Tuesday, March 30, 2010

A Prayer for The Many


Our exchange student from Japan left today, to many hugs and tears. I was sad to see her go, and maybe a little relieved. I'd often told people that the 17 year olds we host are not a true picture of teenagerhood. The girls we host are usually very polite, laugh a lot (it's a cultural thing to laugh at jokes, as well as anything you don't understand), and never gave us any lip. Definitely not typical for girls their age.
Although our Arisa was delightful, she was part of a small group of students from the same school who had obviously been mistaking a language immersion program half-way across the world, for Japanese Girls Gone Wild! Or a tamer version of it. The moment they arrived they were angling for ways to, well, get their own way. We had no problems with our student, who was sweet and helpful, but her pals were another story. They had a teenager's knack for, as my husband put it, 'finding the weak gazelle in the pack and picking it off." That gazelle was a sweet grandmotherly host (whom I'll call Dot) who took in one of the other girls after she had a meltdown with her original host family, and once paired up with her student, they were relentless. Instead of planning meals and events, as we host families are supposed to do, Dot made the mistake of asking them what they wanted to do. It's been a long time since Dot was 17 or she never would have given them this power, but once it was handed over, they spun the poor old lady around like a top. No! to the museum, no! to ping-pong night at her church, no! to pasta, no! to homework, no! no! no!
What they did want to do was to ditch the grownups as often as possible and spend time hanging out with their friends. This meant hours in someone's bedroom chatting (in Japanese), playing cards, eating mounds of junk food, and generally herding together as teenagers do. Not exactly the program their parents spent thousands of dollars for an intensive immersion experience to shore up their English.
So when Dot suggested Pageant of Our Lord at their local church, it was only after hours of coaching (an exchange student veteran) to put her timid foot down at long last and take no guff from her rebellious girls. The event may have sounded like a crashing bore to a teenager, but I actually wanted to go because I'd heard this show was technically as good as the famous, Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach. Tickets to that yearly event are expensive and hard to get. For those who aren't familiar with this event, in Pageant of the Masters, humans ornately painted and draped recreate famous paintings. It is an amazing visual feat and almost impossible to tell from their one-dimensional counterparts.
So, after a game of bowling in which the girls were humiliated by losing to their 80-year-old host - he had a few tricks up his sleeve, moving at the speed of molasses but with very good aim, we packed off to Rolling Hills Covenant Church in Rancho Palos Verdes, where host Dot and her husband were members.
Rolling Hills Covenant Church is huge, uncomfortably so to a devout Unitarian like me who has a hard time with the Bible belt version of Christianity. They had several large, modern and well-tended buildings on two campuses straddling Palos Verdes Drive. The girls were able to go backstage to see the actors being made up for their part in the paintings and sculptures, and this part was quite fascinating. Although one of the students slept through the show, it was worth the price of admission. So when Dot asked me if I wanted to share my email address with the church (the carrot was a DVD of the performance), I agreed, and when I handed in my card, they eagerly gave me a book for people like me, whom they called 'seekers': The Morning Comes and Also the Night.
The next day I took a few minutes to leaf through the 200-0dd page book, written by the senior pastor at the church. Though I suspected it would be pretty heavy-handed, reading the story of the coming period as prophesized in Revelations to be akin to standing in front of an oncoming car. There was no mystery as to what was coming next, and yet the brutal certianty of it was mesmerizing.
Some Christians fudge the whole concept of heaven and hell (the kinder, gentler version), but Pastor MacDonald was pretty clear on the matter. Believe in Jesus as the only son of God or burn in the fires hell for eternity. As an incentive to those of us who actually were Christians (but not born-again) we would get a special, even hotter place in hell because, unlike the poor savages in a distant jungle who had not yet heard the word of God, we were willfully choosing not to tow the line. He did assure us, though, that at any time we could accept Jesus fully into our hearts and minds, and make a last dash for the promised land. There was also a cheery side-note about how the better a Christian you were, the better your job in heaven - like being an Director of Angel Affairs, or actually serving Jesus personally (probably a very nice boss).
As odd as some of his claims were, the most egregious part of the last chapter was his explanation of how Jews would be handled in this phase. As he described it, the last generation of Jews would have the opportunity to convert to Christianity (again as prophesied) thus making it to heaven with the rest of us. Those who did not would go to hell, along with the rest of us. Note I am including myself in both scenarios. When all this was said and done, the earth would explode, and a new world would come with God among us, a world in peace and harmony.
This kind of did it for me. Having a close and ongoing relationship with Judaism, I have come to know with certainty that God is there in the Temple, as well as in church, and this has led me to believe He can be found in any other place where people are in daily earnest and open communion, with the intent to learn. I have felt His presence during High Holidays uplift and inspire just as clearly as I have felt it during Christmas worship in church. Perhaps the difference is really within our weakness as humans: What we do in our search to be closer to the principals and commandments of God is where we seem to get into trouble. The challenge and struggle of those who study the Torah, or the Bible, or the Koran, is that we are all trying understand and reach perfection as defined by God in our daily lives - to live moral, responsible, forgiving, and just lives during our short stay here. Killing, maiming, or segregating others from a relationship to God is the act of those who cannot attain this state of grace. To me, it is a reflection of our failings.
Judgement on this subject is God's job. And I think He's probably better at it than we are.
I find Unitarian services to be somewhat colorless and boring and I miss the pomp and circumstance of the music and message I grew up with, familiar as a warm glass of milk. I'm more of a gospel choir enthusiast, and our unitarian choir can't sing worth a ditty, given that they let anybody sing, even if they can't hold a tune. But I am committed to the principals of acceptance for all beliefs as long as they uphold the same principals of fairness toward others. I am aware that to my Christian brothers and sisters, this puts my immortal soul in peril, but as I have often assured them, I believe it's a principal worth fighting for.
God, if you're listening, I betting the farm that you will understand.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

