Nephew Alex Gutierrez-Kovner and his band Espresso put together an album of their music. It's called Espresso: Triple Shot. They call the genre"Funk Rock."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrOKUO2Pb7w
Part rap, part instrumental - strongly rhythmic on some cuts and incredibly lyrical on others, fun lyrics. Enjoy!
Alex is the one in green pants and/or wearing glasses and playing bass. Very talented nephew!
* * * * * * * * *
My soon to be son-in-law just celebrated a birthday. He prefers really strong coffee... so that's what we sent him. Only within the last couple years did I learn that espresso has less caffeine than regular "leaded" coffee. I love it! I prefer it black, bitter, and strong. Americano is espresso with hot water added to make a full cup. I could nurse a cup of any coffee for hours in the insulated Contigo cup I prefer. I just love the taste of it on my tongue. D.A. is what I am... Definitely Addicted. But, hey! I get so much more done in a day when it includes café!
* * * * * * * * *
At Los Angeles City College in 1968, I had a Spanish class that held an end-of-year pot luck. We students were from all over the world. One gal brought home made baklava; another homemade sushi. A guy brought Turkish coffee. Teeny tiny little cups were filled with something that looked like the kind of black oily sand I remember playing in at El Segundo Beach when I was a kid. It smelled GREAT! The coffee that is. The teeny tiny spoons that accompanied the brew stood up in the cups of goo! It was sweet as it sat on the tongue with a thickness and powdery texture that took some getting used to. I could get used to it. That was beyond espresso!
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Monday, April 18, 2016
Riffin' in the Stream of Conscious Memory
The summer of 1953, just before turning five and going to kindergarten, Danny Fefferman and I - two goofy giddy kids who had played at getting married when we were two - were jumping on the couch in his living room, play fighting - just as our parents did, when he pushed, I went forward, and my front teeth hit the square edge of the coffee table. This caused a big whoop-de-doo. His mama Helen gathered blood soaked me into a big white bath towel which promptly turned into a bright red splotched bath towel. My mom drove up the hill to fetch me and take me to the dentist who put a mask on my face and told me to count backwards from ten, while I breathed in something funny but familiar.
He pulled out those two front teeth and that’s how I got to look so empty faced when we went to pick up brother Mel in Garapata Creek that August, just before he started sixth grade and I started Kindergarten. Mel had been working the trout farm run by Cole Weston’s family; Brett Weston took a photo of toothless me and my freckles.
The other memorable mishap that happened the first week of Kindergarten was a fight I had with Angelika at her house across the way at the top of our dead-end street in Echo Park. I was bolting out the Fox’s heavy oaken front door to run home, when Angelika slammed it catching my pointer finger. So, here comes Edith Fox wrapping me in a big bath towel. With blood all over, and me wailing in her arms, she ran up the flag-stone steps from the Fox house, all along the dirt path, past the Eucalyptus trees with their tiny diamond shaped pods twinkling at me through my tears, past the white wood barricade that marked the end of the street, and across the gravel parking pad toward my house. I could hear the gravel crunching under her hurried feet. She pounded on our front door, which was really the back door, but the only suitable door for opening on account of this house we lived in was made of redwood and glass and the heavy floor to ceiling sliders required strong stomach muscles, two hands on the handle and a foot braced against the frame to pull them open. So, we always went through the more normal hinged door in the laundry area of the kitchen. Edith pounded and rang the buzzer bell, yelling, “Bobbie!” and handed me over to my mother Barbara whose hair was in curlers - this being a Saturday.
Irv King our family doctor was in Inglewood. A long trip. I was used to breathing through pain, once the shock wore off and I knew I wasn’t going to die, so, after my hiccups and jagged breath subsided, mom and I sang all the way down to Dr. King’s office while I held onto the finger in a washcloth full of ice. He met us there and removed the little chip of bone that had broken off inside the tip of my finger. He took off the mangled nail and put a few neat stitches in the side - just like I’d later learn to stitch up my cloth dolls’ feet or arms when the stuffing came out.
My first year of school had a stand out start. It took the other kids two years to catch up to my trend-setting empty face look. They began losing teeth in Second Grade.
