Playdate: Notes from the Trenches

Happiness is a warm boot: Remembering September 11

2011-09-12T15:15:00.000-07:00

On September 10, 2001, Bob and I flew home from a visit to Canada. We had just become engaged and I wanted families on both coasts to meet my fiancee, and my hope was that the connection would be strong enough to convince them all to travel to California in February for the wedding. It was my second time around and not something you can count on. But I knew this marriage was going to last and I wanted this wedding to be the memory we all held in common, not just in photographs but in the sensory river that is life experienced in all its minutiae. As a family, a community, a nation, we become the sum of these memories, they bind us together, force us apart, we navigate them hourly, daily, and at the end they are everything, the river on which we flow.
In Ontario the Indian summer nights were kind, crickets and lawn chairs, images darkening through the long twilight. Sitting on the cool grass my fiance, whose post-war Japanese mother had married his American father, chatted amiably with my uncle who was only one of two pilots to escape the bombardment of his airfield in Ceylon in 1942. I marveled at the changes that could happen to bring us together within the span of one lifetime.

The flight home was tiring but uneventful, sleep welcome.

Before the alarm summoned me to a workday, the phone rang, it was barely dawn, I was groggy, but within seconds the television was on. I sat, tangled up in sheets, watching in disbelief and horror as the events of the morning unfolded. I thought about my co-workers who were within a block of the Towers attending a convention, and it looked like New York was coming apart at the seams. My bags, from the flight, were still sitting in the living room, unpacked. I couldn't leave the bed. Didn't want to, it felt safer somehow. As the morning lightened, the church bells that mark the hours near to our Los Feliz apartment began to ring out, incongruous, celebrating unknowning, a timer clicking on and a man hurrying to turn it off. Then they were silent.

The planes. I had been on one just hours earlier. The towers - seen from a safe distance as helicopters buzzed, cameras captured. I had been in New York several times over the previous years, working on projects at St. Vincents Hospital, one of the places I knew would begin to prepare for the injured (who would never come as most simply perished). But as the focus stayed on the towers, I saw them not as they were trembling that morning, but as I remembered them a few years before, when I'd been speaking at a conference in Manhattan. The turn-of-the-century hotel where I was staying occupied the block next to World Trade Plaza and the view framed by my room window was completely dominated by these two soaring obelisks, darkened by the perpetual shadow they cast on the ground below. It was not a pleasing sight - the white slits designed into the base contrasted like tall ghosts with the gloom, the towers stretched far out of sight, their sheer magnitude impenetrable, unforgiving. Something about it made me uneasy, perhaps it was just the anxiety of preparing to speak before a room full of physicians.

It felt prescient now as I watched the screen, my view now far up where they alone reflected the clear light of a bright day. They looked so beautiful, heroic as they imploded, compacting neatly, I thought, going straight down into the earth. We joined in the river of these images, made memory.

In early December Bob surprised me a whirwind trip. We were going to spend four days in New York to celebrate my birthday. It seems now to be a testament to our national determination to heal that by December we were even contemplating taking a holiday in a place where the violent memories were still fresh. It was a busy four days - we sat in the near front rows of a hit Broadway show, ventured downtown further to see the newly-famous Blue Man Group, then the Rockettes Christmas Spectacular. New York seemed to be as alive and vibrant as ever, full of itself, dizzying.
Except for the air. Even by the beginning of December, three months after the Towers fell, the remains, now reduced to micro-particles remains still kicked up from the ground, blown from cracks and crevices where the exploding debris had settled into every part of the city. It was omnipresent: Acrid, mettallic, earthy, gypsum, wood, pulverized glass. Everywhere, a suble, constant reminder we were still in the organic process of assimilating what had happened. We were absorbing it, into our bodies, into our still-fresh memories.

The Blue Man Group show was only a few blocks from Ground Zero. We briefly considered venturing further south, but the power of what had happened was too great. It was too soon - we knew we would see the same images captured on film, the grey dust, poking ruins, swarming volunteers now joined by masses of heavy machinery shoveling away the debris.

Then a visceral memory, from my first visit to New York decades earlier. I was with my mother and we were walking down 5th Avenue on our way to a cheaper hotel when someone ran across the street and was hit by a car. There was screaming, and a crowd quickly coalesced from the river of pedestrians, circling, then pushing an shoving to surround the injured man. My mother stopped and turned to join them, drawn as if by some invisible force. To see. I turned away in anger, dragging my suitcase a good block before she caught up to me, breathless, equally angry. We barely spoke for days afterward, each of us lost in our own place in this drama, the voyeur, the witness.

The air was the river of that memory. In silence we skirted the destruction, fiercely determined to stay with the living, to keep moving forward. In the clear winter afternoon we simply stood hand-in-hand for a moment, facing the direction of the void that had once been crowned, contemplating the hidden world beyond. Our future, so vibrantly bright, so full of promise. It seemed incongruous to shift from one reality to another. I turned to the nearest store window, we went inside. And then I bought a pair of boots because my feet were freezing and the world had gone cold. For a moment, it had gone very cold.

And you thought Canadians were milktoast

2011-05-25T14:09:00.000-07:00

Topping Google news today is the story of the Toronto couple who have decided to keep the gender of their 4 month old a secret so they can raise him/her to be gender neutral.

May I give my thanks to Storm's parents for busting the myth American's have (and perpetuated by Michael Moore) that Canadians are boring, polite, sane (okay, slightly socialist) people who ski a lot.

Before this story went viral, I was already giving some thought to the role of masculine/feminine biology because of something that happened recently at the YMCA : Do men steal more often than women? Could it have to do with the hunter/gatherer part of their brain that drives them to take what they need? I mean, in the way, way, old days, men went after things to provide for their woman and children, and there wasn't a price tag on the elephant, or a pre-purchased bear. If you could take it, it was yours to claim. Perhaps some ancient urge at work?

In my totally unscientific experiment of one, my eBook was sitting alone on the exercise bike, and after I left, someone in the adjacent free-weight room (totally guy land) decided to take it. It was abandoned after all, fair game. After sneaking off with it (the cyclist next to me didn't even notice), the thief took his prize back to the weights but ether discovered it wasn't an iPAD, or that it was just a simple book reader, or just too puzzling to figure out, and left it behind. Four hours later someone found it there and turned it in, after I'd already been to the Sherriff's Department to report the theft.

Once I heard what had happened, I admit I did have an image of one of those beefy guys in a muscle shirt and shorts pawing over it with a quizzical look, turning it this way and that, then dropping it on the floor to run off and start beating his chest and screeching at the others in frustration. Not nice, I know, but I put it down to mini-PTSD.

I do love my eBook.

Back to poor Storm: On KPCC's "Air Talk", host Larry Mantle had a great interview with a child psychologist to discuss this issue and these are the comments I left on the website:

Unless Storm's parents plan to raise their child in a vacuum, there would be no way to tell if their goal to raise a gender neutral child is successful - just too many factors will come into play as the child navigates the world. I agree with your guest that kids gender identity depends on a blend of nature/nurture/and culture. Freedom of expression aside, some things you cannot change no matter how you obscure their origins.

Biological imperative is a strong determinate here - and to think one could erase these DNA cues so easily is to underestimate, and over-simplify the evolution of the human species. True gender neutrality would have to evolve over time and I believe we're already in this process - intellectually, perhaps biologically, but a long way away from understanding how it will manifest. And the future of gender neutrality may not be what Storm's parents envision, or even desire. Even today, what is defined as masculine and/or feminine in one part of the world may be very different in another, so our idea of 'neutrality' is subject to our own cultural biases.

Any parent today who is raising a child by letting them pursue their interests and self-expression without regard to traditional male/female roles is in fact working towards the goal of a gender-neutral person, and this is far more common than the media attention this story about Storm deserved.

In this age of reality fame, Storm's parents are getting something out of this, and I'm afraid their child will suffer for it over the long run. And I suspect this move was one born out of frustration with the issues their other two kids are struggling with, thinking they can solve the problem by artificially removing Storm's birth gender. How controlling is this? Not much room for a child who may not live up to their experiment.

Sadly, I think Larry was right about a future book deal....

Time for a talk show

2011-05-23T10:52:00.000-07:00

Here's a quiz for you Los Angles Yahoo users who cannot help but be drawn to the line item of local news stories that you see when you open the page to get to your mail:

1. Story and photo of a one-legged man who overcame 30 years of alcohol and drug abuse to win the L.A. Marathon (guess the city name on the lead line)

2.Photo of big waves challenging surfers (guess city name on lead line)

3. Sunset photo featuring kite-flying contest. (see above)

If you guessed San Pedro in the first inspirational story, you would be right. The second and third: take your pick of Palos Verdes, Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach, or, in the case of the kite-flying contest, possibly land-locked Torrance.

After a couple of years reading the Daily Breeze, which also feeds Yahoo these local stories, it came to me: I might possibly be in danger of turning into one of those loud-mouthed opinionated, semi-paranoid talk show hosts who can't shut up when they get on a tear.

These days information comes at us from thousands of sources and this fluid ocean of data may seem innocuous when you can pick and choose the things you relate to, but once a person (say, me) sees a trend in the way news is being reported, the pattern that emerges is so striking it's time to start putting foil on the windows and replacing the metal fillings. At least it would be if I was actually paranoid.

San Pedro, in my opinion as you all know so well, is a victim of this kind of pattern reporting, and it didn't take long for me to start complaining, even though I wasn't sure that anyone in a position to do anything about it would even listen. At least not enough to make a difference to the lackluster traffic in our newly restored downtown, or the general mud slinging that goes on in chat rooms where anonymous posters refer to San Pedro as 'little Mexico', and a 'slum'.

I had a lot of statistics to back up my claims that Pedro was getting the shaft. Crime in this city of 81,000 is merely 'average' compared to LAPD statistics (with six incidents including a bar fight and four burglaries in a recent week). In a timely check of high profile crimes like murder and assault I found that my old stomping grounds in Los Feliz (part of the Hollywood Division) was worse. Not news to me: When I lived there cars were stolen off the street regularly, air support helicopters hovered, graffiti to be painted over, and once a police chase ended right under my bedroom window, tires squealing, bullhorns, the whole bit. And yet, Los Feliz has the halo of a place where the buzz is good, where the hipsters congregate, and it's written up in French tour magazines as a gem in Los Angeles.

San Pedro's image problem was really galling, so about six months ago, armed with a list of all the front page stories about our town along with a list of the 'feel good' photos they posted regularly, I wrote a letter to the publisher of the Breeze. I simply pointed out the pattern, and asked her why the paper focused on the poorest population of our city, and never once sent a photographer to capture our beaches, sunsets, or the vast seascapes we share with wealthy Palos Verdes neighbors. Food drive? San Pedro. Toxic port issues? San Pedro. Rising above adversity? San Pedro. Sober living? San Pedro.

Somebody was writing these stories, and some editor was directing the editorial content. It seemed that the folks at the Daily Breeze were of the same opinion as the anonymous racists, and had written off this port town long ago.

My other complaint focused on the city crime stats reported every day. Torrance, a larger city with it's own socio-economic issues, (and home base to the Breeze) seemed to be a very special, clean, and safe place to live. San Pedro, on the other hand, featured a slap-up of some kind followed by home burglaries and what they referred to as 'shots fired'. No one was killed in these altercations, and the injuries were not listed, but anyone reading these reports would give the place a wide berth. And who could blame them? They'd never set foot in San Pedro and were never likely to.

Unless you were a New Yorker, maybe.

I must have intuited something because soon afterwards the news stories changed a bit, and the San Pedro focus shifted from misfit makes good (inspirational) or downtown struggling (hard news) to a wider variety of human interest and news features. Not a major sea-change, and certainly no color piece of some of our beautiful coastline or beach areas has yet to grace the front page, but an improvement.

As for my charge that the crimes were not accurately being reported on a weekly basis for media release, I was vindicated yesterday when the L.A. Times (the real big city newspaper) reported that the City of Torrance Police Dept. was selectively filtering out certain crimes from these reports and skewing the stats. Rapes, assaults, robberies, missing. In my letter to the publisher, I surmised that LAPD, which reports for San Pedro (we are in their Harbor Division) has no agenda for promoting tourism or property values so they just say it like it is. But all the other cities in the South Bay have their own police departments, and I suspected they were joined at the hip with other city officials, cognizant of their city image, and there was no independent monitoring of the accuracy of their stat reports.

I love it when I stumble on something.

The battle to accurately portray San Pedro goes on, and this is as much a PR issue as it is a media issue. We have only a tiny (and nascent) citizen-run Visitors & Convention Bureau because like everything else that was taken away when Pedrans were duped into voting for annexation to Los Angeles in 1909, the big budget Los Angeles Visitors & Convention Bureau doesn't do squat for us. And I mean that nicely.

I've been asked if I'd be interested in running for City Council if Janice Hahn makes it to Congress. This is probably the only time I've really regretted not being a citizen. But I can continue to work from behind the scenes to make this place as transparent to the rest of Southern California as it should be. Not perfect, but a work in progress. Not unlike the human condition: always room for improvement but does better when given a compliment now and then.

I think San Pedro needs a publicist.

Life With Iron Giants: Rowing to Catalina

2011-02-02T11:17:00.000-08:00

John Olguin died on New Year's morning. Most of you reading this have no idea who this man is, but here in San Pedro he was Ernest Hemingway's Old Man and The Sea, Jack LaLanne, and Saint Nicholas all rolled up into one humble package. Nothing shy of a living legend, his love of and ever present relationship with the sea was the stuff of tall tales, even made more fantastical by the improbable but true stories of his rowing trips to Catalina Island, or the time he and his wife opted for a month-long rowboat trek to explore the Carribean Islands, rowing at night when the seas were calm, and frolicking in remote beaches where they'd camp for a night. He met the water on several fronts, as a lifeguard, sailor, swimmer, and teacher of the bounties brought by the sea.

And Olguin was in it constantly. For decades he would start his morning by jumping into the port channel for a swim around the point, avoiding tug boats and tankers alike. Other times he would take to the beaches around our part of the peninsula for swims long and short, choppy or calm; his sun-browned children spent their summers at our Cabrillo cove where he lifeguarded and shepherded many students of the sea into successful and fulfilling lives. He built museums, restored our rich maritime history, a legacy he grew like a man tending to the shallows where young fry needed protection to thrive.

When I met him two years ago he was 87, and as sweet and robustly energetic as he'd been all his life. I was invited to their home to honor his painter wife, Muriel, with a special plaque. They collected these things by the dozens, but John usually got most of the attention at these affairs. He seemed so delighted to be sidelined by the affection shown to his wife that day, sitting casually on a nearby stool, hands on his knees, his bright gaze everywhere. Shyly hanging back in the crowd, I was still trying to take in the atmosphere, and a powerful sense of familiarity with the rough-hewn cottage life I'd come to know as a summer kid in Ontario.

John and Muriel's hand-built wooden plank house perched on the edge of grassy cliffs that undulated down toward the sea. It had grown to a pleasantly ramshackle footprint in stages, starting with a modest post and beam structure that was added onto as fortunes and children dictated. The place smelled like sea air, beach wood, and creosote from the original pot-bellied stove still in the corner. There were two doors in the single bathroom, one for the house occupants and one for sandy-footed surfer/rower/swimmers who would pad up the stone path from somewhere down to the sea-crashing shore. Wild flowers grew everywhere, visible through the huge windows, and their perfume added to the warmth inside.

The living room led through glass doors onto a large porch on stilts, winged over the falling terrain so's not to obscure breathtaking views. When I asked John why there was a double bed outside in the far corner of the porch he looked at me with a twinkle in his eye.

"Muriel and I sleep out there," he answered.

"Every night?!"

Those who scoff because of our warm California reputation have never experienced the dark and bone-chilling winter, when torrential rains and Arctic flows hover near the freezing mark. When the sun goes down on the ocean horizon it can get damn cold.

"For fifty years," he confirmed, and smiled again.

I looked out to the porch with skepticism. The bed had a modest cover on it, and no screening - just the natural protection of a corner niche, and bracing possibility of constant off-shore breezes. It seemed impossible, especially with two white haired octogenarians huddled there, often in the buff, if he wasn't having me on.

Mimi was outside and at that point came running in with a sweet in her mouth.

"Where did you get that, honey," I asked.

She solemnly pointed to the porch floor, rough hewn and spotted with decades of useful dirt, pigeon, seagull, and peacock droppings."

"Spit it out!" I cried, oblivious to the old man next to me, who had lived to a ripe old age reveling in the rough, obviously to no ill effects. But my daughter had already swallowed it and before I could utter another word she turned and ran back out to the porch again, a new fan of the transparent barrier between home and nature the Olguins had created.

While I fretted about the possible diseases she might have gotten from the poisoned pill, let me mention the peacocks again if they slid by in the story without more than a how-dee-do. Peacocks lived around and on their house, as they do in the entire neighborhood of their part of San Pedro. Brought in to nearby Palos Verdes by someone decades ago as a nice lawn ornamentation, they thrived and stayed wherever they were welcome. When Bob and I drove over, we were warned early to watch out for them, and it was obvious they weren't watching out for us, so they ruled. A couple of times we had to stop and wait for one or two sauntering across the road, as haughtily oblivious to us as sleek cats, tails up or down, crown feathers of jaunty blue and shimmering rainbow hues bobbing along. God help you if they decided to stop midway, or perhaps with one of their luxurious tails still resting in your way. Mess with a peacock and you suffer the consequences, for they can be formidable advisories, especially those coddled by the locals as these were.

How can you not see the magic in a place where peacocks perch on rooftops and men row to sea on a summer's night for fun? This was one of the many times that I had an affirmation for where we had landed, so much by chance, as by fortune and circumstance, a place off the grid even to those of us living down the way. John and Muriel's ocean house was a reminder of the escapist times of my childhood, when cottages were simple structures meant to be used for sleeping or lounging on ancient but comfortable furniture, or to play cards by on rainy days or in the quiet night. For the rest of the time, the outside world was our playground, our wonder, our constantly changing place of discovery and imagination. And appreciation. All vistas were of the gifts given to us by the world around us, never less important than any one thing in our lives.

I met John Olguin only once. And now he's gone. But the peacocks, and all those who love and protect the ocean, they live on.

Sticky Situations and A Girl Named Cake

2011-01-30T13:55:00.000-08:00

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

Thanksgiving with the Grump

2010-12-26T09:18:00.000-08:00

Apparently, with Grandpa Grumpy, there is an expiration period for frank talks. Those of you who check in here from time to time may remember last holiday when I had it out with the old guy. Not in the screaming-in-your-face kind of way, which knowing him, would have resulted in immediate banishment from Sweetpea's beloved grandma, but in calm, direct debate (and a raised middle finger behind my back). I thought we'd worked out the main kinks, but apparently, like many old folks, his short-term memory is very short.

Grandpa Grumpy is kinda-sorta my father-in-law. Not really, but to have him hear it, he grafted onto my husband's family when the kids were all grown, and takes territorial possession due to marital imperative. And since he has no contact with his biological children from marriage number one, his step-children, their spouses, and grandchildren have become the psychological equivalent of crash-test dummies. He's constantly working out his angst about the fact that his own flesh and blood cut him off, clumsily poking and prodding in the only way he knows to connect to his current 'kids'. These kids being three step-sons, and relationships are problematical. One of the brothers has found a way to connect with him, and gives him his due, something I find difficult given the old man's penchant for thrashing me about at any opportunity.

One problem I have, among many when it comes to Grumps opinion of me (as a woman, a mother, a wife, and generally in pretty much every aspect of my life) , is a particularly toxic ball and chain around my neck. Nothing I do or say can ever release it. I've committed the most egregious sin of all:

I'm a Canadian.

Grandpa Grumpy is a dyed-in-the-wool, blue-blooded American Patriot. Current Tea Party Member, proud card-carrying member of the NRA, hell, he even keeps a squirrel rifle leaning up against the living room wall (antique and de-commissioned). And he despises anyone who has the temerity to live in this greatest country on earth and not be a citizen. To him it's as inconceivable that I would actually choose to remain here and not take the oath. In the past I toyed with the idea, given that Canadians are currently able to carry dual citizenship, but rumors that this might end have put the kybosh on this idea. I've been a legal resident of the U.S. for decades, and so far it's worked out fine. I mean, Dan Rather said it quite eloquently during the Vancouver Olympics earlier this year, the U.S. and Canada are political pals, and share the longest peaceful border in the world. Heck, we're practically married.

But in Grandpa Grumpy's view there is no namy-pamby UN in this messed up world, and he has taken jingoism to new heights when it comes to his belief that America is the only nation in the world worth living in, or for. And my reluctance to swear allegiance to it that has finally pushed Grumps to new heights of fury, for as all fanatical, true-believers of any radical ideology will concur when it comes to a line in the sand: yer either in or yer out.

And I am most definitely out.

It has escalated in the last few years, partly fueled by his advancing age and the fact that he is now fixated on the WWII years, especially the Pacific Theatre. To an interested listener, his weaving in and out of both sides of the Japanese-American conflict is a fascinating dance of blame on both sides, and is a chilling portrait of the hell of war. From his now-distant perch he obsessively relives the last gasp of a world conflict, cleaning up the rotting remains in Nagasaki, running security detail at the War Crimes Tribunal, seeing hunger and starvation from the streets of his adopted home of over two decades. He will freely hold both sides accountable for the atrocities committed in the name of freedom, with a generous mixture of compassion and sympathy for the plight of POWS tortured in Baatan along with the millions of civilian Japanese diaspora who returned home to starvation in a devestated land.

All this ceased to be fascinating years ago when he told it for the second, then third time, then on and on. And as the daughter of another elderly raconteur stuck in a loop, I'd be content to simply nod and listen, except that it just ends in the same place: I'm a Commie Pinko, and should be run out of town on a rail. On all matters regarding this issue, his logic gets very fuzzy when it comes to fighting for liberty. But to spare you the long version, it boils down to this: Fought for the U.S. Worthy. Fought for any other Allied country: Not worth mentioning. Apparently you can only defend liberty if you are an American. His idea of liberty, freedom, and all the other ideals that go with it are country-specific. Uncle Sam's got the copyright, apparently. Literally and figuratively.

Grandpa Grumpy is the Ugly American. And who would want to line up for citizenship when faced with this kind of welcome? To borrow (liberally) fromWoody Allen, I'm not interested in joining any club that would have him for a member.

Grumps is a tough old bird, and has gotten back his God-given mobility after knee surgery (over a year ago, sibs take note), and as much as I'd like to make peace with him, we have reached an impasse. It's an ironic one, as you might have guessed. I am as loyal to my birth nation as he is to his, and the only difference is that I keep my mouth shut. Which, for those of you who know me, isn't easy. Keeping quiet mostly entails a dumb, wide-eyed expression when he tries to bait me during what seems like an ordinary conversation (he is very good at approaching the subject from any manner of obtuse avenues). This puzzled look allows him to get to the punch line, which is usually a direct insult to me, Canada, or any number of Obama connections to our socialist policies, like health care for the disabled or sick children. Here's an example:

"Hey, I met a gal from Queebeck the other day at the cemetery when I was paying my respects last week."

Looks at me.

"You know why I was there, right?" Cocks his head, stares with a smile. I nod politely.

"Well, I dunno what you do, but that's what we do on Veteran's Day, pay our respects to the men and women who served our country to protect the freedoms you enjoy here in America." I nod, try to mention the poppies we wear as the Canadian symbol of respect for our armed forces. He cuts me off and moves on.

"Well, anyway, she was an interesting lady. I wish I'd taped our conversation."

Looks at me (I keep my expression neutral).

"Yeah, she said she loves it here, and that there ain't any place in the world like America. And if you don't want to be a citizen she says you should get the hell out and go back where you came from!"

Grins and stares at me, as if waiting for a retort. Which does not come.

Then he sits back and puts on his best Kansas drawl. "Yeaaah, man, that's what I'm talkin' about."

Looks around the room to see if anyone agrees with him, but surprisingly the others are all picking lint off their clothes or staring at the ceiling.

After a long period of these one-sided conversations, when he starts to relax and get chummier, we might exchange a few friendly shots across the bow. Only a few mind you, because this more direct approach inevitably ends in a tirade, or a shouting match with his wife (my mother-in-law) who recently has begun to object to his abuse. Then I go to bed, where I am now, writing this to you all.

On this trip I did learn something remarkable - we both share ancestry to the Mayflower. My father's family descended from John Howland, made memorable by his fall from the ship mid-Atlantic, and his frantic grasp of a trailing lanyard that got him hauled back on board. A true survivor, he married another Mayflower passenger and had many children, which led to half-million of us in future generations. GG has a similar chart, but I didn't stay long enough to figure out from whose loins he eventually sprang from. It was as annoying as hell for Grumps to find out my people had been here at the first Thanksgiving, a claim he has long reveled in, being the champion American that he is. Unfortunately, he sees this as further proof that we are elitist fops of the first order, snuff-sniffing, poppinjays who defended the evil King, and ran tail when the Revolution began. So now I'm a Commie and a turncoat.

Oh, Canada!

Life With Iron Giants: Where the Improbable Meets the Possible

2010-12-23T14:35:00.000-08:00

No matter how many times I try to explain how special San Pedro is, I get a lot of blank stares in return. The nicer ones make a real effort to see this place through my eyes, and I give them credit. But part of me knows that when they go back to their comfortable suburbs, they'll get stared down if they try to defend the place, and soon, the bright feather of enthusiasm will drift away, untended. I've heard more than once about the secrets we keep within our sea-crashed borders, inured to the slings and arrows of outsiders, and in some ways it's a bit disingenuous to expect others to be able to draw away the curtain without spending some serious time here.

It's okay, I want to tell them, I do understand. Take my friend Ernie, for example, whom I see regularly at one of our local cafes. This is a man with a history that, at first blush, appears to be less reality than reality show. To begin with there is his implacable certainty that he is the illegitimate son of Howard Hughes and Katherine Hepburn, though no evidence can be found that this lovely but solitary woman ever gave birth during her extraordinary career, despite a fling with Hughes during her younger years. But should you be quick to dismiss the white-haired gentleman with a flowing beard and the piercing stare of a bluejay, you would miss the amazing story of his life. One that would lead you to believe that he very well could be the offspring of a genius aviator/engineer and a genius actress. If the proof is in the DNA, his seems to flow with potential from both parents.

Ernie, who will soon be the guest on my first podcast in the "Life With Iron Giants" series on this blog, is actually a very accomplished, and intuitively brilliant engineer, and designer of famous cars and speed boats, some of them fetch in the high six figures, they are so rare and coveted. As the owner of a cutting-edge design company, he led the high life for many decades, and when I see the photograph of him in his prime, suntanned, blonde and wickedly handsome zenith (and yes, a Hughes look-alike), I can understand why he married so many beautiful women in his ultra-modern, Newport Beach house. He has made and lost vast fortunes, and in his early years, he was a child of the kind of early 20th Century power and privilege few of us have ever experienced.

At birth, he was adopted into the Ford Dynasty in Detroit, by the brother-in-law of Edsel Ford (his mother was a Ford), and grew up during the WWII years when his father was often called to Washington to help with the war effort. Ernie lived amongst the technology and political giants of his time, and although he was a self-proclaimed non-conformist in many ways, never attending university, he had a natural talent for engineered design, doing much better than his blue-blooded parents might have envisioned. His innovative, cutting-edge creations can be found on enthusiasts' sites all over the net. And even though he hasn't produced one in many decades, his name is legend.

But Ernie's more complex nature won out in the end. When his business failed spectacularly in the 80's (all due to a steam engine he developed for cars then selling the patent to an automobile company that promptly mothballed it), Ernie lost his many homes, wives, boats, and other trappings of wealth. He took to the sea full time as the captain of his boat, then a became a spiritual seeker, diving into the mystical plane where he spent many years in various ashrams and retreats. It sounds eerily parallel to Carlos Castenada, who explored "the known, the unknown, and the unknowable" in his Don Juan series. Ernie may have crossed paths with him, so similar were their journeys into the nova of human consciousness.

And as you talk to Ernie, these two lives, engineer and yogi, intertwine in fascinating rhythm, only adding to the confounding mystery of this son of greats, and his possible biological legacy. As for his claim that he is Hughes' son, there is no denying that Ernie displays the same single-minded obsession with engineering challenges that the famous aviator did, even now he is constantly scribbling designs on napkins, and his innate understanding of natural principals a constant inspiration.

So what is the truth? Ernie typifies many of the challenges we face in San Pedro, a town as misconstrued, stereotyped, and unknown as he is. We are not available to all comers, especially those who lack curiosity, or the ability to breath into and travel into new territory the way Peter Mayle managed in A Year in Provence. Provence didn't need a PR campaign, so we're in a deeper hole, because the veil that separates the reality of life here and the perception of others is an intimidating divide.

And that itself is part of the mystery. And still news to a lot of people.

Life With Iron Giants: Squeaky Wheels and Small Victories

2010-12-17T08:50:00.000-08:00

Our park - before construction began.....

Going up against the Port of Los Angeles is as mythically challenging as it gets. David and Golaith time, except in this case, David had his slingshot taken away in an earlier skirmish and is left on the battlefield with nothing but his courage and a lot of bravado. "How's it going, Golaith, old buddy? Hey, that's my head you're tearing off....."

Despite the documented carcinogenic fallout from industrial pollutants that for the better part of a century poured into San Pedro, Wilmington, and all cities north (including you folks up in the Westside), decades more went by before the Port took responsibility for its wrongdoing and started to clean up its act. Too many mega-interests in the financial, political, global manufacturing, and labor spheres, were caught up in a bob and weave dance of conflicting self-interests to worry much about the deaths and shortened lifespans that were a result of our free market system. But hey, we still had lots of landfill-bound junk from China coming in like there was no tomorrow. Talk about uber-denial.

In the past month, we reached a landmark of sorts. The journey started over 20 years ago when some of the local citizenry (mainly those with downtown business interests) thought it would be a good idea if the Port actually did something with the industrial wasteland tthat separated San Pedro's downtown from the water. Ports O'Call, a leasee of the Port, once a thriving dockside retail and restaurant tourist attraction, had fallen into dingy disrepair, the entire place was a sad mess.

Langston Hughes asks what happens to a dream deferred. Does it dry up, like a raisin in the sun? That raisin was as withered as it could get around here. But in the last decade, the blood, sweat and tears of many have begun to bring that raisin back to life. Perhaps the start of this change began when huge multi-national conglomerate, China Shipping, peititioned to build a larger berth in the Port, along with mega-storage for containers. Environmental groups got involved (thanks to those dismal pollution studies) and supported assorted squeaky wheels in the community, and during the contentious debate that followed, some of the most significant cracks appeared in the wall of resistance built by the Port.

