Recycled New Year

Perhaps prompted by viewing a preview of the perfectly peachy picture, “Hugo,” on Christmas Eve, that night I dreamed a solution to some of our household’s clutter. In the film there is a desk built entirely of books. (I recently saw an actual front desk made of books at The Last Book Store on Fifth Street near Hope in Downtown Los Angeles.) Perhaps there is hope yet for reducing, or at least making useful, my plethora of previously perused publications.

In my dream I made a living room side table by stacking magazines in two parallel towers on top of a wooden base. I topped the towers with a sheet of glass, drilled holes through it all and bound the whole thing together with heavy gauge rope and PVC pipe with fiber-optics running through it. I may need to dip the whole table in resin for stability which would necessitate designing and building an enormous dipping bath. Probably, the recycled dream table would cost a mere $500 to $5000 to construct, depending on the cost of building that resin dip.

David Rudolph is a friend and fabulous fabricator of fantasy furniture formerly of Los Angeles now living in Santa Fe. I may approach him with this idea and see if he thinks it feasible. 

When one of our daughters graduated from Los Angeles County High School for the arts, I saw a similar and scintillating repurposing of would-be waste. The ceremony was held at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at he Music Center. One of the visual arts students paraded (slowly) across the stage to secure his diploma wearing a pair of flip-flops which neither flipped nor flopped. The student had made his shoes by stacking and gluing magazines together to a somewhat precarious height, then he used a jigsaw to cut these vertigo-inducing platforms to flip-flop shape and secured them to existing rubber thongs. He was an apparition floating on these stilt-like slippers with his long white graduation gown poofing around him with each deliberate step.

I adore the idea of re-visioning would-be waste into useful items. I’ve seen baskets, place mats, and even children's furniture fashioned in Nepal of colorful candy wrappers that would have been otherwise discarded.

When I think of the amount of trash generated by “convenience” it makes me want to weep. Wrapping individual items, mostly in non-biodegradable plastic, costs us so much it is mind-boggling. How do we begin to comprehend the cost to the earth? How can we pre-cycle even more by buying in bulk or in minimal packaging, recycle what’s left over and/or re-visioning the waste into useful items instead of relegating it to the land-fill?

Another dream I had in 1970 was based on Einstein’s recognition that matter can neither be created nor destroyed but can only change form. In that dream, a nightmare, really, the entire world was made of plastic.... plastic grass, plastic trees, plastic buildings and plastic people. This is not a dream I want to come true. If we insist on making products of materials that won’t biodegrade, I’m afraid the dream will become a reality.

One of my holiday gifts to the family this year is late in being manifested. A super-hero cape for the glorious granddaughter took precedence, but within the week I will complete the sewing of fine mesh produce bags for the daughters and our own household. These nifty organza bags will be in graduated sizes with draw-strings, so we can purchase veggies, fruit and bulk items without using plastic bags. They are long-lasting and washable! My aim is to be plastic free by the end of this brand spankin’ New Year!!

Happy Healthy 2012 to you, filled with love, light and lots of laughter.

May your happiest dreams come true!

Torch Bearer

Have yourself a merry little Christmas...?

Overstuffed? Over-tired? I am. Too much stuff and boxes and wrapping paper to recycle? Having a Tryptophan high is a good time to lay low, think about all the things I should be doing and instead fall into a warm and cozy winter’s nap.

In the 1970’s my Grammy Stern instigated the family-wide policy of giving gifts only to those persons under the age of 18. Her rationale being: Christmas is for kids; we adults have way too much stuff to deal with. My husband and I follow that with all but our own daughters and their significant others. Other than those adults it’s all about the kids. The two-and-a-half year old Granddaughter, of course, rules our heart, but I find myself holding back from over-giving even for her because I don’t want to overwhelm her or enforce the culture-wide message that buying and having stuff is our primary purpose as humans.

My younger brother Steve took our grandmother’s dictum to new heights this season, by giving gifts of “being” rather than objects. He gave certificates for events his whole family will enjoy, like: Tickets to Plays, Descanso Garden Picnic Promises, Beach Days, Movie Nights... in short, times of being together. I aspire to that. Actually, I vaguely remember giving out gift certificates like that in years past for baby sitting my brother’s kids when they were very young so the bedraggled parents could go out and “be.”

Confession: I’m a packrat. When I tried to “decorate” for the current holidays I found that there WAS NO FLAT SURFACE on which to put cute mice dressed in furry elf coats, Santas, Angels, dreidels or even flowers and candles! You know it’s time to clean out when you can’t find room for the traditional display of Christmas keepsakes, for Christ’s sake! We stopped buying a tree years ago, when the nest first became empty, so I just put select ornaments on the mantle and book cases or hang them from curtain rods. Further confession: Packratness has reached saturation level. The only appropriate decoration would be a neon sign on the roof, flashing “TILT...TILT...TILT!”