My great finger bandage may have been a trend-setter too, because Warren Harris broke his arm jumping off the Jungle Gym that same term, and Glen Gillis got hit by a car and was lucky to come away with only a broken arm from that encounter. They held a competition to see which one of them could get the most people to sign or draw a picture on their casts. I wondered, years later, when Glen’s dad married Warren’s mom after each lost their spouse, whether breaking the same bones so close together in time meant they were destined to become family.
Angelika and I were Blood Sisters. We poked a pin in the tip of one of our fingers and pressed the blood spots together, swearing solemnly forever to protect each other like real blood sisters would. Then we ceremonially buried the pin. We each had one brother and no sisters except each other. Hers was her twin Peter; mine was six years older than I. His name is Melton. We called him Mel.
Mel was king of the hill. We neighborhood kids - including Danny, Warren, Glen, Jeffrey Killen, Peter and Angelika and I would play this game: Mel would hold a blanket by its four corners and swing it as he spun around in a circle trying to catch our legs and knock us down. When all of us were down and holding deathly still, he’d hoist his jeans by the belt-loops and yell, “New Men!” Then we’d all pop up and do it all over again. Why he was always king was a mystery, and only one of the many things I thought unfair as I grew up in post WWII suburban Los Angeles.
For instance, was it fair that all the daddies in our neighborhood were often sick or mad or just plain crazy?
Angelika came running over to our house when she was barely four, crying, “Daddy is sick again.” Her mom had gone to work, and her daddy Don was supposed to be in charge of the twins, but he was “sick” - meaning he’d drunk himself silly. My mom tucked him in bed and brought Peter and Angelika to our house to play until Edith got home.
When I entered first grade, my own mother went to work leaving Daddy in charge of me and Mel when we got home from school. He worked nights at the Los Angeles Times, so he slept most of the morning. Mel took a bus home from Junior High; the twins and I walked two of the five blocks home with Judy Young and Virginia Nakano, then up the rest of Baxter Street along Avon Street and up our steep, steep hill of Avon Terrace to my glass house at the top. The Fox house was down the path, past the white barricade. It looked like a tree house because a HUGE pepper tree was practically growing into the sliding glass door between the living room and the balcony which overlooked a vast expanse of terraced ivy.
When we were all about six or seven, Don rigged up a thick rope around one of the limbs of the old pepper tree so we could climb up on the balcony rail, sit on a big knot in the rope and swing out over the ivy, jumping off into the soft tangle of roots. We’d gallop up the stairwell, through the living room and wait for our next turn. We loved that swing and truly perfected the art of jumping by holding on high up on the rope and not sitting down until the jolt of the slack going suddenly taut was passed. We had contests to see who could land the farthest from the house. We honed our keen eyes to know exactly where the stone curb at the edge of each terrace was hidden by the ivy.
One summer, when we were about eight, little cousin Jimmy Fox came from Maryland to visit. We showed him the ropes, so to speak, of the great swing. Perhaps we knew exactly where the stone borders were, but we didn’t recognize that we’d grown adept and strong of muscle, eye, and judgement over the course of a couple of years, and had survived many near mishaps - skinned knees, blistered hands and the like.
When it was Jimmy’s turn, we encouraged him mightily - the memory of our own first jump so dim that we couldn’t fathom his fear. Brave he was, and not wanting to be a wuss, he jumped. The jolt proved a stunner for his seat, we heard him cry out, but courageously he sailed onward for two or three swings out over the terraces, then he jumped off near the height of his arc. He was really far from the house. Could’ve won our contest. We heard the sickening thud and ran down the back stairs into the yard. There we found him dazed and crumpled. There was a scrape on the side of his forehead, but he was holding his shoulder.
His trip to the doctor and back with Edith in her blue Ford station wagon seemed to us to take a week. The three of us camped out at my house worried and wondering if there was anything else we coulda-shoulda done to instruct him better.
Ultimately, our little black hearts turned on Jimmy and stopped featuring our own guilt in the matter of his broken collar bone. The rope swing had to come down because of him.