A large sum of money (in the multiple millions) was set aside for what they call 'mitigations', kind of a trade-off system. This included new parks, money for waterfront improvements, etc. Some of the money went to form a new elected body (PCAC) made up of local citizens and Port staffers, with the purpose of transparency and input on all matters pertaining to POLA. The City of L.A. was making its own changes in local representation - Neighborhood Councils were created through a charter, with the purpose of adding more in-depth discussion and direct input from communities on issues affecting them.

All of this happened before I got here, but I jumped into the fray because the job of watchdogging an entity like the Port is never done. The Bridge to Breakwater project, an ambitious 1.5 billion dollar investment, was unveiled this fall and all of us squeaky wheels (past and present) jammed into a local gymnasium to find out just how much impact we'd had.

What The Port wanted:

Bridge to Breakwater billion-dollar development of parkland and interconnecting boardwalks from Vincent Thomas Bridge to Cabrillo Beach
lots of concrete parking structures
disconnect between waterfront and downtown San Pedro
new paint for ageing Ports O'Call
mega liner ships parked in front of the town beach
permanent street closures, parking nightmares during tourist surges

What we got:

Bridge to Breakwater billion-dollar development of parkland and interconnecting boardwalks from Vincent Thomas Bridge to Cabrillo Beach
Real development funds for Ports O'Call refurbishment
underground parking structures covered with grass rooftops
removal of acres of parking lots - converted into parkland and boardwalk
mega liner berths postponed until further study
construction of 7th Street people pier, connecting to downtown businesses
electric powered transport for passengers travelling to outer harbor berths (if constructed)
LEED-certified green building practices and energy efficiency in all new construction

And, one last thing. The big dirt pile at the end of our street, once a home to oil storage tanks, was in debate for 10 years. The Port wanted to build condos (block our view), research institute (better but not great), shopping mall (yikes!), but the scrappy folks in the Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council helped secure a new park for this acreage. The park, under construction since we moved in two years ago, will have it's grand opening in December. The trees are small, plantings, new, but it is a hell of a long way from the tank farm Bob used to play in when he was a kid.

Things are looking up.

The new park is pictured below...

22nd Street Park - California landscaping, drought tolerant

2010-12-17T07:50:00.000-08:00

Even this gets criticized from some of the upper Pedro residents who can't imagine a park that isn't a lawn. Just as our front yard does every year, it will change with the seasons, with blooming lavendar, fennel, sage, lush in the rainy season and fallow in the dry. What you see in the upper end is a playing field.

Life With Iron Giants: Empowerment Zone

2010-10-19T09:30:00.001-07:00

Last night, radio host Kevin James (Kevin James Show, KRLA 12-3a.m) attended our Coastal Neighborhood Council Meeting. He is touring many of the Neighborhood Councils in the Southland to get a better feel for the issues facing neighborhoods, and to support the local work they do. This is a contentious issue as the Councils have been struggling to keep funding going from the City of Los Angeles, and this is especially true in San Pedro (which has three councils for each of our distinct geographical areas). We have not had our just due from the City for over a century, and although the worm is finally turning in some respects, the Neighborhood Councils here remain the only place to truly intervene on local issues. With the lion's share of city revenue streaming in from our port, and a mere 1/4 of a City Council seat to show for it, we are the true victims of 'taxation without representation'.

When I came home from the meeting, there were a few things that had happened in the meeting that bothered me, so I wrote to him at the station.

Dear Kevin:

After leaving the meeting I realized that you may not return any time soon, and I wanted to point out a few things. San Pedro has a huge PR problem. Until a few weeks ago there wasn't even a Visitors & Convention Bureau for a town with millions of tourists passing through every year - this tourism revenue goes straight back to Los Angeles. Just one of of the many inequities we face as a city annexed by L.A. early last century to drain our resources for the city coffers with barely a nod when it comes to representation or financial compensation. You may not realize this but we are tethered to the city of L.A. by a thin 20 mile corridor running through other cities, created to attach us, but we might as well be a hundred miles away for the historical injustice we've suffered due to pollution, noise, and traffic from the giant port complex the city built on our doorstep. The Visitors and Convention Bureau for San Pedro, like many organizations here, began on a grassroots level by involved community members who, like me, are frustrated by the image that our town has to the rest of the Southland. An image that is simply wrong, mis-informed, and often fueled by vague racist fears.

In fact, San Pedro is a deeply rooted, multi-cultural town with the strongest sense of community I've experienced, and I've lived in every part of Los Angeles. Independent-minded, our 80,000 populace ranges from disadvantaged, middle class, to wealthy, and we all identify as San Pedrans, not Angelenos. Multiple generations of ethnically diverse families live here in relative harmony. No-one ever talks about that. And loyalty? You won't find it stronger anywhere than here. The reason our lead LAPD officer said "criminals live in San Pedro" is not because we house the region's criminals, but because Pedro lawbreakers, like everyone else here, stay in San Pedro, their hometown, and it makes it easy for authorities to track them. This remark may have been misunderstood by someone who doesn't see the context.

We do live in an urban area, and crime is a part of life. But I was annoyed by the use of 'carjacking' to describe an attempted theft, and a later stolen automobile in Redondo Beach. These were car thefts, not carjackings (which infers violent interaction with a driver), and there was an allusion to the fact that someone might have followed this lady from San Pedro all the way to Redondo Beach to steal her car. Unless Anna drives a one of a kind luxury vehicle, the idea seems ridiculous, but our Council members even made an offhanded follow up remark to watch our cars in the parking lot! Our family rides our bikes in this area all the time and down by the beach, it's as safe as any place in L.A. I've had my car stolen, and so have friends - from Los Feliz and Hancock Park respectively. Never here in San Pedro.

We do face some serious environmental issues here, and lately the Port has been responding, I believe due to timely pressure from government, interest groups, and a forward-thinking management team at the Port. Our north Pedro air quality is getting much better, but we still need to keep the pressure up to employ all necessary funds and legislative tools to make businesses comply with new directives. And tourist-friendly development on our waterfront is finally happening after 20 years of debate, 18 of them with a Port and City Council that refused to take us seriously. These things are changing, and as a relatively new resident here, I'm thankful to be part of these changes.

So please remember that many residents of San Pedro often don't care what 'outsiders' think, and after decades of misjudgment and stereotyping, they've just given up. Don't take that stoic, self-deprecating attitude as proof these opinions are accurate.

San Pedro is a complex and fascinating town on a striking sea-wrapped peninsula - truly unique. Give it the multi-dimensional look it deserves.

The Police Chief and The Prostate Exam

2010-08-02T07:39:00.000-07:00

(originally published in May, 2008)

Those of you who know me are aware that I have what I like to think of as a Renaissance approach to my career. Just give me a challenge, from baking a wedding cake (6 tier chocolate with raspberry coulis, butter frosting, rosette trim), to interior design, writing a novel, you name it, I'll do it and it I can usually pull it off without falling on my face (some things are just beginner's luck and I never push it). Oh yes, and I loved making films too and hope to do that again some day.

Last year I had been hired to do an interior design project for a healthcare client in Glendale but after loving the plan they found out they were short on money so they asked me to help raise the necessary funds. I'm a good egg - not only will I work for you but I'll pay myself too. In this particular instance the fundraiser they decided upon was a fashion show featuring a wide (and I mean wide) assortment of lovely staffers from the hospital. Twasn't long before I was tapped to be the Creative Director which meant I had to come up with the concept (and the actual fashions).

Thanks to my pal Karen, costume designer extraordinaire, I was able to mine the vast wardrobe department at Universal Studios and pull together a couture collection of stunning gowns representing the decades of the 20th Century.

Everything went smoothly, the runway show a big success. One of the other fundraising efforts in the event was a silent auction which featured many spiffy items, including something I really, really wanted.

Why I coveted this item was a bit of a mystery to my husband, who was charged with bidding on it while I ran around backstage corralling my models and cramming them into their beaded dresses. I admit it was an impulse buy - perhaps it was because I didn't need another set of stylish earrings from Cookie Lee Jewelery, signed baseball cap or a spa facial. What I was drawn to was item number 604: Lunch with the Chief of Police and a tour of the Jail.

My husband did his duty and entered into a spirited bidding war with another lady who apparently had the same idea. He won and proudly gave me the certificate.

Chief Randy Adams of the Glendale Police Department is a very busy man. Every time I called his schedule was booked for weeks in advance and it took several tries before I finally was able to pin him down. Not wanting to do this by myself I rooked my pal Mari into joining me. I mean, what good is a juicy experience like this when you can't share it with someone to whom you can say at appropriate times, 'ohmygodthisisreallyweird!' or 'isthereseomthinginmyteeth?'

Earlier this month the appointed day arrived and before I went to the large modern building in downtown Glendale that housed the police department I stopped by my healthcare clients on business and happened to mention I was at last cashing in on my opportunity to have the Chief as a lunch companion.

"Fabulous!" cried my client, a very nice and well-meaning nurse with a passion for preventative healthcare. "Here are some brochures about our treatment center, a dozen of my business cards, our Annual Report, and oh, yes, information on our upcoming and VERY IMPORTANT Prostate Screening for Men.

I know a little something about the importance of early diagnosis for cancer because of my work as editor of the online publication, Patient Resource Center, so I took the pile of stuff and gamely carried it to my lunch date. Mari had joined me downstairs in the station and after we were vetted (and probably x-rayed without our permission) they let us upstairs to the inner sanctum.

You must understand I've never had any trouble with the Law. So the idea of being deep inside the inner workings of a real police station, getting up close and personal with a police chief and then touring a state-of-the-art lock-up was making me a bit giddy. Kind of like being at Disneyland on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride when you actually thought the cannons they were shooting at you were real. This was as close as I ever intended to get and I was going to enjoy every minute of it.

As Mari and I sat waiting in the outer reception area for the Chief to finish a very important phone call (probably with the Mayor), we perused the stack of magazines nearby. The title, Police Chief, blazed across the front covers. Inside were lots of articles about the latest technology for chasing, subduing, manacling, interviewing and breaking perps. This was one of those moments where being with someone else was much more fun. We saw a full page ad with a guy in a face and body leather restraint that looked eerily like the Silence of the Lambs model.

We started giggling.

Then without preamble the door to the Chief's office opened and out walked......the biggest man I'd ever seen. He looked ten feet tall, beefy without being fat, big gnarly hands, tree-trunk legs that went on forever, massive chest, and a very big head. He was wearing a somber dark suit which heightened the effect of this overpowering presence. He looked a little like a less-gaunt version of Abraham Lincoln, kindly eyes and all. I'm no wilting lily but I immediately felt like a gnat and when he looked down at me, shook my hand and introduced himself I felt something I hadn't felt in what seemed like forever: totally out of control.

Another giggling fit welled up in my chest. I looked helplessly over at Mari who was smirking.

I'd assumed we would be having rubber chicken in his office but he smiled at both of us questionly and asked, "So where would you like to go?"

I was totally unprepared for this. Out? We were going out? To a restaurant? In public?

I was rendered speechless but Mari bailed me out by suggesting Frankies, a local burger hangout. He looked slightly amused. I'm sure he'd been expecting to squire us to Glendale's version of a five-star eatery where no doubt he usually took his meals with his political equals. After all he was buying.

Nope, we were off to have a sloppy joe at Frankies and he took us down to the super secure police parking lot and we drove three blocks in his very large American sedan (black of course) with plush interior. Our boat arrived and he deftly squeezed into the crowded parking and in we went.

"We'll probably see some of my motor officers," he remarked as we entered the restaurant. I guess that's Chief speak for those guys who drive around and give you speeding tickets. Somehow I was afraid to call them any slang word in his presence although Mari wasn't so shy.

"Oh, yeah," she said, "the cops eat here all the time." Way to go Mari, brave soul that you are.

We were immediately seated next to the only two cops in the place and you could see them visibly squirm when we approached. It was a sure bet no Chief had ever eaten in this lowly hangout. They smiled wanly at us and their boss surprised us all by greeting them both by name, to which they brightened considerably.

Chief Adams leaned toward them conspiratorially and said, "Meet the only two ladies who were able to legally buy the Chief." We all laughed. At least four of us were laughing a little too brightly.

The lunch was pleasant. I fell into writer mode and asked him a lot of questions about his past, how he'd come to be in law enforcement, did he know he'd be Chief one day, and was he the tallest man on the force? He took the questions in stride and was talkative and relaxed. He even confided that his son had been on the wrong side of the law briefly and regretted not being able to join the force because of it. He talked about his first and second wives, his passion for remembering people's names and getting his officers to move out of their social ghettos.

"If they don't widen their circle of friends beyond other officers, how are they going to know that 99% of the public are actually very nice? All they ever see out there on the streets are the tiny minority of nasty individuals and after a while it colors your view of the world."

I was actually starting to like the man.

Then before we knew it the lunch was over and Chief Adams took us back to the station in his big car and we were treated to a selection of items emblazoned with Glendale Police Chief - pens, cups, even a tiny replica of his badge which he wore on his lapel.

It was then I realized I had this pile of promotional material from my hospital client and started in on it with a certain amount of enthusiasm until I got to the part about the prostate exam, when I realized what I was saying and started to sweat. At the mention of his unmentionable he flinched a bit but before I could say, "What the hell am I doing?" he kept me from flaming out by gallantly responding with a yes, such exams were important and he always advised his men to stay healthy.

Whew!

Then he stood up to say goodbye and for a second I saw a very big Magnum in a shoulder holster under his expensive suit - a grim reminder of the seriousness of his job. We snapped a couple of pictures (Mari is 6' so you can get an idea of his size) and I squirmed a little when he put his hand on the small of my back for the photo. I looked like a silly git and immediately deleted the offending shot from my camera. The photo with Mari (above) is my only proof we were ever there.

Then with a pleasant goodbye he was gone. A nice gray-haired lady gave us a tour of the station, the inner workings of which were fascinating to a human question mark like me. Then she took us to the jail downstairs, a modern marvel of foot-thick sliding steel doors, electronic eyes, and a woman who sat in a catbird perch with a bank of monitors with the controls to all the doors in her very competent hands. This ultra-sleek and very clean jail is the 'pay-to-stay' option for people who can afford to avoid other county lock-ups, like the notorious Parker Center in L.A. Keifer Sutherland actually trained to be a custodian while serving his time here, preparing meals for the other prisoners and doing clean-up duties. In exchange he got a room the executive wing which wasn't locked during the day.

Mari had to get back to the office. I stayed a while longer and watched the 911 operators take a few calls. I didn't want to leave because I knew I'd probably never have the chance to be this close to the real deal again. Finally they kicked me out.

When I got home I put my Chief of Police cup in the window where anyone contemplating a break-in would be sure to see it.

Take that, bad guys!

What it Takes to Be Famous

2010-04-25T18:31:00.000-07:00

Fifty years ago, 19-year-old Wilbert Rideau robbed a bank and took three hostages to make good his escape. When they tried to flee from the moving car in the bayou he shot and wounded them, and hunted down one of the women, then stabbed her to death. He was caught, confessed, and was convicted in the robbery/murder and got the death sentence. But when Louisiana abolished the death penalty his sentence was commuted to life in prison.

Then he read a lot of books, grew up, became a writer, prison reformer, journalist, media celebrity, and eventually, a free man.

Now married, and living in a leafy suburban neighborhood, Rideau has an autobiography coming out this month, In the Place of Justice, and when he was interviewed on CBS' Sunday Morning, he admitted that he hoped this book would jump start his return to life as an important man, a status he enjoyed inside prison for many decades.

Life hasn't really been hard for Rideau: Except for the first few years when he was waiting on death row for the axe to fall, life for him became one of growth and purpose: without the distractions of being a breadwinning member of society, he spent hours reading and developed his writing skills, later championing the rights of prisoners and shining a light on abuses. A fourth trial six years ago redefined his crime as 'manslaughter' and he was released with time served (44 years). He believes his good works in prison have redeemed him, supported by the world he was absorbed into as a media darling, inspirational speaker, man in makeup and coifed hair. His post-prison wife adores him, and says he's the best human being she's ever known in this whole entire world. The man deserves to be happy.

In fact, Rideau is a modern day vampire. For 50 years he has been feeding off the dark star of a day gone wrong, a series of decisions that found him straddling a woman crawling for her life, driving a knife into her body, again and again until she died, alone, in terror, her last moment a bogeyman come calling: steel puncturing her organs, peeing and vomiting, taking her hopes, dreams, loves, a future all gone. In that moment the bright nebula of her life energy transferred to him, he fed from it and still continues to do so a half-century later.

Who was the woman who died that day? In Rideau's lengthy biography in Wikipedia, the name and the history of the bank teller he stabbed to death is never mentioned. She was absorbed unblinkingly into her murderer's story, disappearing into his image, a mere shadow figure, having served her purpose to deliver Rideau into his immortality. As the editor of The Angolite, a high profile prison newspaper, he won many journalistic awards, and then, as the memory of his crime receded beneath the accolades, the woman he murdered became no more.

The irony of being an author and knowing my novel will struggle for shelf space in the same bookstores as his, knowing that his will be displayed in the window, on the table by the door, and be talked about in interviews, reviewed by the New York Times, doesn't escape the intense scrutiny all competitors endure. Our lives have intersected, along with the lives of hundreds of other writers who will bring their work to market this year.

I cannot compete with Rideau in the bookstore. He is symptomatic of our diminished, fame-focused, peeping Tom obsessions, no different than the daily TMZ fodder, except that instead of a vapid iconic presence in the anxiety-ridden world of entertainment, we seem to have come to a place where we can forgive a human being pretty much anything if they become fascinating enough to garner our interest and the mantle of idolatry that comes with it. What is next? There seems to be no bottom.

Rideau is touted as "the most rehabilitated criminal in the prison system" and so we are to forgive him for snuffing out the life and timeless thread of humanity that was connected to the moaning woman who gave up the ghost in the dirt, husband, children, left keening into the night and reliving her terror, collecting the stones of fear and loss into their souls. The painful ripples of his act will go on infinitely in lives he will never take responsibility for; He is too absorbed in his own rising star: he walks the dog in a bucolic landscape, and makes love to a woman who admires him above all others.

While I am opposed to the death penalty due to false convictions, my opinion

on murder is this: Take a life, give a life. No parole. I listened with narrowing eyes to his guileless admission that he misses being a "big shot" in prison. I certainly will not buy his book so he can take his pound of redemption in cold hard cash. And if I do see his books in the bookstore, I will practice a random act of kindness, my own brand of justice, and hide them wherever I can.

I do it for you, Julia Ferguson. And the ones you left behind.

Down the Rabbit Hole with novel clutched in hand

2010-04-13T10:16:00.000-07:00

The clock is ticking now, just shy of a month before the publication of House of Northern Lights.

Am I happy? Ok, yes. Am I scared witless? Definitely.

I'm learning quickly about all the online book clubs, and will begin posting my connections here as I establish myself as a serious reader on many of them, a pre-requisite to cultivating mutual admiration. The idea is to get my novel in front of large online book groups who now far outnumber the coffee shop version. Those I'm joining too: you'll see me at the We Love Long Beach Book Club at the Auld Dubliner Pub on the 27th and at the Sherman Oaks Book Club Lite meetup on the 24th at the International Printing Museum in Torrance (lunch afterwards at King's Hawaiian Bakery). I suppose it's time I met other bookwormy girls like me...

But, this whole new venture is making me queasy - as Woody Allen quoting Groucho Marx said, "I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member." And it's an occupational hazard of a writer who spends a lot of time alone in front of a computer, but I'm pushing outside this particular box and doing what I can to eke out a place (and readers) for my small 10 year project.

So here goes. I begin by dutifully posting my recommended reads from the first of many book sites you'll be hearing about, Good Reads. Thank you humbly for taking the time to step into my world to help my novel blossom. And check out www.goodreads.com for some great input from other readers.

Next up: my "Canadian Women Authors" booklist for Flashlight Worthy, which connects to Amazon. Thank you to the moderator, Peter, for this opportunity.

Big bang.

Selected Poems: 1966-1984 by Margaret Atwood

As a Canadian, I grew up on Margaret Atwood's amazing poetry and early novels, Surfacing, and Edible Woman. I'm not as much a fan of her later, more unwieldy stories, but these two, and her poetry are startling in their simplicity and an intimate look at a woman struggling to find her place in the feminist years of the 60's and 70's. Even if you're not an Atwood fan, check out these two books, and her early poetry. View all my reviews >>

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

Until "Talented Mr. Ripley" Ms. Highsmith was known to all mystery buffs as one of the top writers of the 20th Century. View all my reviews >>

An Instance of the Fingerpost: A Novel by Iain Pears

Everything about this author is worth reading. Sometimes a bit dense in prose, but you feel very satisfied with the consumption of his multi-layered stories. View all my reviews >>

Necessary as Blood by Deborah Crombie

Deborah Crombie is one of my favorite crime fiction writers. Her series with Detective Kincaid is always a fascinating look into British policing. View all my reviews >>

The Quiche of Death by M.C. Beaton

I picked up "Quiche of Death" at my library and had never before laughed as much in a 'mystery' novel as I did with M.C. Beaton's first offering in what has become a very long series featuring the stubborn, cigarette smoking, perennial bachelorette, bear-like Agatha Raisin. I keep a bunch of them in my guest room reading basket - I live by the beach and this is perfect summer time reading. Or reading when you just need an emotional or mental break. View all my reviews >>

A Prayer for The Many

2010-03-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

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.

A San Pedro State of Mind

2010-03-17T11:12:00.000-07:00

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.

The Dog Ate My Washer, and other odd things

2010-01-07T13:03:00.000-08:00

We own an every-other-year timeshare, so this was our last family trip to Arizona until 2012, a year that feels as long away as the year 2000 did when I was a kid. Back then, I tried to imagine how the world would be in 40 years, convinced we would be in definitely be in flying cars like George Jetson. Or living in thousand story silver towers with connecting monorails and eating nutrition pills instead of actual food. As for the rest of the picture, I wasn't so sure. Unlike the vision of the future from Orwell or Wells, our technological and social advances went in strange directions, more organic to our nature than these futurists imagined. Although I wouldn't have said this as little as a decade ago, Big Brother is certainly present, but not in a clunky, flying camera way. The messengers of information turned out to be as mysterious as bacteria once were to the medical field; in this case, electronic signals that have created a 3-D digital world of surveillance and loss of personal privacy.

I'm not thrilled with the loss of privacy but there has been one silver lining in the Big Brother age: our ability to find the answer for just about anything by digging into the ever-expanding digital world of shared information. I'm an unabashed answer-nut and dip into this well often. But search engines can't answer everything, nor can they prepare us for the unexplained.

Take the the odd things that have cropped up as 2010 begins to roll.

First was the strange leak in our washing machine that happened just as the New Year dawned. The full size washer/dryer stack is my pride and joy and a welcome release from the drudgery of slogging laundry to the laundromat. It's a new-ish Maytag, front loader, a water-efficient unit that slaps the clothes around a fair bit. Built to last of course: we splurged on this, and a whole phalanx of energy-star appliances when we renovated our home, certain repairs would be in the far, faraway future.

So I was taken aback when, just before we left for our holiday, the washing machine flooded and turned our laundry room into a wading pool. Water was pouring from the bottom of the front door in buckets, (and perhaps elsewhere) and I couldn't figure out why. The 2 year warranty had just expired, of course, and calls to the famous Maytag Repairman, yielded frightening news: Pots of money just to take a look, with the expectation that pots more would be needed to fix whatever was causing the catastrophic leak. No wonder he's lonely....

Not wanting to spend pots of money right before a vacation (there goes my once-a year massage at the spa), I called in the local calvary - two guys from the Italian section of our town who have a ratty looking (read cheap) appliance repair shop on the main thoroughfare. Frick and Frak came out as promised, and after poring over the Maytag manual, examined the motor and various parts of the machine with silent concentration. Then Frick stood back to show me the problem: A semi-circular chunk was missing from the rubber washer that separated the drum from the door. Why hadn't I seen this? Second shock: It looked suspiciously like bite mark. And was dog-height from the floor.

"That there is your problem," said Frick, as both men regarded me solemnly. It was then I remembered seeing a half-moon piece of grey rubber on the floor next to the dog beds, picking it up and saying, "Huh, what the heck is this?" and then throwing it in the garbage.

Frack spoke from his position sprawled on the floor (where he was putting the front back on the motor). "This is a really expensive part - like around $200.00."

"What do I do?" I wailed. I knew these guys wouldn't try to rip me off.

Frick shrugged. "Well, if you find that piece of rubber, you could try gluing it back in place with some silicone." I knew the Maytag Repairman would never have made this suggestion. I warmed up to my visitors.

"Okay," I replied, with some hope of salvaging a bad situation, and they got up, accepted the $20.00 I had in my wallet as payment for their diagnosis (Maytag wanted $70.), and left.

Then I went out back, found all the garbage bags, and pulled on some rubber gloves.

Yup, this is what we homeowners call 'adjusting to the realities of life during very expensive renovations that go on for ten years because you can't afford to do them in one'.

Like a good CSI, I meticulously separated and examined every mangled piece of paper, orange rind, eggshell, and slimed assortment of unrecognizable food items, in a painstakingly slow process. I was determined to find that 2" piece of curved rubber, bite marks and all, no matter how long it took. Two hours later, I gave up.

The repair service for Maytag (I wasn't about to entrust this job to two guys who needed a manual to check the motor) gave me the bad news on the overall cost, and I took it on the chin, including the snickers about how the dog ate our washing machine. Then I had to tell my husband, who fortunately has bonded with the little ball of dirt we fondly call our Shorkie, and who has forgiven many previous incidents involving donuts, our cooler, and (we think) the bowl of strawberries on our dining room table. Oh, and the $50.00 frantic calls to the Animal Poison Control Center to make sure the items weren't going to kill our little dear.

Everything was duly fixed when we came home from Arizona, the money kissed goodbye, and I'm back happily washing clothes.

But other mysteries keep cropping up, and some have yet to be solved.

Like the little buttonhole inside the pocket of Mimi's hoodie. Just the left pocket, not the right. You can stick your finger in there and tickle her tummy. Other than that, the reason for it has me stumped. If you think you can figure out why it's there, please let us know.

No garbage-hunting required.

And In This Corner....

2010-01-05T13:45:00.000-08:00

So, here I am at the in-laws.

Grandma/Obaachan - she dotes on Mimi and gives her the requisite hugging, heart-to-heart chats, and lap time that a young, loving, grandchild deserves. She is typical of her generation of post-war Japanese immigrants - reserved, patient, self-sufficient. I may not want to be her, but I can find a lot to admire, and I see these traits in my husband, whom I love, love, love.

Grandpa Grumpy, or Grumps, is a different matter entirely. I've already given you the short version of our rocky relationship. He's a bully and I'm learning not to be his punching bag.

It didn't start out this way - when Bob first brought me to the Kansas property where his mother and her husband (his step-father) spend their summers, I found my future father-in-law to be garrulous but charming in a rustic kind of way. In his late 70's, he was a strapping farm boy made good who had travelled the world with the military (then later with the civil arm of the military), spoke a few Asian phrases (Japanese, Chinese, Korean). He was very handy with firearms, which I admit I found fascinating because I'd lived up north in the bush where hunting for food was a way of life. Done respectfully, it was a proper skill.

During that visit we toured the thousand acres he had bought back after his settler family had lost it during the Depression. He valued his ancestral roots, and as he ambled through the forested acres pointing out native birds and the sudden glimpse of a white-tailed doe, I appreciated how hard he had worked to live the comfortable life as a landowner and raconteur of his many travels. He taught me how to shoot a rifle (something his other daughters in law refused to do), and showed us the several hundred acre parcel he had deeded to the government for a wildlife refuge (hunting rights reserved, of course).

Trouble began once we started visiting as a married couple. Grumps and Obaachan, both retired from senior positions at the PX (stores on military bases), lived the other half of the year in a large modern home chock-full of antiques and collectibles they had purchased during their separate tours (some of them no doubt from post-war refugees without a pot to piss in). Grumps had been married twice - once to a Japanese woman during the tumultuous post-war period overseas when such things were frowned on, and again in the 1990's to Bob's mother, also Japanese. The key to what made Grumps interesting, and then soured into a bitter pill, was his obsession with proving to everyone what a admirable human being he was, how brave, how clever, how adventurous, how industrious, and above all, not racist. In short, everything became about Grumps. To this day, he shows absolutely no interest in, empathy with, or compassion for anyone else, unless, and this is a big unless.... they are Japanese.

You could bring Freud back from the dead with this interesting head case. Grumps, who had seen the devastation wrought by WWII in the Pacific Theatre, seems to have taken on the psychic wrench of American guilt after the atomic bombings in Japan. He missed the active war by a few months, arriving in time to be an M.P. for the occupying forces, even part of the clean-up crew in Nagasaki. There he saw families reduced to skin and bones from the poverty of war, villages bereft of men (all gone to graves), farms without fields of food, empty baskets, and loss, much loss and grief.

What he never saw was the other side; a close friend being shot or disemboweled in the heat of battle, prison camps for women and children, the mass murder of Chinese in Manchuria, the death marches, thousands of men going down in ambushed ships in Pearl Harbor. The horrible poison of war that visited hell on everyone caught up in the conflict. The American sacrifices, all abstract images to him, are only invoked when he wants to underscore his argument that America must engage in war, no matter what the ideology, no matter what the cost.

So here we are, sixty years on, and Grumps has gathered around him what he knows and believes in most - Japanese-Americans. I think it has something to do with cleaving to a culture that will put up with him. He and Obaachan live in a community of nisei, or second generation, all very nice, all very polite. If they are bored or offended by his endless self-agrandizement and he-haw jokes at other people's expense, they don't show it. He, in turn, is a broken record when it comes to how much these people should be applauded for having the good sense to be American Citizens.

Which brings me to one of the sticking points between me and Grumpy. Here is a guy who lived half his life in other countries as an American ex-pat, and yet he cannot stop harassing me about why I haven't become a citizen here in the U.S. In his eyes, there is no better place on earth, and while he touts the American dream, also denigrates my home country (and entire family still living there) as poor, spineless, socialist second cousins. Hmmm, I wonder why I wouldn't want to call myself his compatriot?

I don't bring these things up - and when he tries to bait me, I let it go. This isn't the bullying I'm talking about. No, it goes much deeper, down into the psyche of a man who at his core is exactly what a bully is: a sad, insecure soul who is terrified of being bullied himself. I know this because in the seven years I've known him I've heard the same stories over and over and over again about what a fabulous, hardworking, brave, savvy, smart, clever, un-prejudiced person he has been in every single situation in his life. He never stops talking. Never. It's as if he is afraid that if he does, something will come into the void and bowl him over.