The week between December 25 and January 1 is one I look forward to all year... a time with few engagements, a time to clear the decks, chuck the old, install the new, reorganize, savor twelve empty calendar pages in my planner, close out the business books and generally prepare for the coming year. It’s a time finally to put the bag of “maybe” clothes in the car and take it to Goodwill, swoop all the tchotchkies off the book cases... or... maybe just torch the place.

Awwww... but remember when Gramps made that reindeer out of a beer can? Still pretty cute doncha think? How can I part with that?

Praise the Lord and pass the blow torch.

Meaningful Merry Making

Christmastime was unpredictable when I was a kid. Santa brought a mixed bag to our celebrations every year. We took from it the AWE of Grammy Stern’s flaming Plum Pudding and pungent scent of pine boughs in her living room. We also pulled from his bag nervous tension that made the air as shatter-prone as Gramps’ favorite peanut brittle. We all feared that my dad would drink too much and cause a “scene.”  I had a tummy ache from November through January.

No case of terminal uniqueness here... I know so many people who spend December haunted by ghosts of holidays past.

My husband was raised in a culturally, but not religiously, Jewish home. Bless his generous heart, the very first time he bought a Christmas tree was for my other Grandma - Grammy Maxwell. We’d been married long enough for me to hear the story about how his first grade teacher humiliated him, intimidated his mother and left him with a bone-deep loathing and even hatred for all things related to Christmas. When he walked into my Grammy’s kitchen up in Victorville in 1974 with a small tree, popping corn and cranberries to string garlands for it and other delights to make a feast for his newly widowed Grandmother-in-law, I just cried for happy and hugged him as tightly as I could. What a selfless and generous act. We used the lid of a tin can to cut out a star and fastened it to the tip of the table-top tree. Grammy Maxwell was blind, but she could smell, hear and feel Christmas and it made her happy. 

As our two daughters grew old enough to be conscious of what holidays could mean, I set out to celebrate everything that made my heart sing. Latkes and lighting candles for eight nights made my heart sing; the scent of pine boughs (OK - they ASKED for a tree), mulled cider and a feast in the oven - all made my heart sing. The idea of celebrating the LIGHT at Solstice, the darkest time of the year, still makes my heart sing, and SINGING the songs of the season definitely makes me sing from my heart, though usually not entirely on key, because of the tearful lump in my throat.

What is it about the holidays that brings on melancholy? Is it that we used to celebrate with so many people who are no longer with us? Are we longing for something from our childhood, or some ideal of what we thought we had or would have liked to have had back then? Or is there lingering terror because holidays were traditionally a time to over-indulge and, when the adults in charge are intoxicated, the children are not safe?

Whatever the reason, this season can bring on gut-tightening angst, rather than the ease depicted in a Norman Rockwell portrait of loving kindness, bounty and grace. If I press my nose to the glass of that idealized scene I can still conjure a deep sense of longing and loss.

Now that our granddaughter is two and a half, her mama is trying to figure out these December celebrations in much the same way her dad and I did when she and her sister were little. I think “Cozy” is our daughter's version of my “what makes my heart sing.” Last week she had some friends with young ones over to her home and they cut snow-flakes out of paper, ate yummy treats, played and enjoyed good conversation. She reported that “That feels like Christmas to me; that's cozy.”


I love that our granddaughter is learning that for her family this season is more about enjoying people and fun activities than it is about getting things. I wish her folks the best of luck in keeping that sentiment alive. So, while I want to buy her the world, I'll curtail the urge to splurge and think instead of ways to create beautiful memories of times spent together simply enjoying the world we already have.

Whatever warms your heart is what I wish for you this season.

I invite us all to stop and register as many sense-awakeners as we possibly can. Smell the fir trees and yams or latkes and lentil soup. Make a joyful noise or listen to some great music. Notice the candles and twinkle lights doing their best to drive darkness from our homes and hearts. Really taste the eggnog or that jelly doughnut. Feel the cozy clothes on our skin that (hopefully) keep us warm enough when the cold winds are rude. Above all, let us find the meaning of the season that makes the most sense to us. We’re the only ones who know how this time of year is supposed to feel. Let's go for it. Own it and share the joy.

Providential Architecture

Do you ever use activities to manage your stress level? 

I do. I started early in life to occupy my hands and mind in order to stay a few steps ahead of uncomfortable emotions that made me feel so out of control. 

Building beautiful ballrooms for Barbies out of boxes, bottles, beads and scarves also built - to a high degree - my coping mechanisms in an uncertain household. Looking back, with my mind’s eye on the detailed palaces which I constructed from age six or seven to twelve years of age, I see symmetry and color-coordination, developing into experimentation with asymmetry, after the divorce in 1959, and clashing, bold color schemes as we neared the 1960’s. I turned twelve October 6, 1960 and girls in sixth grade just didn’t play with Barbies anymore, so I put them aside.

