Mimi 64 Years Ago – Sept 25, 2024

As I take a birthday bow and thank my mother, alive in the afterlife, for hosting my appearance on the planet, I want to begin sharing my 1960 diary. I was eleven and in sixth grade at St. John the Evangelist’s School. I’d turn twelve in September, in seventh grade.

The flavor of the diary, which my father brought home from his law office where it was given as a gift that he didn’t need, is both pious and hilarious. I aspired to fervent devotion to Jesus and Mary and all matters of my Catholic religion. I was haunted by the idea of death, and that it would come soon, not just to me but to the whole world as punishment for its sins. There had been prophecies that the world would end in 1960, when the letter from Our Lady of Fatima would be opened, and the world would be plunged into nuclear war. I wanted to die sinless.

As I aged, I was more likely to commit a mortal sin that, if I died with it unconfessed, I would spend eternity in hell. See James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for how I imagined eternity. The priest’s sermon on the subject, in that book, is identical to what I was told in class by nuns and in church by priests. Eternity was it: curtains. No more life, no more fun—just judgment. If you ended up in hell, it meant endless pain. Heaven was some kind of joy that was unimaginable to most children because being dead was such an awful thought that even spending your dead eternity in a pleasant place had an inevitable tinge of boredom compared to life and the possibilities offered by being alive.

Also inevitable is that this diary is political. I was born a Kennedy, and 1960 was the year that guy from Massachusetts appeared in my upstate NY world and ran for president. He was a Catholic: the nuns were out of their minds with excitement. Alas, my family was Republican. There are comprehensibly good reasons for this, but those stories will come later. Suffice to say that JFK and my father met in 1952, and JFK said to him, “Someone told me there was a Republican lawyer Kennedy in town, and I said I didn’t believe there could be such a thing.”

These two entries, January 10 and 11, encapsulate my eleven-year-old self almost perfectly. January 10 is red-tagged: “Tomorrow is the end of the world,” and January 11 begins with: “Well, it didn’t happen.” I moved on a dime from terror to a shrug. No wonder I became an actress.

There’s an election coming up. Some of these entries will be partisan. But what I like about this diary is it traces something that is very important for us to know about ourselves and all our fellow humans:

Everyone, even the most devoutly attached to an idea, can change.