When we brought Mimi home, the bullying intensified and grew to encompass everything we were as parents, as a couple. Our choices about where we lived, how we lived, how we raised our daughter were endless fodder for his judgement. He ignored us most of the time we visited, except when he wanted to pontificate about his view on child rearing, or to instruct me on my duties as a daughter-in-law. Though he never graced the kitchen with his presence, he was like a hawk, waiting for any perceived slight on my part if I wasn't fast enough to help out with cooking or cleaning. Sometimes his back-handed insults about my lack of character were so stinging I often had to hold back tears, I was so humiliated. If he was finished pontificating, he made real conversation impossible by turning up the television so loud we were forced to leave the room. And his only comments to Mimi were so laced with sarcasm that she instinctively stopped going near him and focused her attention on the old lady with waiting arms and a kind word.

So this brings me to our Christmas visit. I knew I'd reached the end of my rope with Grumps, so on this visit I decided I would start by just ignoring him. But as I mentioned in my previous column, the old man surprised us all and seemed happier than I'd known him in years. I relaxed and we had a pleasant dinner, even engaging in the kind of light-hearted exchanges like the early days. I felt hopeful.

The next morning, I was up early. The rest of the house was quiet and I started catching up on some reading. Grumps came down and sat across from me in his leather recliner. He took off his socks, stretched out his big, gnarly feet on the foot rest, and stared at me with a familiar glittering eye and Cheshire cat smile. I felt the old sense of doom invading the space like the early morning darkness. This is it.

I can't tell you exactly how the conversation started, but it wasn't long before the needling accusations began. It isn't important to go into the specifics, they were the same things he'd been pushing at us for years. All assumptions, because he'd never actually asked us anything about our lives. All judgments, none of them good.

I took the old guy head on. Didn't lose my temper, but I did get a little teary-eyed, which I ignored and pressed on. He thrust, I parried. His voice rose, mine matched his with intent. I kept repeating the same thing, over and over. "If you want to understand something about our lives, just ask. I am happy to answer any and all questions." Although Grumps wasn't particularly interested in the answers, it became abundantly clear that from this time forward, the game plan had changed. There would be no pronouncements and insults in a vacumn. His assumptions would be challenged. And often. And there would be no more impunity for the judge and jury he had become.

In the end, that's what felled the beast.

Grumpy thinks he knows everything about sacrifice. He's got lots of stories on that subject, except that when you peel back the holier-than-thou visage, you realize he's a healthy old guy whose lived longer than most with a fat government pension, free healthcare, summer and winter residences, and a ridiculous amount of collectable junk, so much that he filled his own museum with it. Whatever sacrifices he made way back when, pale in comparison to the sufferings around him in the real world, and it wouldn't take much to hold a cold, clear light up to shatter that illusion.

I'm wise enough to know that, and putting my small sacrifices in perspective keeps me honest about how fortunate I am to have all that I do.

The rest of it is just wind.

So go blow, Grumps. Or better yet, just put a sock in it.

It's Beginning to....

2009-12-28T11:53:00.000-08:00

At some stage in my movie-going life I started seeing trailers for those Christmas movies about families whose gatherings over the turkey inevitably end up in all kinds of strife and drama. Major highlights included, a broken heart or two, lost loves, unresolved conflicts, sibling rivalry, lifetime and unresolved feuds, maybe a lesbian in there somewhere (art house version), and sometimes, for added flavor, divorced parents sniping or reconciling in the midst of it all.

I never paid money to see them because I couldn't relate. Growing up, our Christmases were pretty predictable for many decades: lots of family visiting, spirited card games, hugging, eating, lots of eating, laughter, and warm fuzzy feelings at the end. Like I said: predictable.

Until I got married, met Grandpa Grumpy and his gun-toting Republican friends.

I should point out that I love all my other in-laws. They are a great group of people and Mimi adores her grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins. But Bob's step-father, Grandpa Grumpy (Grumps for short) is in a class all by himself, except when he brings along others of his ilk, which most often happens over Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner.

Take this particular Christmas.

First let me say that Grumps and I have a long history. He bullies me and, to keep the peace, I put up with it. Without going into any detail let's just say Grumps is a self-serving, horn-tooting, judgmental old coot who, is a boor to boot. Relations with his step-children are only a tad better than the ones with the kids he actually spermed, and who cut him cold off two decades ago.

Until recently, when I told my husband that if his behavior didn't improve I would face off with the old guy or threaten to pull grandparent visitation off the table. I had begun to worry that my daughter would think it was okay to take crap from someone just because they were a) a grownup and b) related in some way.

This holiday visit started off on a good note and I was very hopeful. All was going well, so well that I entertained the thought that perhaps Grumps was on some kind of mood-elevating drugs because when we arrived, tired and hungry after a five hour road trip he was positively chirrupy. For the first in a long time, I relaxed into the warm hustle and bustle typical of Christmas dinner preparations.

But after the meal, a new set of guests arrived, neighbors, actually, from this town of ex-military, farmers, ranchers, and small business owners. The conversation was pleasant enough until one of the guests had a mysterious episode of mental confusion that left us all troubled since she was a young woman and definitely not on drugs. Dispatched home with a promise to see a doctor right away, the conversation at the table inevitably turned to health care and the reforms just passed in the U.S. Senate.

One of the guests was a Millie, a physician, originally from Iran, and her boyfriend, an insurance broker with several employees. On the pro-reform side of the discussion was the physician and me, on the other, Grumpy and Mr. Insurance. It was my first time really getting inside the head of the other side of this debate, and it was an eye-popper. Millie kept Grumpy in line with her outrageous opinions, sense of humor, and by affectionately grabbing Grumpy's ear or poking his forehead when she had a point to make and I was learning a lot from her. For the most part we never lost our sense of humor, but the candor in the opinions made it very clear how far apart the two sides were on this issue. Mr. Insurance got angrier and angrier as the conversation went on, and his main stance, from which he never wavered was this: "I worked for everything I have and I'm covered. Anyone who doesn't have healthcare coverage is stupid, an illegal alien, or lazy. All I get out of this deal is higher taxes."

The exchange went something like this:

Q: What if someone has health insurance for 20 years, has an illness, and the provider drops him/her?

A: Get another job.

Huh?

Q: What if someone is laid off and after COBRA runs out, can't get another insurance policy because of a pre-existing condition. For arguments sake, let's pick something non-life threatening, like bronchitis?

A: Get another job.

Okay, moving on....

Q: What if someone has a life-threatening illness and the insurance company decides it won't pay for treatment?

A: Get another job. (as in a second, third, or fourth job to pay for the treatment)

At one point I said that my husband's company (where he's been for 27 years) won't take out an extended care policy on him. If he gets sick and can't work, he'll lose his job. Even with me back at work we couldn't afford caregivers, babysitters, etc. We'd lose the house, etc. His answer?

Leave this company and find another job, one that has this benefit.

Needless to say, things got more and more heated, the humor barely keeping the animosity at bay. When the couple finally got up to leave, we shook hands and went back to our corners. As he was leaving, he had one last comment:

"If the health care bill comes into law, I'll have to fire my 5 employees and close down my company."

My answer?

"Find another job."

I don't think he found this last joke very funny.

Next: Part II of Christmas with Grandpa Grumpy

Land of Iron Giants: It's all About the Closets

2009-11-30T11:30:00.000-08:00

Rich people, I've decided, have very neat closets. They have cleaning ladies, personal assistants, personal shoppers, housekeepers, nannies. I doubt they have anything to do with the state of their clothing, but a well-organized closet is a thing of beauty. The only one we have of any consequential size is the black hole of Calcutta and I can't seem to get a handle on it no matter how much I toss out and rearrange.

Several years ago I was friends with a rich kid. He was my roommate in a house I lived in for a while, a big place with a pool up off Laurel Canyon. I was just subletting, a temporary crash pad between relationships. It was me and two guys - the rich trust-fund kid, and a screenwriter who was about to be nominated for an Oscar, making way too much money to be living in the bachelor squalor we called home.

They had a lot of parties, the kind where people showed up because they'd heard about it on the Strip at one of the many clubs. Even the pizza delivery guy, who came one night to my poker game, stood at the doorway with the pie, looked at the living room and said, 'hey, this is the place with all the cool parties.' My poker buddies were impressed, but they'd never tried to get rid of the black-fingernail and chain-through-the nose gang who arrived at midnight, sucked up the last of the beer, and lounged in our bedrooms until daybreak. The only way we could get rid of them was by playing "Ebony and Ivory" over and over really loud until they hissed like vampires spying a patch of sun and found some other place to crash.

But to an in-betweener like me, the parties were a welcome distraction, and when you have rich roommates, they usually have one or two equally rich friends. Food and drink were plentiful, locations tended to be large acreage abodes with lots of toys.

Mark*, the trust-fund guy, (now a semi-famous music reviewer for a major newspaper) liked to have parties at his parent's BelAir spread when they were at their Malibu weekend place. We went there too, to ride horses, but I preferred the town gatherings because I didn't have to keep up with his parents, experienced horse people who liked to take their mounts into steep canyons and up even steeper hills. To me, that's not riding, that's holding on for dear life.

Mark's family home off the curvy end of Sunset Blvd. was a huge place, owned at different times by movie stars and music moguls. The main house was built to look like a French chateau, and the California modern guest house had four bedrooms and a great view of the ocean. There were two pools, (one for the guests) a tennis court, and so many different gardens, I never did explore them all.

The focus of this large estate was the water feature. This wasn't your ordinary pool, but a large and elaborate man-made lake complex complete with bridges, waterfalls to jump off, hidden coves, step-in warm spots (sort of invisible hot tubs), swim-up bar, and rope swings. It was crazy-sick, and we spent many days doing nothing but living in bikinis, eating Mark's parents' food, drinking their booze, and generally living higher on the hog than any of us had a right to do.

While we had free reign of the property during these playdates, the house always seemed forbiddingly cold and uninviting. It had that 'parent-space' feel to it, and even though we were all well over 30, being in the house made you feel like you were still in high school. No-one really ventured past the well-stocked kitchen, but you could see many rooms in shuttered darkness, every piece of furniture and drapery chosen by a decorator who's name was Otto.

One day, I decided to venture up the grand, curving staircase. I'm not sure why, and certainly had no business poking around in the parent space. Architecturally it was of no interest - predictable, despite the attempts to infuse some European flavor into what was essentially an expensive version of a tract home. The top floor was also in semi-darkness, quiet underfoot with thick carpeting.

In the master wing, I found his parents room, a cavernous space done to death in the soon-to-be out-of style of the day, lots of tropical-themed heavy cherry pieces, Tommy Bahama prints, damask-pillowed furnishings arranged artfully and never used. Ensuite his and her bathrooms of course, sunken tubs, lots of marble, chrome, thick terry towels on heated racks, walk-in steam room and showers with pans the size of dinner plates. I passed through all these public spaces and headed straight for the closets.

This room was the high point of my tour. The size and scope of all the organizational woodwork inside them was not the main event, though the number, shape, and size of the drawers, hanging spaces, and cubbyholes was impressive. I spent little time with the mother's predictable, bejewelled collection of gowns and shoes. No, it was the father's closet that fascinated. Before me was a long row of suits that stretched for at least 30 feet at mid-chest height. More suits than you'd see in Gucci on a good day. Or Men's Suit Warehouse, for that matter, if they had the kind of thousand-dollar bespoke labels Mark's dad, a financial broker, preferred.

Despite the grand scale living I'd been cavorting in all summer, this is where I realized that rich people really did live differently than the rest of us. The suits told all: They were each beautifully pressed and hung exactly 6 inches apart on heavy wooden hangers, organized by color and shade, going from the deepest black, through every shade of the black/greys, and on into light summer wools of smoke, twilight, and fawn. At the far end, there were even a couple of crisp, white linen numbers that Tom Wolfe would have given his fedora for.

The intimacy of the man's collection of perfectly and lovingly organized power wear finally jarred me out of my looky-loo reverence. With a guilty start, I crept back out, certain I had disturbed something in this pristine environment and I would be found out as the voyeur I was. There wasn't a dust mote to be seen, a hair out of place, and the temperature-controlled air smelled like a spring day in a cedar forest.

When I try to make sense of the unholy mess that our sad version of a walk-in closet is, I think about that dark, cool, room, with everything neatly in its place, as remote and foreign to my experience as the ease with which men like him squandered my 401K and moved on. He was entitled to 200 suits, and my life savings helped pay for it.

Truth be told, I didn't really like the house. Or the pool. I'll take a real Ontario lake over that overblown monstrosity any day.

* name changed to protect the innocent rich guy

2012, H1N1, and Being A Hero

2009-11-22T10:04:00.000-08:00

The special effects in Roland Emmerich's film, 2012, are stunningly realistic - especially if you live in Los Angeles, which falls into the sea with spectacular crashing, popping, and upheaving sideways after the overheated earth's core causes something called 'earth crust displacement', where continents shift 1,000 miles all in one go. John Cusak, who plays a talented but struggling author of a novel with modest success, (hmmm...) is the everyman hero, a guy who saves his family when millions perish. We all would like to believe we're that guy, and not the crowds of hapless little figures seen in the long shots, falling off bridges, hanging on to toppling buildings, screaming helplessly all the way.

The debate to get the H1N1 vaccine doesn't reach the cataclysmic heights of a fissure swallowing up an entire city, but there are some similarities when it comes to when and how we listen to our inner voice when it comes to protecting our families. On one hand, the government has been predicting doomsday numbers when it comes to the death of healthy, young people, including those who weather the typical flu regularly. On the other, there are many, equally frightening rumors, stories, and press coverage of people who managed to get immunized and suffered mysterious, wasting diseases, or even died as a result.

When the vaccines began to arrive in the Americas, I was in Canada for a family wedding. Up there, for those of you who think Canadians are socialist-loving sheep who obey the government unquestioningly, we are, in fact, a nation of skeptics and independent souls only slightly left of our ancestors, the hardy fur trappers and bold immigrants who left hearth and home to brave the unknown in the wintry landscape of a northern giant. Yes, we are not generally risk takers who strive for the traditional American free enterprise model (I've worked for mine, so screw you if you're not smart enough to get yours), but we aren't our brother's keepers either, so you might say the Canadian relationship with the government is as rowdy and love/hate as you get. Just witness a typical day in Parliament, where several different elected minority groups who make up our House representatives duke it out over federal issues. Elephants and donkeys got nothing on us.

So most of what I heard up there about the coming immunizations, was nothing short of hysteria. Friends reared up with indignation and warned me the mercury (thermisol) in the vaccine would give Mimi autism; there was talk of the dangers of the augmented version being distributed due to lack of egg protein (squalene- shark oil) somehow linked to the American military and Gulf War Syndrome. Others told me the flu shot had actually caused the flu in their kids. Then there was the poo-poohing of the pandemic numbers, (and most people I talked to thought a pandemic was related to numbers of deaths, rather than numbers of countries involved). No one knew anyone who had died from H1N1, so these stories of deaths among children and young adults were felt to be vastly overstated.

Back in the States, things were calmer, but not any clearer. The government, having promised to deliver enough vaccines for everyone by late fall, was starting to behave like the man behind the curtian in Oz. Bob and I had already decided to give Mimi the vaccine, but getting access to it became nigh on impossible. There was (and still isn't) a clear channel of public information outlining the distribution plan, schedule, and availability. We heard of the first clinic in Redondo Beach on a piece of paper stuck to the counter at Mimi's school. And at this one, panicked crowds of thousands from as far away as Santa Barbara lined up, and caused a virtual shutdown of the surrounding streets.

Although I was glad we hadn't been caught up in this madness, so began a slow, creeping anxiety centered on just how far I would go to protect my daughter. Visions of other circumstances in history began to coalesce. Would I have gotten out of London, as some did, during the plagues? Would I have survived the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918? My great-grandmother had nursed others through it, but she was so exhausted by the effort, she succumbed herself, something my grandmother was bitter about ever afterward. Would I have gotten out of Germany before WWII? Would I have packed my family into a car days before storm surges devastated New Orleans and drowned those left behind? I had always assumed I would, but it was just so much armchair quarterbacking with the gift of hindsight thrown in.

At what point was I willing to make the effort, as some had already, to wait in long lines, push ahead of others, scheme, fight, do what it took to ensure early access to the vaccine? I passed up several more clinics, playing a game of chicken in the hopes that Mimi wouldn't get the flu, wouldn't get it and die, or conversely, get the vaccine and be the one who came down with GBS, wasting away in a wheelchair. I still had a lot of questions about the type of vaccine we were getting, what the risk factors were, and we continued to weigh all the pros and cons.

But in the end I had to trust my instincts. Mimi has had the regular flu mist since she was a year old, with no effects. And enough thermisol in early immunizations in China to dispel any fears on that score. Yesterday we heard about a children-only clinic (which meant the mist rather than a shot, which Mimi prefers). There was only a small lineup, and the job was done within 3o minutes. No sooner was Mimi home than I heard from a friend the vaccine had just been delivered to the pediatrician's office, which meant I could have waited one more day and asked all the questions that were plaguing me. In the end, it came down to a little bit of panic and a little bit of logic. I can't say which side won out, only that it's done. And Mimi is fine - no after effects at all.

John Cusak's character in 2012 managed to avoid falling lava, cracks the size of Manhattan, tidal waves, and disappearing land masses to get his family on one of the four giant arks built by the nation's leaders to ensure the survival of a tiny percentage of the world's population. The guy had way more luck than brains, but his gritty courage and determination to survive is something we all want to believe in.

Real life, it seems, is a lot more complicated. And so are we.

2009-11-16T10:32:00.000-08:00

Our new park - ocean beyond.

Pandora's Box

2009-09-02T10:09:00.000-07:00

Two galley proofs of House of Northern Lights came today by messenger. No one was home but me- my husband had just left with Sweetpea for a day of fun at LegoLand. There was a knock, much yapping by the dogs, thumping and scrabbling sounds as they launched themselves at the door, and by the time I opened it, the package was sitting on the porch waiting for me.

I tore it open and looked at the two books held tightly within a skin of clear plastic. I sat down.

This is one of those moments that remain forever in place. I didn't grow and push a baby out, so that one gets crossed off the list. I did marry, twice. Both marital events are stuck in my head and I wish I could get the first one out. I've been dumped a few times, but those memories are foggy, probably because I was out of my mind at the time and successfully sent the gory details to the corn field.

But this one is a keeper: Opening up the box and looking at the two shiny covers, the thickness of it (wow, did I write all that?), and flipping through the pages like a tourist at my own destination, was a bit of a heart-stopper. I wanted to cry, but I was too exhausted, still mired in the many details of galley proofs, send-to lists, emails full of questions from the publisher, compromises in transit, and all the rest of the stuff that goes along with a major life accomplishment.

I did want just stare at the things for a while. Stop time for a moment and savor the major victory they represented. I'd finally planted my flag on the tip of a very, very deep iceberg. One that crystallized so many years ago, if I tried to write about that far-away experience now, instead of when I did over a decade ago, I couldn't have possibly remembered all the details I needed to create the story that finally took shape.

I'm so grateful I did write it, and that I didn't give up after horrible fizzle that followed the first heady flurry of activity; the phone messages from New York royalty, "best thing I've read in years!", acceptance into Wyoming's UCROSS Writer's Residency where Annie Proulx was writing "Brokeback Mountian". This, after urging from my now late friend, Fred, who at 78 had become a much-beloved first-time author, feted on NPR and lauded in the New York Times. So many phone messages of praise from readers of the manuscript. Being courted by numerous, important Hollywood people, being called a 'genius' by one agent who compared my work to J.D. Salinger in a long and heartfelt letter where he quoted massively from my novel. "A once-in-a-lifetime moment", he called the book. I still have that letter someplace.

At the time I was working at a healthcare company, in a tiny office the size of a copy machine, and when I got the news that one of New York's biggest agents, who represented only five clients, John Grisham being one of them, was going to represent the book, I flung open the door (which hit the back of my chair) and ran out to my boss in tears.

I hugged a lot of people that day, my face radiant and glowing from the promises I was getting from all quarters. I was a veteran of the film business and the images of where this book was finally going to take me were a mixture of hope and relief. I was finally going to get back into the game.

Wait! Okay, now you are going to ask yourself, how the hell did she end up in a mini-office at at healthcare company if she was a big-shot in the film business?

Life is a bitch.

This book was partly responsible for it, and the reason for my mad dash around the corporate loop to gloat over my newfound freedom. I had left my cushy V.P. development job at Warner Brothers to be in the producing team of "The Big Picture", pissing off my very important boss in the process (I told him it was just a three month sabbatical). When the film was done, so was my marriage and I took off for parts unknown, falling into the adventure that gave me the kernel of my novel. I didn't realize at the time how much of my carefully arranged life back in L.A. would unravel along with my marriage. Perhaps I wasn't meant to know.

But as a new adventurer, moving out into parts unknown, I had set a new course for myself and I'm still feeling the ripple effect today in all the good ways I'd hoped. The months I spent in the isolated island community of Masset was so extraordinarily vibrant and knife-edged with real life drama it took my breath away. It was such an amazing, profoundly moving experience, rich with larger-than-life people and a cultural struggle - the rebirth of a nation really, and I was there. I was actually there.

Now this experience has morphed into the story I wanted to tell - the ideas and the challenges and the intimacy of relationships in transition, of people who live and breathe every detail of their messed-up lives and still manage to do good. And my admiration for those who go off the path and take the consequences.

A decade later and the opening of a box, and here I am, a lucky person after all. I revere books and the power of story to transform. They have been such a powerful influence in my life, providing hours of solace during times when I thought my heart would simply shrivel up from the pain of loss, sheltering me, inspiring me. The stories given to me by other writers and the process of actually becoming a writer myself have served me better than any therapy I've ever had.

I am a writer. I deserve to say that now. I've earned it.

When I was seventeen, and a new acting student at Ryerson Theatre School, I remember all of us being so damn proud of ourselves for having beaten the odds and gotten in. We sat there, all full of hope, energy, promise, pride. The Director, a stern old guy with silver hair and a limp, looked over at us slowly and then gripped his hands on the lectern.

"In 20 years only 5 of you will still be actors," he said. "It's not because you aren't all very talented. It's not because the right parts won't come along, either. No, most of you will move on for one reason or another. Some of you are meant to be actors. And some of you are meant to be something else. It's up to you to find that out."

There was a shocked murmur in our group. I mean, after all we'd just gone through a grueling audition process over several weeks, coming out of a group of 200 to just 20 survivors.

Then he finished with something that stayed with me, so I guess that it's one of my moments to remember. "If you succeed in life people will say you were lucky. Luck has nothing to do with it. If you want to know the secret it's this: Persistence and preparation meet opportunity. You make your own luck. Find your passion, and make your own luck."

Works for me.

Land of Iron Giants: Port is not a beverage

2009-08-27T10:34:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it's hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys - when you get involved in community activism, it doesn't take long before it becomes clear that everyone who is passionate about something is the enemy of someone else who is passionate about the opposite thing.

The late Senator Edward Kennedy knew a few things about compromise and he is best remembered for getting legislation passed by enrolling both sides of the aisle. In the shouting matches at recent Town Hall meetings on the very contentious issue of health care for all U.S. residents, it seems to those of us who know families without coverage (living in fear of losing their home, retirement savings, or a loved one from untreated illnesses or inadequate care), find the nay-sayers to be just shy of evil. And yet they come and shout we're all going to Communist hell if universal health care becomes a reality - what's up with that!

But that's not what I want to talk about. Today the Daily Breeze covered a story about angry Rolling Hills residents (that's the rich part of horsey Palos Verdes Estates) who are outraged that one of their neighbors, who owns a 94 acre parcel of natural landscaping, wants to rent it out for 'garden events'. Oh My God!

Down here on the flats, we can't even get our (albeit much larger) City Council to do something substantive about the industrial blight and pollution residents in the danger zone suffer from every day because of the Port. Loud partygoers aside, we're talking about deaths from emphysema and cancer. Lives shortened, kids with illnesses, dock workers and truckers alike breathing in toxic fumes every day and paying the price.

Thanks to those pesky environmental and community groups who've fought the Man tooth an nail over the last decade, the Port can tout many new innovative initiatives, including their Green Trucks Program, lower emission fuel for ships in harbor, and plug-in power during off-loading. And the Port deserves the recognition for their efforts. But new development is always in the offing, as in the proposed Terminal Island expansion, and despite the Port's promise for 'zero-emission' outcomes, common sense tells us that ya can't add stuff to the Port until ya clean up what ya got. Then you really have a zero-emission outcome.

Take their "Bridge To Breakwater" project, due to be presented in final EIR (that's Environmental Impact Report for you activist newbies) to the community in late September. San Pedro Today editor Joshua Stecker, wrote a scathing column in the new October issue, blaming what he called a "small minority community group, who, in the opinion of many, failed to think of the greater good of San Pedro and have only opposed this project based on their own selfish self-interests" (aren't there a lot of superlatives in this claim?)

Well, Joshua, I'm not sure what you are claiming the minority have done to stop this project form moving forward, but from my perspective I have only seen intelligent alternatives put forward by this minority, like, say, keeping development close to downtown so the Port doesn't end up shutting the business/retail community out by putting their shiny new toys far away in the Outer Harbor (and put the 24 story cruise liners smack in front of the town's only beach). How about considering the millions of cars coming into our town to board these ships - adding to an existing air quality problem that puts us among the worst in the nation? Clean shuttles coming to the Outer Harbor won't solve this problem.

I will admit to one bit of selfish self-interest in my involvement: gee, I don't really want the street below my house turned into a highway and our neighborhood closed to through traffic because of the new loads streaming down to the Outer Harbor Cruise Center. Bad person, bad person that I am.

This was never about 'all or nothing' as you claim. A consortium of environmental organizations, concerned engineers and 'green cities' architects came up with intelligent, viable alternatives to some of the proposals in the Bridge to Breakwater plan. Alternatives that support downtown development tied solidly into Port development of new shops, walkways, extended Red Car line. They really do care about bringing San Pedro up to the level of other sea-side tourist destinations. Just not at the cost of old-school thinking where we, the 60,000 people living here have to pay the price. We've been doing it too long.

Nay-sayers are useless, as are over generalized criticisms of people who really are trying to watch out for the health, welfare, and economic well-being of the 60,000 people who call San Pedro home, not to mention other towns of Wilmington, Lomita, etc, that are also under the dark cloud of pollution.

I love, frequent, and support downtown San Pedro and I'm as invested in seeing it do well as Mr. Stecker claims to be. On this we do agree. As he exhorts in his column, "REAL San Pedrans" need to get up and be heard. Does he really believe real San Pedrans want to let the Port do whatever it feels is in it's best interest no matter what happens to the rest of us? He may be surprised to discover the 'minority community group' he grouses about represents a lot more real San Pedrans than he imagined. Real San Pedrans did not build the Port from afar as the City of Los Angeles did, nor become railroad, retail, or shipping tycoons. Those people don't live in our neighborhoods - they simply use us like so much front-line cannon fodder for their global benefit.

Can we make a difference in the way development goes forward in the Port? We won't find out unless, like the folks in Rolling Hills, who with just 96 vocal residents at their City Council meeting were able to accomplish, we actually show up and speak up.

Show up, already! Tuesday, September 29th, 5:00 p.m. (location TBD)

Check the Port of Los Angeles website for final info on the meeting:

http:///www.portoflosangeles.org

Dogtown

2009-08-13T16:38:00.000-07:00

I just saw "Julie and Julia" and, like the movie star who was discovered by a Hollywood agent at the local soda fountain, it is true you can get a book and a movie deal from your blog about cooking a recipe a day from Julia Child's Mastering The Art of French Cooking. Like I'm supposed to be impressed with this fairy tale ending...it's the second book this woman will have to master that will be a killer. One with an actual story that doesn't involve her angst about turning 30 and having her perfect flan fall on the floor of her kitchen. Boo hoo.

Me, I'm not so lucky. I've had to do it the hard way. The long, winding, rutted and multiple blind alley, kick-in-the teeth way. But c'est la vie. Long story, water under the bridge and all that. At least as far as the publishing part goes. What happens to it after it hits the shelves will no doubt be as much up to me as the latter part (insert 'slog' here). Whatever I have, I got. No fairy godmother here.

Speaking of which, I always kick myself later when I ignore my instincts. Take the other day, when I took our six pound Shorkie, Dale, to the vet for shots. He'd been throwing up, which wasn't unexpected for a puppy/vacumn cleaner. He sees, eat eats. Could be a dead fly, a feather, shoelace, pillow stuffing, and anything that smells remotely like food. I've caught him with all manner of items, pulled from the jaws of death, in a manner of speaking. And anyone with a dog knows the saying, 'garbage in, garbage out'. Throwing up is to a dog what colon cleansing at the local yoga retreat for a careful vegetarian.

While at the clinic, I mentioned to the vet (name deleted) I was worried he'd thrown up a few times and after a couple of perfunctory questions he was rushed off to x-ray. "But wait, " I called after them, "he seems fine!"

I had visions of towels or socks or christmas lights (common items found in the innards of dogs) showing up, but when she came back I couldn't quite understand what she was pointing to on the film.

"Suspicious," she said, gazing at it pensively.

All I could see was a very empty set of bowels, albiet a little gassy.

"That's the problem," she replied, when I peered at it. "Gas could mean a blockage. She practically whispered the word.

"But he seems fine!"

The vet looked at me like I was about to yank my child from a life-sustaining ventilator. She clicked her pen (and her tongue). "I'll have my nurse come in with some treatment options."

Dale was still in the clinical anteroom somewhere, no doubt on the verge of a major catastrophe, when the nurse came in with the paperwork. I saw the numbers and immediately started to negotiate. Overnight stay with an IV for $400.00? How about I put him next to me in bed and keep a water bowl nearby. Blood tests? Is he wobbling, shaking, panting, crawling, toes up? Next. Ultrasound? This one was a throw-away because they admitted the ultrasound wouldn't be any better than the x-ray. Barium study for $500.00. This one had me stumped.

The nurse and I worked out a deal and she went off to tell the doctor. Five seconds later the white-coat was back and the tongue and pen were clicking like crazy.

"M'am, I wouldn't recommed taking him home," she sniffed. "It could be dangerous."

"But," I protested, "he seems fine!" In fact he was looking pretty perky.

She pointed to the x-ray again. I leaned in closer and started seeing weird shadows in the gassy colon. "Like I said," it looks very suspicious."

The rhetoric was getting stronger but still no actual diagnosis. We went back and forth like this for the better part of two hours until I finally gave in and had a battery of tests done, including the very expensive barium study. Then I had to go home (leaving Dale there to undergo the procedure which they said could take up to 48 hours and multiple x-rays) and face the muzack with my husband, who, to his credit, was unbelievably sympathetic.