A San Pedro State of Mind


The day we moved into our new home in San Pedro, my grasp of the place we were going to settle down in and raise our daughter was as incomplete as the building that sheltered us. Walls were not painted, we lived on the sub-flooring for weeks until the hardwood was installed; the stucco on the outside of the house followed shortly afterwards, and a new door painted red for good luck. It has taken many months for me to come to terms with the San Pedro I've fallen in love with and the bad reputation it has. The truth, it seems, is as elusive as the thick-skinned San Pedran who has all but written off what others may think and turned a proverbial back on public opinion.

So what about this place? San Pedro is so mysterious and unreadable to outsiders, it's as if it were a mist-laden but forbidding island lost to the world, only seen by a hardy few who venture close to its shores. In more practical terms, this town reveals itself as a multiple personality, and depending on who you are, you may only see one of her many aspects. This has frustrated many San Pedrans over the decades, and I know of no other town quite like this one when it comes to differing opinions about the place. I discovered this when I began telling people we were moving down here. I saw quizzical looks (good), and the kind of polite mask people take on when they don't want to be impolite (not so good). Others were just blunt: "Aren't there gangs there?" someone asked me? "It's rough down there," was another comment. "Dirty." "Polluted" "Industrial". These perceptions surprised me because after the amount of time I'd spent going down to Pedro over the three years it took to hobby-build our home, this was not the San Pedro I knew.

