Monthly Archives: January 2025

You Never Know Where Life Will Take You, But You Must Keep Putting One Foot In Front Of The Other

1 Reply

So, here I am in my senior year. It’s hard for me to believe, but it’s true. It seems like just yesterday, I was a young mother with two children. I still have two children, but they are grown and no longer need me to watch over them or direct them.

For that matter, it seems like recently I was a kid riding my bike all over, playing jump rope and rollerskating in the summer and ice-skating in the winter at Strawbridge Lake in a town a bike ride a half-hour away from my house. My childhood as a baby boomer was somewhat idyllic to some extent. I attended twelve years of Catholic School taught by nuns. There were rules and structures in place. And if you didn’t follow the rules, you could look forward to unpleasant consequences. Which included having your hands rapped with a wooden ruler with a metal edge. You would have to stay after school and write many pages of apologies for your negative behavior. Then you would be sent home with a note from your teacher informing your parents of your misbehavior, a double whammy because both your mother and your father would give you further negative consequences for getting into trouble at school. Mainly because my parents paid high tuition to have us be educated in a private Catholic school.

Reflecting on my life, I find that I have few regrets. Yes, I made the occasional bad choice, but who doesn’t? I have led an interesting and challenging life. After I had two children, I decided to go to college when they were grade-school age. I applied and was accepted at Temple University in Philadelphia and the Hussian School of Art. Also, in Phildadelphia. At the age of thirty-six, I began my college education. For the first several months, the other seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Freshman students mistook me for their teacher. They were somewhat shocked when I explained that I was a Freshman, too. But, over time, they all came to know me, and believe it or not, I was a popular student with the student population. As for the teachers, they seemed to make a unilateral decision that I was the first student to be called on in class, and since I always had my work done on time, be it artwork or written work, My work was used as either a good example or a poor example, either way, the students would learn from my completed work. Although it was difficult at times to balance my home life with a husband and two children and going to college full-time, somehow, through pure determination. I graduated at forty-one with magnum cum-laude and art teaching credentials at the top of my class. At the grand old age of forty-one, with a standing ovation from my whole class and the professors.

Tyler School of Art

After graduation, I searched for an art teaching position in New Jersey. I found that the public schools in New Jersey were no longer funding art teaching. I can not express how devastated I was when I discovered that there were no jobs for me at all.

After some long nights and consideration for my future, I decided that since the public schools were no longer teaching art, I would start my own art school. The house we were living in at the time was too small, and over time, I found an older home in Pitman, New Jersey, that was large and also empty, as the previous owners had passed away years before. Until now, no one had the desire or the funds to buy and renovate the house.

Pitman home and Art Room

The realtor made a last-ditch effort to sell the house and had an open house. And we went to the open house and checked it out. The home was large, 5,500 square feet, and had been unoccupied for many years. It needed a great deal of work. But I was determined to make it ours. And so we made an offer, and they eventually accepted it. We sold our smaller home, moved into our new home, and began to renovate it from top to bottom. The previous owner had been a therapist and had two rooms and an office where he treated his patients. It also had a small bathroom. I was convinced this would make my perfect art room where I could teach my students drawing, painting, and sculpture. I immediately began renovating those rooms. And the two storage rooms. I will slowly purchase all the materials I need for myself and my students.

After I had The Art Room prepared for teaching art, I went downtown Pitman and talked to the editor of the local paper, The Pitman World News and Report, and had a one-page advertisement about my school and the classes I would be teaching. And that my friends were the beginning of my art teaching career. I taught children of different ages in the afternoons and adults in the evenings during the week. Over time, all my classes were filled. I also taught drawing, painting, pottery, and three-dimensional art for many years. I also had the privilege of getting to know my neighbors and many of the residents of Pitamn. We lived there for twenty-five years until we were ready to retire. It was hard to leave Pitman and all the great people we had come to love, but we knew we couldn’t afford to live there once we retired. And so, after my husband retired, we sold our house. And started seriously making decisions about where we would be living next. And our final decision was to move South to North Carolina as it became clear that the taxes were much cheaper there. It was tough for us to move away from our Pitman home and the friends we made, but we did. And so, I sit in my bedroom in our house in North Carolina, having been retired for nine years. I have kept myself busy volunteering three mornings a week at an animal sanctuary and writing this blog for the past nine years.