"I'd pay that for you," was what he said. I couldn't help wondering if that's all he would have paid for me.

End of story - the clinic called two short hours later to tell me the barium passed through without incident. Blood tests normal, doggie fine. Excuse me, all is not fine. We are $700.00 poorer. There goes the dental work I was supposed to have this month.

My husband got home to the news of the bill. His only comment: "Expensive enema."

I've since figured out Dale has hairballs from licking our beagle, Daisy.

Next time, a $5.95 tube of 'Hairball-Away' from the pet store will do just fine.

Land of Iron Giants: back to enterntainment

2009-08-10T10:29:00.000-07:00

Those of you who haven't heard from the Land of Iron Giants for quite a while now may be wondering why I'm suddenly popping up here twice in one week.

The short-ish answer is that I'm twiddling my thumbs while the publisher gets back to me with the galleys to send out to my personal list. This list includes the five authors of novels of similar genres that I asked to read with the goal of a blurb for the back cover of the book. Many were surprisingly nice, despite busy schedules and lots of awards for their own work.

Other recipients of the galleys from my end are literary agents, entertainment agents, influential friends in the aforementioned categories, and family members who don't want to wait for the finished version. It's been a frustrating hurry-up-and-wait process for so long now that, like a time-traveller, I'm never sure what publishing date I'm going to see on the tiny printed page where publishers put such details as ISBNs, Library of Congress info, etc. Since June it's gone from September to October to November. This is because (as the publisher has informed me) there is a 12 week minimum on review copies to places like Publisher's Weekly and the New York Times. These organizations won't even read it if they don't have sufficient time to put into the review cycle.

So while I wait, I write. Book number two is about 100 pages along, and then there are the letters I'm sending out on behalf of my dad who is wheelchair-bound at the moment and can't find an accessible van to rent to attend his grandson's wedding in a nearby town. This required some serious archaeological digging. I'm sure you can understand that rental car company executives with their millions of customers don't want to hear from the inevitable complainers. Instead they steer them to the great bane of consumers: the Customer Service department. And to this end, they have taken great pains to obscure their corporate information, addresses and management teams from easy Google-view. But, I am a dog-with-a-bone, and as my ex-father-in-law the Pentagon Colonel often told me, if you want something done, go to the top.

Now that I've smoked out the proper executives, names, addresses, personal profiles, company objectives, likes and dislikes, etc. they will shortly receive a nicely typed letter with a persuasive argument as to why having one ADA-compliant van in their city-wide fleet would provide a PR and financial advantage over their competitors who aren't smart enough to see the win/win angle in this move. Research has shown there is a proven business model for this kind of rental transportation - many U.S. cities do. But in Ontario, there are thousands of healthy, mobile travellers with disabilities, visitors and residents alike, who can stay in local accessible hotels, eat in accessible restaurants, but how do they get around? Specialized taxies are available but cost-prohibitive: Estimated cost to take Dad to the nearby town and back is $1ooo.oo. That's why he never goes anywhere.

It's just not cool to ignore people with disabilities these days, especially if they have a united voice, and discretionary funds.

Segue to Quentin Tarantino

Now, since there is no way to cleverly segue into the next item, I'll get right to it. Inglorious Basterds is the first Tarantino film I've seen in a long time that had the same unpredictable and powerful impact that Pulp Fiction had when he debuted as a director over a decade ago.

With a sly nod to spagetti-westerns, 60's B-movie thrillers, and a splash of broad comedy thrown in for good measure, it was a surprisingly tight and suspenseful story, a thrilling, nail-biting, and wholly inventive adventure that culminated in an alternate ending to the horror that was Hilter's War. What Tarantino does best is find humor in dire situations, a rare combination of violence and laughter that never seems forced. You simply accept that those who take themselves too seriously deserve to be laughed at, good and bad guys alike.

I've not been a fan of all this director's work and have it on good authority he is a total maniac to work for, but I do appreciate genius when I see it.

Okay, an email just popped into my inbox. I just got word the galleys are ready to go to print! In a few days they will be in my hands, ready for the next step. I'm on the down slope of the rickety wooden rollercoaster, waiting for that bottom to drop out, then the curve into the unknown.....

The Bottom Line, Part I

2009-03-10T10:47:00.001-07:00

Once you commit to a life of writing it's hard to turn it off even when your current baby is being scrutinized by the publisher and you are left wringing your hands until the notes come back. I've taken to entering poetry contests (maybe I'll get lucky, or maybe I'll win the lottery) as a way to keep the parts from rusting up. And because although I'm three chapters into novel #2 writing poetry is sort of like going to the fridge and checking out what's there rather than actually sitting down and getting back to work. Why say it in 60,0000 words when you can say it in 50?

My first attempt turned out to be more of a scam but I'm too smart to be taken in by them past the initial call for entries, even if this organization is akin to the smooth-talking and very successful tonic salesman who rode into town with a spiffy painted wagon and a twirly cane. The organization has a nice name: International Library of Poetry, or Poetry.com for short. Apparently my poem, The Mail, has made it all the way up to "Editor's Choice For Outstanding Achievement in Poetry" and will be published in a handsome, leather-bound volume called "Immortal Verses" which I can purchase for the low, low price of $59.00 (volume discounts apply). Of course I am not obligated to buy one of these hefty tomes (they claim my poem will be published regardless) but every week or so they send me further up the prize chain in the vain hope I will at some point weaken and order copies of the book or (in their latest offer) a CD of my poem being "professionally read".

Gosh, I went to theatre school so I think I could do that on my very own....

Apparently an outstanding achievement award isn't enough to garner one of the many cash prizes they throw in as a hook, but I'm not sorry I wrote the poem. Undaunted, I have moved on, bitten by the idea I could actually make a little money, or perhaps it's just the lure of knowing strangers are forced to read my work. But don't worry, once my novel comes out in June, I'll be on the road pushing my book like nobody's business. After all, why leave it to others to force the world to acknowledge my genius?

Read "The Mail" here and if you feel lucky you too can try for the $1,000 prize they are offering (after 6,000 poet/suckers buy "Immortal Verses" for bragging rights on their coffee table).

(sorry about the double space typesetting....blog limitations)

The Mail

The mail is in

By the kitchen it sits

breathing, or perhaps a memory

From the corners of the room come

the scent of roses, the crust of pie

baking and apples bubbling over.

Quiet is where we are

not where we are going

Dust settles

Our life is careful, daily

The mail comes

A life of its own

and meets us where we wait

to be opened

Next: Bottom Line, Part II (where all puns converge)

Life With Iron Giants: Small Town Santa

2009-02-02T10:42:00.000-08:00

This is February and I realize the tinsel trees have been taken down (hopefully) and all traces of the holiday removed to attics and garages but it it does only seem like yesterday......

Our house is progressing and I'll be talking more about this in detail, but I need to catch up first on the joys of living in a small town. Before we came here I lived in a city where anonymity was practiced with zen focus and although I shopped, ate, and walked with regularity in the same places there was no true connection with those around me.

Not that it was someone else's fault: I'm not like my husband or my brother Will who chats up the counter girl or the restaurant server and is likely to be remembered from one time to the next. And since I'm not a coffee-in-the-morning person I couldn't even count on the friendliest person on earth, the Starbucks barrista, to do the work for me.

But when I moved to San Pedro with its two-street, funky downtown collection of shops, cafes and the occasional upscale restaurant, my attitude changed. This diminutive scope seemed far more manageable and it wasn't long before I began to understand the meaning of community so long absent from my life.

Besides the neighbors who I can now call on to look after Sweetpea in a pinch or borrow a pinch of something for a meal, the shopkeepers I visit not only know my name and my preferences, but they love and dote on our daughter, who is growing up in a place where such things can happen. In particular Anniko and Mishi, who have a small cafe where they bake their wonderful home-made strudel, have become something akin to extended family. We discuss their business as it has grown and expanded, family matters as they crop up, and recently I helped them with planning a high tea service they are giving for Valentine's Day customers. And when Sweetpea comes once a week after ballet class they shower her with hugs and sweets. They've even been to dinner at our house.

I can't do enough to support the small businesses in our town and I've become much more conscious of the inter-dependency we have to nurture our way of life. Without us, Mishi's Strudel wouldn't survive. And without them, my sweets, and my life would be much more of a cookie-cutter, big-box experience.

So what has this to do with Christmas, you ask? Part of being a regular anywhere is getting to know the other regulars. And one of them in particular, Alex, is as salty and irascible as he is fascinating and kind. A retired sea-captain, he's a big man with an even bigger past and you never know what story will come out of a casual sit-down if he's in residence at Mishi's Strudel. Alex has plied his trade up and down the oceans of the world and the Great Lakes too, worked with Jacques Cousteau, and was on the crew that located the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. For those who are not Gordon Lightfoot fans, this is a 1960's Great Lakes ship made famous by poem and song when it sank in stormy weather with all hands on board.

Alex resembles a couple of notable historical figures, Papa Hemingway and his cousin, Santa Claus. So when the holidays came around (and Mishi's Strudel one-year anniversary), Alex decided to offer his services as Santa for visiting kids.

For two weekends in late December Santa set up shop on the velvet sofa in the cafe. And he brought with him an amazing array of beautiful gifts he'd purchased himself. Giant stuffed animals, puzzles, badminton sets, books, puzzles, and games galore. All stuffed into a big red velvet bag and ready for the taking. It was a perfect set-up for Alex because he loved nothing better than to hang out at the cafe with strudel and hot chocolate at his beck and call (caption for photo above).

I read in the local paper that 500 kids came out to see the Santa at a popular restaurant in the tonier section of San Pedro but I can guarantee they missed out big time when they failed to visit the kinder and certainly more generous Santa downtown in the little cafe that cares. Some of the children I saw were in awe of the gift they received from the jolly old elf with the real beard and belly.

Which was great except when five-year-old Sweetpea came in for her regular visit to find Santa holding court with many adoring children by his knee. A fake beard would have come in handy in this instance because after a moment of critically examining the figure before her she greeted him with, "Hi, Alex," then turned to me with disdain and said, "What happened to the REAL Santa?"

I had a lot of explaining to do before Sweetpea would calm down. But happily she saw the real thing two days later at our Unitarian church party, ill-fitting suit, pillow belly, cotton-candy beard and all. I don't think she noticed his life-partner, Greg, was taking all the photos.

Sometimes reality is a bit too much to handle.

Working The Mince

2008-12-17T09:18:00.000-08:00

The best part about visiting my grandmother during the autumn was watching the mincemeat grow. It would begin every year in a large glass container she kept in the corner of her refrigerator where she tended it its development for many months. That one glass jar would grow to three or four by the time Christmas arrived, enough to make the one hundred or so tarts that came out of the oven onto generously heaped platters for our holiday table.

We knew from experience that she started her mince as soon as the harvest was in, long before the first frost came to the cobbled streets of downtown Toronto, long before visions of sugar plums had begun to dance in our heads. The mittens weren't out, school has just begun and we had other things on our minds.

But not Nana. She believed that mincemeat, truly great mincemeat, needed plenty of time, like fine wine, to mature. She called it 'working the mince'.

Her recipie, a thick, rich mixture of fruits, currants and spices aged in a generous base of brandy came from the village of Norfolk, England during the days when produce was still being taken to market by horse and cart, when food was stored in earthen crockery in cool cellars. Moving along at a slower pace, mince, like life itself, was patiently anticipated for the promise of pleasure to come.

"Did you start the mincemeat yet, Nana?"
We had arrived as we so often did to sample her endless larder of cookies and baked goods served on a tea tray with Blue Willow china; proper cups and saucers and strong, hot Red Rose in a big English pot.

The mince, Nana, the mince!
"Ahh, the mince....well, now...."
If the time was right she would slyly open the door of her refrigerator and point out the big glass jar with a piece of cloth wrapped over the lid secured with a rubber band. Something dark, rich and syrupy bubbled inside when she shook it a little as if to wake it up.

"What goes into the mincemeat?" we would ask in a ritual tease.
"Never you mind!"
Whump! The door would snap shut, leaving the mysterious jar to work its magic in the darkeness next to the Cheese Whiz and Worchestershire Sauce.

As it always happened, sometime during our tea, Nana would spy some bit of leftover and announce it was going into the mince.

But that’s an apple peel! We would cry out. Surely not an apple peel? No one could ever remember seeing or tasting an apple peel in last year’s tarts. What else was she putting in there? Leftover bread crumbs? Egg shells? Sometimes while making lunch with bits and odds and sods of cuttings everywhere she would whip something off the counter and into the fridge so fast we had no idea what it was. When we heard the familiar snap of the rubber band we new it had been devoured by the mince.

“Nana, what was that?” we would cry out.
Nana would smile a little wickedly and shake her head.
“The secret to good mincemeat, my girls,” she would explain, cracking the tops off our soft-boiled eggs and cutting up little soldiers of toast, "is in the magic it works when you give it something it likes and then leave it alone to welcome it.”

We didn’t like the idea of the welcome, it seemed to us that whatever went in there was never seen again, at least not in its original form. Truly the elixir that emerged from those glass jars ready for the baking oven was spicy-sweet and flavorful, if somewhat indescribable. Indescribable being the operative word since our delicate child palates did not allow us to linger on thoughts of possible table scraps or other raw ingredients which may have been somewhat disreputable, caught on the fly as it were.

No, indeed, the mince tarts that Nana laid out every Christmas afternoon were pungently sweet and familiar, a generous dollop of the fruity mixture nestled to bake in a bed of flaky pastry and dusted with crunchy bits of sugar. They were pure perfection, down to the little lids cut especially to size so they looked like miniature pies. Two bites and the whole thing was gone, save for the bits of crumbly pastry that always stuck to the corners of your upper lip to be licked later.

Even more than the browning turkey and chestnut stuffing, or the entrance of the flaming plum pudding into a darkened and hushed room, the taste of a mince pie in one’s mouth brought back every memory of Christmases past, the sounds of children running underfoot, mothers and fathers gathered in the parlour amidst a murmuring sea of conversation, Santa’s grand entrance to the sound of sleigh bells with a big sack of presents to be distributed. Toys and books strewn everywhere.

The mingling of smells and noise, aromas pungent and familiar, like those of the mince tarts were best left undisturbed, lest too close an examination reveal the quarrels and the loss, the moments of disappointment on the bleak streets outside in the bitter cold. We steadfastly insulated ourselves from all of this on Christmas Day. Inside my grandmother’s crowded apartment the food and the love was abundant, the realities of living put aside for a few hours to celebrate what was good in our lives.

For that reason I came to understand that perhaps Nana was right about leaving the mystery in the mince. I was content to let her be the holder of the secret, just as she held the secret of who Santa really was until one Christmas my cousin Douglas pulled off his beard and discovered Grandpas’ face underneath. For many years we simply enjoyed the magic created by our family, a time of hobbits and fairies, elves and angels, talking animals and a universe that still allowed for a kindly old man who flew across the night sky every year bringing a toy to children to believed in him.

The secret of Nana’s mince disappeared with her in her 84th year. She taught me a great many things: how to make a perfect apple pie, stuff a turkey, pick a good horse in the 5th, swear with sound-alike words (“I said ship, dearie, not shit”) and why tea tastes better in a proper cup and saucer. And though she gave me precise lessons on how to pick the best apples for her autumn pies, she never told me and I could not bring myself to find out just exactly what went into that mince! And as far as I know she never passed it on to anyone, perhaps because her leaving took her as much by surprise as it did us.

But a few years later I began baking my own mince pies and I believe a little bit of Nana’s recipie must have survived because every year they taste more and more familiar.

The making of the mince has now become a yearly ritual in my household, marking the holidays and creating a new tradition or friends who share our Christmas table. Still rich and pungent, with a bit of crumbly crust to come off on the upper lip for licking later, they are made every year with a great deal of affection, in and for the memory of a woman who believed that all good things in life took time, improvisation, and a little magic.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO EVERYONE!

Life With Iron Giants: On Being a Quiet Revolutionary

2008-09-09T09:20:00.000-07:00

My husband thinks I'm a bit of a drama queen.

But this has nothing to do with the causes I've taken on lately. He just thinks I'm exaggerating when it comes to my fear that if I should, say, get arrested in a peaceful demonstration, I would be deported and then that.....

would be that.

Many of you are probably wondering how that could be. I love my home country - Canada, and for the decades I've lived here I've had some ambivalence to actually pledging allegiance to another one. I remain merely what the U.S. Government politely calls a 'resident alien', living here at their invitation. An alien who could be sent packing and refused re-entry should I do something to piss it off. Not a good idea when you have a family.

Along with activism comes a certain amount of acknowledgement that you've become one of the 'people' in the 'by the people for the people' part of the Declaration of Independence. That's me, the gopher who's sticking its head out of the hole in what sometimes feels like a very bare field. And if I'm going to seriously take on this role, I'll have to bite the bullet and become one of you. Officially. In the process of studying for my citizenship exam (a much harder one these days) I will probably better educated about the history of this country and the workings of a Republic style government. So it's not such a bad thing if I'm willing to start taking a front line stance on issues that are so compelling I cannot in any conscience, turn the other cheek.

I mentioned in my last piece that I was about to attend a day-long workshop on something called the CEQA. Don't know what this is? Neither did I but hopefully more States than California have something similar because it's one of those laws that often stands between you and a lot of toxic chemicals under or leeching into your backyard, poisoning you, your kids and your pets, not to mention everything else that flies, walks, crawls, or swims.

The California Environmental Quality Act came into being in 1972 and California Supreme Court Justice, Stanley Mosk wrote of the decision: "In an era of commercial and industrial expansion in which the environment has been repeatedly violated by those who are oblivious to the ecological well-being of society, the significance of this legislative act cannot be understated."

CEQA's power lies in its ability to put the brakes on development of any kind in any location where the public's health and safety may be endangered by forcing developers to undergo an EIR (Environmental Impact Report). EIR's are comprehensive third-party expert examinations which include many kinds of tests (water, air, soil), local current and projected environmental impact, plus recommendations for mitigation's and offsets. This could include cleaning up existing contaminants, scaling back project size and scope, or providing buffers or dedicating additional space for specialized use (such as additional farming land, parks, wetlands, etc.)

What I learned in this workshop is that without laws like this one we would all be in deep shit. But what I also discovered is that we are mostly unaware of the protections available to us as a community. Generally lawyers bring CEQA to bear in lawsuits against an egregious situation (like building a school on a toxic dump) , but because it doesn't happen often enough CEQA specialists have begun to hold workshops for activists and concerned neighborhoods to help them understand the tools at their disposal when confronted by out-of-control development.

Living next to the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach has to be the mother of all out-of-control developers so this workshop was well attended. (You are probably not aware that there are dredged channels so toxic they are on the SuperFund Cleanup list). That Saturday we learned about various cases pending (and settled) with examples of California projects large and small that were slated to go ahead until and EIR turned up horrific health issues for the surrounding communities and/or the people who would have been moving into the proposed developments. Global warming is an issue, but I was more interested in the micro rather than the macro. As my mother used to say, save your pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.

One particular issue we have been very concerned about here is the Clean Trucks Program. And before you yawn, an aging fleet of 16,000 trucks make 1.2 millions trips in and out of the Ports every year accounting for an estimated 15% of the heavy air pollution in the Los Angeles Basin. Historically, the majority of these trucks have been owned by individuals and small companies with questionable business practices (Atty. General Jerry Brown just filed lawsuits against two of them for running businesses that cheated employees out of fair wages, benefits, workers comp, and billions of taxation to the strapped California coffers). Most trucks are dirty, diesel polluters of the worst kind, and so jerry-rigged with cheap repairs they are a constant danger on the highways in Southern California.

When the Ports finally started to heed the pressure of environmental groups and local communities to clean up their act, they passed the Clean Trucks Program earlier this year which would do away with the owner-operated trucks unless they purchased new, cleaner models, or became employees of large companies with newer fleets. The American Truckers Association filed a lawsuit to stop the October 1st implementation, even though enough large trucking companies went against their own association by joining the program.

When the American Retailers Association filed an amicus brief (friend of the court) supporting the ATA I wrote an impassioned letter to their President warning them that trying to stop this important clean-up program would certainly backfire because when it came to big business interests vs. the health of a community, big business usually fails. The company attorney responded to our letters by saying the Port had no authority under Federal Statutes to regulate the trucks and this program would put thousands of truckers out of business. Aside from the fact that this most likely wouldn't happen en masse, it was clear they would rather thousands sicken and die from diesel pollutants instead. Despite the lofty and frankly condescending legalese, it was really about keeping the price of goods as cheap as possible and folks.....that boat has sailed.

For the first time in history, the Ports teamed up with The Sierra Club (which was granted official "intervener" status in the defence process) to fight for the health and safety of the people of Los Angeles. They believed their legal right as landlords of the Port they could set the standards for tenants (the ships) and support services (trucks, trains, etc). Much hinged on their right to defend this status, despite the threat of vigorous challenges from the opposition.

Yesterday we got the news: The California Supreme Court sided with the Ports and The Sierra Club, ruling against the ATA's motion. The Clean Trucks program has enough companies and individuals signed up to service the Ports without interruption beginning October 1st.

We can all breathe a little easier.

Next: Big Ships, Big Money

Life With Iron Giants: The Mouse That Roared

2008-08-16T16:48:00.000-07:00

I want to admit something: Until recently I was a bit of a city rodent. I went about my business but kept to the shadows, coming out only to take care of my personal needs, blending in as necessary. Raised to fear sticking my neck out when it came to public activism that might make me vulnerable to squashing, broomsticking, or just being spat upon, I preferred the anonymity of a well-tended nest sequestered somewhere out of kicking range. You see, for most of my adult life, I've lived in a major metropolis complete with a wide and complex array of pressing neighborhood, city, and yes state-wide issues that I read about in the newspapers but did absolutely nothing about.

Nada.

I knew the air was dirty, the roads crowded, the schools inadequate, development over-reaching and poorly planned. There were social justice issues too, poverty and racism. And although I had a loud enough opinion in private, my voice ended there. I lived far from the maddening crowd and liked it that way.

Then we moved. To a little town in the shadows of a very, very big bully.

Hello Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The single largest polluter of Southern California Basin, affecting 20 million lives give or take with a whopping 30% of all the pollutants we breathe. Functioning for a century with impunity, maintaining the worst kind of back-room politicking and self-serving financial interests that have spawned major state and federal laws that have as yet still failed to adequately protect the lives of a state population in size close to that of an entire nation (like Canada, for instance).

How a tiny town like San Pedro (along with other neighboring communities) got the privilege of trying to take on an entity with a financial stake as large as the GNP of some of the world's smaller nations is a long story and can be an exhausting prospect for anyone willing to listen. It is a community full of cynics and burned out protesters who mingle with the workaday folks whose lives have been shaped, defined and nurtured for generations by the bounty and politics of the sea. Despite our different paths, San Pedrans have one thing in common. They love this town and generations never leave, a rarity in this transient region. What defines them is a wild, turbulent, and passionate connection to the coastal industries that fuel the Southern California economy and the knowledge that it comes with a price.

It's been an overwhelming responsibility, and since we were annexed early last century by the City of Los Angeles, we aren't even masters of our own fate because, well, it's tough to take on City Hall, especially when it lies thirty miles to the north, tethered by a slim corridor that cuts through other cities with the express purpose of ruling from afar.

But what can you do? It is impossible to live in this place and not step out of the shadows. The ever-present sea surrounds us, as blue as the Adriatic on some clear afternoons, the freshened, aromatic ocean breeze brings with it a constant reminder of the life-sustaining gifts it holds; we gaze on it daily as a touch point, to the southern night sky unhindered by city lights, and when it's solace we seek all roads lead to quiet shores and hidden coves we can explore in relative peace.

The problems we face may be larger than pretty much any small town in the nation has to face, but the rewards are similarly over-arching. What we do here affects not just our neighborhood but millions of others to the north, south, east and west who may not have seen the heavy diesel fog dispersing out from the mega-tonne container ships, the thousands of polluting and dangerously worn trucks coming in and out every day, or the acres and acres of fire-belching refineries in neighboring Wilmington, or Long Beach, but they breathe it just the same, they risk injury on the highways just the same, they, like us, live with the consequences of nature out of balance.

I started small, and to date I am still learning what it means to really understand the concept of 'government for and by the people'. It's not just about who we elect for President, or mayor, or our City Council for that matter. I can't settle for trickle-down anymore. I've come to realize that there are guardians out there and these dedicated people have been working tirelessly and intelligently to protect all of us. We owe them an incredible debt of gratitude, for they stand between us and a lot of very canny, self-serving survivalists who will do pretty much anything to steal our cheese.

There's a quality of life war out there, folks. And I say, choose your side, live your convictions, and join the ranks. If you notice a shiny mouse whose been well fed and groomed sticking her nose out into the daylight of scrutiny, that would be me.

Don't mess with my nest.

Next: A short primer on CEQA, Neighborhood Councils, and my journey into activism.

I'm Your Mummy: When Is Information Too Much?

2008-08-03T08:22:00.000-07:00

This is perhaps the first controversial posting I've done on this site. I know this because some on my list are also adoptive parents. I've had enough conversations with some of them to know we are all over the map when it comes to our choices on how and when we bring details of our kids' adoptions and their cultural origins into their lives. We each have choices to make and I'm sure many of them are private, which I respect.

Before I start I should say that we are parents of an orphanage child from China. Parents of children from a wider spectrum of adoption circumstances (such as open adoption or fostered children) have a much tougher job as parents and I have nothing but the utmost admiration for them and for their commitment to their children.

There's An Article in Psychology Today....

In the months before going to China to bring Mimi home we attended the requisite pre-adoption seminars and heard all the current findings on the issues of when/how/why and with whom adoption information should or shouldn't be shared. We knew that adoptees who hadn't been told until they were teens and older were universally unhappy about this so here we saw a clear-cut guide. On everything else there was something of the 'what's currently known' factor and we realized that we would have to navigate many of the subtleties of adoption awareness just as we had to with every other aspect of raising our daughter.

I'm a firm believer in intuition - I think it guides much of our parenting progress if we listen to and believe in it. This is of course the underlying subconscious river on which is laid a foundation of education, awareness, self-reflection, and observation. Each parent has to make choices they feel are best for their children and not every parent will go the same way at the same time.

When we got home from China I think I went through a period of what I'll call 'guidance-overload'. Everyone wanted to tell us how to navigate the emotional waters of being adoptive parents and having an adopted child. There were websites, magazines, books, and groups of every stripe. It seemed to dominate our parenting orientation. I saw it the other way around. Mother first, adoptive parent way, way, second.

Enough! I finally said.

Growing up I was surrounded by adoption and this continued into adulthood. Cousins, in-laws, acquaintances, BFFs. Perhaps that's why it seemed like a perfectly natural option to parenthood. As a writer I am a voracious and curious student of human nature and have been privy to the inner workings of many life journeys, including adoption beginnings. Even with all the personal questions unique to adoptees I was amazed by something: With expected variances based on their personalities, they are all on the same personal journey as the rest of the human race. While their adoption is a thread in the fabric of a lifetime of concerns, challenges, joys, desires, disappointments, dreams, it is not the defining pattern. Certainly some wrestle with the loss of a DNA history for short periods of time, some put the questions into the background, some came to terms with the unknown, others still hold out hope, even as a tiny flame. Some have met their birth parents, others have not, some by choice, others not. All in all, they seemed to be taking things in stride.

I also learned this: Not one of them loved their parents less because they knew they hadn't been conceived by them. Not one had strained relationships with siblings or other relatives because of their beginnings nor were they consumed by bitterness or anger because they'd been adopted.

And not one of them had written a book, magazine article, or joined a special-interest group, listserv or speaker's bureau focusing on their adoption.

That got me thinking.....and when we were told in rather strident and authoritative terms what, when, and how to tell our daughter about the facts of her adoption and pride in her Chinese roots practically from Day One I admit we bucked the trend and went our own way. I like to think we've taken the middle path in face of wildly swinging sociological trends:

y Mimi knows she was born in China, although we gradually let up on the repetition chant - she gets it! She also knows that I was born in Canada and her Dad was born in the USA, her grandmother was born in China, moved to Japan and her Grandpa is a dyed-in-the-wool Kansan farmer who lived most of his life in Taiwan. Her view of the world is constantly evolving because we travel to visit relatives nationally and internationally and acknowledge the pull of our homelands. Being citizens of the world we celebrate all of our cultural origins in the course of our daily lives through food, music, art and literature as well enjoying a healthy ongoing dose of Americana. In our view, this doesn't include Mandarin immersion for Mimi because we don't understand the need to send our kid off to a school that educates her in a language not spoken at home.... it feels like an apology, defining her immigrant journey as one of separation and reinforcing it within our family. As an immigrant myself (and my husband the child of immigrants) we want to teach our daughter how to balance past and present with a focus on the here and now.

We hope Mimi will want to learn Mandarin (or any other language) later on because being bilingual is always an advantage but that choice will be hers to make when she's old enough to make it. Early language learning is optimal but in English-speaking Canada we begin studying French when we start 7th Grade and our class was reading and discussing Guy de Maupassant en francais five years later so it can be done.

y Mimi knows she was adopted and what that means in ways that are digestible to her age level. We have a couple of books for kids we've shared with her that come at the situation obliquely but we've really not spent a lot of time with them or in conversation with her about the subject. She has seen photos of the day we brought her into our family on many occasions. She also knows we wept with happiness and when we look at the pictures together I always cry again. The concept of a visible wellspring of joy brought about by our connection has rooted itself deeply in her and she loves to share with us her own tears of happiness when they happen. The pure joy of belonging is acknowledged and anchoring.

y Mimi knows she wasn't grown in my womb. She asked once and that was it. She also knows that a lady did this for her and then she got her mummy: Me. I don't use the word bio-mum, tummy-mummy, first-mummy, etc. to describe this other person. Just because the word mother is all we have to describe a woman who gives birth doesn't mean I am bound by the limitations of our language. Because of this our daughter hasn't had to internalize the concept of two mothers, and the resulting confusion that I firmly believe is way too complicated for a brain still in the primal stages of development. There is plenty of time for this later (we will use the Mandarin terms ma and baba). When I hear stories about little ones who have to cope by obsessively play-acting the story of birthing, abandonment and finding another mother I shrink a little inside - I feel for these kids, I really do. Why do we feel it necessary to introduce such complex issues at such a tender and fragile age? None of the adoptees in my circle have ever cried foul because they were denied the full story of their origins before pre-school.

