Go'd B'ye

Go to Echo Park. Dig up the two foot square of cement embedded in front of the playhouse. This is my waking thought at 1:30 a.m., born of the reality that my brothers and I are saying good bye to our family home soon. The doorstep, to what is now a storage shed, holds the hand-prints of the kids who attended my 8th birthday party in 1956. That square has been there for nearly fifty eight years. It is a testament to something, that I cannot quite name.

Were my folks forward thinkers? Did they fancy that it would be a monument to their love for me? Were they hoping to keep us all little - at least our paw prints - forever etched in concrete? Was it the fad of the day?

Friend Lynn proposes a tidier solution to unearthing the slab: do a temple rubbing of those hand-prints! Paper can be rolled-up with greater ease than a chunk of concrete, or even saved digitally. I could simply take a photo of it.

I remember receiving a cat, which was all black, save for a circle of white under his chin, on or near that same birthday. We named him “Eight Ball.” He promptly ran away or became coyote lunch, or some other way got poked by the giant cue-stick called life… We never found him in the side pocket. The folk's marriage ended a year later; eaten by tricksters for sure. Side pocket residue quite slimy and putrid… took years for the stench to subside.

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

It’s a process, this saying good bye. The land itself saved me. I shall miss it and always be grateful to the hills, trees, bugs, weeds and flowers, among which I took communion daily. I’ll always treasure the memory of the “Wedding in the Weeds,” which united me and my husband, there, overlooking the sweet valley of sleepy Echo Park, and the sun gleaming on the sliver of ocean out there beyond Wilshire’s Miracle Mile.

Even when totally empty, as it was Saturday, when Mark and I went to retrieve my grandmother’s dresser from the room with the closet where I hid out for much of my childhood, the house itself feels haunted, and viscerally challenging for me. I cannot be IN those bedrooms where icky things went down without feeling nauseous, and wanting to bolt. My final gesture was to make giant raspberry sounds into all three rooms. Echoes into the past: Cathartic.

I am so happy that the folks who seem to be buying the home and adjacent empty lot, truly love Lautner, revere his work, and are willing to renovate this "long lost Lautner" to its deserved and former glory. As for me, and at least my older brother, it’s the land that we love. Our father who aren't in heaven, Howard was his name, has forever tainted our relationship with the glass, wood, and cement bones of our childhood home. Little brother has done a fine job of preparing and presenting the whole package for sale. For that, we are all grateful.

May the new owners derive much pleasure, peace and prosperity from their purchase. Objectively, it is a gem!

I thank my folks for their far-sightedness. This gift of home will be transformed into useful cash and handed down to the next two generations.

Words wrung from wraiths rarely heal retroactively. Reverberations run deep. Reminiscences, of racing along dirt roads, must raise dust. Remembrances, residing in the hills of Echo Park, take up residence - wreaking havoc in the reticulum of my roof brain. Nittery nattery; chittering chattering. Stop the ride… 
I want off. 
Good riddance.

Weird thought while settling into meditation in Joshua Tree this week...

Meditation is practicing death.

I practice stilling my body in order to still my mind and stop the roof brain chatter, so as to glimpse my “big S” Self.

The first time I saw a dead person was in my late twenties. I got a call from my Cousin Eric that his dad, my uncle, was on his way out. I made arrangements and drove the long freeway to Redondo Beach and walked into the bedroom he’d shared with my Auntie Nora for so many years. There he was in the bed, his silky maroon pajamas and bed covers hiding his hideously distended belly where liver cancer just ate him up completely - trading healthy cells for insane, wildly multiplying cancerous ones. 

He looked much the same as he had a few days earlier when I brought my then two year old daughter to visit. Mosa’s delightful presence brought a weak smile to his lips that day. Uncle Bob loved me and he loved my daughter. I believe it pleased him that we came so far through the traffic to see him. He was too weak that day to lift an arm, but seeing the corners of his mouth lift was worth the drive. We stayed a while, Mosa playing quietly on my lap, then we said our Good Byes.

