Her dad is a con man. Her mom is an alcoholic. The family moves often, scurrying out into the night because they haven't paid the rent. Food is scarce. Sometimes there isn't any.
Life is tough for the little girl, whom author Gwynne Hunt calls Maggie in her autobiography. But Maggie's a smart kid. Her dad, surprisingly, gives her a Bible, which she read through four times. She gets good grades in school, and makes friends easily. These strengths come in handy since she's forced to change schools regularly.
Once when she's invited to a friend's birthday party, her older sister takes her there. However, the sister mistakenly leaves Maggie at the wrong house. An unknown kid's birthday party is happening at this house. Maggie stays at the party, not knowing how to get to the right house, and becoming more and more uneasy about being an interloper.
The sense of being at the wrong party haunts her as she grows up. Her feelings of alienation and rootlessness are partly responsible for her heavy drinking, drug-taking, promiscuity, and frequent job changes.
When she meets Joe, who becomes the love of her life, she thinks she can't marry him because she's from the wrong side of the tracks. In her words, "Who was I to believe I could get married, have a white picket fence and live happily ever after?" Meeting Joe's parents is even more discouraging: "I felt really out of place talking to normal people....I could not fit into Joe's world."
Yet she does fit in, sort of. She and Joe marry and try to do the "living happily ever after" thing. But they're young and both make bad mistakes, hurting each other a lot. Their marriage is a rough road yet they stay the course.
Unlocking the Tin Box isn't a cozy feel-good story, but it's worth reading for the human interest, social commentary, and insights it provides. The book is well written. It held my attention—every word of it—despite occasional mistakes in punctuation, grammar, etc. The author is self-aware and self-analytical, and not afraid to share her feelings. Examples:
"I don't know how to live in this world....I'm scared all the time. I'm broken into a million little pieces."
"Did I even know what love was?.... Maybe I was so damaged from the way I was brought up that I wasn't capable of love."
As a grandmother in her forties, Maggie starts to get a better handle on life. Here are a few quotes from her account of her later years:
"It doesn't matter how old you are or how horrible your mistakes, it is never too late to say I am sorry and work on the damage."
"I went to church....it brought me solace and joy....I was baptized when I was forty-eight and it was an important moment in my life."
"I learned you can repair the past....I changed."
As a reader, I'm glad she changed, and I'm glad the past twenty-plus years of her life have been happier than the earlier ones. Gwynne Hunt is seventy now, and hopes to spend the next ten years writing. I'll be watching for her future books.
Unlocking the Tin Box is available from Amazon and the publisher, Silver Bow Publishing of Vancouver. Elma Schemenauer is the author of many books including the 1940s Western Canadian novel Consider the Sunflowers.
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