A Long, Long Time Ago

I can still remember how that music used to make me smile…

1972 is the earliest summer I remember. My family spent weekends camping out in our car at the bayside near Glen Burnie, about an hour’s drive from where we lived in Washington, D.C.

My father drove, with my mother sitting beside him holding my baby sister. My other sister, a year and a bit older than me, sat in the backseat behind Dad with her hands in her lap. On the other side of the car, my face was pressed up against the cold window, breath fogging in patches as I sang along, “bye-bye Miss American Pie”.

Without turning his head, my father shouted, “Stop that awful noise! You couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket with a lid on it. Shut up.”

I sat back in the seat and stared out, watching all the places I knew move past the window, the National Cathedral rising among scaffolds and cranes, the Lincoln memorial, the Washington monument and Capitol Building. Crossing the bridge, we left the city behind, taking the highway into western Maryland and on to the bay.

I listened as the song played, mouthing the words to myself.

We stopped for gas at a station with a little pub next door. He turned off the car and went inside, leaving us all sitting there to wait. It was hot and the baby started fussing in Mom’s lap. I started singing again until she turned around in the seat.

“Please,” she whispered. “It’s too much.”

When he came back to the car, he filled the tank, then slid back into the driver’s seat. He smelled of the whiskey he liked to drink. Mom was quiet and had an angry, absent look on her face as we got back on the highway.

To me, the drive felt like a journey into another world.. past waving fields and sleepy little towns, riding with the windows down, the warm air smelling of cut grass and the hot asphalt, the car radio playing. That summer, the scents, sounds and songs of the time seemed like a promise of something ahead.

When we turned off the exit, the road narrowed toward a place that seemed to be made just for us. A two-lane drive cut between the seawall and the estuary where Town Creek Marina sat nestled on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, close to where the Patapsco River met the sea. Back then, it was a quiet stretch of water and woods. The perfect place to enjoy the water and gentle sunshine.

When my father pulled the car up along the seawall, it stayed parked until it was time to go home again on Sunday evening. My older sister and I spread blankets and pillows in the back seat, while my baby sister’s cot was made in the front floorboard. As Dad hauled out the cooler, bushel basket, and crab nets, Mom organized the food and folding chairs. The air was full of motion, laughter, and the sense that this was what weekends were supposed to feel like.

Those days blend into one another, stitched together by the scents of brackish water, suntan oil, and fried food drifting from the tavern across the road. My whole world was open air and glittering light playing across the ripples of the bay. It feels like my life began there, as if everything I am now grew from that saltwater edge.

Sometimes my father fished off the long dock, his rod bent under the weight of a bluefish or skate. Other times, we fished for crabs, lowering chicken-baited lines into the shadows where the pylons disappeared into green water. My parents worked as a team. He’d slowly pull in the lines, careful not to scare off the prize at the other end, then she’d creep the net in behind the crabs to scoop them up in a clatter. My sisters and I hovered nearby, too young to be trusted with the “serious” work but close enough to feel like a part of the fun.

There was a little marina that sat behind a small, dark tavern. Docks stretched like fingers into the water, each slip holding its own little boat, bobbing and creaking against the tide. Seabirds shrieked overhead, their cries mixing with the clink of tackle boxes and the low chatter of people setting out for a day on the water. We weren’t allowed inside the tavern unless we needed the bathroom, and then only with one of our parents. For the most part, we stayed on the other side of the little road near the car, on the dock, or down at the tiny beach at the end of the breakwater.

One afternoon, I woke from a nap in the car to stillness. The windows were down, a salt breeze lifting my hair. “Mommy?” I called, stepping out. No answer. I looked down the pier and along the seawall. No father, no mother, no sisters. The pier was nearly empty now, the few people left packing up their things.

Mom had taken the other girls somewhere to play, leaving me alone in the car. Dad was across the street, sitting at the bar, keeping company with another weekend fisherman and a glass of Canadian whisky. I don’t know who left first, Mom with my sisters or Dad to the bar, but I suspect it was my father who decided to leave me there by myself.