On the day he died, when Cousin Eric called,  I made arrangements and drove solo this time from Sherman Oaks to Redondo. I remember looking at the time near to their home, when I felt a chord played in my core. I knew with certainty, he’d gone. Sure enough, when I arrived, Cousin Debby and Aunt Nora said, “He just died.” It was precisely that moment I checked the time. Chills. Cousin Eric ushered me in to the back bedroom and quietly left me alone with his dad. There he was, eyes closed, in those same silky maroon pajamas, covers pulled up to cover the ravages of cancer. What was absent was the animation - however slight it had been a few days prior, this was STILLness, with a capital STILL. There was a sheen to his alabaster skin. There was no essence of what made him alive to us to be detected within or about his body.

I imagined his spirit hovering in the room and so, shyly, apologized for passing gas in his presence. The needs of the living are so very different from the needs of the dead. I sensed and smiled at the thought that he didn’t need an apology; that his freedom and perspective were now absolute. I could almost hear his joyous laugh of recognition: I’m FREEEEEE! Free at last!

Born December 25, 1923, Bob would’ve been 55. He died just three days shy of that, on December 22, 1978.

His brother, my dad, left his body at Long Beach Veteran’s Hospital at age 53 in 1966. I was sixteen when Howard died. I didn’t get to see him lift off, nor his inert corpse. Circumstances prevented that. Since then, I have been present at nine deaths.

It’s the stillness that smacks me every time. Absolute stillness means that the familiar movements of breathing, muscle twitches, eye blinks, and the subtle, nuanced opening and closing of pores of the skin have all ceased. The stillness is complete. It’s eerie. It begs me to watch to be sure there’s not a spec of animated presence still lingering in the “dropped robe" of the body. I keep expecting familiar movement to return.

One of my favorite dialog exchanges from Rob Reiner's filmThe Princess Bride goes something like this:

Miracle Man Max (played by Billy Crystal): “There’s a difference between All Dead and Mostly dead. All Dead, there’s only one thing to do.”

Inigo Montoya (played by Mandy Patinkin): “What’s that?”

MMM: “Go through his pockets and look for loose change. This guy, is only Mostly Dead.”

There ensues a hilarious episode of MMM making Wesley (played by Cary Elwes) a chocolate coated pill to bring him back to life.

MMM’s Wife (played by Carol Kane): “Have fun stormin’ the castle, boys.” (aside to MMM): “Do you think it’ll work?”

MMM: “It’ll be a miracle.”

While Wesley was only mostly dead, Uncle bob is all dead. Seeing the stillness up close and personal is its own miracle of trans-something-or-other: transcendence? Trans-substantiation? Trans-gentrification? Transfer to a different bus? I don't know, but that which made him alive to us is GONE from the flesh.

Meditation is intentional stillness. Stilling the body of its twitches and udgy-ness; stilling the mind of its ceaseless agitation.

Thinking sixty-seven thousand thoughts - three quarters of which are redundant - is the mind’s job; chewing on things like a ruminating cow with her cud. Four stomachs for the bovine’s grass; three brains for human thoughts. First brain: Reptilian is for survival, Fight, Flight, and Freeze. Second brain: Mammalian is center for registering emotions. Third brain is Neo-cortex for executive function and is the part that often gets us into trouble with perseverations at one, two or three a.m.

The practice of sitting to meditate helps me enter into choice-full stillness that brings possibilities for deeper listening to that part of mySelf that is in touch with more foundational qualities - like earth, ocean stardust, and the Big S Self of pure consciousness, of which everything in Universe is made. From basking in that ocean of consciousness, without the distractions of twitches and thoughts, I become more aware of what to do beyond reacting to stimuli and frivolous regurgitation of my personality. Optimally, my practice is portable: I can bring it with me off the cushion and into my day allowing  me to be less reactive, and putting me more in the flow. 

Equanimity is a big word. Stillness helps me chunk down what I react to, and opens spaces which allow me to view things from a different angle so my knees don’t jerk quite so reactively to stuff that happens around me. Like my Uncle Bob’s corpse, I’m not offended if you fart.

Terry Tempest Williams says of John Cage’s silent composition, called 4’ 33’’ , “...our capacity to listen is heightened by our ability to embrace quiet.”

What happens in the gaps between sounds, between breaths, and between life and death is voluminous. Now, I’ll keep still.

