tucking under again, then disappearing altogether for a second or two before the foamy flutter of his kick revealed him. He swims with an easy rhythm, and tirelessly, stopping whenever he chooses to, not because he is tired. He stands up, hiking up his trunks with his thumbs, flicking water from his eyes and nose, his gaze inward, like someone who had just communed with some profound, unassailable part of himself. And then his eyes homing to hers, a slight smile between them, below the surface of their prickly marriage, some supporting secret shared, keeping them afloat.

* * *

For her, water was best solid. At the beach, she could manage a beginner’s dog paddle, but frozen water was her true element. Ice — the remembrance of herself gliding over it — that was the memory she held fast.

“I used to skate. I was good at it.” Another dinner, another day done, she’s washing the supper dishes, her back to me, and I, slow to finish my supper, the cold potatoes on my plate congealing into a solid white mass, watch her face, reflected in the darkened little window over her sink, her incantatory tone set to the timbre of recollection.

“I used to skate,” she continues. “All day . . . all day, I stood at the GE — on the assembly line the foreman never let us sit. And then I’d walk home, eat a piece of bread sprinkled with sugar — your grandmother didn’t believe in cooking — and grab my skates. I was good at it. I could do figure-eights. The boys would build bonfires. I could do figure eights . . . I was that good. Sometimes we’d play crack the whip. Or some boy would take your hand . . . it didn’t mean anything. We’d skate round and round together. We wouldn’t even talk.”

And then she sighs and takes away my plate and wash it, knowing I’ll never eat those potatoes she worked so hard to mash, before emptying out the little red plastic dishpan she stores under the sink where she keeps her cleaning supplies beside my father’s liquor.

Now I think that beyond her own reflection in the dark window over her sink, my mother caught a glimpse of her girlish self, skates over her shoulder, heading to the pond that would be drained and paved with a parking lot when the Hyway Theater was built.

Maybe those boys and bonfires were as innocent as the picture she painted on those long-ago winter nights. And maybe her melancholy tone was only for her girlish former self and not for some boy’s hand. Not until I began writing this memoir and dug into my own memory store did I consider the latter might be the case, but I don’t know for certain. I never will. Memory, it’s wily, slippery, a shabby keeper of truth.

Amazon.com: Patricia Schultheis.

LOCAL OUTLETS: The Ivy Bookshop 6080 Falls Road, Baltimore, MD 21209

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Amazon.

PRICE: 14.95.

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: bpschult@yahoo.com.