I don’t know what or if our circumstances will change, but I do know that I will keep putting one foot in front of the other into the future.

All The Days Of My Life-Part One of Work experiences

1 Reply

ALL THE DAYS OF MY LIFE-

     I grew up in the 1950s in Maple Shade, New Jersey, about a thirty-minute drive from Philadelphia, PA. My experiences as a baby boomer greatly impacted the adult I eventually became. Some of the experiences that impacted me the most were related to the fact that I grew up two houses away from the Catholic Church, called Our Lady of Perpetual Help or OLPH. My mother was a devout woman and attended church seven days a week. And was a member of the Altar-Rosary Society that would gather each day after Mass and say the Rosary. As a result, most of my siblings (six of us) and I attended Catholic School. I went to a Catholic elementary school for eight years. And I attended Saint Mary of the Angel’s Academy in Haddonfield, New Jersey. This was an all-girl high school. My twin sister and I attended St. Mary’s of The Angell’s Academy.

I have to admit I was somewhat immature in high school and had no interest in boys. The only boys that I had any contact with during my high school years were attending Bishop Eustace High School. And we girls who attended St. Mary’s of the Angels Academy were informed that all the boys were studying to become priests. So, we never bothered to get to know any of the boys. Of course, that wasn’t the truth. Few of the boys attending Bishop Eustace became priests for St. Mary’s of the Angel’s Academy. I only knew one of my classmates who became nuns. So, much for that.

When I turned eighteen, I decided I wouldn’t attend church. And I haven’t, except for weddings and funerals. The reason I made this decision was because my mother spent years and years praying for my oldest sister, Jeanie, who was diagnosed with alpha-one deficiency. A genetic form of emphysema. She passed away when she was a mere forty-one years old. She was such a wonderful, funny, and intelligent person, and she had two children who were left motherless at a young age. I lost my faith in god, and that was the end of going to masses and going to confession as far as I was concerned. If there was a god, he had left my sister to die from a long and painful death. And I didn’t want to pray to him again if he existed.

When I was a child, I was shy and quiet. I hated having to talk in the classroom. Probably because the nuns showed no mercy to quiet and shy children, they had no difficulty saying harmful and hurtful things and embarrassing students by making them stand in the corner or not allowing them to go to the bathroom unless it was when all the students in the class stood in the hallway and waited their turn. Unfortunately, I was blessed with intestinal problems and IBS, which was a relatively unknown illness in the 1950’s and 1960’s. This caused me to have accidents in the classroom, Which ultimately caused me to hate Catholic School even more.

Not everything about elementary school was bad. I made a lot of friends during my eight years of elementary school and four years at St. Mary of the Angels Academy in Haddonfield, NJ. I have to admit I didn’t put forth much effort in my twelve years of school, possibly because I was constantly told how stupid I was during those twelve years.

My experiences after I graduated from high school by the skin of my teeth proved to me that I was certainly not stupid but quite intelligent. Right out of high school, I found employment as a dental assistant for Dr. E. G. Wozniak in Haddon Township, where I worked for five years. Then, I worked at Ellis Insurance for Evie and Harry Ellis for several years until I met and married my now husband, Robert. We have been married for fifty years and have two adult daughters.

Over the years, I have had many jobs, including selling high-risk auto insurance and hairdressing, as well as being a counselor at St. Vincent’s School for Exceptional Children in Santa Barbara, CA.

How, you may ask, did I end up in California? After Bob and I married in 1974, Bob moved to California so he could attend Brooks Institute to study photography. We lived there for three years. And I loved every minute of it—such a glorious and beautiful place to live. And I made many friends while we lived there. The first year I was there, I got a job selling hats and wigs at Robinso, which isn’t a department store. I worked with a decent and kind boss but hated the job. Standing eight hours a day trying to sell hats and wigs. A friend who worked part-time at Robinson’s school told me about St. Vincent’s School, and I immediately went there and applied for a job as a counselor.