Lyda Tong

We can fit all of our clothes, assorted house plants, books, a dog and some kitchen paraphernalia into his Toyota Station Wagon and my VW Bug. We have no furniture to speak of, apart from two bent wood rockers and three gigantic stuffed floor pillows from the Prize Department of Truth or Consequences, where Mark is working. We are moving to our first house!

For little over a year, we’ve been renting in Laurel Canyon from Jeanne, the  contestant coordinator of the show. She tells us about a friend of hers who is getting married and moving cross country to Michigan and needs to lighten up.

Her name is Lyda Tong.  She invites us into her Park La Brea apartment this evening to look at what she wants to sell. It’s 1973. Lyda is seventy eight years old. She is moving back to Michigan to marry her first love - college sweetheart, Sedgwick. It might be his first name, or his last, or both, but that’s what Lyda calls him, and every time she speaks his name, her eyes twinkle behind her glasses more brightly than the rhinestones on her beige frames. 

“Sedge lives in a lovely and gracious home, right on the lake, but I can’t bring all this stuff with me! My husband died five years ago. Sedgwick’s wife died three years ago. We reconnected at our sixtieth high school reunion last fall and fell in love all over again - as if we’d said good bye only yesterday! Our children think we’re crazy. Maybe we are... crazy in love!”

She shows us a brass floor lamp with heavy marble base and silk shade. “We love it! For how much would you like to sell it?”

“I expect five dollars is a pretty fair price.” 

“Make it ten and we’ll take it,” Mark says. “And the chair?” he points to a rosewood chair with carved back and upholstered seat. 

“Oh, maybe seven dollars for that,” she chirps from a chair behind two huge steamer trunks.

“We’d love to buy that too,” I nod.

The steamer trunks are the kind that stand on end, and open length wise. Each has space for hangers on one side, and drawers and built-in shoe-boxes in the other half. Plastic wrapped clothes and strings of pearls are spilling out of one trunk. On the floor in front of the other is a pile of dress shoes. The scent of mothballs and lavender mix with Earl Grey.

Over tea, she tells us of her life, her plans, this new twist of unexpected love. She pulls from us our hopes, dreams and aspirations, and the fact that we’re crazy in love too... and decided on our second date to get married. 

Lyda  gently guides us to a chest made of cedar wood. The lid is propped open. Inside are linens, photos and a flag. Lyda sees my eyes light up at the sight of embroidered napkins and white cotton crocheted placemats. She bends forward and brings forth several beautiful pieces.

“Back in the day, I embroidered all these for my “hope chest.” My granddaughter has the chest, but she is such a Modern Miss, she doesn’t want anything to do with these relics.”

Lyda straightens up and looks us each in the eyes. Her jaw juts forward as if she’s considered and decided something important.  Behind her lenses & rhinestones, her own eyes mist over. She pulls the rolled-up flag from the cedar chest, clutching the long cylinder to her heart.

“This was over the casket of my brother William when he came back from World War II. Will you please keep it for me? I think you’re just the right couple to honor his memory.”

Our own tears are touched. I smell the cedar-infused red and white stripes as she hands it over to our keeping.

“Thank you, Lyda Tong, you have given us so much in such a gracious way. We will always remember you.”

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And so we do! Forty two years later, we still have Lyda’s lamp, chair, and the chest of linens. The forty-eight star flag reminds us of her brother’s service to our country, and all the ones who fought for a cause and came back in boxes, or broken into so many pieces that some of their souls still need mending. We keep William’s flag in the large, formal cedar chest which had been my grandmother’s.

The little cedar chest from Lyda Tong held our clothes when we went on a two week camping trip in 1975 - B.C. (Before Children) to Colorado to see my cousins, Mesa Verde, Salt Lake, Tahoe, Mendocino, Willetts, Fort Brag and San Jose - where Mark’s Aunt Hilda lived. We had bought a tie-dyed Volkswagon Bus from a production company. Mark built a plywood platform, I sewed a cover on a foam mattress. Voilà! We had a bed. Out of Noah’s Ark sheets, we made curtains. 