Even so our daughter has absorbed enough to own her story. Last week when we were staying in a B&B in Canada our friendly hostess mentioned her son had been born in the U.S. Mimi, who can be shy with strangers was quite chatty.

"I was born in China," she promptly volunteered.

"Really?" our hostess replied, delighted. "My son was born in Denver!" Mimi leaned back on the chair. "My mom adopted me," she added with a shy smile.

My husband and I exchanged surprised glances. By the ripe old age of almost five and by the standards set by the information gurus, she was way late in verbalizing this to anyone. She seemed quite comfortable about it, too. We debated whether to open a discussion with her about what this disclosure might mean among friends or at her upcoming elementary school and decided, once again, to wait for her cues to take it to the next level. Chances are she's already shared this with her friends and her attitude tells us so far so good.

We have come to believe if our daughter nutures that kernel of safe harbor as she absorbs the gradual awareness of her beginnings, even when she comes to realize that the anonymous people who gave her life chose to pass her on to the fates, to the unknown, and that doesn't define her we will have done our job. We can only hope the nourishment she has absorbed into her being through the thousands of moments of love, compassion and the pure joy of a thriving childhood will sustain her through this later part of her life journey and allow her to focus on the business of living a full life.

Most of all I hope we can give her a legacy of keeping her adoption story in perspective and come to understand that life is full of mystery for all of us. Adoption should not be what makes her unique.

But maybe this will:

The other day she said to me, "Mum, I want to be a nurse-scientist-astronaut policewoman."

Now that would be something worth writing about.

The Boyfriend I Never Had

2008-06-20T17:33:00.001-07:00

A friend emailed these pictures to me today. She knew me when we were in high-school together and although I'm still not clear how she got these photos from the set of "The Boyfriend" (circa 1970's) it was an eye-opener.

In more ways than I care to imagine.

When I look at this and the other photos she sent, I see a lively, attractive, confident teenager belting out tunes and showing her comedic range fearlessly. Not the awkward, shy, wallflower who was terrified of being found out for the even more frightened, awkward, geeky looking person she felt like inside. I skittered along the edges of a potential but never realized social life in constant angst, assuming no boy would ever find me worth dating. A reality made visible by my own illusory projections and acceptance of the status quo. Never kissed during my high-school years, I was on the decorating committee for the senior prom and after I spent two days putting up flower pom-poms and shiny disco-balls at the local hotel ballroom, I went home. I didn't have a date. Disappointment was tempered by my belief that this was just the way of things.

How could I have been so blind? 'Youth is wasted on the young'.....whoever coined that phrase knew what they were talking about. I look at that girl in the photo and cringe. I can't time travel and go back to her and give her the benefit of my hard-earned wisdom, I am simply left with the mystery of why I was so hard on myself and why I couldn't look in the mirror and see things as they really were.

She was so skinny, this Val-child of mine. I did manage to hang on to my figure until recently but now I'm currently working on losing the spare tire around my waist that has somehow attached itself to me like a leech; prying it off has taken a humbling visit to Jenny Craig and a lot of frozen food portioned out by a schedule on my fridge.

See, I'm doing it again!

Old habits are hard to break. I want our daughter Mimi to grow up knowing without a shadow of a doubt that she is beautiful, powerful, resourceful, and worthy of being a treasure. I have no control over her physical features, that will be her own affair, but I can instill in her a kind of knowledge well, deep in her DNA, that we will continually refresh as long as we are able.

My mother's only comment when I once asked her if I was pretty was that I had a classical Roman nose. When you are surrounded by Barbie dolls dressed up like the vixen Madonna, this comment would be perplexing and very unsatisfactory (as it was). Mimi has the kind of regular, generous features that turns heads (life is unfair this way), so she's never asked me the same kind of questions. But our job has been to focus on the inner life she will inhabit and share with the world, because that is something we can have a say in. She is learning her worth comes from being a good and honest person, from trying hard at things, from respecting others, and from loving and being loved by people that she trusts.

I want her to look to us first in times of doubt, and drink from that well, and be the voice of reason in an unreasonable world. And when she stops listening for those years when we all stop listening to our parents, I want to believe that no matter what swirls on the surface of her life, she will never quite lose touch with that deeper sustenance.

Unlike my mother, who was unconscious to her crushing insecurity and fearfulness, unable to provide her girls with much more sexual advice than Victorian-era sayings like "just close your eyes and think of England," I hope my magic-bus of a relationship journey has netted me enough insight into the male psyche that I will have more to offer in the way of weaponry in the dance of the genders. I was so unprepared, and unaware of my own honeybee charms that I mucked about for far too many years and nearly toppled my dreams in the process.

Having said this, I am content with the way things have gone despite the late blooming, but damn, I would have liked to have felt the power of what I had much earlier on. When I had hair that flowed like the Goddess Diana and a very, very flat stomach.

Back to the menu on the fridge. I think tonight is a teeny-tiny lasagne. And veggie chips......Bye, bye spare tire!

Life with Iron Giants VI: Mollie & The Storage Unit

2008-05-19T18:40:00.000-07:00

I was working at home a few weeks after I'd met Mollie* at our local strudel shop when the phone rang. I didn't recognize her voice at first, she seemed out of breath. "I have a favor to ask," the voice said without preamble. Since I'm new to the helpful neighbors code of behavior I was taken by surprise.

"Who is this?" I asked politely, not certain if it was a sales call.

"Mollie," she said, assuming it was not necessary to remind me where and when we'd met. We lived only a few blocks apart, after all. We went to the same grocery store, the same bank, the same cafes. We practically breathed the same air.

"I need a ride."

"Okaaay," I replied, somewhat cautiously. I knew she didn't have a car. The entirety of our conversation was coming back to me and at least she wasn't asking me to ghostwrite her daughter's life story. A ride somewhere I could do.....as long as it wasn't to another state.

"I have to take care of my daughter's things." She was starting to get upset. "They've been jerking me around at the moving company, they told me I didn't have any right to take her belongings, I've paid money to lawyers, I have an affidavit....." she was talking a mile a minute.

"The man's a monster," she went on, voice rising to a pitch. "I need a witness, someone to come with me when I give him the money he's extorting from me in exchange for the key to the storage locker."

This was turning into more than a ride. I had visions of a shady transaction involving a big burly mafia guy, a hysterical victim trying to short him at the last minute and a tire iron being pulled from the trunk. But before I could think of an excuse to refuse she started crying.

"Please tell me what to do....."

"Do you have the money to pay him?" I asked. Yes, she did, but he kept upping the price to release the key every time she called. It was now over a thousand dollars. I couldn't believe that someone as poor as Mollie could put her hands on that much ready cash but it underscored how desperate she was to reclaim her daughter's belongings.

"Her things......they're all I have left," she said. So I agreed, wondering where all her friends were and why she had called a stranger to help her with this intimate task.

The next day I came by her place. It was then I discovered one of the many surprises about Mollie that shattered my preconceived notion of who she was. Instead of the shabby storefront I thought she'd bought years ago for a pittance, the address on a main street in downtown San Pedro was a large commercial building painted a blinding shade of white. No shabby corners or rusty fences. It was quite modern, with large windows along the front and a row of studios running along its length. Mollie was standing at the main gate waiting for me, her snowy hair frazzled.

"Who lives here?" I asked, curiously.

"Just me." There must have been 6,000 square feet in this complex. She saw my puzzled look and went on, "I need the space - my studio, home, and storage space. My paintings take up a lot of room. I figured they'd have to be either very big or of a huge quantity to warrant that much space.

She asked if we could stop at the bank first, a task that turned out to take over an hour as Mollie confessed later she hadn't any official I.D. (no driver's license and her passport had expired four years earlier). It had taken some time to establish her identity to the bank officials before they gave her the money. Which came from her line of credit, even though she told me she had the option of dipping into her savings, another interesting piece of information. Obviously she had more assets than first appeared, and her lack of a car was by choice rather than necessity.

The ride to the nearby storage facility was short but when we got there the mover, Carlos, who was supposed to meet her there hadn't shown up. He was really just a middle man who charged customers a fee to move their stuff into the facility and then held the contract, charging a fee every month just for taking the check and paying the storage company. A scam for sure. The woman in the office wasn't very friendly, partly because I gathered Mollie had made quite a pest of herself during the six months it had taken to prove she was entitled to her daughter's things. Zora had left a suicide note, but no will.

While we waited for Carlos to show up, the facility manager made Mollie sign a piece of paper memorializing their part in the transaction and it took several attempts on my part to convey its legal purpose to my new friend. Mollie seemed by turns to be both canny and persistent as hell but when she wasn't happy with something, she affected a fragile, blank demeanor as if well into her dotage. So much so that the manager stopped talking directly to her and addressed me as if I were her daughter and she the senile granny. During this conversation, Carlos called and said he was on his way.

Mollie and I waited on a bench outside the office and that's when she told me more about her own history, the two failed marriages, the hand-to-mouth existence in Mexico, a stint in an Oregon commune, and her determination to make a living as an painter. A lot of tough times, a lot of moves, men with drinking and gambling addictions. Through all this tumult her daughter, Zora, had seemingly flourished, doing well in various schools, then on to a scholarship at USC and an advanced honors degree. Mollie was immensely proud of her daughter's achievements, the first in her family to graduate from university.

But with such a zig-zag childhood legacy, it finally became apparent that Zora had only been hanging on by her fingernails and the burden had finally caught up with her. Mollie was eccentric, Zora was mentally ill. She was bipolar and spent most of her adult life in a cycle of intense, manic creativity followed by periods of crushing depression. Mollie supported her daughter throughout the decades, paying for bills left after jobs fell through, moving her furniture from place to place, sometimes five or six times a year, often providing a safe haven between disappointments. Mollie seemed unaware of the danger Zora was in psychologically. Because her daughter was an artist like her mother perhaps that's why her illness was hidden from the person who knew her best. In her brilliant times, Zora produced documentaries, wrote scripts, painted striking canvases, but her personal life was a mess. At age 40 the marriage and children she'd always craved had never materialized and there was one last depression that found her with a house full of furniture stuffed into a bedroom in Mollie's studio and a final argument that escalated into violence.

Mollie responded by kicking Zora out. The last time she saw her daughter she was moving hundreds of boxes and assorted furniture into the moving van to be stored. It was only a few days later that the call came from the Zen center with the news that Zora was dead. She had committed suicide by taking an overdose of pills and tying a plastic bag over her head.

Mollie pulled out a snapshot she kept in her purse of Zora and handed it to me. She had honey blond hair and the same strong features of her mother. Over-thin, a sad and fragile woman who had just run out of options. Mollie had no one but Zora, and now even she was gone.

Carlos, finally showed up and we all trooped down to the 12X12' locker. Far from being a big burly monster, he was pleasant and businesslike. The only hint of his monster side was that he had strung Mollie along for many months, racking up storage and late fees which she had been forced to pay. He appeared immune to the pain of this elderly, forlorn woman who had lost her daughter in the worst way possible.

When Carlos cut the lock to the space, the manager raised the corrugated door and we took in the huge jumble of boxes piled to the ceiling, the shabby, overstuffed chairs, rafts of oil paintings next to broken lamps, a pair of lone shoes sitting in the corner.

Suddenly, Mollie let out a wail, a long thin cry that pierced the air. She fell forward and clung to the boxes as if they were Zora's coffin, weeping and clawing at the sad jumble while we stood mute, eyes averted. She kept crying out her daughter's name. "Oh, my God, my baby, my baby!" she wailed over and over, "this is all you are!"

The mover made his escape, obviously embarrassed by this show of pure agony. I stayed close to Mollie, supporting her thin frame, acutely aware of the sad collection of junk that Zora had hauled from place to place at great expense, because this was all she had, would ever have. The sum of her life lay in a jumble before us. The dusty canvases, the unfinished scripts, the filthy shoes, the thrift-store, shredded lamps, the smell of decay and ruin.

And yet to Mollie, they were all as precious as gold. She had fought like a mother lion for these things, moved heaven and earth to reclaim them for her child.

Back in the car Mollie apologized to me for taking up most of the day. I assured her it had been my privilege to help. She turned to me. "I couldn't let them take her life, everything that was precious to her and sell it off like garbage." She searched my face. "You understand, don't you?"

In that moment Mollie was the most eloquent, beatific person I'd ever known. I held her hand and we drove in silence. I don't pretend to understand why life can be so cruel, even when we believe we may be responsible for some of the weight put upon our children, even when we cannot see our own part in their pain.

I took her home to her white castle and she talked and talked until I gently reminded her I had to get my daughter from pre-school. She told me that the next morning she would be returning to the storage unit to pick up all the boxes with another mover and a van, to take them all back to the bedroom she'd cleaned up and painted. To her daughter's altar, a place where she, Dorota, would try to fulfill her daughter's lifelong wish to be famous, loved, and admired.

I may not be the one to write Zora's story but if I know Dorota, she will search and search until she finds someone who can.

Life With Iron Giants V: Mollie

2008-05-12T17:32:00.000-07:00

When I lived in Los Feliz I spent my share of time in local cafes and there were plenty of good ones, including the much-touted Alcove, and my favorite, the delightful French patisserie and purveyor of scrupulously researched organic delicacies, Figaro's Bistrot. Their delicate and saucy apple tart tatin with organic cream and a caramel finish was a treat I always looked forward to on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

But I never actually felt connected to the pleasant but aloof staff or any of the very hip customers who always looked like they were either in the entertainment or music business with the unmistakable but subtle class distinction that comes with being in the arts. Casually dressed in something just the other side of the fashion curve, they were always engaged in lively discussion with their friends or hidden in Moorish solitude within the depths of the New York Times whilst feeding tidbits to schnoodles tucked inside Prada pooch purses.

I am in the arts. In fact I'm a bonafide working artist (not a poseur like some were), but I never felt at home in this group. There was something about the energy surrounding them that reminded me of high school cliques; they were focused inward as if to protect themselves from the fringes, the unpredictable, the un-vetted. To be on the outside was to feel the change in air, to feel loneliness creeping into the void, to be at the window looking in, longing for the warmth and companionship spread so liberally within that circle.

In short, I was never a member of the community, whether in small or large doses, whether on my street, in my garden apartment building, or my neighborhood. Not politically, not socially, not as an activist nor even as a lone speaker on a box, voicing my opinions and being heard.

This was my fault, but not for reasons as I understand them now. As with everything in life it's all about passion. Passion for the things that you can truly connect to: life, reason, love, the man on the street, the tramp at the backdoor, the act of breathing life into the places and things around you, the need to connect and be heard, to listen and to feel the tendrils of understanding reach out and take root. To hear the past speak and to reach out to the future as it bonds people together. To find commonality and to nurture it.

Case in point:

Soon after we moved into our house it became clear that all things in my life were under construction. For us it was missing doors or kitchen cabinets, unshod floors and the absence of a working shower. But as I began to make myself visible to the community I realized this building process was the way of things for everyone.

I met Mollie* one afternoon at a little strudel shop that had quickly become my local hangout. The owners, Mishi and Aniko opened their new Hungarian-style bakery/cafe shortly after we'd arrived in the neighborhood. They needed customers and I definitely needed their flaky homemade strudel in 16 delicious flavors. With their blessing I set myself up on one of their comfortable lounge chairs with my laptop every afternoon to write. They even put a framed photo of our daughter up on the cafe china cabinet and fuss over her like doting grandparents when she comes in to visit. In this congenial atmosphere striking up conversations with strangers has become easy.

Like most openers here in Pedro the first things you talk about follow along these lines: how much we like it here, how many generations we go back (I cheat and count my in-laws who arrived in 1945), the politics of urban renewal, how things are changing for the better for the worse, the influence and congruence of the bemouth Port, and the definable, beguiling essence of small town life that has survived here despite everything. After Mollie and I had gotten all of the pleasantries out of the way she became reflective, quietly sipping her tea. After a moment she began to share her story with me.

A thin, slight woman in her 70's with a deeply lined face, my new acquaintance confessed she'd been housebound for almost six months and had only recently ventured out to walk the block down to Mishi's for strudel. By the paint-spattered yoga pants, black turtleneck and colorful yarn skull cap jammed over her thick white curls it was apparent she was an artist. Her studio was nearby, she told me, and when we looked up her bold, modern canvases on the gallery website I saw how talented she really was. Her work was not cheap, her respectable dealer located on the Westside.

She looked at the images of her paintings wistfully and said despite the fact they were constantly being rented for use as set decoration on various films and television series, not many were selling.

"But that's okay," she added, "I haven't done anything new for a while." And then she whispered, "It's been hard....my daughter.....I've had some grief and it's been terribly hard to go on." She looked at me searchingly. "She was so beautiful and talented. She could do anything she put her mind to and do it better than anyone I knew."

Mollie became an artist in the thick of the original bohemian movement, living in New York and then in Mexico where her writer husband drank a lot of tequila, sold jewellery in street markets and ultimately left her to raise her daughter, Zora*, alone. Zora shared her independent streak, threading together a patchwork career as a writer, painter, and documentary filmmaker. But at forty she was still unmarried, close to broke, and desperately depressed. One day she left her mother's house where she'd been staying temporarily and moved into the Zen Center in downtown Los Angeles where they found her.

"She killed herself." Mollie's voice was quivering, the loss was still raw.

Then she looked at me. "She left so much unfinished work. So many pieces for me to put together. I need to do that to honor her, to keep her spirit alive. Maybe you could help me write her story."

I didn't think I could.

But I wanted to help in some way. I gave her my number and after we had finished our meal and a cup of tea I went back to work certain we'd cross paths again.

Mollie asks for a favor

*I've changed Mollie's and Zora's names to protect their privacy.

Happy Mother's Day!

2008-05-11T13:16:00.000-07:00

What Mom among us hasn't stopped sometime during the day and heard themselves in this mode...

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?cl=7769235

love and hugs to y'all with the same challenge.

Life With Iron Giants IV: Land Ho!

2008-04-11T10:48:00.000-07:00

Yes, that's me - and yes I am wearing my daughter's swim goggles. That is an industrial strength staple gun I'm holding and I managed to install several rooms of insulation without nailing my finger once. By the time this photo was taken we were pretty much on our own in the renovation process.

But I digress.

For three years we were so focused on the transformation of our faded salt-box into a livable home, I paid little attention to the goings-on at the Port. Ports, actually. The Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach have morphed together geographically to form the largest of its kind in North America. It is a powerhouse of industry and commerce, bringing in over a half-billion dollars in goods each day just on the Los Angeles side (more on the larger Long Beach side ). That adds up to a lot of containers (millions) trucks (16,000 per day) ships (spewing bunker fuel which is one step away from crude oil) and lots and lots of cars (parking lots the size of Manhattan). The sheer tonnage of metal, acres of giant cranes like so many Star War's monsters and ships the size of three football fields is overwhelming if you drive along side the twin ports on the Vincent Thomas and Gerald Desmond bridges. Humbling. Seeing all the stuff coming in here on a daily basis has in no small part focused my increasing desire to downsize, recycle what we consume and reduce the family carbon footprint to a mere cat's paw.

But as our home construction neared its end and we contemplated moving in we had to think more about this new relationship we were about to enter, both with the town of San Pedro, and the steel heart where so many of its inhabitants go every day to earn their living. It was inevitable the Port gradually made its presence known, though for quite a while I kept it in the periphery, knowing there were things about it that would gradually and inevitably have their pull on me but it was too much to consider then.

My energy was elsewhere: Construction on our house, after being knocked down to its bones and refashioned along more elegant lines (photos below), stalled after the contractor had deserted us, work unfinished and funds depleted. Because most of the house was left as open two-by-fours, we hired someone to wrap the structure in sheets of Tyvek (a breathable plastic undercoating for stucco) and nailed a piece of plywood to the front door opening. But it didn't stop neighborhood kids from partying in the new addition and we often found beer bottles and evidence of lots of good times littering the floor. Our neighbors would have been a lot more annoyed with us if it weren't for the fact that the tenants we'd kicked out had been so much worse and we cruised on this passive goodwill for a very long time. They waited patiently as we picked up our britches and started back into work with an assortment of handymen-slash-faux contractors who were cheap but required lots of supervision and a growing (mine) knowledge of construction, plumbing, electrical wiring and masonry.

It was during these daily trips down the 110 from our Los Feliz neighborhood that I started to really understand what San Pedro had that no other city in the Los Angeles basin had: honest-to-god character forged from generations who came here and never left. Never wanted to leave. In all the years I'd lived in the upper suburbs I'd never felt like a newcomer. Everyone else I knew was just as transient, whether we were moving on up to better and better neighborhoods or simply moving on. Here, people actually stared at me as if I were in a small town in the midwest someplace, and many of them struck up a friendly conversation (just curious, you understand), something that had never happened to me before. And in response I became suitably chatty in public places, very much out of character. I was charmed by the restaurant and bookstore regulars who's parents and grandparents had been regulars. And every place seemed to have their own collection of photographs of the local landscape - from arial vantage points of the ship-laden port to the rocky cliffs and white lighthouse of Point Fermin, the blue-green of the Pacific everywhere, surrounding us.

It was soon time to move in, ready or not. The Port began to take on more of a presence in my visits, and I looked over to the iron landmarks and the silently passing cargo ships with more awareness every day. I saw the air, dusty brown in the distance, saw it spreading north and east, heard the distant an never-ending rumble of steel coupling and uncoupling. I lifted up my head like the groundhog in our front yard and sniffed at the air, coveted the open ocean to the south of us, marveled at the giant and mysterious fog bank rolling in from Catalina way and almost suddenly became passionately attached to the ever changing natural vista I saw there.

I had become rooted. And I was about to take up a pitchfork and fight to protect our little plot and all the little plots around us. Our neighborhood, for better or worse, we were in it now.

2008-04-10T12:44:00.000-07:00

A few steps in the transformation.

The 490' master bed/bath addition was added to the back of the house making the footprint 1,600'. Nothing of the original house remained except the hardwood floors of two original bedrooms which were reconfigured in size and shape. The front of the house underwent major changes as we removed interior walls to create a large front living area (which required new beam support structure) and changed the roof line to create vaulted ceilings. All interior and exterior walls were stripped down to 2X4s and the foundation was bolted to the existing and new part of the house for added earthquake strength. We added a layer of reinforced shear wall to the existing structure, re-insulated exterior and interior walls for sound and weatherproofing, installed all new windows, french doors, new hardwood floors, new plumbing, electrical, drywall, fixtures, new porch, heating and air conditioning, new roof, and exterior stucco. The backyard was partially re-fenced, levelled, and the separate garage was given new stucco, trim paint and an electric garage door.

2008-04-10T10:57:00.000-07:00

2008-04-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

Life with Iron Giants III: The Toad and Mrs. Caseres

2008-03-31T13:08:00.000-07:00

Garbage is expensive. When you get into home renovation you realize that you may have missed many opportunities to become wealthy, none of which have to do with office work or other similar white-collar professions. And one of the quickest way to riches is to advertise or pick up work from Craig's List. Itinerant handymen who drink on the job get $50.00 an hour, skilled tradesmen (and they are mostly men) command much more....even the guy who picked up the backyard full of trash in an old truck and took it to the city dump got $3,000.00 from us and he probably sold most of the metal to a scrap dealer in the bargain. I don't think a college education and twenty years clawing my way up the corporate ladder ever netted that much in my take-home packet and even though, according to my sister, my income put me in the top 20% of professional women.

As you can see by the 'before' photos our house required a herculean effort to restore it to liveability. And at every step we were confronted with the decision to go with the Craig's List guy who was cheaper (read less reliable) or pony up money we didn't have for licensed professionals (who also turned out to be unreliable).

All of which wouldn't have been half as bad if we hadn't had to deal with incompetent nincompoops in the building department of City Hall in the bargain. To be fair, building and safety department guys are a crap-shoot. Some are awfully nice and some are awfully off-their-rocker insane with various versions of Napoleon complexes that they live out fully on unsuspecting innocents like us. Give a guy authority and a rule book and something snaps in their brain. I think it's that absolute power corrupts thing in action which tells you that we human beings aren't hard to figure out when it comes right down to it.

Meet the Homeowner-Builder, aka The Easy Mark

Those of us who do not have a contractor doing the work (long story) are called homeowner builders and employees of the building department who can't beat their wives or kick their dogs love us. We aren't like the hardened contractors who come in with their dirt-encrusted boots, meaty hands, and don't mess with me attitude. We are polite, respectful, and they assume we are as dumb as cows. So they wait until they see us sidle in the door with our plans and our clean fingernails and they get all the frustrations they've had dealing with ornery (and knowledgeable) professionals out on us.

Enter my nemisis, whom we shall call Toad of Toad Hall.

My husband, Bob, who is a lot more patient than I am, first encountered Toad, or Mr. Toad as he preferred to be called at our local planning department. We were already frustrated and picking the lint out of our pockets after being cleaned out and defrauded by our contractor, who left the job site fully-paid but half done (much of it discovered later). The only thing he left us besides shoddy work was his beat-up straw hat which I took great delight in stomping on and then letting the dog poop into.

Rather than trust another professional we decided to supervise the work ourselves and off we went to the building and construction department to sort out our mess and to get moving again with (hopefully) more trustworthy subcontractors. It became my job to supervise the work and dealing with the building & safety office was the first order of business. We'd had a very nice senior building inspector come to our house and give us a list of things that needed to be done again (only better) and we needed some engineering amendments to our plans in order to proceed. Bob had gone over to the building department with our first attempt to address these concerns, met Mr. Toad and come away with another list of things to do before getting a sign-off. Try at any cost to get anyone to help you but the toad, my husband warned me, but sadly fate always seem to intervene.

Mr. Toad was the supervisor at this particular office and I call him this because in memory no other image comes up to supplant the more human version I'm sure he must be. Though I had never been formally introduced, the moment I entered the office I knew without a doubt to against whom Bob had warned me about. He was loud. He was a bumpy grey mound in a blue checked shirt with a mop of Brillcreamed hair. He was officious, and he picked his nose.

"Next!"

My number came up and I lost the who-get's-the-nice-guy-next-to-him lottery.

I spread the plans out before me, along with my well-prepared notes, engineering amendments, drawings, and the list prepared as requested.

Mr. Toad looked them over and started jabbing at various places.

"What's this?" he asked, peevishly.

"The engineer's amendments as you requested, along with his stamp."

"Oh, no, no, this will not work!" He was pushing his glasses up his nose and getting ready to dismiss me.

"I'm sorry?" I asked, the blood draining from my face.

"You'll have to go back to the engineer," he said as if this were rather obvious.

Not the guy who was more elusive than Howard Hughes......it had taken two weeks just to get theses amendments signed, sealed and delivered.

"I don't understand..." I said in my friendliest voice.

"He didn't draw a cloud-shape around his call-outs."

"Huh?" I was honestly confused.

"C-l-o-u-d" he repeated as if I were a six-year old.

"But he's drawn a circle around them," I offered, still not getting it.

He pulled out a pencil and with it poised over the paper, asked me, "Shall I show you?" and before I could answer, he drew a little curly shaped sample over the circle the engineer had drawn.

Seeing I wasn't getting anywhere on this issue I pushed the list of neatly typed amendments he'd requested Bob put together as an addendum to the plans.

"What about this?"

"That's not what I asked for either," he said, without further explanation.

"But....."

"Sorry," he said making it clear he was anything but.

"But what do you want, then?" I suspect my voice was becoming a teeny bit less cooperative.

"I told your husband."

"But this is what you said you wanted...."

"I never said that." Never mind he didn't offer up the correct instructions. Just stared at me through his bottle glasses with pursed lips.

And that folks is when the wall finally hit me and to my acute embarrassment a teeny bit of water begin to leak out of the corner of my eyes, unbidden, unwanted. I should point out that in all the years I've dealt with difficult clients, bosses who yelled, or the occasional nasty co-workers I have never, never, ever cried in my professional life. Now I was reduced to this show of shameful blubbering frustration and I could feel the eyes of the contractors sitting behind me boring into my head. All became silent.

Mr. Toad stared at me for a second, pushed his chair back and said very,very, very loudly,

"Excuse me Mrs. Caseres, but if you can't control yourself this interview is terminated."

"I....I'm sorry." The leakage stopped immediately and disappeared as if in reverse-footage. Where it went is a mystery.

I took a deep breath and collected myself.

"It's just that we are trying to do everything you asked of us and I need to know what to do now," I said with respectful acquiescence even though part of me wanted to punch his lights out.

"Make the clouds," he said again. And burped.

"Okay," I said, "I will take care of this right away."

Then he saw that I was sufficiently mollified, grovelling as I was in his presence, and then he became strangely jovial.

"You know, Mrs. Caseres, that we are here to make sure you do the work properly so that everything will turn out just right for your new house. We wouldn't want it falling down in an earthquake, now. Ha, Ha!"

"Of course, I understand perfectly," I said, and got up, bowing as I left.

It's the clouds. They made all the difference as I look back, so thankful that I spent another several days tracking down the engineer and driving across town to have him trace over the circles into cloud shapes while he grumbled about the absurdity of something that wasn't in the code book no matter how hard you looked.

Saved by the clouds. It's all rather mystical.

The House Deferred

2008-03-25T09:30:00.000-07:00

A Handyman's Dream.

Who falls for that these days, anyway?

Us.

It all started with the 300 square foot cottage two doors down from Miss Josie's. Miss Josie took care of Mimi for a few hours every day and she lived in Eagle Rock, an old city neighborhood that had only a couple of years before been so gang-riddled that even affordability wasn't an attractive enough incentive to move in.

But by the time we started bringing Mimi to Miss Josie's comfortable house the neighborhood had changed dramatically because of the housing insanity that had gripped the city. The little pre-war houses and woody Craftsman bungalows had been snapped up by flippers and angst-ridden buyers amidst the smell of fresh paint, sawdust and landscaping dirt and the prices they were paying bordered on ridiculous. Bordered on that is until the falling-down cottage two doors down from Miss Josie went on sale. The guy living in it had been there since he'd bought it in 1945 for $250.00 and the day the realtor visited was the day he took out his corncob pipe and blessed the amazing stupidity of city folks. It wasn't much bigger than a garden shed and the porch sagged so much you didn't need any steps to get to the scruffy dirt patch that passed for a lawn.

The real estate company put a fancy-looking post up with a plastic box with a sheet listing the exciting 'details' of this wreck. Two bedrooms (where?) bath (I was looking in the backyard) and cozy living room (for two standing up) in a Craftsman cottage with lovely detailing (hmmm, I suppose the sagging porch was a miracle of nature). Makes a great starter home! All yours for $700,000! The exclamation mark was really there, I swear.

Whaaat? I actually laughed out loud (and a bit maniacally) when I read this bit of realtor doo-doo. I told Bob about it and later he took a look because he didn't believe me. We swore up and down we'd never, never, never, never pay close to a million dollars for a wormy trailer with a foundation. It seemed so out of wack. It seemed very wrong. But such were the conditions of the real estate market and we were getting restless.