Bless Brother Mel’s heart. In one of his more magnanimous moves, he tied a new rope to a a walnut three that jutted out from the hillside that ringed our “South Forty”, which was just a big empty lot of sandstone covered with foxtail weeds. The only problem with this swing was that it was a lot shorter, and instead of landing in succulent green ivy, if you jumped, you landed in sticker weeds. A low branch had broken off jaggedly near the roots requiring care when swinging back , so you wouldn’t gauge your own back on it.
Those hills of Echo Park hold a lot of blood extracted from us - the hard-playing kids they nourished. I wouldn’t trade the harsh realities of those hills with their poison oak, rattlers, scorpions, centipedes, and black widows, nor the grim realities of my household for anything. Both were equally nourishing and equally poisonous. Turning poison into nectar became my life’s work.
He pulled out those two front teeth and that’s how I got to look so empty faced when we went to pick up brother Mel in Garapata Creek that August, just before he started sixth grade and I started Kindergarten. Mel had been working the trout farm run by Cole Weston’s family; Brett Weston took a photo of toothless me and my freckles.
The other memorable mishap that happened the first week of Kindergarten was a fight I had with Angelika at her house across the way at the top of our dead-end street in Echo Park. I was bolting out the Fox’s heavy oaken front door to run home, when Angelika slammed it catching my pointer finger. So, here comes Edith Fox wrapping me in a big bath towel. With blood all over, and me wailing in her arms, she ran up the flag-stone steps from the Fox house, all along the dirt path, past the Eucalyptus trees with their tiny diamond shaped pods twinkling at me through my tears, past the white wood barricade that marked the end of the street, and across the gravel parking pad toward my house. I could hear the gravel crunching under her hurried feet. She pounded on our front door, which was really the back door, but the only suitable door for opening on account of this house we lived in was made of redwood and glass and the heavy floor to ceiling sliders required strong stomach muscles, two hands on the handle and a foot braced against the frame to pull them open. So, we always went through the more normal hinged door in the laundry area of the kitchen. Edith pounded and rang the buzzer bell, yelling, “Bobbie!” and handed me over to my mother Barbara whose hair was in curlers - this being a Saturday.
Irv King our family doctor was in Inglewood. A long trip. I was used to breathing through pain, once the shock wore off and I knew I wasn’t going to die, so, after my hiccups and jagged breath subsided, mom and I sang all the way down to Dr. King’s office while I held onto the finger in a washcloth full of ice. He met us there and removed the little chip of bone that had broken off inside the tip of my finger. He took off the mangled nail and put a few neat stitches in the side - just like I’d later learn to stitch up my cloth dolls’ feet or arms when the stuffing came out.
My first year of school had a stand out start. It took the other kids two years to catch up to my trend-setting empty face look. They began losing teeth in Second Grade.
My great finger bandage may have been a trend-setter too, because Warren Harris broke his arm jumping off the Jungle Gym that same term, and Glen Gillis got hit by a car and was lucky to come away with only a broken arm from that encounter. They held a competition to see which one of them could get the most people to sign or draw a picture on their casts. I wondered, years later, when Glen’s dad married Warren’s mom after each lost their spouse, whether breaking the same bones so close together in time meant they were destined to become family.
Angelika and I were Blood Sisters. We poked a pin in the tip of one of our fingers and pressed the blood spots together, swearing solemnly forever to protect each other like real blood sisters would. Then we ceremonially buried the pin. We each had one brother and no sisters except each other. Hers was her twin Peter; mine was six years older than I. His name is Melton. We called him Mel.
Mel was king of the hill. We neighborhood kids - including Danny, Warren, Glen, Jeffrey Killen, Peter and Angelika and I would play this game: Mel would hold a blanket by its four corners and swing it as he spun around in a circle trying to catch our legs and knock us down. When all of us were down and holding deathly still, he’d hoist his jeans by the belt-loops and yell, “New Men!” Then we’d all pop up and do it all over again. Why he was always king was a mystery, and only one of the many things I thought unfair as I grew up in post WWII suburban Los Angeles.
For instance, was it fair that all the daddies in our neighborhood were often sick or mad or just plain crazy?
Angelika came running over to our house when she was barely four, crying, “Daddy is sick again.” Her mom had gone to work, and her daddy Don was supposed to be in charge of the twins, but he was “sick” - meaning he’d drunk himself silly. My mom tucked him in bed and brought Peter and Angelika to our house to play until Edith got home.