The little chest now contains musical instruments which we crack out every family occasion where noise or music is required. It also holds many memories, including memories of feelings that cannot be contained - even by so sturdy a chest - but must well up and flow out from time to time.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Mother

With thanks to Andrea Beard for Friday morning’s prompt in our Creative Life Writing Class. The prompt is based on

Wallace Stevens Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Mother

And we all know.... if it isn’t one thing... it’s your mother... try to be kind... try to remember the sweet parts... I’m trying... with greater or lesser success... I’m trying

I

2012

One head

Two unseeing eyes

Triangular nose

Lips, pursed over now missing teeth,

Belie once voluptuous smile

II 

I remember the particularity of that gesture

When a thing is no longer wanted

She tosses it definitively 

Lets it go almost in disgust, fingers flicking

As if the thing burns

When the thing is no longer wanted

III

Her heart beat, an anchor

Rocking,

My ear leaning into that rhythm,

Echoing down the decades

Steadying my life even now

IV

Twilight

Star light

Jedi Knight-like

Fierce, when need be

(Sigh... That would’ve been nice)

V

I lift mine eyes unto the hills

Whence my sustenance comes

From Baby’s perspective, them’s MOUNTAINS!

Flowing with milk and honey

VI

How do I love thee?

With sly cock of his wee baby head little brother adds:

2 breasts to feed me plus

2 arms to hold me plus

2 legs to walk me ‘round my kingdom plus

1 heart to guide me... makes you the 

7-liest mama in the world!

VII

Tooth Fairy

God Mother

Chief cook and

Bottle washer

Taxi and typist

Bed-tucker

Bath slosher...

MmmmmmmaaaaMmmmmmmmmaaa!

VIII

Mouth so dry she crackles when she speaks of

Changes to come in my pre-teen body

Lays out Kotex on the bed with the belt 

(I’ve already seen it at school 

Two presentations - boys and girls segregated

Sweaty-palmed fidgeting giggles equally loud from both rooms Where Sex Ed movies tell what our adults cannot)

She sets out two books: Men and Women

Rhonda and I read and wonder. 

Well,… how long DO you leave it in?

Only now do I realize how very uncomfortable Mom was

With everything about Sex Education

Wonder what it was like when she came of age in 1930?

IX

Camping trips

Writing song parodies

Adventurous cooking - Bouillabaisse, 

With unpronounceable exotic ingredients, like Safron!

Stroking my hair out of my face, moving it behind my ear

Ritual movement puts gauze in my head

Sounds of conversations fade

Falling asleep at the party, my smooth-haired head in her lap

X

Mom

Tried to be Gran’ma

Chose Bubelah as her name

(Approximation of Bubby?)

Career Woman/Bubby clash

No easy co-existing with these two.

Jealousy rising when Extra Gran’ma 

Cousin June has preferred elbow skin for 

Two year old granddaughter to play with while 

She sucks her thumb

Sorry, Ma. So easily hurt by the innocence of 

Children smelling the truth

Not much room in your heart for little ones when it’s so 

Full of YOU!

XI

Model of power and perseverance

Model of focus and purpose

Pinching pennies - the hold-over habit from 

The Great Depression

Yields surprising gifts later for your three children, Mom

Wow. How many years of shopping at St. Vincent de Paul?

How many cold nights of winter to endure rather than fix the heater?

How many trips not taken in order to leave it to the kids as

What? Restitution? Paying it forward? Therapy funds? 

Thank you. We had no idea. Clearly, you had some idea of The need.

Thank you, for that, Mom. Choosing to think you loved us.

XII

The sweetness of you feeding me applesauce, yogurt, bran, While I nurse my first born-at-home-daughter in the 

Afternoon light, trying to heal my torn-up bum.

The times you DID show up. You DID come through,

When I got the measles and couldn’t nurse my babe. 

Broken blood vessels in my eyes from coughing so hard.   Measles in my throat

Mark called. You came, when asked.

I think now, it was not because you didn’t want to, but that                 You were afraid… of

Not being enough?

XIII

You stand on the shoulders of my Gram

Who stands on the shoulders of yours

I wish I could know all the women in our lineage

Thanking each in turn for holding up her daughter(s)

To the LIGHT, as high as ever she could

So she, we ME, I could thrive

And lift my daughters as high up into the

Light as ever I can...

And that granddest daughter in all the land...

Miss D... Your Bubelah Loved thee... as best she could!

My love for you, though imperfect, is unconditional

That much I learned from Mom

Love with no strings is the BEST love!