I was alone. I felt my stomach clench in that unsettled way when something’s wrong and there’s no one else to notice it. I was afraid and I needed to pee. Badly.

I couldn’t cross the road to the tavern on my own. And I didn’t want to find my dad to help me anyway. I didn’t like the way he did things. I couldn’t go behind a bush or hide behind the car door, not with strangers to see me. I had to figure it out by myself.

Still in my bathing suit, I had an idea. The little beach was on this side of the road. I could walk down to the shore and wade in far enough that no one would see. Problem solved.

I set off, determined and convinced that I was ever so clever to have found a solution myself. I wasn’t afraid anymore. I had a plan.

The water was mildly warm, with a slimy mess of sand, mud, and slick rocks underfoot. I went out to my belly, warm shallows swaying with the tide, and let the water hide what I was doing. I let go in relief, bobbing with the waves until I found myself up to my shoulders in the water.

Where the river rushed in from the culvert, the ground dropped away several feet at once. I felt the edge of the dropoff as a wedge of cold water that wound around me. As I turned myself to face the beach, a boat passed through, churning up waves in long ribbons that rushed into the bay, bumping into each other in swirls and peaks. A rise poured over my eyes as my feet reached down and found nothing below.

The water spun me under. I thrashed, my arms flailing for something, someone, anything. My nose burned, my eyes stung. My fingers clawed at water that slipped away. All I could do was reach, desperate and clinging, for help that wasn’t there.

No one saw. No one even knew I was in danger.

A healthy family notices when a child has needs, when a child wanders, when a child is missing, when a child is in distress. A mother cares and a father protects, but mine didn’t. That is the truth I can see now, decades later.

I would reach for someone when I was in danger, overwhelmed, or hurt and find only emptiness. I didn’t stop reaching for a very long time; I simply learned to keep grasping while at the same time preparing to find nothing. It became the template I carried forward.

Once you stop expecting rescue, you stop crying out as loudly, stop reaching out. You don’t run to find help, you figure out how to manage on your own. This is the silent ground where abuse grows, festering under neglect. It doesn’t always start with someone doing something wrong. Sometimes it starts with no one doing right, with no one doing anything at all. The gaps in care are what make space for harm to go unnoticed, unchecked.

Looking back, this wasn’t just a close call in the water. It was an early lesson in the rules of my life. If I need something, I must figure it out myself. If I am in danger, I must survive on my own. If I am hurt, it’s up to me to put myself back together.

The rules didn’t come all at once, but they began here.

Not long after this, harm came in other forms… in rooms with the door closed, in moments where words and touches turned into things I couldn’t name, couldn’t understand. The lesson still held true. No one would notice me there alone. No one would step in to stop the worst from happening. I might be rescued, but never saved.

I understand that someone finally saw me there, that someone saw me struggle. There were shouts from people along the shore, and somehow my mother was the one to pull me out and do mouth-to-mouth. She has often told me how she rescued me from death that day. But there would be many other times when she wasn’t there when I went grasping, there were other kinds of drowning, other kinds of dying when she didn’t or couldn’t save me.

The water took me under for only moments, but the emptiness I grasped at then has lasted a lifetime. If no one protected me in the open daylight, why would anyone come in the darkness?

Don McLean’s American Pie always felt like a whisper from another world. As a child in the summer of 1972, the song was a distant soundtrack to roadtrips and days by the water… the warmth, the endless sky, the fragility of innocence.

I became the girl who smiled and turned away.

American Pie by Don McLean

Thank you for reading this first chapter of Miss American Pie.

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This story is a deeply personal journey through the shadows of childhood sexual abuse and the lasting wounds it leaves. Miss American Pie is my way of breaking that silence, sharing what it’s like to grow up without the safety and protection every child deserves, and to survive the abuse and neglect that thrive in the gaps.

I invite you to join me as I continue to share this journey in future chapters. Subscribing means you’ll receive each new installment as it’s released and become part of a community committed to confronting this particular trauma and fostering resilience, healing, and justice.

Thank you for your courage in reading, your empathy in listening, and your willingness to walk this path with me. Together, we can bring light to places that have too long been kept in darkness.