It’s not like I actually played with the Barbies really, but rather used the scale of their impossible bodies to build my palaces. A cantilevered stack of flat and shiny beige boxes that my mom’s nylons came in became a perfect staircase descending to the grand ballroom. An empty white glass Luster Cream shampoo jar was an ideal sink in Barbie’s luxurious bathroom. I draped most of the boxes with colorful dress-up scarves which were plentiful at our house. Gaudy costume jewelry beads or pastel plastic pop-beads cascaded down most of the staircases - like Klieg lights, while the old cameo brooches my Grammy gave me hung like portraits on the wall - which usually was an up-ended produce box draped with a scarf. Many of the brooches hung at rather unfortunate angles, on account of the way the pin backs were set side to side rather than top to bottom, disturbing the symmetry I was trying to achieve. Fussing over these cock-eyed miniature make-believe ancestral portraits on a cardboard wall proved a useful stand-in for trying to fix my actual relatives.

The point of arranging things “just so” is that it calms a charged-up nervous system. As beautiful as the Lautner house I grew up in was to look at - everyone IN the house had a grotesquely over-activated nervous system. Dad managed his with binge drinking, sex and raging; mom with cigarettes and playing the piano, my older brother by running away as the inevitable fights began to escalate or by rebelling against mom when dad wasn’t around. I managed my worry, fear and stomach aches by building things, climbing trees, roller skating on the patio, and, later, by dancing. My closet was a great place to hide and there I created imaginary worlds which were so much more pleasant to occupy than that redwood-and-glass-house-moderne where we “lived” and where so many nightmarish things happened.  

By building Barbie Ballrooms, I learned proportion, math concepts, uses of color, texture, line and style and, most importantly, the art of self-soothing.

An educator friend of mine recently sent an email listing “THE Five Best-EVER Toys for Kids.” Boxes, dirt, water, sticks and rocks. Evidently, we need to use our imagination for healthy brain development. The more amorphous the medium with which we are engaging is, the better use we are making of our grey matter.

In his classic book, Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim adds to my understanding  - that nondescript toys are better for kids - with a tangential concept: that it is better for children to hear open-ended, descriptions of heroes, heroines and villains than it is to have the heroic or villainous traits spelled-out to the tiniest detail. In a storybook, the witch can exhibit the perfect amount of witchiness which that child can handle. On a movie screen, if the witch is too scary, the child easily can be overwhelmed. Reading aloud to children has so many benefits it warrants further exploration in another blog! Creating a coherent narrative is essential to our healing from any event in which too much happened too fast. Books give us road maps forged by other travelers which can ease our own journey.

One purpose of imagining anything is to master our environment - both the external environment and our internal environment. Children with difficult histories are always trying to heal from their physical and psychic wounds. Play is the operating theater where they perform precise surgeries to remove the traumatic impact of real events by acting out the way it all should have gone down!  Grimm’s fairytales give us hope because the good guys always come through their trials to enjoy a righteous and just end. So might we. 

Can we give children the simple tools for sculpting their best selves? Can we offer them time and space in which to heal?

My gratitude is profound as I look back and appreciate the benign neglect which passed as “parenting” in my family of origin. I had oodles of alone time, simple things to arrange and work with and a grand and glorious out-of-doors, in the hills of Echo Park, which I used to great benefit in healing my external and internal worlds.

Ballroom building gradually gave way to ballet at ten and modern dancing when I was twelve, but I’m thankful that those years of providential architecture allowed me to survive elegantly enough until the dance fix came along.

What will the children in your life find in their gift boxes this season? Hopefully, some books. And hopefully some of the boxes will be empty of stuff - leaving S P A C E to be filled with the child’s imagination! S/he knows exactly how to heal through play.

Enjoy the season!

Housing Nature

Architect John Lautner would have been 100 years old this month. NPR had a piece on our local radio station about Frank Lloyd Wright thinking Lautner the second best architect in the world and how Lautner houses brought nature IN to the living space. In Los Angeles, which Mr. Lautner named the ugliest city in the world because of its concrete rivers, maladaptive housing style and smog, his most famous house is the "Chemosphere" overlooking the San Fernando Valley just off Mullholland Drive. A glass doughnut sitting atop a pedestal that must be approached by private funicula, this mushroom shaped home is iconic, intriguing and certainly the most interesting feature of the hillside community.

