Moving Story # 1

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, Willtts, 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 pull 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.

Running

As I child, I learned that cars ran on gasoline from the Flying A or Texaco stations, and that the driver ran on beer or vodka from Pioneer Market or House of Spirits next door to the market.

Dad made sure to get out every last drop from his amber colored quart bottles of Acme Beer by “squeezing” them over his glass. It used to make my brother and me giggle with the absurdity of the joke. The giggles belied our terror of the unexpected behavior that Dad’s drinking brought to our lives.

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While cleaning out my mother’s files this week, I came across an article she’d copied from the L.A. Herald Examiner in 1986 about how the effect on kids, from growing up in an alcoholic home, was nearly identical to the effects on American Soldiers returning home from fighting in the Viet Nam War. I guess mom suspected that running the house on alcohol wasn’t such a keen idea after all. Maybe she felt remorse for exposing us to the violence attendant to the unpredictability of growing up in a house full of spirits, so she saved that article to shine a light of hope or apology from the grave?

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I fared better than my brother. The genetic pre-disposition to become alcoholic was passed to both of us, but the tide was stronger at his strip of beach, and rip currents pulled him under at an early age. He says he started drinking when he was ten, in 1952. 

I was four that year and still had my front teeth. They got knocked out when I was five. (Funny how we calibrate years by where we lived, how we looked, what we were wearing, birth of siblings, etc.)

Dad had nothing to do with my teeth going missing. They had to be removed because they got hurt when they hit a coffee table at Danny’s house, when we were jumping on his couch. Ether was the drug of choice, in 1953. I must have felt very “ethereal” and maybe a bit like cornflakes “thereal,” when the teeth got pulled. It was very shortly after that event that the song, “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth...” became so popular. I related to it strongly!

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I’m not sure what I run best on, but I seem to prefer sustained loving and high octane chocolate.

Clipped Together

Filing through mom’s files I observe a single file thread: All the articles, stories, notes, and poems are held together by paper clips.

I started the weekend with six boxes of Mom's files, including a long and very sturdy one I forgot was buried beneath a wooden box lined with green felt that my Gran’pa Stern made for her. Sunday night finds me with three heavy boxes left to sort.

For the most part, I’m relegating to the recycle-bin, all the financial planning pages, newspaper and magazine articles, myriad class notes - most of which are in her studied stenographer’s short hand, (who can read that?), and her completion certificates from those classes, including her studies in community building, hospice care, literacy for children, Los Angeles Children’s Hospital volunteer orientation, and other equal indicators of her altruistic tendencies from age seventy on. The papers go, if not to recycling, then to stacks labeled for other family members. But, I save the clips.

The pile of them is deepening.

I’ve kept letters from my father to my mom, a cryptic list of her “alliances”, AKA lovers, and copies of cards she made for friends and family members - as if to say, “Hey! I’m proud of what I done, so I’m keepin’ a copy!” (only her way of saying that would have been much more erudite and grammatically correct). I don’t know why I keep the clips. Nor why I’ve removed the cutely curled pieces of shiny (some are rusty) metal bits that have held the papers together for more than 20, 30, 40 and, in some cases, 50 to 60 years!

Why save paper clips? 

Perhaps it’s magical thinking: that by keeping paper clips, my connection with mom will also stay together. What is the tensile strength of love? 

Probably stronger than metal. 

Metal clips DO recycle, don’t they. Perhaps it’s time to put ‘em in the blue bin... so this house won’t turn into a clip joint.

She was a remarkable woman. 

I’m privileged to be 

Barbara Freeman Stern Maxwell Kovner’s daughter.

Thoughts on Aging are UP

Walking with a friend recently, she recounted a tale that made my blood boil. Beyond the heat of a hot Santa Ana wind in Los Angeles, I was steaming with upset about what her friend endured at the hands of some women who have swallowed the Kool Aid from the fountain of youth, and are spreading the poison every which way they can. 

Seems that this friend of hers lives in the heart-(less)-land of Stepford Wife-dumb. My friend says her friend is BEAUTIFUL. I trust my friend. She says her friend suffered a back injury recently, rendering her incapable of walking two steps without pain, so she has put on a few pounds. She is still beautiful.

At a recent social gathering, one of this gal’s “friends” handed her a card from her own plastic surgeon, saying, “You really could use a thigh tuck.”

Mortified, the friend took the card and ran to the women’s room and burst into tears.

In explaining the whole episode to my friend, my friend’s friend went all out defending the rationale of the plastic surgeon card-toting woman, saying she only had her best interests at heart... or at least in mind. She only wanted to be helpful and thought if the gal LOOKED better (in whose eyes, I want to know), then she’d FEEL better. 

Re-wind to my experience last week at the mall - a seldom used resource for me because they sell dumb stuff there. Walking by one of the kiosks where really dumb and expensive stuff is sold, a young and gorgeously coiffed man of about 22 pressed a sample foil packet in to my hand, saying,

“You look beautiful, but you could look even MORE beautiful, if only you’d try this Merlot Collection Resverotrol Moisture Day Cream!” 

He asked what I use now on my eyes. I was genuinely confused. 

“Besides water?” I asked. 

His turn to look confused. “What do you mean, water?” 

“You know, WATER... “ I mimed drinking, “when I wash my face.” 

Truly, I saw him roll his eyes. I looked at the ingredients on the packet. The list included propylene glycol, petrolatum, and a bunch of other unpronounceable chemicals - many of which are derived from petroleum. I said out loud,

“This stuff comes from petroleum! Why would I put petroleum based products on my face?” 

Mr. Smooth knew he wasn’t going to make a sale. Flushed and flustered, he said, 

“This stuff is really expensive! It costs over $400 an ounce!” As if that would make me want to buy it.

“Thank you,” I smiled, and walked away.

What are we so afraid of in this culture? Aging and death are parts of life. No one gets outa here alive.

The truth is each of us earns every wrinkle, every white hair, every “character line” carved with care by the artist called Experience. Why would I want to revert to my twenty-something putty face to be just another putty face?

A colleague of mine, I’ll call him B, had a near death experience while attempting to hike Mount Everest. He and a group of would be ascenders were flown in at 14,000 feet. Too high an elevation for most folks to acclimate to in the forty eight hours the guides allotted for acclimatizing. B felt more and more woozely of head and gut, as the hours wore on. Going higher, it got progressively worse. Hiking down mountain and back up again, didn’t help. The other eight guys AND the guides, too, who wanted to earn their money for the whole climb, all went into denial. They refused to see how compromised B was.

He described that it took him twenty minutes to tie one boot, he was so weak and disoriented. He could not eat, drink, or breathe well. Later he found out that he had brain edema, and would have died had he stayed a few more hours on the mountain. It took him two years to reclaim memory and much of his brain function.

Not one of the climbers was willing to acknowledge his own personal worst nightmare unfolding before his eyes. Altitude sickness can kill.

Life IS terminal, as my beloved says. We just don’t know which terminal and when! None of us is born with a guarantee. 

Where I see beauty of experience etched in the elder faces I love, others may see their worst nightmare - that of superficial beauty fading. Enter Jacky O’Shaughnessy, model for American Apparel’s line called Advanced Basics. Her BOYFRIEND said he couldn’t be seen with her in public any more because she looked too old. Here’s a link to her interview on the “What’s Underneath Project.” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBZQpsXUsfw

Who would I be, if I didn’t have one of my faculties? One of my senses? One of my familiar body gestures? My hair? I think I would still be me. Would you still talk to me? Or would you hand me the card of a plastic surgeon and walk away?