How Do I Love Thee?

Let me count the years...

45!

That's no jive

Where'd they go?
This we know:

One love ablazing
Beach walks and star-gazing

Two daughters growing
Balls and clay pots throwing

Three homes in So Cal
Four if you count Nor Cal

Five golden decades

Six brand new roofs
Never without goofs

Seven year old grandie
In our hearts she's handy

Eight small creatures
Most with furry features

Nine cats with nine lives
Boa who gave Mark hives

Ten + years of camping
Joyous wild foot stamping

Eleven some-odd cars
Some did not go far

Dozens of plane trips
Cousins and friendships

Oodles of weddings
Too many dead things

Wouldn't trade a minute
Nor all the love within it

For me there's no one dearer
I'd like to keep him near here

Alas his passion calls him
Summer camp enthralls him

As long as he comes home
He is my bon homme

Joyoux Aniversair to you
April 30, 1972

How to Make a Bed

One way to strip a bed is with an aerobic form vengeance. Is it productive to feel discounted that a seemingly entitled house guest has not brought her bedding upstairs to the laundry area? Only if you like that sort of cardio workout. I prefer dancing. It is perhaps equally futile to assume she is feeling entitled. Maybe she's uncertain of the routine. Maybe she's jet-lagged and cluelessly occluded - floating above any cognizance of protocol. Communication is key here. Something on the order of this may be stated next time I show her to her room upon arrival:

"It would be lovely if you'd bring your sheets and towels up when you're through downstairs. Are you willing to do that?"

Then, when the visit is complete, and the last dish or piece of folded laundry is put away, the making of the bed can be accompanied by a happy dance done to a hum of gratitude. Lyrics run through my head: "I'm so glad for the time we had. You grace the space with your goofy-loving face." Reminiscing and savoring the conversation, cooking side-by-side, wine toasts, collective awe at the dropping of the sun through a gloriously colored cloud bank into the sizzling sea. Aaah... That's the way I prefer to make a bed.

With three of my L.A. writing buddies here over the weekend, each of whom brought all her sheets, towels, and personal items up, we devoured good food cooked together, too much chocolate and too many bottles of wine, savored the succor of deep conversation, and listened to one another's writing. At the end of the day on Sunday, I blitzed the house with blissful zeal and slightly misty eyed longing, because I wanted them all to linger longer. They called shortly after they left, which was four hours after we all thought they ought to leave. They wanted to include me in the closing reading which we forestalled so they could get on the road and back to Los Angeles before midnight. They asked me to read the piece we'd chosen as part of the ceremony of closure. It is "The Invitation" by Oriah Mountain Dreamer...

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, 'Yes.'

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

With gratitude do I welcome my company, with gratitude do I make the beds.

Now, to welcome my honey back from four days of camp, I make the bed with relish. Hold the mayo. Looking forward to a lovely catch-up.

Conversations In Passing

During the traditional post-service trio of coffee, conversation, and cookies on Sunday, I was approached by one the members of this “Church of Last Resort” - as neighbor Gregory calls it. A talented wood carver, B was married to a lovely alto who sang in the Church Choir. When his wife died late last year, B followed the protocols for grieving. For a few months, he looked ghostly himself - a gossamer phantom. Gradually he has begun to rally… a little.

Easter Sunday, the sermon was about there being no one correct way to interpret the resurrection story. It could be Spring itself and the ever-renewing quality of life. Some might choose to believe the gospel story of Jesus actually rising from the tomb, rolling the rock aside and declaring triumph over death. Perhaps resurrection is the re-do of a relationship gone south, or the welling-up of wanting to live again after being leveled by grief like Wile E. Coyote under a steam-roller.

Maybe it was the sermon and a Happy Easter Hug I shared with genuine delight at table with B, that prompted him to launch into a recounting of a recent road trip with A, another man of the congregation who lost his wife just weeks ago. She too was a powerhouse and beloved member of the church. 

The two men, A and B drove down the coast together to hear a musical presentation put on by one of their sons. They spoke unreservedly with one another of their difficulties, triumphs, and futures. I acknowledged that having a portable living room on wheels and miles to travel can be the perfect setting for deep conversation. How wonderful that these two men could share their sadness and shoulder one another’s grief with heart-felt understanding. Perhaps it is true: Joy shared is doubled; sadness shared is halved.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

For a few days, I was in Southern California to support an old friend whose mother died last week, I revisited the idea that there is no one correct way to grieve. Only our own way. Relief and grief are often inter-woven. Celebration of the emancipation of spirit from no-longer-useful flesh makes sense. Gardening in her backyard, with my friend the day after the burial, suited her perfectly. Another friend dealt with multiple loads from the dishwasher. We all just hunkered down and did the work that needed to be done and the interstitial heart-to-hearts were a balm. Clearly, my friend was working alchemy in her emotional body by pounding the earth with fist and foot. She was able to voice her frustration and disappointment owing to her children’s different priorities in the wake of their grandmother’s departure. The family has much work to do. Lawyers will be mitigators and prioritizers. 