Perhaps the secret of why San Pedro's true character continues to elude outsiders, is its history, and the unfortunate luck of being sandwiched next to hilly, horse-mad enclave and, some would say, an uber-private community of Southern California's wealthiest inhabitants: the 'quiet elite' of Rancho Palos Verdes. Unlike Beverly Hills, its flashy nouveau riche neighbor to the north, RPV is old money, and the well runs deep. Fiercely protective of its prime piece of real-estate, the community is a true cultural child of the once powerful Sepulveda Dynasty who first fed their cattle on the Rancho San Pedro peninsula and then obtained ownership after a court battle with the rightful owner, a luckless army captain who serving afar when his father died. Lush with old oak and fragrant pine, this oasis in the otherwise sprawling metropolis that is Los Angeles, looks down on San Pedro as one would as an owner of a mega-corporation would view its teeming (and oh-so-necessary) laborers. And they take great care to protect this illusory barrier, keeping their distance, despite the availability of good restaurants and interesting activities. The irony of all this is San Pedro might have been the beachfront playground for the Rancho crowd, had not the the various political players of the late 19th and early 20th Century been so sucessful in designating the tideland shallows of San Pedro Bay as the city of Los Angeles' new harbor. The other choice was Santa Monica (there by the Grace of God go you, Montana Blvd.) San Pedro would have developed into a choice piece of waterfront/boardwalk property, home to the rich and famous, replete with spectacular ocean and mountain views.
But, as luck would have it, San Pedro became the port for a growing metropolis, feeding goods, steel, lumber, and eventually oil into a hungry population. The Navy came, building ships for the war, the Merchant Marines were based here, commercial and pleasure boat-building flourished. The biggest refineries may have risen in acres to the northeast in Wilmington, but San Pedro remained true to its sea roots: in the largest fleet in the West Coast, fishermen and women focused on the bounty of the temperate Pacific oceans, spawning a tuna habit that fed the entire nation (StarKist began here, among others). Though much of this is long gone, this is the San Pedro that most people see in their mind's eye when they look to this working harbor town, a place where you got dirt under your fingernails, a place where immigrants from every country where fishing was a staple, came and joined the hustle and bustle of sea-based bounty. A place where longshoremen labored up from the docks in rubber boots and caps of wool, Navy men in their white dickies poured into town where bars were lively, and the women questionable.
But the Port mechanized, and the ships got bigger, the pot of gold rich beyond belief, much of it going north to the city of Los Angles who had annexed San Pedro under protest almost a century before. The fish, and with them the canning industry moved to warmer Mexican waters, and the town had to adapt, or die. By this time, San Pedro was flush with more personal wealth than might have been imagined. Powerful waterfront unions had birthed a new generation of six-figure, blue collar workers who became parents of college-bound children. Houses grew large, even luxurious, and they spread up the hill and eventually bled into the Rancho borders. All the while, the families who had come here generations before, remained fond of the place, perhaps because their families back home in the old countries (Italy, Croatia, Serbia, Greece, Mexico) were the kind who pass their trades from father to son, and to raise children close to other relatives. It should be no surprise that we have the largest number of navy veterans in Los Angeles too, as they return to where they had once been stationed in the many oceanside officer barracks that still pepper our town.
San Pedro's essence is unique in that many cultures have lived here and worked here together for generations in a ten-square mile area. But it can also be a source of community profiling. One of the personalities that visitors often see first is the visible Latino population (about 40% overall). What they may not know is that nexus of this population has co-existed with its Anglo neighbors for generations. These are families that have grown up together, married, and raised children who also grew up and married Pedro spouses. We have a strong Eastern European and Mediterranean tradition here, but it is less obvious than the Latin temperament: guns shooting to the sky on the Fourth of July, passionate affairs and clashes of the heart, and yes, gang members who tattoo Rancho San Pedro on their necks from the projects on First Street. But this is not gang-held territory, and perhaps the main reason this hasn't happened is because San Pedro remains a stable population in ethnic mix and inter-dependence fueled by Pedran loyalty. That loyalty is as much about the ocean as it is family. To them, the sea is life-affirming, a source of food, sustenance, and an ancient link to hearth and home. Ask any of the third and fourth generation Pedrans why they stay, and their answer will be the same: it's in their blood, and they never stray far.
San Pedro is also a shy girl. She chooses to hide her best features from the visiting public and you have to really spend time here to discover them. The slightly tattered coat of a gritty downtown, all but forgotten by the rush of economic change, is all that most passers by see, a feature of San Pedro's end-of-the-earth nook accessible only by a freeway that dead-ends into the rough and tumble, or the lesser-known long and winding coastal road through the most secretive part of a secret Rancho, territory guarded by landslides, shifting earth, and a destination to the kinder, gentler part of town. Newcomers invariably land into our struggling downtown, only recently shrugging off decades of neglect with shiny condo towers and restored Victorian lofts; This entryway is what gives San Pedro the bad name it can't seem to shake. What they don't see is the larger, hidden part of Pedro, the community of artists who live and work here, the many-featured neighborhoods of brightly colored stucco homes, patchwork gardens, backyard roosters and wild peacocks, orchid blooms, orange trees, cliffside neighborhoods with million-dollar views. Lighthouses, aquariums, secluded beaches, parks with bonfires for scary stories, 4-yelper, family-owned cafes with history on the walls, small town sensibilities in a vast urban landscape. Another surprise around the corner.
Yes, San Pedro can also be a sulky child, a fuck-you and the horse you rode in on kind of town too, but as a young woman I cut my cultural teeth on the gritty downtown neighborhoods of Toronto, dreaming one day of my own sklight-lit loft among the abandoned garmet factories that were quickly being converted for artists like me. I get that San Pedro is quirky, and feisty, even though I have to call 311 every week to remove a slash of graffiti I see someplace in town, or pick up bits of garbage and the flotsam that the steady wind coming off the hill blows against fences and collects everywhere. Pain in my ass. But kids play in the street here, oblivious to the suburban man's burden of fear, they skateboard, and ride their bikes to the little corner markets tucked into neighborhood streets just like my husband did when he was ten. My eye for value is still good: our street ends in a new park overlooking the marina, and when I drive my daughter to school, the view down steep Anchovy Ave. is 180 degree ocean with Catalina laid on the horizon like a magnificent rocky stole. It feels like you are diving head first into a world of water. Mimi paints and prances in her school productions, and tends to a wild native garden outside her classroom. There is order in the magnificent chaos, a perfect metaphor for the life she is experiencing here.
So, for a newcomer like me, it is difficult to try to explain all that San Pedro is because I haven't yet developed the thick skin of my more tempered neighbors. I take the insults personally, still not yet willing to pray the mantra I hear so often from the old-timers- all said with a certain gleam in their eye: "San Pedro is our secret". This secret may begin with a defining moment: mine was the first time we drove to our new house at night. We curved south down Harbor Boulevard alongside the hulking shapes of gleaming white cruise ships, past the aging Ports of Call, still gamely coy in her coat of many colors, and then all the noise, shapes, and light fell away as we reached what seemed to be the end of the earth. And in a way, it was. The night sky, reaching away from the end of the peninsula, darkened from the amber hue of a bustling port to a deep velvet blue-black, starry filled and endless. No matter how many times I come home along the water, the magic of that moment never loses its impact.
I don't know all that makes San Pedro tick yet, but I think I'll have to let go of the one word comeback I can't seem to find at the appropriate moment for the doubters and the jaded, who believe we should hide our pain and our poverty, our struggles, and differences, and segregate them from the triumphs and comforts we acquire as a shield from all that we are. This is real life, all wrapped up in one unique package.

In short, this is one amazing town, man. Deal with it.