July 10, 1969

My good pal Lee has requested more entries from the travel diary. While the entry for this date in 1967 is not all that interesting, I did find an entry from a family vacation to New York City when I was 13 (almost 14!). Once again, my comments are bracketed. Note the increase in verbosity and the lack of paragraphing:

Well, wouldn't you know it. Just when I get the hang of the subways and streets and know my way around [LOLOL! As if!], I have to leave! Well, this morning I got up and ate breakfast at Suttons. I had hotcakes and 1/2 & 1/2 coffee again. Then Mommy and Grandpa and Grandma went for a stroll in Central Park, while Johnny, Daddy, and I went to look for a Snoopy Astronaut doll. He [John] found it and we rode back on the IRT subway lines [sic]. It was very nice and clean and modern. Then we decided to find me a souvenier [sic: obviously, a couple of years have not been enough for me to master this word!]. We went into a card shop near our hotel and I got a mini-swinger [here is inserted a sketch of said item: one of those wooden frames with large ball bearings suspended on plastic wires so that when you pull one back and let it go, it hits the others and sends the ball bearing on the opposite end swinging] and some hand-painted, original cards. Then we 4 [?] went for a walk in Central Park. It was very pretty. There was a little baby boy with his nurse in the park and he was so cute! He was laying [sic] in the grass. Then he picked up a stick and was holding it when we we left. Then we went back to the hotel, packed, and caught a cab to La Guardia. The driver told us how to remember the streets. The streets go east and west. The streets going east were even numbers. The streets going west were odd. The avenues went north and south, staggering. [!] We arrived at the [Eastern] Shuttle terminal and I had a doughnut and a coke at the snack bar.

[Whew! A paragraph break!]

Johnny and Daddy had chocolate pudding. We loaded the plane and I got a window seat. When we started to ascend, it felt so cool! [This was my first plane ride; we took the brand new Metroliner train from D.C. to NYC.] We flew over the Unisphere from the 64-65 New York World's Fair [which the family went to in 1965]. We got into the clouds then and were between 2 cloud layers and all that was outside was white as snow. When we started to descend it looked like we were right on top of the city. It only took us 50 mins. to get to Wash, D.C. from N.Y. At the airport, I bought a book called "The Hobbit." I've wanted it for a long time. We got lost going out of Wash, D.C. [It was family tradition to get lost driving into and out of and within Washington, D.C.] This time we got caught in Arlington National Cemetery and also in a fort! We finally got out, without too much difficulty. Then we drove and drove and we ate at a diner in Warrenton [VA]. Boy! The food was good! I had the shrimp platter. Boy was it superb. We drove and drove, till [sic] about 7:00 we reached home. That ends this summary of my trip to New York City.

My First Movie

This past weekend I shelled out all of twelve bucks to own the very first movie I ever saw in a theater: Darby O'Gill and the Little People. My dad took me to the Wayne Theater to see it when I was three years old. And I had nightmares for years afterwards. This was something my dad didn't expect from taking his precious and precocious little daughter to her first Disney flick, but then, he didn't know about the banshee and the death coach before hand. In all, I loved the movie. But the banshee stayed with me. And appeared regularly in a recurring dream until I was about ten or so.

I'm sure I dreamed about the banshee before the recurring dream took hold, but the first time I had the dream had to be after I had turned four. That year, we went to Schenectady to visit my Aunt Grace (my dad's sister) and Uncle Sal and my cousin Marietta (who later shortened her name to Mari...we haven't seen each other for more than thirty years...). At that time, they lived in a white clapboard house on a big corner lot in Scotia. On their broad front lawn was a cement pedestal and a shiny gazing ball--I was enchanted by that. But in the little shed behind their house was something that ended up terrifying me: a big wood bin with a hinged lid--big enough for me to hide in, as I vaguely remember us playing hide and seek. Big enough for a banshee to lurk in.

That was the crux of the recurring nightmare: That I opened the lid of the wood bin and a banshee--a banshee that looked just like the one in Darby O'Gill and the Little People--was waiting there for me. Waiting to chase me. Waiting to catch me and throw me in the death coach and float alongside it, screaming, as it bore me up into the sky toward oblivion. Shudder!

I've seen the movie since then, maybe a couple of times. And I recall it fondly, even though I have a hard time recovering the terror I felt nearly fifty years ago. After all, I'm an adult. I know that the banshee was animated--although I still think it's creepy as hell. But the terror the dream inspired? That's still in the back of my mind, lurking like the banshee in the wood bin.

I'm going to watch it again in the next few days. Fingers crossed I'll rest easy after doing so!