This other friend of my friend deserves a separate conversation in passing about passing. Her son was killed in 1998. These two bereaved women trauma bonded over the tragic and unimaginable loss of their brave sons. J, my friend since we were three years old, lost her son to a senseless murder in 1999 when he was advocating for the Uwa tribe in Colombia. C’s son had a vision of saving the old-growth redwoods in Humboldt County, California. He was crushed under one of the magnificent trees, which was cut down and seemingly aimed at him and his fellow protestors. The tree cutter employed by MAXXAM Lumber was never brought to trial. Similarly, charges couldn’t stick to Occidental Oil or FARC in Colombia, although both entities  were implicated in the kidnap and subsequent murder of J’s indigenous-rights-advocating son and his two companions. A book by Patrick Beach recounts the tale of environmental heroism in A Good Forest for Dying: The Tragic Death of a Young Man on the Front Lines of the Environmental Wars. 

The death of my friend's son is touched on in the video about Ram Dass called "Fierce Grace."

Conversing with someone who understands deeply our own gut and heart is a great gift. 

In the case of these two women, I can only empathize as if I could know their shared experience of loss. My fervent prayer is that I never do fully understand that level of loss. Selfish? Yes. There are many other conversations about death I can partake in full-heartedly and with intimate knowledge.  God and Goddess, please watch over my children and grandchild and all Earth's children going forward that they may thrive for years to come.

May the uprising of Spring put a spring in your step and incline your thoughts toward the miracle of being alive.

What I Wanted To Be...

I always wanted to be a dancer. Not that I knew what it meant at seven or eight. I only knew that the Sugar Plum Faeries were the most beautiful, graceful, and light-on-their-feet beings I’d ever seen. My mother and her best friend Kay took me to see the Nutcracker. Maybe there were others in our party, I don’t recall. I only remember the dim lighting at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, the sparkle of the dancers’ costumes, the wonderful music lifting me out of my seat, and the smell of pine and fresh mown (or trampled) grass. I was seven years old.

Kay gave me A Child's Book of Ballet, which I still have - minus the cover, for my birthday. That summer, Mom signed me up for lessons. My friend from across the street, Angelika and I were taken to a studio somewhere under the big Eagle Rock in the town of that name. Sometimes, I was afraid that rock would roll right over the studio and squash us flat. 

There was a recital. Angelika and I practiced together and danced our hearts out. My father  built a ballet bar where we plié-ed and relevé-ed, did our port de bras, and ronds de jambes à terre for warm-ups before doing chaîné turns across the patio. So serious were we!  

When I was twelve, Ann Barlon was my teacher for modern dance, much closer to home. Angelika had moved away to Running Springs by then, and Ann’s classes were at the Saint Athanasius Episcopal church directly across from Echo Park Lake every Saturday morning. We put on concerts twice a year in Elysian Park. There, the Devil’s grass prickled our bottoms as we sat bare-legged on it. Very different from the wooden floor at Saint Athanasius which was polished smooth by feet passing over and scouring the boards for eons. Maybe we can thank the Devil’s grass for giving us strong gluteus and hip muscles. Ms. Barlon’s choreography was filled with hip lifts - meaning we came to standing by thrusting our hips skyward and the rest of the body followed. Those pokey blades propelled us up!

In between the Eagle Rock Ballet School and Ann Barlon’s Modern Dance Classes, my father introduced me to Carmelita Maracci, danceur extraordinaire, who was signed by impresario Sol Hurok for a five year contract. Unheard of! During one of her performances in the 1940s, Carmelita broke her ankle. When Hurok insisted that she dance on it anyway, she terminated the contract. 

Fiery and feisty, she taught Cynthia Gregory, Juliette Prowse, Julie Newmar, and many other dancers at Perry’s Dance Studio near the corner of Highland and Franklin, just up from Hollywood Boulevard. Perry’s was on the second floor of a commercial building and, just like the song in A Chorus Line, we dancers went “up a steep and very narrow staircase…” to a place that “wasn’t paradise, but it was home.” Peggy Henderson was the matronly assistant from Scotland who spoke with a broad brogue… “Now, Laidyes…” and gave us sound effects with her mouth: schwttttt, schwttttt, as we did our battement tendu at the barre. She taught the youngest students warm-ups and barre work before Carmelita got hold of us for floor work.

