Sticky Situations and A Girl Named Cake

The day began and ended in the strange land I'll call 'shoulda known better'. Mimi is reading Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree Stories about a group of siblings who discover a magic forest behind their country cottage. In this forest is a very tall tree (yes, the faraway tree) and if you are brave enough to climb this tree you will find, at its topmost branches, a revolving collection of worlds, which come and go at inopportune moments. Climbing the ladder into the unknown can, according to Blyton, be exciting, but with the leap comes many unexpected consequences. And yesterday it felt a little as if I'd landed in 'shoulda known better' land, and it ended with a girl named Cake.

But let's start at the beginning.

I was enjoying my croissant and latte at Starbucks (the yang to the yin of the gym), reading the L.A. Times someone had conveniently left behind, when I saw the headline article about the city of Bell. For those who do not live in the southland, Bell is a small city (about 40,000 souls) of mainly working-class Latinos, who discovered that their city leaders were making a boatload of money for running a place the size of Mayberry. Like many small cities that make up the patchwork generalized as 'Los Angeles' (which is actually a misnomer since Los Angeles is only one of dozens of such adjoining municipalities), Bell has it's own mayor, city council, fire chief, police chief, and city manager, among others.

Apparently the voters in Bell had no idea the salaries of these public service employees were so outrageously out of proportion to similar cities until the Times broke the story in July. It was truly unbelievable: The city manager was making over $800,000 a year, twice that of President Barak Obama, and the police chief was making almost $500,000 a year, twice the chief's salary in Los Angeles, a city hundreds of times the size of Bell. Within short order (and after angry protests in the streets), there were all sorts of investigations underway, civil, legal, criminal, and the chief administrative officer, city manager, and chief of police had all resigned.

I was clucking away at the indignity of it all when a name caught my attention: Bell Police Chief, Randy Adams. I couldn't quite believe it, and since I'm bad with names, I read on thinking perhaps I was mistaken. You see, Randy Adams was featured in an earlier piece of mine, which I've now attached below this one: The Police Chief and the Prostate Exam.

How had I come to know this man? Back in 2008 I spearheaded a fashion-show fundraiser for an interior design project I was hired for at the Glendale Adventist Medical Center. One of the silent auction items was billed as 'lunch with the Chief', and my husband, knowing how much I love to meet interesting people, bid a lot of money on this item and proudly won it for me. I was as excited at the prospect of meeting a real police chief as any human being can be who hasn't got a criminal record, and within a few days I'd roped a friend into joining me for what I thought would be a fascinating look into a world I'd probably (and hopefully) never glimpse. Plus I'm a big fan of "The Closer" "Law & Order", and every police procedural show ever made.

The day arrived, my friend and I were ushered into the newly built and very impressive Glendale Police Station, where we met the well-groomed, and very imposing Chief Adams. You can read all about it below, but suffice to say it was a fascinating few hours, and I came away from it feeling as though I'd met a man with great ambition, presence, and integrity.

Maybe not.

I guess I was wrong about Randy Adams. Or maybe the clue lay in the strange story he let slip during our lunch when he mentioned his son, whom he'd once had hopes would follow him into the force, had actually been in jail briefly for a minor drug offense. I did sense he was a man of great complexity, but perhaps his overwhelming size (6'6') and smooth delivery, lulled me into a false sense of security.

This was an intelligent person who, by his own admission during our lunch, had his sights set on the highest position in the 9,000 member Los Angeles Police Department, one of the most prestigious jobs in the country. To that end, he'd spent 15 years in Ventura, a small city to the north, working his way up from Detective, through the supervisor ranks, eventually ending up as Chief, and then moving up to the same position in a mid-size urban city right next to Los Angeles, perfectly poised for the next jump up. It had been two years since I'd seen Chief Adams, and I couldn't quite get my head around the colossal error in judgement made a year ago when he'd taken a job in a much smaller burg, and at a salary that was so out of proportion to his responsibilities that sooner or later, it would blow up in his face.

So odd in fact that it made me wonder what had prompted his move from Glendale. And someone, a better investigative journalist than I, should try to find out. Something stinks in Whooville.