When I entered first grade, my own mother went to work leaving Daddy in charge of me and Mel when we got home from school. He worked nights at the Los Angeles Times, so he slept most of the morning. Mel took a bus home from Junior High; the twins and I walked two of the five blocks home with Judy Young and Virginia Nakano, then up the rest of Baxter Street along Avon Street and up our steep, steep hill of Avon Terrace to my glass house at the top. The Fox house was down the path, past the white barricade. It looked like a tree house because a HUGE pepper tree was practically growing into the sliding glass door between the living room and the balcony which overlooked a vast expanse of terraced ivy.
When we were all about six or seven, Don rigged up a thick rope around one of the limbs of the old pepper tree so we could climb up on the balcony rail, sit on a big knot in the rope and swing out over the ivy, jumping off into the soft tangle of roots. We’d gallop up the stairwell, through the living room and wait for our next turn. We loved that swing and truly perfected the art of jumping by holding on high up on the rope and not sitting down until the jolt of the slack going suddenly taut was passed. We had contests to see who could land the farthest from the house. We honed our keen eyes to know exactly where the stone curb at the edge of each terrace was hidden by the ivy.
One summer, when we were about eight, little cousin Jimmy Fox came from Maryland to visit. We showed him the ropes, so to speak, of the great swing. Perhaps we knew exactly where the stone borders were, but we didn’t recognize that we’d grown adept and strong of muscle, eye, and judgement over the course of a couple of years, and had survived many near mishaps - skinned knees, blistered hands and the like.
When it was Jimmy’s turn, we encouraged him mightily - the memory of our own first jump so dim that we couldn’t fathom his fear. Brave he was, and not wanting to be a wuss, he jumped. The jolt proved a stunner for his seat, we heard him cry out, but courageously he sailed onward for two or three swings out over the terraces, then he jumped off near the height of his arc. He was really far from the house. Could’ve won our contest. We heard the sickening thud and ran down the back stairs into the yard. There we found him dazed and crumpled. There was a scrape on the side of his forehead, but he was holding his shoulder.
His trip to the doctor and back with Edith in her blue Ford station wagon seemed to us to take a week. The three of us camped out at my house worried and wondering if there was anything else we coulda-shoulda done to instruct him better.
Ultimately, our little black hearts turned on Jimmy and stopped featuring our own guilt in the matter of his broken collar bone. The rope swing had to come down because of him.
Bless Brother Mel’s heart. In one of his more magnanimous moves, he tied a new rope to a a walnut three that jutted out from the hillside that ringed our “South Forty”, which was just a big empty lot of sandstone covered with foxtail weeds. The only problem with this swing was that it was a lot shorter, and instead of landing in succulent green ivy, if you jumped, you landed in sticker weeds. A low branch had broken off jaggedly near the roots requiring care when swinging back , so you wouldn’t gauge your own back on it.
Those hills of Echo Park hold a lot of blood extracted from us - the hard-playing kids they nourished. I wouldn’t trade the harsh realities of those hills with their poison oak, rattlers, scorpions, centipedes, and black widows, nor the grim realities of my household for anything. Both were equally nourishing and equally poisonous. Turning poison into nectar became my life’s work.
Saturday, April 16, 2016
Below are photos I was trying to integrate into last week's blog post about Dunsmuir, California.
1 - Beautiful Mama Shasta
2 - The California Theater on Dunsmuir Avenue
3 - My favorite shop. Established 1894
4 - Griffin Poop? Or Spring Tulips
5 - Mr. Dunsmuir offered to build a fountain for the town if they'd rename Pusher after his family. The water is always running! The BEST WATER IN THE WORLD!
Photos 6 - 10 Inside Dunsmuir Hardware
6 & 7 - The same kind of National Cash Register my neighbor Angelika and I played with as kids. Her dad worked there
8 - Old implements above all that is for sale. (BTW... The store IS for sale for less than a half million!)
9 - Broken heart
10 - License to decorate
11 - Get-away-car-driver
12 - Bridge over Lake Siskiyou
13 - On the bridge
14 - Gotta love a heart in the Sacramento River. Taken from the edge of Dunsmuir Botanical Garden
15 - Head stand with legs in the air?