All of us young dancers were afraid of Carmelita. She was exacting and eager for her dancers to represent her well. She was a perfectionist whose harsh voice and severe features could crack open the waterworks of many young ones, sending them into teary exits from Studio A.

Perhaps because my father had selected her as “the best” in Los Angeles, I hung in there with the twice weekly lessons, until my father left to live in Hermosa Beach. That’s when I studied with Ann Barlon - age twelve to fifteen. After my father’s death in 1965, I returned to Carmelita’s classes, which had moved to La Brea Boulevard, and eventually onto Catalina Street between downtown and Wilshire Boulevard’s “Miracle Mile.” At sixteen, I could drive myself to classes, and I took six a week, sometimes riding my bike from classes at Los Angeles City College to the dance studio and then all the way back to Echo Park at night. Anorexia was not part of the lexicon in the 1960s, but had it been, I probably would have been diagnosed with it. Even though I ate constantly, I burned off every scrap. Scrawny. Drawn. Wiry. Determined to live my dream of being a ballerina, I was driven to be the best I could. Carmelita said I had good legs. She offered me a scholarship. That was a blessing, as I was working just a few hours a day as a switchboard operator at a non-profit, and it was barely enough income for food, rent, books and class fees. My mom and step-dad were OK paying tuition my first year of college at Cal State LA, but not when I professed wanting to become a dancer. LACC cost just six dollars a unit. I continued my education there in the foreign language department, worked as a tutor, and studied dance mostly at night.

My boyfriend at the time was not a big fan of ballet. More precisely, he was not a big fan of me being gone to study ballet so many nights a week. Looking back, I’m not proud of letting his opinion matter so much. His will, that I be more available, and my feet developing arthritis in the ball joint of my big toes led me away from Carmelita and the whole idea of becoming a dancer. 

Before I hung up my dance-shoes altogether, I put in a couple of years at a Classical Spanish Dance studio with a teacher named José Fernandez. I went with the young mom for whose kids I babysat weekends. Ruth and I would drive together over to Falcon Studios on Hollywood Boulevard every week. He taught us castanets, zapateado, and how to keep our backs straight and chests high. He told us that women in Spain who learned this classical style wore corsets with whale-bone stays that were sharpened to a point - pointing up. If they let down for even an instant, their breasts would be pierced. I don’t know if the story was true. I do know that it inspired Ruth and me to keep our chests very high - even though both of us were board flat in the chestal department. She encouraged me by saying, “When you need breasts, Melinda, you’ll grow them. I nursed Amy and Sarah with no problems at all, then they just went flat again.” It was from Ruth and her artist husband Bob Gore that I bought my very-own first car - a 1954 too-fine, four-door, two tone Chevy Bellair. What a glorious yellow and green tank it was. It got me where I wanted to go… to school, to work, to dance class, and to Gypsy Gerry’s… until I finally learned that no one has the right to tell me what to do with my life. It took a long slow (five year) dance to figure that out.

When both my daughters studied Modern Dance with Karen Fox in Studio City, my friend Wendy, who had been a dance major at UCLA, and I hung out in the teen class (sipping our Geritol) and loving the live music and chance to be creative and immersed in what we both love so much.

I’m glad I got to dance as much as I did. Sometimes I still put on my toe shoes or Spanish Dance Shoes and conjure old steps and pieces I choreographed. Perhaps it’s good for getting my synapses to syn. 

Last December, I treated the seven year old Grandest Daughter and her mama to 

The Nutcracker presented by San Francisco Ballet. Perhaps she’ll remember the sparkle of the dancers’ costumes, the curtain going up, and the music lifting her out of her seat. She has asked for ballet lessons this summer. That is the job of a grandmother, isn't it?

Once upon a Midnight dreary...

Long I sat with butt grown weary

Screen staring 'til my eyes grew teary

Once upon a midnight dreary.



Mr. Poe, I do apologize 

Virtues yours, here note, I eulogize

Writing thus, I only fantasize 

Annabelle's not mine to plagiarize 



Butt in chair is what's required

In other's business I'm too mired

Now, it's late and I'm so tired

You'd think the blog should get me wired



Exhaustion leaves the mind in fog

Too numbing tired to write a blog

So I sit and bitch like a dog

Which, flea-infested slips a cog



Never to write a pleasing piece

Forever to wear a forehead crease

Writing any further I must cease

I'm going to bed, now, where's my fleece?