      I called them several times a week for a month until they gave in and interviewed me for a full-time job. I immediately said, ‘Yes.” For the next three years, I worked as a counselor at St. Vincent’s School in the cottages where the girls lived. And I supervised teenage girls. I can honestly say that this position was my favorite job ever. That’s saying a lot because, throughout my long life, I have had many, many different jobs and employment opportunities. My father always had difficulty understanding why I ended up working with nuns( they taught in the school where the kids attended.) since I always detested them when I was in elementary and Catholic high school. I had minimal contact with the dear sisiter’s since I only interacted with them when I picked up the kids from school, a short distance from the building where they lived.

     As I sit here contemplating my life, I feel blessed to have had all the experiences throughout my lifetime. I have learned from each one of them, and I met wonderful people. I will be writing memoirs in the not-too-distant future. Going to college when I was thirty-six next was a challenging and positive experience for me. Since I was the only adult student to enter Freshman year at my “advanced age of thirty-six,” I attended and excelled at Temple University, Tyler School of Art. They were at once the most challenging four years of my life and the most rewarding..  Not only was I, not your typical college freshman, as I was thirty-six years old, and I had two children, seven and four. And so began my life as a college student. More to come in Part Two.

YOU NEVER KNOW WHERE LIFE IS GOING TO TAKE YOU

1 Reply

Looking back over my life, I find it difficult to believe that so many years have passed by so quickly. And here I sit, realizing that I have come too close to the end of my years on this planet. For the most part, I have few regrets.

I have led a fascinating life for the most part. I was born into a family of two parents and five siblings. My parents were hard-working people who did everything they could for their children. For over forty years, my father was the head dispatcher for SEPTA Bus Company in Philadelphia. He devised the system that is still used. His nickname was Smiley. It was some joke because my father rarely smiled. There were members of our family who referred to him as “THE BIG BEAR.” Because he was somewhat of a grouch.  House I grew up in.

My brother, Harry, was twenty years older than me. He was married and moved into his apartment when I was pretty young. He was a psychologist, and very well-known in his field, In fact, for many years he was head of the Psychological Society. My sister, Jeanie, was nineteen years older than me. She was one of the kindest people I ever knew. And she was beautiful. I have two sisters, seven and eight years older than I am. They both married when they were young. When I was in grade school, their names were Eileen and Elizabeth. Then, my sister Karen and I came into the picture when my mother was forty-one.

Our first home in Pitman, NJ

We are fraternal twins. This means that although we were born at the same time, we don’t look alike, act alike, and have few things in common other than we have the same birthday. As children we did not play together, we each had our own friends. My mother, Marie, had two babies a year after Karen and I. They were named Steven and Girard; unfortunately, they did not survive. I didn’t learn about their existence until I was about ten or eleven. My father took my twin sister and me to the cemetery and showed us where they were buried. I was young then and don’t think I understood what my parents told us.

Life in the Carberry Family was typical for the most part for families that lived in Maple Shade, New Jersey, where I was raised. We lived two houses down from the Catholic Church, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. We were Catholic, so we attended Sunday Mass when we were young. And then when we were old enough, seven years old.” We were enrolled at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Elementary School for eight long years. I say eight long years because we were taught by Saint Joseph Nuns who were very strict and thought nothing of putting you in the corner, smacking your open palm with a ruler with a metal edge. Or, in my case, putting me in the heater room if I misbehaved. I don’t recall what I was doing wrong, but I spent quite a lot of time in the corner with my back to the rest of the class.