16 - Heart-Rock-Cafe? (next door to The Brown Trout)
17 - Building that houses The Brown Trout (Vintage everything!) and The Wheelhouse Cafe
18 - The Brown Trout's natural Air Conditioning. It's SO COOL! A tributary to the Sacramento River goes under!
19 - I have a fascination with the oval photos of the deceased on many of the headstones in Dunsmuir Cemetery
1 - Beautiful Mama Shasta
2 - The California Theater on Dunsmuir Avenue
3 - My favorite shop. Established 1894
4 - Griffin Poop? Or Spring Tulips
5 - Mr. Dunsmuir offered to build a fountain for the town if they'd rename Pusher after his family. The water is always running! The BEST WATER IN THE WORLD!
Photos 6 - 10 Inside Dunsmuir Hardware
6 & 7 - The same kind of National Cash Register my neighbor Angelika and I played with as kids. Her dad worked there
8 - Old implements above all that is for sale. (BTW... The store IS for sale for less than a half million!)
9 - Broken heart
10 - License to decorate
11 - Get-away-car-driver
12 - Bridge over Lake Siskiyou
13 - On the bridge
14 - Gotta love a heart in the Sacramento River. Taken from the edge of Dunsmuir Botanical Garden
15 - Head stand with legs in the air?
16 - Heart-Rock-Cafe? (next door to The Brown Trout)
17 - Building that houses The Brown Trout (Vintage everything!) and The Wheelhouse Cafe
18 - The Brown Trout's natural Air Conditioning. It's SO COOL! A tributary to the Sacramento River goes under!
19 - I have a fascination with the oval photos of the deceased on many of the headstones in Dunsmuir Cemetery
Monday, April 11, 2016
Dunsmuir
In the shadow of Shasta, the tiny town of Dunsmuir California chases its tail.
Formerly called Pusher for all the locomotives it housed, ready to push trains up and over the steep sides of magnificent snowy peaks of the Trinity Mountains, it is now a town in transition.
Tiny houses originally built for rail workers and their families variably look forlorn or cared-for.
The population, which in the 1950’s and ’60’s was close to twenty five hundred, is down to just over sixteen hundred. Principal Ray Kellar of Dunsmuir High School says they once had a student body of eight hundred. Now, they are struggling to keep the home of the Tiger's football team open with only sixty-five students in four grades. I don't think the school's “Go Tigers” logo sent the students away. More likely it’s the lack of incentive to get up and go to school, says Mr. Kellar. Federal welfare laws changed in the 1990’s. The entire population took a dive. Many families left town. Work is scarce. The population is depressed - financially and psychologically. At least the Tigers enjoy breakfast and lunch for all students, no stigma, no questions asked. Charter schools and home study programs don’t require sleepy teens to get up and show up, says Principal Kellar. This June they expect to graduate sixteen students. Many of them will go up the road to Shasta City to the community college there. Fewer will go directly to four year colleges or universities. The future may hold one high school for several mini-cities in the shadow of Shasta's enigmatic and ubiquitous presence.
Writing buddy Jan and I stayed three nights at a fine old motel called Cedar Lodge - complete with lovely aviary full of parrots, cockatiels, and coy fish. Owners Mike and Sylvia Robinson filled us in on their effort to sell the place, and told how Dunsmuir’s demographics definitely are skewing older, as young people leave for jobs elsewhere.
Yet… there are glimmers of new life. City-weary folk from the Bay Area are looking northward for R & R. When we tucked into The Brown Trout, across Sacramento Street from the train station, we had the sense that change is in the wind. Feeling the natural air conditioning wafting up from a grate in the floor of this historical (1903) building was magical. SEEING the river flowing by directly under our feet through a plexiglass chunk of flooring was dizzying. Owner Peter and store manager Barbara were helpful and informative as my friend and I sought historical perspective on this gem of a town in transition. Peter travels east to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania about once a year to pick up dazzling antiques. Driving back trough the Rust Belt, he can't help but notice the strong resemblance these falling-apart-towns bear to his new hometown of Dunsmuir. A Bay Area transplant himself, he is made aware during his yearly sojourn that this old town is on a similar skid downward. It's as if the gutting of infrastructure due to lack of a vibrant economy yields a third world economy. Is it gentrification that is pushing out the welfare families? Is it the closure of rail yards and lumber mills? No viable opportunities to work make it hard to live.