I carefully folded up the section of the paper with this fascinating, and unanswered question contained within, and went on with my day. Mimi was in camp, and I had a great deal of work to catch up on after a month of vacation and family holidays.

That evening, our new Thai student came home from her first day of school. I should tell you first that in Thailand apparently, parents like to give their kids English nicknames. Our last Thai student, Honey, and her boyfriend, Fame, were delightful examples of this quirky tradition. However, English and Thai couldn't be more incompatible, and when you don't speak a word of a language in which you choose a delightful nickname for your child, perhaps an English/Thai dictionary might be a good idea. There are countless examples of names that, while sounding melodic in your native tongue, may be offensive, odd, or just plain silly, when heard by the native speakers. The name of a friend of mine, Marcio, for example, in Brazil is an ancient variant of the Italian, 'Mario', but in Portugal it means 'the spoiled part of a piece of meat'. Good thing he didn't tattoo it on his neck.

Getting back to our student, Sudarat, and her English nickname: Cake. We love cake. And Cake. It's a bit of a challenge to call someone the name of a dessert you have with coffee, what can you do? Cake is a sweet, shy, eighteen-year old university student who came to us via a short stint in Bangkok, but mostly from the 40 acre duck and chicken egg production farm she has lived on most of her life. Since she arrived we've had a dozen phone calls from her mother, father, aunt, and neighbors just to check up on how she's doing. Day two of five and a half months, and we sincerely hope they relax soon and trust that she will do great on this adventure.

We have had many students live with us, but Cake is less urbane and more authentically a stranger in a strange land than anyone we've hosted. Besides the usual struggles with broken English and our genuine (and surprisingly good-humored) attempts to delve into ideas and concepts in the no-man land between two languages, Cake has educated us about the insular world we Americans live in sometimes.

At the end of the day, after Bob had located her town and egg farm on the satellite map of Thailand, she knelt down next to me.

"Can I ask you something?" she inquired shyly. "What religion are you?"

We tried to explain Unitarianism, and how we respected all paths to God.

Then she pressed on. "May I inquire, why is Buddah in the bathroom?"

"Looks good...?" I replied, or rather lamely asked, because something told me that her question was leading up to something bigger.

Cake looked down, a little unsure how to proceed, both with her struggling vocabulary and what I saw as a bit of fear in her eyes.

"It is.....unsuitable....to have Buddha on the floor in the bathroom," she said, finally. And I suddenly had the visual of the two-foot stone Buddha I'd given to Bob as a wedding present, sitting inches from our toilet.

Oh, Gawd.

"Are you Buddhist?" I asked, and she nodded. There was a moment of pure embarrassment, on both our parts. Bob was snickering a little in the background.

"I don't mean to offend...." she said, tentatively.

I felt the flame of humiliation rightfully due from our ignorance. She'd been here two days most likely wincing with shame every time she had to use the facilities while Buddah sat below her, on the floor, looking up her panties.

"I....." I was stuttering, not sure how to proceed. We looked at each other for a moment.

"Where can we put it?" I asked, looking wildly around the room. Buddha had ended up in the bathroom because, frankly, it sat in a quiet spot and wasn't lost somewhere in the chaos of our Western furnishings.

After a search round the house, we settled on a bench in front of the window in the reading area of our living room. I promised not to let anyone sit next to it as one must always be lower than Buddha, and certainly not chumming up to it over a casual conversation. Then I went online and brought up pictures of stone Buddhas that were for sale all over the place, to be placed among the flowerbeds in gardens (never done in Thailand), as planters, candle holders and actual candles, and yes, on the floor in rooms with a bath (most likely inspired by many visits to the spa at Burke Williams). I explained to her that in the U.S. most of us (non-Buddhists) like Buddha in our spaces because of the peace and tranquility of Zen and meditation from his teachings. And that I had put Buddha in our bathroom because we had a soaker tub and his cross-legged presence added a palpable calm to the room.

This was all news to Cake, and during that conversation we both learned a great deal about each other's cultures. For a Buddhist, reverence of one's Deity is a way of life, for us it's a decorating accent. We've poached the cache and left the rest behind.

I'm going to enjoy Cake. And I hope she learns, with time, to forgive and embrace the mistakes of a world experimenting with cross-culturalism. We deserve another chance.

Read on about Randy Adams below