The home in which I grew up is also a Lautner house in Echo Park, near downtown Los Angeles. Nature certainly was part of my childhood - inside and outside. The red concrete slab floor was laid over copper tubing which circulated hot water through it providing “radiant heat” in winter. That warm slab floor - level with the grass just the other side of huge plate glass sliding doors - invited critters of all  sorts to come right in. Black widow spiders, centipedes, scorpions and once a rattle snake found homes within our home. The creepiest feeling was to see a centipede fall from the ceiling and not know exactly where it landed. Automatic reflexes last a lifetime evidentally. To this day, if I see a small something fall I go upside down and shake my head and swat my hair - just to make sure that any creature with way too many legs is not IN my hair. 

The other thing that flowed freely through our home was water. Whenever it rained hard enough to saturate the hill behind our house, the rice paddy pretending to be our back yard would flood and all that water would seek its lowest level which was the downward slope on the other side of our house. In winter we had an indoor heated wading-pool - which was great except for touching the refrigerator or record player, which could be a shocking experience!

I wonder about John Lautner’s dedication to bringing the natural world into the living space. Was it born of not wanting to box people in? Or of refusing to relegate the wildness of nature to beyond doors? Either way, I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Lautner.

One of my personal heroines is Robbie Davis Floyd, cultural anthropologist, author (Birth: An American Rite of Passage), lecturer, mother and champion of birthing mamas world wide. Robbie uses the story of “The Three Little Pigs” as a metaphor illustrating how humans have systematically pushed away or otherwise tried to control everything that’s wild.

Little Pig Number One represents the Hunter/Gatherer era of humans on the planet. “Number One was fond of play, so he built his house with hay. With a hey, hey toot he played on his flute and danced around all day.”*  Food was fairly plentiful after the Ice Age. Men went after wild game while women and children collected roots, grasses, berries and whatever other edibles were to be found in the pristine garden of Eden. There was leisure time to “talk-story” around the evening campfire, play music on mastodon scapulae or logs, sing, dance and have a pretty good time entertaining one another while passing on the cultural values to the young ones. I can imagine that many of the stories were about the unpredictability of the natural world and the deep respect needed to live right along side myriad creatures... or how we lost Glorg last winter to a hungry Sabertooth Tiger.

“Number two was fond of Jigs so he built his house with twigs. Hey diddle diddle he played on his fiddle and he danced with the lady pigs.”* Piglet Number Two stands for the agrarian folk who began to domesticate animals and stay put for some time, planting crops to ensure more stable (they thought) sources of food. They didn’t have quite as much free time to cavort in nature and, in fact, expended quite a lot of effort in keeping at bay the wild things that ate their crops and livestock.

“Number Three said, ‘Nix on tricks. I shall build my house of bricks.’ He had no chance to sing and dance ‘cause work and play don’t mix.”* Davis-Floyd uses the term “technocracy” to describe our current human plight. We’ve pushed nature so far from us that the wild element (the Wolf) is about as subdued as we can make him. What we’ve lost is connection with the natural world, and as a result, the wild side of our own nature. In addition, countless species are becoming extinct due to our selfish and ignorant behavior which is polluting the entire planet. Our technical wizardry has landed us in hot (and caustic) water.

Robbie Davis Floyd extends the metaphor to describe the birthing practices around the world where these three lifestyles still prevail. Yes, there are hunting/gatherering tribes. When a pregnant gatherer goes into labor she secludes herself, squatting in the bushes or in her rudimentary home and gives birth - very soon to return to her duties and to the care of her family. The human female body is designed to be adept at bearing and giving birth to babies with ease. Our bodies have been preparing to give birth since we were an egg inside our mother's infant body when she was floating in our grandmother's dark and quiet! The process is meant to work - well!

Rural farm folk tended to have midwives come to support their women in labor. Still a basic trust of nature prevailed, but let’s have someone skilled and familiar with the process on hand to support the birth, shall we?

Industrialized society views a woman’s body as a machine. The distrust of birth as the natural process it was meant to be is so extreme that women are thought to be incapable of giving birth and so must be delivered. Many more machines are employed to extract babies from the womb than I can name here. From forceps to vacuum extracters to Caesarean Section - babies have imprints of the mechanization of birth written on their sweet flesh and embedded in their psyches.

Do we really have to wonder why the world is so crazy? We’ve barred nature from entrering into our homes and into our hearts. What have we truly lost? How do we get it back?

Perhaps the Occupy Folks have the right idea... let’s camp out on the grass, sort things out and reconvene when we’ve regained some balance between nurturing Nature and the human heart on one side of the equation and appropriate use of technology on the other.

Perhaps Lautner’s adamantine efforts to bring nature in was more than an artistic statement; perhaps it is a pro-survival strategy after all. 


And hey, if something falls from the ceiling, simply turn upside down, shake your head and swat at your hair.


*Lyrics from "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" by A. Ronell and F. Churchill