Girl with a Camera by Carolyn Meyer

Author:Carolyn Meyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Boyds Mills Press
Published: 2017-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

16

Starting Over—1925

BY THE END OF 1924—WE HAD BEEN MARRIED ONLY six months—I was often thinking how much better my life would be if I weren’t Mrs. Margaret Chapman. Even the name upset me. I had been Margaret White all my life, and I had wanted my name to become famous. My own name—not my husband’s. I felt as if I were losing my identity. And my marriage seemed to be falling apart.

I scarcely knew who I was anymore. I had not worked on my children’s book about insects for months. I had taken all of Professor Ruthven’s courses, and without him to guide and inspire me, my interest shifted from herpetology to paleontology, from snakes to fossils. It was a drastic change, and it meant that in my fourth year of college, instead of being a senior at Purdue, I had to start over as a freshman and take a different set of required courses. The girls in my classes were close to my age, but we had nothing in common. They chattered about their dates, the dances and parties to which they’d been invited, and the clothes they planned to wear, just as I had only a couple of years earlier. When I told them I was married, the wife of a faculty member, they shied away. The other faculty wives were no better match—I was decades younger than any of them, sometimes even younger than their own daughters.

At a dinner for faculty and their wives, I was seated next to a gray-haired matron who assumed that I, too, must be a professor’s daughter. She asked what I was studying, and I told her.

“A scientist in the making!” she enthused. “How nice. Well, I enjoy doing needlepoint,” she said and described the cushions she’d worked to raise money for a charity. “What are your hobbies, dear? Besides collecting rocks, or whatever it is paleontologists do?” she asked.

“I enjoy taking photographs.” How bland that sounded!

What had once been my passion was now reduced to little more than a hobby. Had this really happened to me? I felt sick just saying it: I enjoy taking photographs.

The woman nodded approvingly. She was the advisor to a campus sorority, she said, and her girls were looking for someone to take pictures for a book they were putting together. “Portraits of the girls, informal pictures of life in the sorority house, that sort of thing. I’d be pleased to recommend you for the job, Peggy.”

“That sort of thing” was not the kind of photography I loved to do; there was no artistry in it, no imagination required. But it was an opportunity to use my camera and earn a little money of my own. I leaped at the offer and spent hours taking pictures. It turned out to be a disaster. I didn’t have enough experience in photographing people, and I misjudged the available light. I overexposed every single shot, and the pictures were worthless. I was horribly embarrassed and didn’t get any more assignments.

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