Okay, the itty bitty cottage did sit on the market for this price but we were outgrowing our ancient but charming apartment in Los Feliz and with a young kid we were starting to lust after a backyard. That plus the fact that I was tired of letting the dog out for 4:00 a.m. pee and having to make sure he didn't run off down the street never to be seen again. Since we had both lost our first houses in our respective (and distant) divorces we were basically starting off with virtually no equity, just what we had put away in our savings accounts and by the second year of our marriage we actually had socked away enough for a down payment on and up/down three bed 2 bath palace in a nice neighborhood. But fate intervened and homeowner status was deferred when we chose to put all our savings into adopting our daughter, knowing full well that it wasn't really much of a choice. House vs. extraordinary, beautiful, smart, loving human being we actually got to parent. We'd really won the lottery on that one.

So we waited and as the market spiralled out of control we realized that we had to get creative.

Enter the house on 18th Street.

You already know I had fallen in love the neighborhood and the romance of the sea nearby. So I was willing to overlook the fact that the house were about to take possession of was, well, a bit of a challenge.

I had heard of packrats but had never actually seen one up close. Or to be more specific, their work. Mercifully I was in denial during the final decision process, seeing only in my head the vision of what it could become. The property was large enough for an addition, maybe up, maybe back, we got lost in the future, sketching out ideas and dreaming of the way things would one day be. Which, by the way, was supposed to be in three months according to our contractor.

So we gave notice to the tenants (and a letter of recommendation so desperate we were to get them moved out in a timely fashion) and then the day came when we had the key and the house was empty.

Not quite.

The tenants, a whole family of packrats, were not very happy about having to vacate their little home and having gone through the moving process myself, I get now that they figured, screw them (meaning us) and basically took a couple of suitcases worth of clothes, their son's Army uniform, and left the rest for us to deal with. Since it would be hard to believe what I'm about to tell you I have supplied photographic evidence below (more reliable than the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I promise). Bob had taken a reconnaissance inspection before me and when we both arrived to 'clean up' he pulled out a box of things he'd bought on the sly so's not to scare the living daylights out of me.

1. 10 boxes of 24 count 100 gallon heavy-duty plastic lawn bags (not enough)

2. 10 pairs of industrial strength elbow length plastic work gloves (suitable for toxic materials)

3. 1 box (10 count) industrial face masks (oxygen tank optional)

4. 4 industrial size brooms

5. 2 pairs of rubber work boots

6. hairnets (?)

7. 4, 100 gallon trash containers (not nearly enough)

8. One case of handy-wipes

9. One case of Gatorade

Photographic evidence (only a small sampling) is below. Having our own home, it seemed, was not going to be easy.

Work gloves on!

Mr. and Mrs. Caseres' Dream House

2008-03-24T23:30:00.000-07:00

Life with Iron Giants: The San Pedro Diary

2008-03-24T10:33:00.000-07:00

Welcome to San Pedro.

That's what the blue and white fishing-village style sign says when you reach the end of the 110 Freeway in the southern end of the suburban sprawl that is Los Angeles. After this point there are no more fast ways to get anywhere unless you count the winding Pacific Coast Highway that snakes across bumpy landslide terrain at the south end of this isolated Peninsula, and even then if you don't slow down you run the risk of taking off like a runaway 747 if you hit one of the speed bumps nature has provided as the edge of the landmass slowly slips toward the ocean and tears the road apart.

Natural beauty is ever present here in sharp contrast to the sprawling commercial enterprise that is the combined Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. But it's been a tough hoe: Until recently it was nature: 0, rustbelt enthusiasm for the almighty consumer dollar: 100. The unspoiled preserves of open water, sandy beach and wetlands were as rare and as persevering as a weed pushing its way through the crack in cement. We all notice the ornery, stubborn bit of green with the same primal respect we show for all things that survive our relentless assault on the land and yet we are rushing, rushing, somewhere so the glimpse is swift.

The moment I first saw the graceful lines of the first of two pale green bridges that span the port waterways I felt an immediate connection to this small city and the road that follows the water's edge, sharp and clean lines of demarcation between us and the giant freighters, fish markets, cruise ships gleaming like opals with their blue flags snapping in the breeze. This was a place unlike any other in Los Angeles and it felt a million miles apart from the giant sprawl of comfortable patchwork of housing tracts and convenient shopping malls that had been the map of my life since I'd arrived from Canada in the 80's.

Like most Angelenos I had a distant but proprietary relationship with the Pacific coast and the great ocean beyond its sandy shores. Visits to Santa Monica or the necklace of beach cities that dot the western coastline were always places of retreat and reflection for me. They were also, for the most part, a cozy wrapping of affluent promise mixed with the bright air and breezy relief of marine layers bringing the sights, smells and sounds that kept me connected with the last elements of raw nature still clinging to the edge of our vast metropolis. So vast, that in early days I thought nothing of boarding a bus in Silverlake and emerging into the bright sunshine of the Santa Monica Pier in more time that it might have taken me to fly from here to Canada. And yet it still felt close since the boundaries were simply street names with no other break in the city landscape. There was something lemming-like in my predictable runs to the water, flip-flops, sunscreen, hat and beach bag in hand.

And like most Angelenos, I knew nothing of the small town at the bottom of the city map on a rare east-facing coast except that you could take a fast boat to Catalina from one of its ocean berths. I never ventured into the town, never saw the need. But when I arrived as a tentative and perspective immigrant to San Pedro, I felt an unexpected rush of familiarity and the exhilarating knowledge that this place was very special. And in my naivete, I was equally enchanted with the location of the house we were considering. The street ended within sight of the front yard, dipping down into an open park with the marina and our slice of blue ocean shimmering beyond. To the left was the tail end of the port, with one or two of the giant cranes lifted up and resting. While we stood and watched the sun dip closer to the mountains across San Pedro Bay, a boat glided by in the distance, big, muscular, loaded with goods to feed, clothe and grow the nation. It moved by in absolute silence, or so it seemed at the time, and then it was gone.

Because Vancouver is one of my favorite cities in the world, this vista with sea, snow-capped mountains, ships, sails, and arching bridges was the connection I felt I'd lost when I moved here to the arid desert and brown hills. The house was a broken-down salt box on a patch of weedy land. But the wooden fence running along the length of the shady alley was graffiti free, as was the neighborhood, and the solidly working-class homes mixed with a few older cottages and sea captain beauties, were all well tended and quiet. A hanging garden of wisteria threaded its way along a neighbor's porch and the mauve blooms were reminiscent of another, slower time.

My strongest memory of that first day was the brightness of the light and the faint smell of fish on the air, a smell so subtle that now I cannot detect it anymore, except on foggy mornings. There was a constant breeze coming up off the water and it fought for dominance with the arid downdraft from Palos Verdes, a fog-shrouded rocky mound to the west that rose above the town in green splendor.

My time to leave a place I'd come to see as a vast wilderness of cool, chic, urbane, mysterious and aloof sensibility had finally arrived. I knew at once that I didn't have to go home to Canada to finally put down roots again.

And in the distance, the iron giants loomed. Our street, so bright and breezy, was bare of trees, a sea of concrete medians. And we were about to chop down the very tree that kept our lane shady to make way for construction.

Next: Four Walls, a Roof and Political Bedfellows

Theory XV

2007-03-24T11:16:00.000-07:00

Sara stayed with Notty while she’d finished her work and held on the to the cup of tea until it had gone cold. She’d been offered the little iron cot in her grandmother’s sewing room for the night but the springs creaked every time she turned around so after a few tries she got up quietly, dressed again and let herself out.

She knew her grandmother wouldn’t talk about Tom, it would only stir up resentment and jealousy and remind them both how very wrong things had gone those years ago when the two halves of the family had split and never spoken again. She knew in the past Tom had come by to see their grandmother but she was mum on the details. Sara only knew that he’d slept on the sewing room cot from time to time when he’d had no place else to go. And in the beginning it happened frequently – soon after his sixteenth birthday, their father had disappeared again, leaving him in the care of a woman he’d taken up with and a savings account with two thousand dollars for his ‘board and care’ like he’d been some kind of dog. But even then, living with someone he barely knew, Tom had refused to come home to his sister and mother. He seemed to blame Sara in particular for the reason his father had taken him and left home and wanted nothing to do with them.

Her last glimpse of him had been the only time he’d come by the house, but refused to leave the car. He’d glared at her through the front-seat window of a battered ’85 Datsun, sitting beside her father’s ex-girlfriend. The two of them were equally defiant and both had the smeary looks of alcoholics on a bender. Then they’d roared off, smoke billowing out the tailpipe.

That had been ten years ago and since then he had fallen into the black hole of anonymity a city could provide. He might as well moved to Winnipeg or died for all Sara knew. He was as invisible as her father, whose whereabouts were just as mysterious.

The city was sleeping. She walked through the park toward Queen Street where she could get a streetcar. Men drunk from the bars and a fifth of something in paper bags were sprawled under the trees even though it would definitely get below freezing. She couldn’t help peering at their darkened shapes for a sign of Tom, but they turned away or were snoring already, open-mouthed and oblivious. She realized that any one of them could have been him, with their marred and swollen features they had morphed into one mushy brotherhood. The same Sally Ann dark coat, the same cauliflower ears, the same rheumy eyes, the same, the same. One was indistinguishable from another and they liked it that way.

She put her head down and followed the tarmac path as it wound its way toward the edge. The giant oaks branched above her and rent the moonlight, making the way difficult in patches. Toronto was not a frightening place after dark, even when the midnight bells had stopped tolling and the last of the revelers had found refuge in the dive of their choosing, but Sara kept her wits about her just the same.

The steamy bright warmth of the Queen car was a comfort and within minutes she was asleep, lulled by the rumbling of the wheels on the track and the rhythmic swaying as it raced past empty stops. She woke up just before her's and stumbled out onto a deserted block of shops. Only now did the darkness feel threatening. She quickened her pace as the cold and the uncertianty seeped in with a vengeance. Someone was watching.

When she got home, exhausted and shivering, Bertie didn’t even have the decency to come to the door to greet her. He looked up briefly from the Queenstown sheared sheep doggie bed she’d bought on a whim a few months before and then curled back in even tighter.

“Bertie!” she whispered urgently. He ignored her.
“Bertie!
He looked up.
“Come.”
The standoff last for a while, Sara bent down, tense, Bertie feigning sleep.

“Come!”
His mistress drew up, ready to spring. On this cue Bertie yawned, stretched slowly, one leg and a time, and then ambled over. Sara scooped him up in her arms and took him upstairs to bed where he burrowed deep under the covers and kept his own counsel. Curled as close to him as she could get, Sara watched the oak tree move to frame her view in the windless night and thought about the faceless shapes beneath the others, also looking for shelter.

XIV: Tom

2007-03-08T13:32:00.000-08:00

In 1985 when Tom was born his picture was published in the Star. “Record-size baby welcomed in Toronto General!” the caption read. He was a hefty fourteen pounds with a barrel chest and huge feet. And because he’d been carried to term in the heat of a particularly sweltering summer by a woman who was thirty-nine and reluctantly pregnant, he was also bad tempered from the get-go. His full-lung squall dubbed ‘the rebel yell’ by Delys could be heard down the block even when all the windows were shut (which they frequently were to keep family matters private) and he cried more hours than he was silent.

Sara, who was five at the time, found the silence to be worse because Tom’s infrequent moments of reflection seemed to be focused on her and the stares became more aggressive with time. She began to believe, fueled by her father’s imagination stories at bedtime about monsters emerging from dark places to eat little children, it was not impossible her brother was a changeling, and that his stare was far too intelligent for his infantile status. She wondered what he got up to in the dark hours of the night when he slept behind locked doors, locked only after he’d been found one afternoon stripped of his diaper and taking a casual pee in the neighbor’s prize azelea bushes.

As a baby Tom had a definite size advantage, with a low center of gravity that made him a force to be reckoned with once he got some speed up. This was how Sara, who should have known better than to be on the flat roof of the garage behind Notty’s apartment, had come to be cannonballed into the abyss by her brother, who was then barely three. She had been standing near the edge looking at a particularly high snowdrift (and thankfully clad in a bulky snowsuit) when Tom somehow slipped his harness and had run at her full stop. She’d barely turned when he caught her at the waist and before she could right herself she’d gone head over heels. She remembered even now how surreal it had been, and in her memory the fall had been more like a gentle drift downwards followed by a very soft landing into the new snow. But in truth she must have had the wind knocked out of her for she’d lain there for a quite a while half buried, until Tom, who had played on the roof (in considerably more danger given his size) for over a quarter of an hour, finally wandered to Notty’s back door with his announcement.

“Ganma, Ganma, she falled off the roof!”

But his size advantage mysteriously evened out by the time he was five and much to his chagrin he no longer towered over his playmates which meant his bullying tactics were not as effective. The first time he was slapped back by a fiery little redhead he ran straight to Delys and when met with little sympathy changed tactics and focused his attentions Sara who seemed both bewildered by and a little afraid of him. He found it quite amusing to torment her when they were alone, beginning with crude devices (picking his nose and flinging at her was an early favorite) and then graduating to more subtle forms of torture. Unlike most siblings who exercised power based on birth order, Tom-the-younger had the edge almost from the day he was born and he never conceded the advantage.

Delys seemed unaware of the danger brewing between her two young ones, busy as she was trying to shore up her failing interior decorating business. She blamed the demise of “Done by Delys” on the birth of her children and at one point was so overwhelmed that her alarmed husband had hired a nanny. Sara remembered the woman well, she had come advertised as the grandmother-type but when free of Delys’ oversight her pale blue eyes hardened into steel and both children feared her grip and her tongue, which lashed out at unexpected moments and kept them servile. It wasn’t until Tom had kicked a grapefruit size welt into her thigh that she’d packed her bags in a huff and scrubbed out. It was the only thing Sara had ever been grateful to Tom for.

Notty was watching Sara at the table. Even in the steamy warmth of the kitchen, Sara held onto herself as if to preserve body heat. Her legs were too skinny, she thought. And the hair….
“Bubala…”
Sara shook her head. She knew what was coming. Notty sighed and turned to the cooling confection. She put down a yard of wax paper and began dropping spoonfuls of caramelized brown sugar mixed with pecans and candied popcorn into neat rows. When the first batch had cooled she put a few on well-worn Staffordshire saucer. Sara had once asked about the Blue Willow pattern, with its ornate Chinese landscape in which two doves cavorted while men toiled in the fields below. She’d asked about the doves and Notty had told her the pattern was based on an ancient Mandarin story about two ill-fated lovers who had perished and been reborn.

As a teenager she learned more of the story and discovered that they had been murdered, burned alive in their home by the father who felt the young man unworthy of his daughter.

“Some people are just not meant to be together,” Notty had said to her.

And a few months later her father, whom she’d worshipped for his patience, his courage, and his intelligence, had disappeared and taken her brother with him.

Theory XIII: Notty

2007-03-01T16:23:00.000-08:00

Bundled up in her fur-lined maxi coat and tam she braved the dark streets, cakebox in hand. The long block stretched before her, and she held off the unkind wind with the cardboard offering firmly dug into her breast. Night trips were so difficult in the winter and her grandmother was on the other end of town. For a fleeting moment she wondered what life would be like with a car.

It was possible to live one’s entire life in Toronto and never own one. For Sara the idea of driving was so frightening she sold her mother’s aged Citroen even before the will had been read because its very presence in the garage was akin to a kernel of popcorn lodged in her back tooth.

Wimp. Who had said that? Her mother or Chip. Certainly not her father, who had taken the subway to work good weather and foul, his fedora abandoned only in the heat of summer, along with the boxy merino overcoat (in grey) and half-rubbers (unless raining). She had a picture of him trudging down Collins, beaten and tired in the last stretch of a day that had begun the same way in pre-dawn. He got out of the house as early was decent, ostensibly to beat the rush-hour crush on the Public but really it was to escape the burnt toast and pithy orange juice served up by Delys in the breakfast room. It wasn’t until years later, when she was old enough to accompany him to the office that daughter learned from father that he spent a good hour in the steamy confines of Yonge Street breakfast diner with a cup of coffee, cinnamon Danish and the newspaper.

Sara and her brother hadn’t been so lucky. Their mother, though well-intentioned (although perhaps not upon reflection) had the delicacy of a jackhammer when it came to the culinary arts, and she cared not a whiff if the milk was lukewarm, the peanut butter hardened to the consistency of cement, or the tuna salad studded with bits of left-over spine. The daily chore of providing sustenance to her family was steamed, beaten, boiled, and fried to an unpleasant death, then slid without ceremony onto plates.

Delys’ penchant for ruining everything except the Christmas feast and the occasional roast beef dinner on Sundays, was a mystery to her husband and children because her own mother was so good at it, if a bit peculiar. Delys’ mother, a warm and kindly spit of a woman who had been in her youth what she referred to as "the theatricals", cooked everything on a two-burner hotplate in the tiny walk-up flat she'd lived in since her only daughter had left home to marry. Notty was an expert at making things in one pot, a skill she claimed to have learned while accompanying her tap-dancing husband on the Vaudeville circuit. She could make an entire meal including biscuits and dessert with a collection of nesting pots she hung in descending order above the apron sink in the nook that passed for a kitchen. Everything she made, absolutely everything, tasted wonderful. Light and airy if it was to be so, dark and rich if it was to be so.

It was Notty who had taught her only granddaughter how to make a cake from scratch, among other things in her odd collection of road-recipes. Because Sara wanted to remember and preserve the memories of afternoons spent in conversation across the table from her with a pot of tea and some delicious confection all crumbly and sugary she was a very good student indeed. And soon she became the official baker for every family occasion. Her cakes were as whimsical as she was reserved, some sported plastic animals parading under paper umbrellas, some were towering with multi-colored layers ascending into the heavens until they listed at a crazy angle like the Cat in the Hat’s hat. She learned to make fairy cakes, iced finger squares with tiny flowers sprouting new buds and delicate stamens made from spun sugar. Once she’d even created a Greek temple with a hollowed-out center filled with tiny marzipan people which you could count if you were brave enough to peer through the tiny windows.

As it happened, Notty was made of stronger stuff than her daughter, and at 85, divorced from the tap-dancer for more than half of those years, she was still going strong. Still walking up and down two flights of stairs, still shopping one item at a time along six blocks of specialty shops with her wheeled carrier filled to the brim. Still handicapping the trotters in front of her ancient television console, apron folded between her knees, pencil in one hand, paper in the other. Still cooking on her hotplate and sharing the proceeds with everyone, including the homeless guy who had staked out her doorway decades ago and never left.

It was thus Sara found her, two streetcars and a subway ride later, above the fish-and-chips shop in Cabbagetown, stirring something in the kitchenette, talking to herself.

She jumped.

“Lordy! Why on earth did I ever give you a key?” The confection in the pot burbled.

Sara put the cake box down on the Formica table. The grey marbled surface was worn through to white it had been scrubbed so many times. Her coat came off around her and flowed in waves of fur around the chair. She had taken off her boots by the door.

Notty was all she had left.

Her grandmother stirred the pot with singular concentration until something about the sound of the mixture or the aroma rising above it satisfied her and she took it off and put it on the ceramic drainboard next to her sink to cool. There was no talking yet. Sara was content to sit quietly and be still within the light and the warmth, to put her back to the framed square of darkness outside. There was a flap of something white on the line off her back porch. The one she'd fallen from so many years ago.

Ganma, ganma, she falled off the roof....

“Notty….”
The older woman turned.
The pot cooled.
“Where is Tom? Where is my brother?”

Theory XII

2007-02-15T14:22:00.000-08:00

Christmas was just around the corner. It was a difficult time for Sara who blamed her mother’s poor planning for bringing her into the world on the 24th, Christmas Eve, and thereby spoiling the magic that was meant to belong to this holiday alone: the heady elixir of Santa’s mysterious, midnight appearance via the chimney, the gigantic velvet goodie-stuffed stockings appearing at the ends of their beds by morning and the final triumph of the orgasmic mountain of brightly colored, beribboned presents waiting under the tree, hot chocolate standing by. It was a pleasure the entire Moresby family ascribed to, including Sara who was well-indoctrinated from an early age.

So it was no surprise that Sara remained considerate and modest about the passing of her birthdays. She was mindful of the wrench it might throw into the frenzied Dickensian-style preparations her mother undertook each year for their family and the surrounding bridge-playing neighborhood: A misletoe and holly-decked reception followed by a full-course dinner with roast goose and Yorkshire pudding, mince and pumpkin tarts, flaming plum pudding, sticky treacle and salt-water taffy, red and green aspic molds.... and while the men smoked cigars, a turn as rosy-cheeked and muffler-draped (or so her mother pictured it) carolers out on the street.

God rest ye merry gentlemen....

And too, Sara's brother found the whole juxtaposition of one celebration over another particularly annoying and said so to anyone who would listen. Gifts were awkward because sibling rivalry inevitably intervened and Sara had to settle for a Christmas cupcake with candles rather than the dinosaur or cowboy and Indian monstrosities produced for her brother’s well-attended summer events. Outsiders felt the need to apologize to her, oh you poor thing! Crushed into Christmas that way… and she always demurred to the contrary.

In her darkest days when her mother was ill and there wasn’t anyone to care for her but Sara, Delys had been overcome by guilt and had begged her daughter to forgive her foolishness and made her promise to buy herself ‘the biggest cream cake in the Belgium Bakery’ when her birthday came around again. “I’ve left you some money in my will,” she whispered to the close and present ear. “Money for cake, and a fur coat if you want one!”

But now Sara had the house to herself and she found she had momentum for neither cake nor tree and as the holidays drew near had gotten no closer to the stacked boxes of tinsel and blown-glass ornaments stored in the attic. But Nate’s declaration of ownership over her bike was rankling and she found herself hovering at the bottom of the pull-down with more intention than she’d felt in years.

Dammit! That bike had been a substitute for her 17th birthday present that year even though she’d gained possession of it fully four months beforehand. Now she wondered if her mother had purchased it at all but had traded it for something valuable, like gossip. It would have been like her to set her cap for something unattainable, like the kid’s bike (much used but still serviceable) and carted it off without a backward glance.

What else could he mean with his snide remark about the questionable sale? She hadn’t stolen it, of this she was certain, for Delys was many things but she was not a thief. No, her methods were much more suburban. She was once very popular and her power gave her access to all kinds of valuable information.

The baby next door.

The girl skating on the river.

Outside the snow had begun again in earnest, heavy and wet with lakewater. Most houses on her street sported appropriate displays of glowing roof trim and festive lawn sculptures. Her's must look like a dark star in the night sky, sucking everything into an uncertain future. The notes of concern would start to appear in her mailbox and she couldn't have that. She turned the cup of tea around and around in her hand.

Night was falling down with the snow, they were coming together.

Delys' daughter stood for a while at the window, lights and heat off, until her tea went cold and scummy. Then she sighed and went up into the attic where she found the silver tinsel tree wrapped in tissue paper and carpenter’s tape.

Not this year.

When the snow had stopped and the silver of moon shed no light on the landscape Sara crept outside with her father’s hacksaw and cut down her mother’s naked plumeria bush. While Bertie watched from his usual place on the sofa, head on paws, she dragged the frozen skeleton inside (its fate long-ago sealed) screwed it into the tree-stand, strung lights on its mummified branches, and then baked herself a cake.

To Granny's house she would go.

Theory XI

2007-02-08T13:33:00.000-08:00

Delys had a collection of fur coats she took out each birthday and wore around the house in order of the year they were purchased.

The fox fur from her trip to New York in 1967. She and her best friend, Suzie Winowski, were single and in a mood to kick it up. Their hairsprayed candy-floss do's were as yet untouched by the ironed Berkeley style sweeping the cities (they were from a small town in northern Ontario) and someone (another friend?) had turned to take their picture. The photograph of the two of them striding down 5th Avenue, arms linked, smiles wicked, hung over the mantelpiece in the living room.

Her father gave it the evil eye every time he passed by. Why wasn’t the family portrait up there instead?

The full-length black Persian Lamb was a wedding present from her in-laws in 1974. For your glamorous side, they said, already counting the days when she would flee from their stolid son. But they hadn’t counted on the rewards of a life steadily climbing the accountancy ladder to a full partnership in a prestigious downtown firm....

...That paid for the luxurious mid-calf shearling in fawn with Bighorn sheep collar and sleeve trim, wood and leather barrel closures and a beaded knit cap a la Love Story. Very early-seventies, meant to capture the fading luster of a hippie generation that was fast passing her by. Being a mother and the wife of a junior executive, Delys had boomeranged past the pot-smoking era but wasn’t past looking the part in public.

You’re not wearing that to bridge with the Wilsons on Friday.

In the mid 80's her father had tried to mitigate the alarming trends in fashion by presenting his beautiful wife with a pelted ranch mink for Christmas in a swing style reminiscent of Doris Day in Pillow Talk. It shone and rippled in silky butterscotch waves across the new aluminum toboggan nestled under the tree. Both were adorned with red pom-pom bows.

Delys had accepted it with proper gratitude but worn it seldomly, preferring the next fur, one she’d found in at the Crippled Civilians resale store. This one was a sheared beaver jacket dyed burgundy with box pleats and big shoulder pads, which were back into style in the late 80’s when she found it wedged between a grey wool midi and a sad-looking men’s cashmere overcoat.

Sara cursed the appearance of the beaver jacket. Her mother had been obsessed with bargain clothing ever since she’d been fitting out two children on a slim household budget, but when she’d found the coat, whimpering for lack of attention but perked up by a good cleaning, her mother had never visited the inside of a regular clothing store again. There was nothing in her closet after her death but stained blouses and pilled pants.

She looked up from the phone and saw the beaver jacket. Somehow it had migrated from the basement to the hanger on the back porch door. Chip must have been by.

Her head hurt.
To Nate:
“I’m hanging up the phone, now.”
“I’m telling you the God-honest truth!”
He sounded desperate.
“Your mother…..”
The coat winked.
“Your mother, she loved shoes!”
Now triumphant.

Sara considered this.
It was true Delys had another obsession, for shoes. A particular style of shoe, rather. A pump with a two-inch squash heel and a gently rounded toe. She bought them in various colors and then dyed them other colors when the mood suited. Thirty-six pairs were still lined up along the bottom of her walk-in closet, from black to scarlet and every shade in between.

"Yes, sir, she loved shoes alright!"
“Why?”
“Beat's me.” Nate was calming down.
“No....I said, why did you know?" She got up and closed the door to the back porch. Tomorrow she would put the coat in the trash.

“It was ten years ago. She came to our house for a yard sale.”
“Sounds like her….” Sara was giving up. She slumped down next to the empty dinner plate.
“My parents……” He dwindled off for a moment. It seemed better to remember the yard sale than events that had followed….
“….they were out front and she came by. With the dog.
“Not Bertie.”
“No, another dog. Something with big ears and stubby legs.”
Their Bassett hound. Long gone now.
“She,” he continued, warming up to the subject, glad to be off that of his parents, “was very chatty.”
That would be Delys. Friendly.
“And she bought shoes.” Sara closed her eyes.
“Did she! My mom was a shoe nut too and they spent a good hour going through the box of cast-offs from the old lady’s closet.”
Suddenly the memory came to her.

“Six pairs!”
Delys burst through the front door with dog and sack tangling. The contents poured out onto the kitchen table a mess of worn, shabby pumps with the required squash heel and rounded toe. Sara backed away from them, the mixture of grease and dirty footpads and good leather waning. Their last legs, it seemed, were to be her mother’s.
“I’ll just dye them up and they’ll be as good as new!” She had that maniacal look in her eye. Like a rabid dog.
“Awwwww,” Sara caught herself.
Nate seemed not to notice.
“She told us about you!”
“And,” he added when met with silence, “..your brother.”
“But what…” She wanted to ask how it possibly could be that he’d remember this so many years ago and how he’d made the connection. She’d said nothing about her own life.

“It was the bike.”
“What?”
“You’ve forgotten.”
She hadn’t. It was just that it was crowded in with so many similar ones that it had disappeared into the minutiae.
“That bike was mine! I saw it the last time you were here and put two and two together.” He sounded so pleased.
“I hate you." It came out dull as dishwater. She had no energy left.

“Don’t you want to know why my mother sold that bike?”
“It wasn’t new….” She remembered how the it had been wheeled into the house after her mother had dumped her shoe booty on the table and gone out to fetch it.
“But how?” She should have known better than to ask this of her mother.
“I rode it home, silly!”
A picture, unbidden, came into view of Delys pedaling away in her boxy beaver jacket, bag of shoes, and the Bassett galloping along trying to keep up on his tether.

“Nate…..”
“It was fate.” He sounded grimly pleased.
“Nate….”
“You were listed….in the phone book.”
“Nate.”
“That bike was mine!” He shouted into the phone and hung up on her.
“That bike was old. And it was for shit.” She said to the wall. She’d said it once before, too. She’d meant it to be hurtful.

And Delys had laughed. The silvery sound was like magic, erasing everything. And nothing.

Theory X

2007-01-25T13:49:00.000-08:00

“Mother has been dead…..”
“Don’t say it!” came the command from the other end of the line. With one heavily-gloved hand, Sara lifted the lid on the spaghetti boiling on the stove. It was writhing around in the roiling water like a nest of angry vipers.
“You need to clean your stuff out.”
She put the cordless down on the counter and poured contents of the pot into a strainer. Huge clouds of steam billowed up and around her head. The phone, and the barely discernable squawk from the phone were temporarily rendered invisible.
Sara was tired. The day had ended with barely a whimper at the forgettably-named ad agency where she’d labored over a phalanx of sketches that, in her opinion, far outshone the original idea. But instead of murmuring appreciatively over the finished products the ridiculously-named and even more ridiculously dressed studio manager had merely clucked and taken them away with not so much as a thank-you very much.

The phone nattered on in its resting place on the counter and Sara emptied a tin of sauce with mushrooms into another pot and put the flame on.
By-your-leave, indeed!
She was last to go. Left alone at the sketch table to finish up what had obviously been the most problematical of the toy line, the other freelancers slipping away as anonymously as they’d chosen to be all day. Bucket lights suspended from the ceiling were turned off and the studio had been emptied of all the useless hangers-on who did little more than attend meeting after meeting and doodle prodigiously on leather-bound binders before getting into their expensive cars and roaring off for some evening fun. She’d shrugged on her coat and said goodbye to the only other person visible, a sad-looking MIS grunt tinkering with a crashed MAC, and headed out into the night.
The winter night had come for her, and with it biting cold.