Yet, Peter's inventory of vintage items - including fine old oak furniture, toys of the fifties, fine clothing, and jewelry - is impressive yet reasonably priced. Tourist trade is his life blood.
Dining at the Wheelhouse Cafe next door (yum!) completed a lovely afternoon in Dunsmuir. While dining, we saw and said hello to our waitress of a couple of nights before from Yak’s Restaurant. It really IS a small town! Yak’s is rated as one of America’s top 100 restaurants. She and her luncheon companion said they value the quiet and natural beauty of Dunsmuir and fled the "Big Bay Busy" to try it out. So far, so good!
By far my favorite place on Dunsmuir Avenue is the Hardware Store. Founded in 1894, it has the best selection of new items displayed under and around one hundred year old farm tools, crates, OLD license plates, and photos of the town in its heyday. Don’t old hardware stores have the best smell and the best wood floors? Again, owner Ron is seeking a buyer for the thriving and only hardware store in town. (At less than $500,000, folks... it's a steal!)
Our last evening there, we walked around the cemetery. I have a fascination with the oval convex photos adorning some of the tombstones. There was a small fenced yard around the grave of Abner Weed and his family. It is for him, and not cannabis that the town of Weed is named. Weed is just an exit or two north on Interstate Five.
Dunsmuir is definitely a destination for further enjoyment, along with its companion cities of Shasta, Weed, McCloud and Etna. And, hey... it's just a skip to the Oregon border and the annual Shakespeare Festival in Ashland!
(Grrrrrr.... I have some lovely photos that refuse to jump across from my smarter-than-I-am-iPhone to my computer. Perhaps, when I figure out how technology works, I'll be able to post them as a "Tuesday Museday.")
Formerly called Pusher for all the locomotives it housed, ready to push trains up and over the steep sides of magnificent snowy peaks of the Trinity Mountains, it is now a town in transition.
Tiny houses originally built for rail workers and their families variably look forlorn or cared-for.
The population, which in the 1950’s and ’60’s was close to twenty five hundred, is down to just over sixteen hundred. Principal Ray Kellar of Dunsmuir High School says they once had a student body of eight hundred. Now, they are struggling to keep the home of the Tiger's football team open with only sixty-five students in four grades. I don't think the school's “Go Tigers” logo sent the students away. More likely it’s the lack of incentive to get up and go to school, says Mr. Kellar. Federal welfare laws changed in the 1990’s. The entire population took a dive. Many families left town. Work is scarce. The population is depressed - financially and psychologically. At least the Tigers enjoy breakfast and lunch for all students, no stigma, no questions asked. Charter schools and home study programs don’t require sleepy teens to get up and show up, says Principal Kellar. This June they expect to graduate sixteen students. Many of them will go up the road to Shasta City to the community college there. Fewer will go directly to four year colleges or universities. The future may hold one high school for several mini-cities in the shadow of Shasta's enigmatic and ubiquitous presence.
Writing buddy Jan and I stayed three nights at a fine old motel called Cedar Lodge - complete with lovely aviary full of parrots, cockatiels, and coy fish. Owners Mike and Sylvia Robinson filled us in on their effort to sell the place, and told how Dunsmuir’s demographics definitely are skewing older, as young people leave for jobs elsewhere.
Yet… there are glimmers of new life. City-weary folk from the Bay Area are looking northward for R & R. When we tucked into The Brown Trout, across Sacramento Street from the train station, we had the sense that change is in the wind. Feeling the natural air conditioning wafting up from a grate in the floor of this historical (1903) building was magical. SEEING the river flowing by directly under our feet through a plexiglass chunk of flooring was dizzying. Owner Peter and store manager Barbara were helpful and informative as my friend and I sought historical perspective on this gem of a town in transition. Peter travels east to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania about once a year to pick up dazzling antiques. Driving back trough the Rust Belt, he can't help but notice the strong resemblance these falling-apart-towns bear to his new hometown of Dunsmuir. A Bay Area transplant himself, he is made aware during his yearly sojourn that this old town is on a similar skid downward. It's as if the gutting of infrastructure due to lack of a vibrant economy yields a third world economy. Is it gentrification that is pushing out the welfare families? Is it the closure of rail yards and lumber mills? No viable opportunities to work make it hard to live.
