Charlotte Jarmy has endured hip replacement surgery and a broken arm, but there’s one infirmity she’s never suffered: writer’s block.
For the past 15 years, Jarmy has written a monthly column for the Los Altos Town Crier, waxing lyrical on everything under the sun (and over it, too). She’s also churned out numerous short stories, a novel and now “Reflections: A Columnist’s Journey Through Time,” a paperback volume of her collected Town Crier columns.
Many columns examine her Jewish origins and holiday rituals. Some comment on the political issues of the day, especially if they involve war and violence. Still others look back on her heartbreaking losses (one husband, two sons).
But Jarmy, 79, remains feisty and fun-loving, and her writing shows it. “I am inspired, she says, “by what’s happening in the world, in my life, in Los Altos. I’m unrestrained in my column and I love it.”
Putting “Reflections” together wasn’t as easy as it might sound. Defiantly computer-phobic (she writes everything in longhand), Jarmy enlisted her husband, Howard, to help her collate and edit the material for re-publication. “He’s an engineer,” she says, “and he understands these things.
A former high school English teacher, Jarmy does have a way with words.
Recalling her grandmother’s wedding band, she wrote in one column from 2000: “I can see the ring on her finger as she holds her prayer book open to a page during a special holy day. The same fingers had pressed me up against her sweet-smelling clothes and tucked a secret dollar into my delighted hand.”
Writing about the 1995 death of her schizophrenic son Charles, 40, Jarmy ends her column: “My son knew he was loved every day of his life. I have learned to accept my sorrow and try to reach out to others who suffer. Once again I listen and listen.”
Exposing her inner self through writing is a big part of the appeal for Jarmy. “My emotions are very strong,” she says. “I’m a happy person, I laugh a lot, but then I would go into the depths when things bothered me. Not just losing kids and a husband, but the events of life overseas, where young people were dying. It’s cathartic, almost necessary for me to write.”
Over the years, Jarmy’s readers have followed her through the ups and downs of life. Her teenage son died in a 1970 car crash. Her husband of 39 years left her widowed some years back, and both tragedies resurface from time to time in her work.
But “Jarmy’s army” also followed along as she found love the second time around with Howard Jarmy. The two met through a singles ad in j (then the Jewish Bulletin). “I lived a strange single life,” she says, “a senior having a wonderful time dating and meeting interesting people through the ads. I wanted a nice Jewish boy.”
No surprise that was her heart’s desire, considering she grew up a first-generation American in a Jewish household in New York. Her parents were born in Eastern Europe, her mother a child of the shtetl. Her father shed his provincial origins as quickly as possible, becoming a pharmacist and bequeathing his daughter a love of art, literature and Jewish culture. “Judaism was part of my life,” she recalls. “At no time did I consider getting involved with a non-Jewish man.”
She attended Hunter College and Columbia University, later moving to California with her first husband to become a teacher. She taught at South Bay high schools in Mountain View for 20 years, sharing with students her love of American literature. She left the public schools but kept her hand in the profession, teaching creative writing to seniors and supervising new teachers at Stanford University.
She is one of four columnists at the Town Crier, which gives her plenty of time to think about her writing. But she never knows when the impulse to write will strike. “I’m not a good sleeper,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll slip out of bed in the middle of the night. I wrote my next column at one o’clock in the morning.”
With a book in the stores, Jarmy is adjusting to the world of marketing and publicity. She will be making a few public appearances in the weeks and months ahead, enjoying, in particular, the chance to meet her readers. But with all the attendant joys in her life today (she has one son and a grandson, and she’s madly in love with her husband), her mind is often on that next column.
Last month she wrote one about December, “The month of miracles,” she says. “The last paragraph has the overall philosophical point that brought it on: We’re still living in a world of miracles, and the biggest message of all is one of peace.”
“Reflections: A Columnist’s Journey Through Time” by Charlotte Jarmy, ($13.50, AuthorHouse, 225 pages).