The phone went silent.
She calmly redialed and when the line was picked up, apologized.
“Sorry, juggling too many things and it nearly went into the soup.”
“Sara…..”
“Chip, you have to get your stuff once and for all.”
“What’s the damned hurry?”
Sara had heard this all before.
“Your shoes stink.”
There was more sputtering on the other end.
“And your socks, too.”
Superheated, the sauce puffed up like a bloodied soufflé. She quickly pulled it to safety and sighed audibly into the phone,
“I’m finished with this conversation, Chip. Get your junk out of here or it will be on the lawn…..the slushy, freezing lawn, by next week.”
Then she hung up.

When the phone rang again she had a mouthful of spaghetti.
“What!” she managed.
“Sara?”
The voice sounded familiar. The last of the spaghetti slid down her throat. Gone, gone.
“Is this Sara?”
“How the hell did you get this number!” she cried.
“Whoah, don’t get your knickers in a twist.”
“I’m eating,” she said unnecessarily. She was going to hang up anyway,
“No, wait!” It hovered near her ear.
“I got your number from your mother.”
Sara put the phone back as close as she could to her mouth.
“My mother, for your information, is dead.”
“I know.”
“You never knew her.”
“I did.”
Sara didn’t know how to respond to this.
“Please,” said Nate. “Please don’t hang up on me.”

Theory IX

2007-01-18T17:04:00.000-08:00

Bud came home well after dark to find his brother sitting on the couch. Implements of dinner were scattered around him on the floor and he looked asleep, a china teacup balanced delicately on his stomach. He tried to sneak past.

“Oh, girl....”
The plaintive refrain from a Beatles’ song rose out of the dark shape. Nate had a beautiful voice when he chose to share it.
“Doof, you scared the shit out of me.” Bud went to turn on the sole light, a battered Eames floor model they’d rescued from a dumpster. Someone had pasted Scooby-Doo stickers on the shade.
“Hey, Bud.” Nate sounded tired.
“Any dinner left?” Bud was pulling at his valet bowtie. It seemed to be getting tighter every day and Nate teased him it was because of the weights he was lifting in the garage. ‘Soon, I’m going to be calling you Bulldog.’
“Vermicelli in vodka sauce with Bella mushrooms.”

The two brothers separated, as was their custom, for the night. A thin ribbon of light from the kitchen door provided the only illumination after Nate had heaved himself out of the depths of the couch and shut down the lamp.
“Oh, gir,rl…..” he began again. The replying dishes clamored and pots crashed easing his troubles and turning his attention to sleep, which he did, toes up on the sofa, cup and saucer cradled in his arms.

************************************

On Monday Sara got a call from Circle Me, with a job for the week. They needed an illustrator for a toy concept meeting at a downtown advertising agency. Sara had been working less and less lately and she took to wondering if it had anything to do with her dislike of the head recruiter. But then she was careful to hide her feelings.

Still, work was dwindling and it might be time to find another placement agency. It couldn’t be the quality of her work - she’d always gotten good reviews from clients. And she was a quick study, picking up the style and pace of the assignment without complaint. But the bigger advertising agencies had stopped calling for repeat work and she was being sent out now for increasingly smaller outfits, with commensurate drops in her hourly rate.

This client was in a loft on John Street and she’d been in the same location when it had been occupied by others. A succession of start-ups with the same fresh faces and eager energy that had gradually dwindled into oblivion. She introduced herself to the smartly dressed woman at the reception (wasn’t it the same curved plywood desk?) only to be directed back into a bullpen of sorts where a dozen or more art-school students (for they looked that age) were busily sketching at a railroad flat of tables. They barely looked up when a woman with flaming red hair and thigh-high boots materialized out of a warren of wavy-glass cubicles.

There was that look again. Too nice. The others scribbled furiously, not a familiar face in the bunch.
“You must be…..” she searched her memory. Not very bright, thought Sara.
“Oh, yes!” she cried and arched her eyebrows to indicate that she had, in fact, remembered, and then fairly pushed her to an empty seat next to a boy-child with multiple piercings and a faux Mohawk.
His striped sweater sleeves were longer than the ends of his fingers but it hadn’t slowed him down any. He was making fashion work for him.

Sara edged away on the stool, it screeched on the concrete floor and he gave her an unflattering look.
The red-headed woman had disappeared.
What was she supposed to do?
Looking around surreptitiously she bided her time by then digging through her large drawstring bag for the box of pantones and drawing pencils.
The boy looked up and sighed.
“Honey…..”
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped.
“You idiot, that’s the name of the studio manager!”
“Sorry.” She needed this person, this pierced, stuck-up brat.
“Anyway, Honey has assigned everyone on this block to do working drawings of one of 12 SKUs. And you,” he finished with a flourish, “have number 12.” He then pointed to the bottom of the rubbish heap of choice, a badly drawn concept sketch, no doubt by the untalented product manager, of a hideous thigamajig with seven arms and some kind of squawk box attached to its bulbous head. No doubt it came with a clever name dreamed up by the creative director who came with the team. The sketch had been fingered by everyone before being abandoned, alone, in the middle of the table.

Mercifully the boy left her alone after that and Sara, after glancing at the other work in progress, set about to do her part.

Behind her Honey, resplendent in a fake fur vest as she prepared to take an early lunch, whispered to a co-worker as they peered around the bookend cubicle.
“Look at her,” she said, jabbing a red fingernail.
The man saw a woman hunched over the table, a dove amongst a flock of peacocks, her baggy grey sweater loosening woolen threads of silver to float upwards where they threatened to take hold in the unruly brown hair.

Honey shuddered.
The man shrugged.
“She’s working hard. Isn’t that all that matters?”
The studio manager looked up over the sea of glass anxiously. Her bosses expected miracles in the three days they had to get this presentation together.
She’d take a brown mouse.
She’d take a dead body if it would produce for her.

…..but the pinched face, the owlish glasses from another era. The agency had told her she was young, OCA trained.
Where had they found her?

Theory VIII

2007-01-04T13:29:00.000-08:00

Sara’s hands were full of tea things so she ignored him. The room had cooled somewhat as the day had begun to cloud over, withdrawing into the inevitability of the season. There seemed to be no heat source in the room, just as she had remembered it, the air currents ran with the time of day and were just as unpredictable.

She lifted the biscuit up again and after licking the chocolate from her finger, repeated,
“These are good.”
Nate snorted.
“You don’t have to sound quite so incredulous.”
“It’s just….”
He stood up again, restless.
He thumped over to the drum set and eased himself onto the stool. It squeaked but admirably held.
Her tea had grown cold and she put the cup down. He seemed to have forgotten she was there.
“Mabel!!”
He let loose with a blood-curdling, banshee cry, picked up a pair of drumsticks and crashed them onto the nearest drum, then hit the cymbal over and over. The sound was deafening. It was then she realized he had an iPod and was listening to something.
“Well!” she said with disgust and got up, leaving the tea cup perched precariously on the lounge arm.

As she neared the door she turned to reprimand him (even though his back was to her and she knew he couldn’t hear anything) and before she could speak he lifted his hand with a dismissive wave before launching into a frenzied solo.

He could play the drums too. It was all lies, she thought with grim satisfaction and made sure to bang the door behind her.

**************************************8***********************************

That night she decided to cook. It had been a long time and it took a half-hour searching before she found her mother’s Joy of Cooking, splattered over and yellowed with age. Perhaps some pork chops from the freezer would do. Her mother had loved pork chops and surely there were some left over.

The freezer was in the basement. Sara hadn’t been down there in a long time. She stood at the top of the stairs trying to make out the dark shapes below. Her parents never had bothered to put in a light switch. Only a string hanging from the ceiling light, lost somewhere in the depths. She kept one foot on the landing and leaned backwards to keep close to the warmth of the stove. Beside her the windows overlooking the garden were dark reflections, revealing nothing of the world outside. They had begun to frost over, silver patterns obscuring all else.

Not your fault.
Oh yes, oh yes.

Geordie was six days old. She’d seen him from their stoop, crying and crying.

And there were other times.
Oh yes, oh yes.

The girl skating on the river.

She was so full. Fullsome. A lovely girl. There wasn’t room for anything else. The patterns of things were so clear to her, why hadn’t they been to anyone else?
Outside the air crackled and popped, burst onto the glass as a visible testament to the forces of nature.
So predictable.

The darkness was too much. She shut the door and eased away from the swollen, tired frame, covered with so many grimy prints it was hard to tell when and from where they’d come.

The water on the stove began to boil.
And boil.

That night she lay in bed and thought about Bud. Bud the beautiful. Bud the crazy. Bud the provider. Nate had crashed his drumsticks and beaten his feet on the floor but Bud could not be banished. He was for dreaming. She turned on her side and watched a spider hang gracefully from the top of the window frame. She folded into herself. Took out a flashlight and read her book under the covers.

Bud stayed outside, like a ghost.

The Theory of Big and Small VII: Bud

2006-12-28T13:34:00.000-08:00

Bud stared at Sara for a moment.
“Plat!” he said, turned on his heel and disappeared into the bowels of the house. She heard a door slam.
Nate made as if to get up and then fell back, waving his hand dismissively.
Sara sat motionless, unsure what to do.
Or say.
“He’s having a bad day,” was Nate’s only comment before picking up his bottle again and sucking at it noisily.

“Don’t you have anything to offer me except beer?” Sara felt no desire to leave and the leather on the chair had warmed.
“Nope.”
He eyed her slowly. Now that she wasn’t running out the door he could take his time assessing her. She was wearing some old flannel shirt that looked like it had come from her dad’s closet and a pair of unattractive corduorys in some god-awful shade of puke green. Her hair would be quite nice in a thick, brown-y kind of way if she hadn’t put it into a ponytail and plastered it down with a sweaty wool tam. It lay on the floor next to the chair where she’d dropped it. He smiled. She must have ripped it off her head when Bud came in.

Like that would have made a difference.

She swiveled around, taking in the living room again. Nothing had changed, except the lumpy thing in the corner had been stripped of its canvas drape, revealing a drum set.

“You play?” She saw him drop his gaze out of the corner of her eye.
“Naw, that’s my brother’s stuff.” She exhaled. Of course he would be a musician. Moondoggy?
Why do you call him…..
“He thinks he’s a surfer and for some stupid reason he goes out to the lake every day in the summer looking for a good ride”. Nate laughed derisively and foam in the beer bottle volcanoed out and sprayed along the sofa in a delicate imitation of a cresting wave.
‘But….”
Nate laughed, then glared at her.
“He’s nuts, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Sara looked wildly back into the murky depths of the house.
“But…”
“Yeah, he’s cute isn’t he?” He was snarling. Or laughing, she couldn’t tell which.
“No, I mean….”
“Oh, you mean the waves? Or the lack thereof on Lake Ontario?”
She was getting frustrated.
“You said….!” Nate stopped whatever he was about to say. “You said he was going to school!” She was shouting now and there was the echo of a crashing sound in the back of the house.
For a moment Nate looked reflective. He swirled the contents of the amber bottle and watched the bubbles dance around the lip.
“He is in school. And he works part-time to pay for this palatial residence in which we both reside…..”
He catapulted up off the couch so suddenly Sara fell back into the Barkerlounger. She put her hands up over her face.
Nate lumbered to the kitchen and went straight through pushing the door in front of him with a loud bang. It swung back with equal force and cut her off into silence.

Where was her hat?
She stretched sideways over the side looking for it and was planning to make a run for it when Nate returned. He was carrying a wooden tray with a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits visible above the curved edges.
Sara tried to hide the tam, her hands were every which way. She ended up shoving it under her behind.
“’S okay,” he remarked without meeting her gaze. With the tray balanced deftly in one hand he pulled a small table over to her chair with the other and then set the tray down. Next to the delft-blue teapot, a delicate cup and saucer in a thorny rose pattern. The biscuits were dipped in chocolate. How had he put this together so quickly? The fluted china and teapot were another mystery.

“I have hot chocolate if you’d prefer,” he said in a fake English accent.
“This is nice, thanks,” she said a littled dazedly. It was then Sara noticed he’d included a large cotton napkin, neatly folded into a silver ring. She reached for it.
“Just don’t put it under your chin,” he said, wiggling his ringed fingers at her like it was a royal command.

The tea was steeped to a dark peaty color when she poured it into the cup. The aroma of caramel steamed up toward her and curled around her face and hair. Not knowing where else to put it, she took a biscuit and put it on the rim of her saucer. It was all a bit awkward, maneuvering over the chunky contours of the lounger and she remained perched on the edges, trying balance everything. It took her mind off the situation at hand, at least momentarily. The two of them passed a few minutes in complete silence. She sipped.

Then,
“Your brother.” Sara started again with more authority. "Is there something wrong with him?” She’d only heard barely two words out of him anyway, and he’d started out on the right foot.

“Nothing a little medication wouldn’t cure,” came the reply. She looked for signs of sarcasm on the face visible over the rim of her cup but found none. She took a sip and thought some more.
“I’ve seen that look,” said Nate.
“I’m just confused.” About Bud, and about the tea and biscuits suddenly appearing by her side.
“He’s really not nuts.” Nate sighed. Every bit of air came out of him like a deflated balloon. “He just likes to fake people out.” Nate shoved the empty bottle under the couch with one huge, bare heel. Somewhere along the line he’d shed his flip-flops which were askew like two bunny ears next to the couch.
He leaned forward.
“You don’t know what it’s like to grow up with a twin brother who looks like an underwear model.” He was expressionless. “I kind of went a different way with my look.”
“And yes…..we are identical twins if that’s your next question.” To her silence he added, “Hence the oddness of it all, wouldn’t you agree?”
That being the obvious elephant in the room (she forgave herself the pun), Sara tried to stick to the point.
“He seemed….well, a little strange at the end there,” She wasn’t sure how else to put it. He’d spat.
“It’s my brother’s way of evening out the playing field.”
“That’s insulting!” she managed before realizing what she’d said.
Nate lifted his hand and slapped the wattled flesh around his thighs. “I’ve been this way since second grade. It is an old habit, my brother’s lame way of protecting me.”
Sara took a bite of the biscuit. It was homemade, delicate and flaky. Buttery. She held it aloft.
“Did you?”
“Yes. One of my hobbies”
“And the tea?”
“My brother put the tray together for you. There’s another door to the kitchen from the back.”
She turned at that moment to see Bud re-entering the room. He was wearing a valet’s uniform with a red vest and little black bow tie. From the neck down he looked ridiculous. From the neck up……Sara realized then why it had been so hard for Nate to exist in the same space as his twin. Bud couldn’t help sucking the life out of everything around him, and time stopped. He was truly beautiful.
She turned wildly seeking the reflection of something in Nate’s face. It was a reflex, as primal as a wary animal looking for patterns in the shifting shadows of the brush, listening for something new, something foreign. Everything had to make sense, to fit together or there would be danger.

Nate sat impassively, waiting for the moment to pass. He had long ago stopped trying to help, to suck in his gut or turn his face to match that of his brother, to show off the angular line of their cheeks, the square jaw, the vibrant, alive eyes. He was beyond truculent (another phase), beyond defensive. He let her scan his features, the pouchy flesh under his eyes, the pinky stretched bum-cheeks, the jowls falling away into his neck. He sat and waited.

Bud barely slowed down.
“Bye.” It came out mumbled. Strangled.
Nate's brother totally avoided her, she was a leper to him and he got out of the door as fast as he could, the metal screen door banging open and snapping back on his shins as he fled.

She heard the truck start up and drive away. Nate hadn’t moved.
The cookie was still in her hand, the chocolate warmed and coating her fingers. She put it down.

“You’re sitting on your hat,” said Nate.

The Theory of Big and Small VI

2006-12-08T11:06:00.000-08:00

Nate was standing there, fully functional in flip-flops, a pair of baggy cotton shorts and a gigantic teeshirt with Keep On Truckin’ emblazoned across his ample man-breasts. She had forgotten how tall he was – over six feet, broad shouldered. Not all of him was lost to fat – his massive arms showed muscular underpinnings, and his calves were firm and surprisingly well formed. But these details were overshadowed by the rolls of extended flesh around his face, neck, and the swell of his gigantic belly. And the fingers, like sausages, were still adorned with an array of flashy rings. He stood in the doorway for a moment behind the protection of the outer glass screen before reaching out and unlatching it.

Sara wasn’t white sure what to say but as Nate stepped aside she came in, this time to a room that was familiar in memory, still dark and shadowy, but not so frightening.

“I……”, she started and then gave up. What was she doing here? Feet thudding on the floorboards, Nate moved past her to his post on the sofa where he let himself down but not without tremendous objection from the furniture, which squealed and groaned. The cast was gone so he was walking with much more confidence, though his bulk still made movement difficult. The room looked clean, no fluke there, she thought. Someone was taking care of the place.

She stood awkwardly at the door until he gestured to a Barkalounger chair next to the sofa. She’d hadn’t remembered it being there before. It was dark brown leather and obscenely padded, with a wooden lever on the side to shoot the out the footstool. She gingerly ventured into its depths and was immediately engulfed, legs dangling. Nate had her at an advantage.

He didn’t look like the young teenager she’d mistaken him for either. Now it was obvious he was much older than that, just as he had claimed. And to prove his point he reached down beside him and lifted a half-empty bottle of Labatt’s Blue.

“Can I get you one?” he said with a malicious gleam.

Sara found her voice. She scooted forward on the chair and hung there in the balance, hands firmly on the armrests. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t come by sooner…” Nate looked like he’d heard this all before. He gave an exaggerated sigh.
“My brother bought me another guinea pig, if that’s what’s worrying you,” his expression made clear that he thought otherwise.
“Yes, well, about that.” He watched her with some interest. “I think I should pay for….pay for…well. “Yes, let’s not beat around bush, shall we,” Nate interrupted. “Her name was Mabel. Mabel! She was twenty-four guinea years old, liked pistachio ice cream, quiche, and moonlight walks on the beach.” He chortled. Sara stared.

“You know, I’m really sorry!” The chair was getting uncomfortably hot and it seemed to be taking her back into its depths.
“Sure, that’s why it took you two months to come by and tell me so.”
Had it been that long?
“Yes, I know.”
“Inexcusable,” she squeaked out at last.
Nate licked his lips. “Well anyway, my new g-pig is a guy this time. He’s big and bad works out every day on that wheel of his and anytime you want to bring your little dustmop around for a slap-down I’m sure he can take it on.”

She deserved this.
“Okay, okay, just let me know what I can do to make this up to you.”
She had inched forward on the chair and had almost got her tippy toes on the floor when the kitchen door banged open and she started with a yelp and pitched forward.
Nate turned and cocked his head, but his eyes were on Sara who was still trying to regain her balance. She was always falling down in this place!

“Hey bro, have you…..” The voice behind her stopped and she turned half-expecting to see another large apparition. She froze.

The man was tall and lanky, wearing a maroon hoodie over a black teeshirt and jeans. His dark hair was tousled into thatchy peaks. He had a strong chin, with a bit of stubble, which he was rubbing, looking sleepy. His feet were bare. As he stood rooted to the spot staring at Sara, she saw he had the same green-flecked eyes as his brother.

She was bent over and scrabbled to right herself. The chair! She moved as far away from it as possible.

Nate didn’t bother to get up. He leaned back and lifted his beer to his lips.
“Hey Moondoggie. Thought you were already at work." His eyes flickered back to Sara. "I’m just hanging out with my gal-pal.”
“But I’m not…..” Sara sputtered and then stopped. “I mean….’
“Oh, that’s right,” Nate said with exaggerated politeness, “I guess you haven’t met my brother.”
His free arm hand extended out in the parody of a grand gesture. The rings clinked.
“Bud, meet……” he looked at her pointedly.
“Sara,” she managed.
“Sara, meet Bud….my twin, “ he finished with no small amount of satisfaction.

The Theory of Big and Small V: False Start

2006-12-02T16:53:00.000-08:00

The bitter cold snap was gone by Sunday – a bright, warm kind of day that often came on the heels of winter’s false start. A last gift before bowing to the elements and turning on itself, giving up like a sigh unto death. In the transition time the impermanence of spring-like weather was like forbidden honey, to taste and taste.

And the morning sun had come on strong, turning the night’s freeze into rivulets of fresh water pouring down from glistening roofs and dripping into the sodden earth. The thin layer of snow on the streets had melted into patches of evaporating dampness. Soon all traces of the storm would be gone Sara noted with some satisfaction as she stood at the living room window watching a sparrow (her mother called them ‘little brown jobbies’) peck at something in the damp earth of the rose garden. From the warmth of her bed to the cool darkness of the rest of the house she now felt drawn to the sun, to get out and feel it on her face and arms. A bike ride would do.

Sara had no place to go in particular but after taking Bertie for his morning constitutional she put on a an old pair of corduroys pinched at the ankles by a pair of bike guards, and a hat to guard against the sun. The sky was very blue, washed clean of city soot, the kind of pleasing warmth against a sweater that felt almost like spring. She had a beach bike with thick tires and simple gears. The green paint had long since chipped away but Sara thought the harsh, changeable weather of the city and the constant wind coming off Lake Ontario full of acid rainwater made repainting it a waste of time.

She put her leather satchel in the big wire basket and pushed off, coasting slowly down the long driveway, feet grazing the pavement, thin scarf flying behind. Hands on the handlebars, she looked up and saw the friendlier clouds, the small white ones that had so often taken up her thoughts as she lay under the plumeria bush in the backyard. Her parents, who’d been to Hawaii once on a tour, had bought it home as a seedling and while made it through year after year of winter to grow spreading branches heavy with fragrant blossoms of yellow and cream, they’d told her often of their night at the luau in Wakiki when their host had threaded dozens of these flowers into leis which were put around their necks before the feast began. The way they described it, looking at each other, the pungent aroma that her mother said made her giddy and a little bit ‘fast’. She would laugh then, like Katherine Hepburn, looking heavenward, and her father would always blush.

The plumeria shouldn’t have survived in this cold climate but her mother bagged the huge bush in plastic every winter and then wrapped it in an extra layer of burlap. Then she sprayed a layer of water on it during the first hard frost in January and there it stayed, silent and sleeping, until April when the longer days and warmer weather gradually dried up outer covering and her mother would free it again. The neighbors declared it a marvel.

Sara had never been to Hawaii but her mother had once told her she was not so different from the plumeria. She’d come home from school one afternoon with scratches on her face and arms.

“What happened?” It was a rare day when Delys was home. She was usually down the street taking care of the neighbor’s children. Sara had fled directly into her room and refused to come out.

“My bangs aren’t straight!” was all that came muffled through the door after much pleading. When her mother found it unlocked an hour later Sara was sitting on the old wooden vanity, her hair sopping wet flattened under strips of scotch tape across her forehead. She was pressing her palms on her hair, smoothing it down and rocking back and forth.

“What happened!” her mother demanded again, taking her by the shoulders. Sara looked off into the mirror and saw everything in the backwards world. There were so many unexplainable things there. She didn’t understand, but it didn’t stop them from happening. Her mother’s cornsilk hair curled away from her face like a spent dandielion, ready to rise up into the air, like the rest of her. She was all soft and simple. A simpleton. She watched Sara with all the intensity she posessed and still it wasn’t enough to penetrate the density between them.

But she was waiting for an explanation.

“They took me to a closet.” The supply room at the school. The others thought she’d told her teacher about their glue sniffing marathons out by the gymnasium door. The Principal had come for them, there was blood to pay. The girls found a key, pushed her inside and held her up against the wall, clawing at her, stoned and enraged. She didn’t scream. When they were done they left, one by one and she had crept out after them and taken her place in English class as if nothing had happened. They filed in later, defiant and glaring at her. From now on she'd be labled as a snitch.

It was useless to tell her mother any more. She’d long ago stopped trying to cross the divide, to pluck at the strings of her mother’s heart. There were too many children vying for her attention and she’d always said Sara could take care of herself.

“Like water off a duck’s back,” Delys marveled to her friends. “I don’t worry about my Sara!” And then would come the darkness when she complained of the menial jobs she had to take to support them and her spendthrift husband.

But that day her mother had looked hard into her daughter’s eyes and sighed.

“You’re in trouble, aren’t you?” she asked. And she looked off for a while, still holding on to Sara in a protective fashion. Daughter leaned into mother and it was then Delys said,
“You aren’t so different than my plumeria.” Sara didn’t care what she was saying, so lost she was in the embrace. Her mother put her face close to Sara’s lank hair but stopped at putting a hand up to stroke it. “This isn’t your time, she said with resignation, “and you’ve got to cover yourself up and wait for summer to come.” It was then Sara realized just how much drudgery the delicate Hawaiian transplant had been, demanding her mother’s time without mercy, unrepentant. And only Sara to lie under it each flowering spring to breathe in its perfume and dream its dreams.

There was no traffic on the street, dappled as it was from the trees still heavy with fall foliage, the distance beckoned. She set out for unknown territory. Today would be an adventure!

But it was not to be. One turn led to another and she was on the street where Nate lived. She didn’t care if he lived or died. But the house was suddenly there and in the driveway sat a red pick-up truck.

Something new.

She parked her bike on the kickstand and unlatched her pant guards. Shaking out like a dog coming from the rain she made her way up the path and finding the door closed and locked this time, she knocked and waited for someone to let her in.

The Theory of Big and Small: IV

2006-11-25T10:56:00.000-08:00

The next day was Saturday and Sara had a great deal to do. Shopping to start with, for a new winter hat, perhaps a matching pair of gloves if they weren’t too dear, followed by a mug of hot chocolate from the donut shop near the Canada Place Mall on Yonge Street.

The day hadn’t improved over Friday’s dismal showing so rather than ride her bike downtown she took the streetcar along Dundas to the downtown retail district. It was a chance to read her latest book anyway, an English mystery about a middle-aged woman who loved to wear big hats and stuck her nose into local crimes. She always seemed to be a step ahead of the local constabulary, then in some kind of peril at the end. But in this series the woman always managed to get out of any mess with her hat and dignity intact so there was always one more book to look forward to.

The streetcar was over-warm so Sara took off her old scarf and stuffed it in the pocket of her dark wool coat. The sound of the car rumbling over the tracks always soothed her. That and the regular dinging of the old-fashioned pull-cable to alert the driver that a passenger wanted to get off at the next stop. The windows in this one were also old-fashioned, vintage 1940’s as was the streetcar. She pinched the two metal tabs on either side of the frame and slid the glass up a little to let in some fresh air. In the summer these cars had no air-conditioning so they always seemed to be too close for comfort. She settled back and opened her book, careful not to make eye contact with anyone lest she be drawn into the life around her. With the windows open the sounds of traffic, the clatter of the metal wheels, and the snap-crackle of the electrical post connecting them to the rails above the street were as much a part of Sara as the contours of her room at home, and just as comforting.

Someone sat down next to her and she kept her eyes on the book, surreptitiously inching closer to the window. He smelled of curry and pushed several large grocery bags into the space beneath their feet. Sara crossly jammed her leathers closer to the heating vent below and began to regret not having taken her bicycle. She looked out the window to the low clouds, so close they seemed to be ready to settle on the rows of brick storefronts and their second floor apartments. The sky was too full, multi-layered in colors of smoke and ash, heavy with something. People on the street had finally let go of the vestiges of fall lightweights, scarves and hats in colors and tweeds peppered their outfits, collars turned up, lives turned inward. People hurried more in the cold and today they were looking up now and then, a sure sign that something was about to happen.

It was late November.

And always this way. A perfectly good day ruined by bad weather or someone pushing too close to her on the streetcar. She wanted to give a vicious kick to the groceries rubbing against her leg, the raw chicken sloshing about next to jars of heavy sauces, thick stalks of giant leeks jutting up from the confines and making her eyes water. With an audible sigh she pulled her book up in front of her face and forced herself to focus on the story. The English countryside, so verdant and peaceful. The lives of the villagers in this town, so intertwined and predictable. The frisson of the hunt for a killer…..

The streetcar lurched to a stop, bell clanging, and Sara realized they had reached Dundas and Yonge. With a yelp she shot up and pushed her way past the man with the groceries and joined the queue of people getting off from the back door.

It was bitterly cold and she thought she saw the first snow flurry was making its way from above. Sara lowered her head like the others and hurried to the big revolving doors of the old Simpson’s Building without bothering to retrieve her pocketed scarf. Once inside the oppressive heat hit even harder and she started to feel a little dizzy. She undid the big round buttons on her coat and when that didn’t work she took it off completely and draped it over her arm while she awkwardly tried to pick up objects of interest with her one free hand. Finally she acclimatized and put the coat back on, open. It wasn’t perfect but it would do.

Like in any good department store there were luxury, impulse-buy items near the entrance. One wouldn’t be in a mood to purchase a new watch, for instance, if the money had already gone for winter boots or underwear. Sara was perfectly aware of this ploy but it didn’t stop her from sliding her hand along the rows of shiny objects on display with veiled enthusiasm. With both hands now freed (gloves safely stowed in the other coat pocket) she fingered the necklaces of heavy silver and faux-pearls, her favorite. She took one or two off the hanging racks and tried them up against her neck experimentally. Catching herself in the mirror turning this way and that coquettishly she blushed a furious crimson, then forgot as a display of dinner rings came into view.

They were perfectly gaudy, but fascinating. Big and bold, some with dozens of tiny jewels set into intricate patterns, starbursts of yellow and gold, flowers of fake diamonds, rubies, emeralds. She thought of the parties people would wear these to, the clubs they would flash them in, a perfect accent for strappy black dresses flowing down like a breath of air over flat bellies and perfectly proportioned behinds. When they moved the rings would dazzle and play on the stems of cosmopolitan glasses, above them curious, speculative glances, watching this way and that, brushing off one or another before settling on the right one. Then she saw a particularly large gold ring with a snake winding around a gigantic red stone set square in the middle and she thought of Nate. He was grotesque, like these rings. He had shouted at her, his muumuu swaying and revealing the rise of his thigh…Bertie had killed his guinea pig! She felt a little sick remembering the tornado of blood whirling around them, and quickly turned away.

She must find a hat. And gloves, she said firmly to herself. She deserved a little something to meet the long winter ahead. But even the luxury of trying on dozens of woolen tams, cloches, felt hats with feathers and rabbit-fur earmuffs did nothing to remove the picture of Nate and his dead companion from her head. Finally she bought something dark grey and sensible and fled the store, new gloves forgone. Only the promise of hot chocolate kept her going and the chill in her bones made her want to live.