Yet, Peter's inventory of vintage items - including fine old oak furniture, toys of the fifties, fine clothing, and jewelry - is impressive yet reasonably priced. Tourist trade is his life blood.
Dining at the Wheelhouse Cafe next door (yum!) completed a lovely afternoon in Dunsmuir. While dining, we saw and said hello to our waitress of a couple of nights before from Yak’s Restaurant. It really IS a small town! Yak’s is rated as one of America’s top 100 restaurants. She and her luncheon companion said they value the quiet and natural beauty of Dunsmuir and fled the "Big Bay Busy" to try it out. So far, so good!
By far my favorite place on Dunsmuir Avenue is the Hardware Store. Founded in 1894, it has the best selection of new items displayed under and around one hundred year old farm tools, crates, OLD license plates, and photos of the town in its heyday. Don’t old hardware stores have the best smell and the best wood floors? Again, owner Ron is seeking a buyer for the thriving and only hardware store in town. (At less than $500,000, folks... it's a steal!)
Our last evening there, we walked around the cemetery. I have a fascination with the oval convex photos adorning some of the tombstones. There was a small fenced yard around the grave of Abner Weed and his family. It is for him, and not cannabis that the town of Weed is named. Weed is just an exit or two north on Interstate Five.
Dunsmuir is definitely a destination for further enjoyment, along with its companion cities of Shasta, Weed, McCloud and Etna. And, hey... it's just a skip to the Oregon border and the annual Shakespeare Festival in Ashland!
(Grrrrrr.... I have some lovely photos that refuse to jump across from my smarter-than-I-am-iPhone to my computer. Perhaps, when I figure out how technology works, I'll be able to post them as a "Tuesday Museday.")
Sunday, April 3, 2016
Writing
With grateful heart, I sit a bit… listening
Her bereft heart pours out grief,
Her terror and rage seek relief
Tears puddle beneath our feet
Emotional exhaust rises to rafters and out the peak…
No quantifying stats, only evidence based proof
Events that used to floor her have gone - *poof*
Transformed terror into triumph
Fashioned compassion out of angst
Folks come into this space with terrible knowledge
Fortunate am I to bear witness with hard-earned wisdom
Not stuff learned in college
Slowly, I turn up the heat under the crucible -
Lead into gold; dross into floss
She puts down her cross
Out into the world to live life with a bit more grace and ease
As lives run smoother; fears that tripped us, miss us
now
as we’ve found a different groove
Eventually, there’s nothing left to prove
So we pass along the learning
Still there’s bound to be yearning
That children wouldn’t have had to have suffered
Wish that our adult bodies could have buffered
The winds, slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Yet, with gratitude I note, what didn’t kill us made us stronger;
I sit a bit with others, and want to linger longer…
Some days I wake up feeling broken all over again…
That’s when I need to be reminded that I want to linger longer.
Living well is the best revenge.
One sixth grade teacher perceived the pain
Powerless to change the life of her student
But acknowledging the student even by so slight a
Glint of recognition in her teacher’s eyes was enough
For that student to carry her through to the time
When she could act upon the label:
“Melinda, You’re going to be a writer.”
Seventh grade’s Mr. James, or was it Mr. Jones,
They were both so ungodly handsome, all those
Ken Dolls look alike, who ever…
He started off the semester with, “It was a dark and
Stormy night…”
Never knowing it was stormier in the daylight when this
Student was a kindergartener
What fun she had letting go
With words about things that went “bump
Bump” any time any where
Eighth grade’s English teacher had pin-ball eyes
Steely blues blurry behind bottle bottom glasses
His waddling penguin gait exaggerated the blur as
Head followed feet’s command: waddle left
Waddle right, waddle hallways out of sight
His private invitation only to this student
Was to write essays about the new baby in the house
Starfish fingers; interrupted sleep
Crying, cooing, cuteness, crawl and creep
Journaling began in earnest
High school sweethearts page after page
Reds, whites and blues were all the rage
Reds were a downer, Bennies (whites) made you high,
True-Blue Truinols told the truth, but some nights she could fly
Sailed so high, she crashed and burned
Failed to remember all that she’d learned
Mrs. Payton in tenth grade science
Saw her gifts, offered an alliance
Got her into Advanced Placement Classes
With the gentrified lads and lasses
Mrs. LeFont we all called, “Mommy.”