When I graduated from grade school, by the skin of my teeth, we had to take an entrance exam to attend Catholic High School. Parents had to pay tuition for Catholic Schools. There was a public elementary school at the end of our block. But I believed we would benefit from a Catholic School. And so my twin, my two older sisters, and I attended Catholic High School.I graduated by the skin of my teeth in 1969 from Saint Mary of the Angel’s Academy in Haddonfield, NJ. Haddonfield is an upscale town where most of the residents are pretty wealthy. My parents enrolled us there because it was an all-girls school.

high school graduation picture

Susan Culver- high school graduation picture

I can’t say I missed having boys in school with me since I was always quite shy around them. I didn’t go out on a date until I was twenty-one. So, you may wonder what I did do next. You probably think I went to college. No, I did not. My parents told St. Mary of the Angel’s Academy that they could not afford to send us to college. However, the school did find employment for both my sister and I. My twin got a job at a mailing service. She did pretty well there and made good money. I got a job through the school as a dental assistant at a dentist’s office for Dr. Edward Wozniak. He was a decent young dentist with two small children. His office was attached to his home. I worked for him for five years. It was an interesting position, and I was pretty good at it. I trained two people to do the job. When I was twenty-one, I went on a date with my best childhood girlfriend’s boy cousin. And the rest, my friends, was history. Her cousin lived in Florida then and was visiting his cousins in New Jersey and Philadelphia on his way back home to Florida. I had met him when I was pretty young. Anyway, after he (Bob) went back to Florida. We started writing letters to each other. The next thing that happened was that I decided to move to Florida to be with Bob. That is precisely what I did; I was about twenty-two then. My parents were heartbroken when I left since I was their last child living at home. All the other siblings had married, moved to their own homes, and started having children. My parents ended up with seventeen grandchildren. I loved those kids. And I was looking forward to having my children at some point.

After I arrived in Florida, I took an auto-train. This is a means of transportation where your car and the people in another train car are loaded on the train. It took eight hours. When I got to the end of the ride, I waited until Bob got off from his job and met me at the parking lot where the auto-train left me and my car off. It was hot, hot, hot. I had no idea any state could be hotter than New Jersey’s summer. But, boy, boy, were they. It felt like an oven to me. Bob finally arrived, and I followed him behind his car to the apartment he had rented for me. (I paid for it.) It was a lovely one-bedroom apartment with a living room, small kitchen, and small bathroom. It was nice. I had lived in my apartment in Haddonfield, New Jersey, for a year before I moved to Florida. So, to some degree, I was used to living alone. I found a job in the first month I arrived in Florida selling high-risk insurance, I had held a simlar position in New Jersey. And I liked it. The fact is, I enjoyed working in general. I like being busy, accomplishing things and doing it well. I liked earning my own money. It’s a good feeling.

So, what’s next, you might ask. Well, we got married. I decided to look for a different job. Why, you may ask. Because when I came back from our honeymoon and went back to work. I was called into the office and informed that, unfortunately, I was being laid off. Sorry about that. After several weeks of looking for a new job, I decided to go to hairdressing school because employers in Florida were reluctant to hire people from out of state. Yes, hairdressing school. Why? You may ask. You only had to attend for eight months, and you got a license to do hair. Now, I never had any interest in hairdressing. I didn’t do much with my hair. But hairdressing is what I learned to do. And sure enough, I completed the training and got a job doing what? Not hairdressing, I had also been trained in doing facials, nails, and hair. So, I applied for and was hired to do facials at the Collanides Hotel on Singer Island. (where the rich to play) And actually, I was pretty good at facials. I worked there for several years until my now husband, Bob, decided he wanted to attend Brooks Institute in California to learn photography. And that is how I lived in beautiful California for several years until he graduated.
I got a job working at St. Vincent’s School as a counselor. Once again, I had never done this type of job, but I was more than willing to give it the old college try. And as it turned out, I loved this job and all the children. I came to love them like my own children, and I stayed there for several years until Bob graduated from Brooks Institute. After Bob graduated, Bob and I decided to move back to New Jersey. Bob believed there were more photography jobs in Philadelphia than in the South. And so, we were returning to New Jersey and Philadelphia. And thus began another chapter of our life.

Stay tuned for the next chapter of my life next Wednesday.