The donut shop was bright and noisy. Sara sat in a corner table by the window and watched the flurries, now thickening in earnest to the first snowfall of the season, come down in ever increasing numbers. The streets and sidewalks turned from dark grey to soft white, falling snow arcing toward the tall windows. It was so cold outside the patterned flakes stayed on the glass without melting and she put her face close to one of them. A perfect hexagon, the color of crystalline sugar webbed and strung into patterns as intricate as fine lace. Dark shapes rushed by, too early for boots, sliding and cursing the wetting and seeping coldness into their shoes. But here inside the aroma of glazed maple and honeyed dough, the steam of coffee and muted conversation she was safe, the paper cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream before her on the formica table. She held on to it, and after a while, lifted the warm confection to her lips.

Soon it would be dark, the thin day claimed by the storm pushing the sun far, far away. The invisible orb would dip toward the horizon and be gone before anyone had seen it, defeated and denied its pleasure.

Sara took for home and the shelter within. From there she would watch the snow make its way up the garden steps and fill the dying beds.

Soon the snow would cover her dreams and she would sleep.

The Theory of Big and Small III

2006-11-16T12:15:00.000-08:00

Sara had never known Bertie to attack anything, let alone a helpless, kitten-soft guinea pig. Her happy dog, (or at least he seemed that way now), lay down on the floor next to his prize and promptly went to sleep, little bits of white fur and flesh speared on his whiskers. She couldn’t look for one second longer at the bloody lumps, dog and pig, any more than she could meet Nate’s eye. What she could see of it - a glistening orb barely visible beyond the hump of his fleshy chin was keeping its own counsel. They were all still on the floor, Nate having slumped back, arms stretched in supplication. After an interminable silence, at last came the whimpering.

It seemed she had some explaining to do.
“Bertie’s never…..”
He suddenly shot up like a dead man come to life on a morgue slab. Sara gasped and scuttled backwards until she met the wall. He had strength after all, enough to start pushing himself up on his hands, and while she remained frozen, he groaned and grunted and rolled himself over. Then he managed to get to his knees, all the while making god-awful noises.

Before she could protest he managed to stagger to his feet.

“You liar!!” she cried and got up.

“If you hadn’t killed Mabel I would have been stuck on this floor,” he retorted, breathing heavily. He turned on her. “You think that because I’m heavy that I can’t get around?” He was flushed, fists balled, feet apart. Bags of fat and flesh hung from each kneecap, falling in waves around the top of the dirty cast that extended from ankle to upper calf. The skin was mottled, angry in red whelts where he’d been pressed to the floor,

He stepped toward her, the encased leg stiff and threatening like a club.

“Stop!” She put her hands up.

“Afraid of a fat cripple!” He snorted and something flew out of nose. He looked mortified.
“Sorry…..”
“Oh for heaven’s sake!” Sara moved toward the couch and found a squashed box of tissues. She edged closer.

“I really fell…..and it hurt.” Nate dropped his gaze to the floor and stood silent for a moment.
“Come on.”
He took the box offered to him and noisily blew his nose. Then he finally looked over toward where Mabel’s corpse lay.

“She was the only thing that kept me company.,…” The small voice quivered and fell into the vast abyss of his being. Everything seemed to fall into that black hole and disappear.

“What about your brother?”
“He’s at school all day and then he has to work…you know…to afford our luxe accomodations.” He gestured toward the barren walls and the lone piece of furniture in the room next to the metal bar and pulley apparatus. The walleyed couch sighed once again, tired of the critical looks.

The place wasn’t dirty, exactly. This room at least had been painted a pale cream color recently and the dark oak floors were swept. But it looked as if someone with good taste had moved on and the current occupants were living out of the contents of a Goodwill box left behind. Someone had washed the two high windows of stained glass on either side of an ornate fireplace (with cherubs of all things), and flanking the large front window were formal curtains of aging, heavy blue linen hung on wooden circlets from a matching valence. But all was dimmed by the meager light seeping around the edges of blinds and the pale eyes of privacy kept close. From their edges, only a sliver of the grey afternoon managed to penetrate the gloom.

She could see no means of entertainment in the stark surroundings. No television or computer. Something covered in a tarp showed itself at the far end, a shapeless lump hunched and quiet. Next to it a piano stool, or a doctor’s stool, because it was on wheels. Sara turned her gaze away.

“How old are you anyway?” They were still avoiding the subject of Bertie.

He gave her that sharp look again, veiled under heavy lids.

“Old enough to be home by myself, if that’s what you’re asking!”

Sara edged around, back to dog and corpse.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I’m old enough to vote and to drink!” He turned and clumped toward the kitchen.
“In fact, I’d like a beer…..how about you, then?”

Sara tackled him and they both nearly went to the floor.

“You’re 15 if you’re a day and you’re not going near the kitchen.” He threw her off with a bear swipe.

“Get out, now!” I don’t need you anymore and for your bloody information I’m a hell of a lot older than that!

It was the baby fat, the pearly luster, the skin of comfort and bottled milk, innocence. He pulled his mumumu closer, looking more like a sumo wrestler now than a fallen, lost innocent.

“Get out!” The roar was frightening.

Bertie took the command with a snap upwards and marched out the door, head held high.

Meekly, Sara followed.

The Theory Of Big and Small: II

2006-11-02T13:52:00.000-08:00

He had a clear, cunning gaze, and with it he raked her up and down in a comically obvious fashion.
“Nice.” He licked his lips.
She turned to go.
“Aww, come one!” He was whining. “You can’t possibly think that I could do anything to you?”
She blustered. It was all really too bizarre. “That wasn’t…….” They stared hard at one another.
“I’m a prick.”
She put her hands on her hips.
The dog was barking now in the dark recesses of the house. Sara looked fearfully off into them.
“He’s found something.” The boy gazed at her, more curious now. “Probably a huge spider. Or a nest of them because I have heard a lot of scratching back there”, he added thoughtfully.

Sara grabbed her handbag. The huge arms came up reflexively, with some effort. “I’m just kidding. But my brother tells me this kind of stuff all the time. He’s trying,” the cunning look was back, “to keep me out of the kitchen.”

“I doubt you could make it through the door,” Sara said before she could stop herself.
The boy laughed. It was a high-pitched sound, rippling like an electrical charge through every globule of his ample padding. “Good one…..now, can you help me up or what?”

Mollified she stood her ground. There was still the sound of barking from somewhere. Bertie didn’t sound like he was in trouble, but she had no idea what to do.
“How….?”
A large arm came up towards her, fingers wiggling.
“I’m Nate. Pleased to meet ya.”
She took his hand gingerly, trying not to lose her balance into the part of the floor that had become him.
“Sara.”
He eyed her appraisingly. “I think you’re strong enough.”
“For what?”
He pointed to a steel pole that was bolted to the ceiling and the floor. It was three feet distant, next to an enormous, ancient couch.
“I need to get to that.”
The couch was sagging in the middle, fabric and foam stretched into a bowed imprint of the shape on the floor. It looked like but for the floor it would have thinned down the middle into two halves and given up the ghost.
He lay there watching.

She moved closer to study the steel apparatus, which seemed to reveal itself as more than just a simple bar. It looked like something from a torture dungeon, with a lot of leather straps and strange pulley mechanisms.
Nate clunked a gigantic cast on the floor.
“Oh!”
“Yes, I have a broken leg.” He grunted. “You didn’t think that I was on this floor because I’m humongously fat do you?”
He waved away her answer and it as then Sara noticed the rings. Knuckle dusters. Big square jewels in shades of citrine, emerald and ruby. His fingers had grown around them like unstoppable fungus. He would die in them, she thought. They were never coming off.
He clunked his cast again.
She was aware with blushing rapidity that his legs were now splayed and the muumuu had ridden up to his upper thighs. “I……”
Bertie started to bark in earnest again and she could hear thumping and thrashing from the kitchen.
“I have to…..” she gestured toward the darkness.

There was a tremendous crash and with a Herculean strength belying his size, a growling Bertie barreled back through the swinging door furiously shaking an object between his teeth.
Sara felt a splash of wet on her cheek and went to put her hand to her face before she realized that Bertie was gnashing a huge rat and the wriggling thing was squealing and spraying blood everywhere.

She was screaming a high pitched keen of operatic proportion before she identified the source of the sound as her own but was powerless to stop it. Bertie took it as encouragement and began to dance all around the available floor space chomping and flipping the bloody thing in the air.

“Mabel!” came a louder cry from the floor and Nate’s legs scissored together with the speed of an enraged mother cow and caught Sara by the ankles. As she went down she heard distant, futile sobbing and the sound of Bertie still scrabbling to hold on to his prize.

With an superhuman roar, Nate rolled over and the floor reverberated. Spoke to Sara who was at sea, lost in the pandemonium. She heaved herself up, pushing as far away as she could from the granite of flesh, the opening grave, the blood. Somewhere her shoe.

The boy was sobbing inconsolably.

“Mabel...", he moaned, looking only at his clenched fists. His rings. Bertie was behind him, stopped for a second, more because the thing in his mouth had stopped fighting. Sara scrambled to her feet, heaving. With indignation.

“My guinea pig!” he cried out helplessly. He was staring now at Bertie who’d trotted around to show off her grisly prize. She saw that it was indeed a furry white and brown object in the dog’s mouth. It looked completely terrified and very much close to death. Rivulets of blood were coming out of the belly wounds her dog had inflicted and its tiny pink paws were jerking in spasms of pain.

“Oh, god….” Sara sank to her knees. Huge tears rolled unchecked down Nate’s face, mixing on the floor with the blood.

Bertie sat. The guinea pig went limp.

“I’m so, so very sorry…..”

Bertie grinned and Mabel fell with an unceremonious thud to the floor.

The Theory Of Big and Small I: Miss Sarah Walks the Dog

2006-10-25T15:35:00.000-07:00

It was a grey day, not much for walking but Sara thought it would be good for her baby. Bertie had been moping around quite a bit lately and had taken to watching her every move under shaggy brows.
“Let’s go then!” She snapped on his leash and took the keys from the wall hook, quietly closing the door behind her. Cold for early September. Not promising.

Looking up at the uncertain color of the gathering clouds she stood with her back against the door on the small cement landing and thought about going back inside for an umbrella. But Bertie resisted and for a moment she felt trapped, the heaviness of shut places, the brief snarl of the terrier, the sky closing in. Thinking about it later she wondered if it had been a warning. A signal like so many she’d ignored in the past. Bending forward a little, just enough to see past the entryway, she looked down the street to the familiar places she’d been with Bertie for six years.

Sara had been walking Bertie the same two-block radius since he’d come home a bright and enthusiastic puppy, all hair and attitude. He’d never lost the enthusiasm of that first time, investigating every tree and blade of grass along the way day in and day out. She loved his curiosity - he never seemed to mind the sameness and Sara thought perhaps he lost his memories each night as he slept and when it came time for the morning walk it was as if everything were new again. It seemed like a blessing.

They started out down the long drive and Bertie strained at the leash nearly pulling her over. He sniffed at the mulberry bush, as was his custom, and then unceremoniously peed on it. Then he stretched, first one back leg, then the other and pawed at the ground in a curiously aggressive way as if he were getting ready for a cock-fight.
“Good dog!”
Instead of turning left this morning, perhaps with a mind to the darkening sky and missed opportunities for shelter, she decided to go right. Bertie seemed nonplussed and sniffed his way along without breaking stride. “So you really have forgotten?” she said, now more convinced than ever that left or right, up or down made no difference.

Sara had never turned gone this particular way before because it led to a main street and she was nervous of the traffic. Bertie was the runt of a terrier litter, all scruffy and stiff with energy, but he was tiny and he had no idea of the power of cars. He just saw them as noisy nuisances, along with children in strollers and anyone on a bicycle. Once they hit the main thoroughfare Bertie was quivering with a mixture of excitement, indignation and fear, bolting sideways when anything came near.

The sidewalk was stained and gummy with lots of small things for a curious dog to investigate so it was slow going. She was beginning to regret taking this diversion and his lead got shorter and shorter as she fought to avoid crashing into an assortment of legs, wheels and other small impediments. Bertie took this as an insult and began to strain, taking out his aggression on anything near. When he started barking at an old woman coming out of the green grocers she hastily pulled him onto the next side street and pulled him up short.
“Bad boy!”
He ignored her for a moment, turning to bark furiously at the apparition with a large shopping bag and she had to drag him behind her, face flaming with embarrassment. Once he quieted down she looked up and around at her surroundings. In all the years she’d lived in this quiet neighborhood in Toronto she’d never come down this street. It loomed with arching trees, gnarled and old, like the tainted cornfields from The Wizard of Oz, beckoning her take a chance toward a distant light. She looked around for a name but the block was very long and there was nothing to help her.

“Come along….” She said smartly, picking up the pace and Bertie marched up ahead of her looking around with interest. With the wind picking up the back of her skirt Sarah tried to figure out how to get back to familiar territory, all the while briskly click clacking down the paved sidewalk in her black pumps. Perhaps a block or two down she could find an alley to cut across….. Nothing seemed right, and although she knew she was not far from home it was like looking at a book upside down and tried to read the familiar…. she cursed her stupidity for losing her way. Where was the weeping willow that took up the whole of the front yard of the Millers, visible forever? And the big lilac bush two doors down at the Simpson’s. She’d lain under it as a child in the summer and the fragrant blossoms had been so heavy the branches had bent to touch the ground. She’d spent hours there on her back hidden from sight, the heady ambrosia all around her like a swaddling blanket. She could feel the milky promise of the early morning sun beginning to turn and the memory of warm, drowsy afternoons was sharper. She hurried along in the memory of the lilacs, waiting for her nearby. Somewhere nearby.

The block was longer than she thought and although Bertie seemed energized she was beginning to feel a mixture of panic and exhaustion. She thought she might have to sit down.

The letter had been sitting on the entry table. Next to the big silver vase kept fresh with garden flowers. They spilled everywhere in a profusion of colors, pink and pale yellow, white, red and pale lavender. But all she saw was the letter, white against the dark wood. Upright and stern, reflected in the surface. One letter real, one ghostly and unreachable.

Bertie froze to standing attention and she almost ran into him.

“Help!”
It was very faint. But desperate. A real cry, not something from a child playing a game. Bertie cocked his head to the right and quivered. “What?” She looked at him in an attempt to ignore the persistent sound.
“Help, please!” The dog looked at her and grimaced. Sara locked eyes with him and they stood motionless for a moment. The next cry was fainter but infinitely more fearful. “Please….!”

“Alright” she said, and turned to look for the source at the nearest house. Bertie took the lead and pulled her toward the walk. “Well, really!” she exclaimed with irritation and yet she let him take her closer.

It was an older house, one of the original tenants of the neighborhood when it had been on a horse farm long before the expanding city had taken over the open land. She’d heard once that Northern Dancer, the most famous Canadian racehorse had once been to stud there before it had been sold and subdivided, but she had no idea if it were true. She had a vague memory of a distant row of white clapboard houses with green trim that she supposed had been for the grooms or trainers. Though small, they’d always been neat, well kept and the developer had saved them so he could give the neighborhood a visible provenance. Somewhere she’d seen a sign hanging between two white posts: Lassiter Farms, est. 1812. Now the little enclave was an anomaly, book-ended by expensive brick homes, four car garages and manicured landscaping.

Bertie continued to urge her up the walk toward one of the clapboard houses. On closer inspection she could see it was worse for the wear. The neighborhood association would be after them soon for letting the values go, she was certain. The porch was a single block of salmon-colored concrete, with spindly wrought iron railing.

Bertie strained. Sarah leaned forward so she could see the entrance facing into the porch on the west end of the house. There was a motley screen with a broken handle door and beyond that, darkness. It was obviously open. Conscious of the now-drawing cold, she knew something wasn’t right but still felt reticent. It was private property, after all. Not her business.

She heard the thump first, then a groan. “Oh hells bells”, she thought, and climbed the steps, Bertie bounding ahead of her, nails scrabbling on the huge steps. She inched forward toward the opening, peering into the dark interior.

“Oh, thank God!” came the voice. A man’s voice. Sara instinctively stepped back, the hairs on her neck rising.

“Please don’t go!” the voice entreated, stronger now. “I can’t get up.” Sara was not convinced. She stood her ground trying to adjust her eyes to the interior, which was shuttered and dim.

“Seriously!” The voice sounded younger than it had at first. More like a teenager. She put one foot on the doorstep, pulling Bertie behind her so’s not to have him jump on the screen door. She saw him then, lying on a beige rug in the middle of the living room. There seemed to be more than one person. Or at least more than one person should be.
She put her hand on the screen door handle. It felt flimsy beneath her gloved hand.

“It’s freezing in here!” Now he sounded like a little boy, but nothing that big could belong to a child. She stepped in, still reigning in Bertie who was hopping around her legs, his nails scratching the hardwood floor.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, knowing it was an obvious question but unsure of how to begin.

“Whadda ya think?” came the reply. She tried to which end was speaking. The mound was so large she couldn’t tell heads from tails. Then he raised an arm. Folds of fat and skin had turned it into a giant, fleshy hammock but it was unmistakably an arm, for the hand, ballooned out like a fan of sausages, waved at her.

The screen door shut behind her with a rusty screech. With a start she let go Bertie’s leash and he bounded off into the dark recesses, the red cord whiplashing behind him. “Bertie!” she cried to his backside.

“Oh, don’t worry, he’s only after the cat’s dish,” said the voice. She inched closer, determined to get a better look. She could see that the shape was wearing a giant cloth of sorts, like a muumuu, all the more incongruous in the winter weather by the bright pattern of parrots and palm trees.

“I’m sorry…..” she began.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” and the hand gestured toward what was obviously the speaking end. Then she saw beneath a series of enormous chins, a tiny face. It was so tiny, so incongruous, so perfectly formed as it was, lost in the giagantic proportion of the rest of him that she was stunned. Only his face showed the person he had or might have been once. A perfectly normal nose, two green eyes, and a full mouth. The face of an aristocrat, almost.

She realized she was gaping. He looked at her steadily and then raised his eyebrows.

"Done looking, are we?"

The Theory of Big and Small: Introduction

2006-10-04T13:36:00.000-07:00

Starting next week I will be serializing my new novel, The Theory of Big and Small and presenting it here on Playdate.

The Theory of Big and Small is about a 30-something woman and her relationship with two brothers.

Most of you know my first book, How To Cook A Wolf, will be coming out next year (really). This novel was the result of a year-long journey to northern Canada and a complicated, politically-charged relationship with a First Nations Chief on the Queen Charlotte Islands. Despite an enthusiastic reception from a sucession of literary agents - my first agent had only a handful of clients, one of them John Grisham - Wolf was a puzzlingly tough sell with the houses there and a very frustrating experience for me.

So now I say, why bother with the middle men (or women)?

I've come to realize that I can use the net to become my own publisher and from time to time I will do this on Playdate. And soon I'll be moving to a private website where it will be easier to navigate my archived work and view back installments of the upcoming novel. Also, the installments will be longer - I don't want this to take an entire year to read, so a more efficient format will make reading and printing individual chapters easier. But if you are someone who likes the romance of reading in smaller bites, you can come back as often as you like and go at your own speed.

Save a tree. Read my book online......

'till next week when the story begins.

A Thanksgiving Heirloom

2006-10-02T21:01:00.000-07:00

More on "Big and Small" on Thanksgiving is coming up and I had to share a little miracle with you.

Our three-year-old, Sweetpea, loves to play with her dolls and has spent many hours in a world of ever-flowering imagination as she spins out complex storylines with her small charges. Kids are notoriously fickle with their belongings so as an experiment I've purchased a few items from local garage sales, not sure if they would inspire creativity in Sweetpea's world. Take the yellow and green plastic kitchen I scored for a quarter from the nice lady down the street. Sweeetpea bonded with it the instant it appeared in her room and after many meals of plastic food served up to us and to her various stuffed animals, I found her a more durable, wooden kitchen from Little Colorado Company in Denver. I ordered an unfinished version so after we move to our new house we can paint and decorate it together. It's old-fashioned in concept, but solid, sweet-smelling and lovingly constructed from maple with simple working parts and a removable metal sink. With it came a wire basket of wooden food, glorious in variety and color. Having served its purpose as a toy-in-waiting, the plastic one will now grace our next garage sale and the home of another little girl.

The other thing that Sweepea loves to do is play house and for this we purchased a small, fold-up (and also plastic) dollhouse. Again it stood up to the test of time, even though the rooms were tiny and the furniture fell out every time Sweetpea tried out a new tableau. So about a year ago I started looking around for a more substantial, wooden version and realizing how expensive they were, moved on to ebay for something pre-loved. I saw a lot of dollhouses, some very expensive and elaborate, some very cheap and falling to pieces; old ones, new ones, they came and went while I lurked, wondering if I would ever find the perfect fit. There were tin ranch houses from the 60's (hello memories!), delicate gingerbread confections from balsa-wood kits, and many different plastic wunderkinds of all shapes and sizes, some standing six feet tall with hundreds of pieces of matching plastic furniture. But none were just right.

Then a couple of weeks ago on a late-night perusal of the latest items for sale, I saw a simple but sturdy-looking Federal-style dollhouse up for sale from a family in Plymouth. Since this town is our family's entry point to the Americas (fresh off the Mayflower) I thought this to be an inspired gift to our daughter who is folding into an family of immigrants with her own story to tell. This house seemed to call out to me as a visible talisman from my distant roots, one that would over time become part of Sweetpea's adopted history.

Notwithstanding its provenance, it was a beauty: Tall and elegant, white with green shutters, a peaked roof, and when turned around, an open back to play in with generous-sized rooms finished in old-fashioned wallpaper. The starting price was very low (too low for such a fine bit of construction) so I didn't hold out much hope it would be affordable. But as fate, or luck would have it, when I put my last-minute, inexpensive bid in, I was the winner.

After some correspondence with the seller I learned the house had been built by her husband, a Martha's Vineyard carpenter, and she assured me it would make the trip out west without any problems because it was very sturdy. But nothing prepared me for this work of art when I pulled it from the enormous box and yards of protective bubble-wrap.

It sits now on the floor of our living room, soon to be hidden away again for Christmas. And it is the most exquisite object my child-heart has ever laid eyes on. The house stands four feet tall and every inch of it is crafted with care. The painted white exterior is sheathed in a replica of eighteenth century wood siding, each of the six faux-glass windows are four-paned and graced with forest-green wooden shutters. The roof, high pitched with a chimney at the peak, is laid with hundreds of individual, overlapping shake shingles, still in their natural color in shades of walnut and sienna. Solid, wooden steps lead to the paneled front door and the turn of a tiny, filagreed brass knob opens up into a gracefull entryway and a beautifully made staircase leading to the second and third stories. The floors are 1/4" wood, made to look like tongue & groove hardwood, and each room is wallpapered in a miniature version of Republic-style wallpaper. Tiny roses, stripes, polka-dots, ribbons.

When my husband came home he saw me on the floor, peering through the tiny windows. I was thinking about moving in.

"Look!"

He walked past.

"You know," he said kindly, after a moment "this dollhouse isn't for you, right?"

Any toy that mother and daughter can delight in equally is a good toy in my book.

That's my motto now.

Thank you Plymouth/Martha's Vineyard family for giving up this treasure. I don't know how you could have parted with it but it's staying in our family forever. And one day very soon, like any house worth its salt, the new owner will fill it with many bits of furniture, a family, laughter, and love.

I can see it already.

Eric Roberts IX: The Eyes Have It

2006-10-02T17:46:00.000-07:00

You may not remember Eric Robert's promising body of work in the early 80's but you do know his sister, Julia, who has proved to have a much more durable career. She was still in school when Miss Lonelyhearts was in production but her breakout film, Mystic Pizza, was only a couple of years away, along with her rise to stardom and the eclipsing of her older brother's fragile hold on fame.

As the older sibling, Eric was the first to reach movie star status and based on the extraordinary films he made over a few short years in the 80's he had more talent and potential, but the same genes that made Julia a quirky comedienne (Rupert Everett recently referred to her in his new book as 'beautiful but slightly mad') had a much darker manifestation in her older brother. As serene and innocent as Julia appears, Eric is the dark spirit, the sinner, the shadow. Combined with his sweet, vulnerable side this unpredictability gave him the complexity for more interesting roles. His films, including Star 80, The Pope of Grenwich Village, The Coca-Cola Kid, and Runaway Train, were all critically acclaimed, the last one garnered him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. But by 1985, only two years after we filmed Miss Lonelyhearts, his rise was over.

In the beginning there was no mistaking the siblings' raw material in Hollywood terms: between them Eric and Julia had the requisite movie-star looks with mirrored male/female features. Although he had a strong profile, Eric was as strikingly beautiful as his sister, with the same luxurious wavy hair, expressive blue eyes, full, sensual mouth and dazzling smile. He was a also a complicated, angry, enfant terrible who forged relationships that were as murky as the roles he played. He was, in short, fascinating to be around.

He was perfect for the role of Miss Lonelyhearts and the strong, experienced support cast created a powerful atmosphere to work in. It is a dismal tale about the underbelly of ordinary lives and culminates with the young advice columnist being murdered by the jealous husband of one of the women he'd sympathetically befriended after she had sent him a desperate letter. We all felt the pull of the story as it wound its inexorable way to the climatic ending. But as the producer and director of our ambitious student movie soon found out, the brooding, character and very heart of the film was gradually taking over the fractured ego of our young star.

So when Eric failed to show up on the last, but critical week of shooting, there was both a sense of disbelief, but also a vague undercurrent of inevitability. We'd lived in dark, stained rooms for too long, watching silently from the shadows as the cast steeped themselves in a morass of despairing emotions and the particular exhaustion of people who are stuck in hopeless situations. The sets may have been false fronts, but we were working 18 hours a day, stumbling home in the dark to sleep and then rising again pre-dawn for another round so it had in many ways become our reality too. Blinking, we were forced into the sunlight for the first time in weeks and for a while got on with our lives, the mystery of what had happened to Eric open to maddening speculation.

When Lydia called me several weeks later to ask if I would be interested in particpating in the reshoots, they had a plan to work around the missing footage and get their deal with PBS. It was then I heard what had happened the day Eric disappeared.

Apparently he got on a plane and flew back to Long Island, to Sandy Dennis' house. Didn't tell anyone, just walked out of his hotel room and took a cab to the airport. Whatever strain there was between this odd couple certainly hadn't been helped by Eric's erratic behavior in L.A. and if they argued when he returned home we don't know the details. The only thing we do know is what was reported in the press: Eric was out of control on a highway near their home, speeding along in his open Jeep when it flipped over and crashed. He had extensive injuries, and his face was badly torn up requiring reconstructive plastic surgery. There was something eerily familiar about this story: thirty years earlier another promising and brilliant young actor, Montgomery Clift, had suffered the same fate and his career never recovered.

It seemed only fitting when I saw photos of Eric's lumpy face months later that he now resembled a prize fighter. His delicate, almost feminine features were gone, and with them the gentleness and whisper of naivete that I'd found so compelling. Now he looked mean, battered and defensive, the scars barely visible except for a crooked nose and the thickness that comes from damaged skin and muscle.

The man who emerged to star as the abusive, controlling husband in Star 80 and the misfit in Runaway Train was transparent to me now - and although he retained some of his handsomeness, more rugged in a powerful frame, the allure was gone. And his career lost momentum, with only the financial, man-cult success of his martial-arts character in the Best of the Best series to follow over the next decade.

His decline to B-movie status may seem puzzling to those who could not understand why such a promising actor failed to capitalize an amazing string of successes, but it's not a surprise to me. This past year Eric appeared in The L-Word, a popular series about a group of gay women friends in L.A. His character was the father of one of the main players, a soft-spoken, intelligent man who seemed determined to mend his estranged relationship with his daughter. But in the end he turns out to be a slick, deceitful manipulator. True to form.

The last time I saw Eric was outside a grocery store on Olympic Boulevard, a couple of years after Miss Lonelyhearts wrapped and sucessfully aired on American Playhouse. I was engaged to Michael, we were preparing to work on Pee-wee's Big Adventure and my student film days seemed very far away. Eric was lurching a bit, he seemed high on something and had his arms draped around two skimpily-clad young girls, one on either side. He was boozily regaling them with some story and to my astonishment, his stutter was completely gone.

"Eric!" I exclaimed. I couldn't help myself. He glanced over at me, gave me a look of utter distain and kept on going.

But for that familiar look I wouldn't have known if he'd remembered who I was.

Photo: Eric Roberts and Arthur Hill. Author's collection.

My email exchange with Scott Simon at NPR Radio

2006-10-01T15:23:00.000-07:00

In mid-2004 radio host of an NPR syndicated program, Scott Simon, and his wife returned home after adopting a daughter from China. He subsequently broadcast a beautiful, lyrical, but finally China-critical commentary about the new life she would embrace in the US. I wrote to him and expressed my dismay that as a journalist he would choose to use his public platform to thumb his nose at the Chinese government after they had made it possible for him to become a father and expressed my fear that it might have an impact on waiting families (including us).

He wrote back immediately and lambasted me for being 'naive', saying that his remarks would have absolutely no impact on adoption policies.

Well, here we are three years later and I finally wrote him back:

Hello Scott:
You and I corresponded in 2004 when my husband and I were waiting for our China adoption referral. You were responding to my concerns that, as a public figure with a national platform, your commentary about your daughter’s new life could potentially embarrass the authorities who set the policies for international adoptions.

You responded immediately, and were quite passionate in your defense of these remarks saying that your opinions about the positive aspects of her future in the US versus what she might have faced in China were the truth as you saw them and you felt it would have absolutely no impact on future adoptions.

Here I am finally replying – it took three years but I do believe public comments like yours did have an impact and led to an eventual tipping point. Over the years the Chinese government has been bearing increasing negative public opinion around the world regarding their one-child policy and the social consequences of a male-skewed population (not to mention the abandonment of so many girls). Was this justified? No question. But public comments from adoptive parents like you about the ‘better life’ these transplanted children would have in their new countries was bound to add salt to the wound. Rightly or wrongly, this has, in my opinion, had consequences for the children in orphanages who are now being restricted from leaving China.

You may argue differently but at this stage no-one outside the Chinese government can say for certain what caused these changes. Although the CCN claims it is because less children are available for adoption this is not borne out by the figures of orphanage populations. Many questions remain as to the cause of this major shift in adoption policy.

And in an bit of final irony (or perhaps a prescient fear on my part), if had the new rules been implemented before our turn, we would have been ineligible to adopt. But we were lucky. As it was we traveled to Guangzhou in November of 2004 and came home with a beautiful, intelligent, healthy little girl. She is much-loved and truly one of life's treasures.

Our little family is made up of citizens of three different countries and because of this we feel that homelands (no matter how brief the occupancy) play an important part in our identity. We live the concept of a global community in our home and to that end we hope one day she will return as a visitor to appreciate and embrace the China of her future. Being as loved as she is we can only hope she will bring our values, our strengths, and our vision with her.

Valen Watson