Mr. Fagan was a Queen and, perhaps, a Commie
Played us Vivaldi’s Seasons
Explained logic and reason
loved to watch as D. Kurakani stretched
“Look out, there he goes, there he goes,”
Mr. Fagan wiggled his nose.
“Mr. Kurakani, please watch out for your toes!”
Blur of dope days
Owsley’s purple haze
Some how survived
Glad to have arrived
At a time in my life that's ripe for reflection
A time for writing from selections
Of chapters
Back to the rafters…
Up & out into the stratosphere
Helpful to clear the atmosphere
Creating a good and right write rite
Miss Finley, help me out here... please!
Her bereft heart pours out grief,
Her terror and rage seek relief
Tears puddle beneath our feet
Emotional exhaust rises to rafters and out the peak…
No quantifying stats, only evidence based proof
Events that used to floor her have gone - *poof*
Transformed terror into triumph
Fashioned compassion out of angst
Folks come into this space with terrible knowledge
Fortunate am I to bear witness with hard-earned wisdom
Not stuff learned in college
Slowly, I turn up the heat under the crucible -
Lead into gold; dross into floss
She puts down her cross
Out into the world to live life with a bit more grace and ease
As lives run smoother; fears that tripped us, miss us
now
as we’ve found a different groove
Eventually, there’s nothing left to prove
So we pass along the learning
Still there’s bound to be yearning
That children wouldn’t have had to have suffered
Wish that our adult bodies could have buffered
The winds, slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Yet, with gratitude I note, what didn’t kill us made us stronger;
I sit a bit with others, and want to linger longer…
Some days I wake up feeling broken all over again…
That’s when I need to be reminded that I want to linger longer.
Living well is the best revenge.
One sixth grade teacher perceived the pain
Powerless to change the life of her student
But acknowledging the student even by so slight a
Glint of recognition in her teacher’s eyes was enough
For that student to carry her through to the time
When she could act upon the label:
“Melinda, You’re going to be a writer.”
Seventh grade’s Mr. James, or was it Mr. Jones,
They were both so ungodly handsome, all those
Ken Dolls look alike, who ever…
He started off the semester with, “It was a dark and
Stormy night…”
Never knowing it was stormier in the daylight when this
Student was a kindergartener
What fun she had letting go
With words about things that went “bump
Bump” any time any where
Eighth grade’s English teacher had pin-ball eyes
Steely blues blurry behind bottle bottom glasses
His waddling penguin gait exaggerated the blur as
Head followed feet’s command: waddle left
Waddle right, waddle hallways out of sight
His private invitation only to this student
Was to write essays about the new baby in the house
Starfish fingers; interrupted sleep
Crying, cooing, cuteness, crawl and creep
Journaling began in earnest
High school sweethearts page after page
Reds, whites and blues were all the rage
Reds were a downer, Bennies (whites) made you high,
True-Blue Truinols told the truth, but some nights she could fly
Sailed so high, she crashed and burned
Failed to remember all that she’d learned
Mrs. Payton in tenth grade science
Saw her gifts, offered an alliance
Got her into Advanced Placement Classes
With the gentrified lads and lasses
Mrs. LeFont we all called, “Mommy.”
Mr. Fagan was a Queen and, perhaps, a Commie
Played us Vivaldi’s Seasons
Explained logic and reason
loved to watch as D. Kurakani stretched
“Look out, there he goes, there he goes,”
Mr. Fagan wiggled his nose.
“Mr. Kurakani, please watch out for your toes!”
Blur of dope days
Owsley’s purple haze
Some how survived
Glad to have arrived
At a time in my life that's ripe for reflection
A time for writing from selections
Of chapters
Back to the rafters…
Up & out into the stratosphere
Helpful to clear the atmosphere
Creating a good and right write rite
Miss Finley, help me out here... please!
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