Ringing In the New Year

My wedding ring makes a really cool sound sliding along the wooden banister on the left side of the stairwell going down into the underbelly of the house. It's a wind-like sound with a little rhythm. As my feet take me down, step by step, there's an almost imperceptible pause between each stair. 

I like the constancy of the accompaniment to my descent whenever I go to my office - early each morning for yoga and meditation, and later for office tasks. 

Welcome to my space. It's a small space, just large enough for a desk and a chair and a healing cot. If I want to set up my massage table, it's really cozy. Squished feeling. But clients don't seem to mind when they're supine and their eyes are closed or they're prone in the face cradle. Nor do they mind when I slide the healing cot into the middle of the room on a diagonal so I have access to all sides. 

The only problem is when I want to do a boundary exercise with a newish client. Then I need to move to the official guest room. Even there, it's a little cramped. Too small to have quite enough space for a big circle of rope or yarn or ribbon around a client to determine where a boundary may have been breeched by an unwanted or unexpected event. 

It's important to know where someone's boundaries have been breeched. Dad's good right hand smacking against our cheek as we accidentally spilled milk at the dinner table can leave a lifelong imprint - meaning, child (now adult) is always looking out for that smack to come, thus ignoring the other side. OR we know what's coming to us from Dad's right hand, or a remembered auto accident, surgery, or other assault, so we willfully ignore that side and get hyper-vigilant toward the other side.

Boundaries count. They keep us healthy. Repairing them is a fun puzzle. But we need a big enough space for the body to speak its truth. Hopefully, when clients who have boundary breeches come to me, they will not be disrupted by walking down the hall to the Hobbit Room. We call it the Hobbit Room because it's snuggled into the hillside. The only window is three inches too high up from the floor for safe egress in case of fire, according to the Oakland's Department of Building and Safety, but we keep a stool handy, just in case.

Boundaries R Us. Don't leave home without one. 

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Israel is said to have the largest number of traffic accidents in the world - more than any other country. Think of it as an island of land that was  initially petitioned by Zionist leader Herzl when the Ottoman Empire ruled Palestine in 1896. 

Not until May 14, 1948 was Israel officially declared a Jewish State, by the United Nations after the Holocaust led so many Jewish refugees to flee Europe. The very day of Israel's establishment as a country, bombs were being lobbed into it from surrounding Arab nations in the morning, and by Egypt in the evening. 

Surrounding Israel are Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Egypt. The Red Sea is to the South; Mediterranean Sea to the West. All these countries still want that precious land originally given to the Israel, then under rule of the first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. 


The reason for greater numbers of car accidents perhaps lies in the  number of wars that have been fought over the land of Israel. War breeches boundaries like nobody's business. It is a huge factor in making humans crazy with a feeling of "Not Safe." We need to have a certain base level of safety in order to be able to function with any coherence. When boundaries are breeched by bombings, there's a sense of not knowing when or whence the next blow is coming. That sort of gun shy reaction makes terrible drivers, because people in shell-shock are always ducking and covering while trying to navigate through a city's busy streets. Syria may run a close second in number of traffic accidents. What atrocities we are capable of perpetrating against our fellow humans! One Lifeboat, Earth, folks. ONE lifeboat. 

Peace, man! Peace.

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My Ring... makes a joyful noise as I go downstairs. It's like a Pavlovian bell indicating it is time to meditate. Yummy. Or write a blog. Yummy and challenging. Or pay bills... Mehhh. Or to work with a client... Definitely yummy. I love to work! I love to work with clients and kids and babies and old folks... 

Sometimes, the ring sound is missing, replaced by clunk, clunk, clunk. I am carrying the vacuum, the feather duster, and vinegar for cleaning toilet, sinks, and mirrors. 

Sometimes, cleaning happens. 


Although I've worn my wedding ring for nearly forty-eight years, it's not getting much thinner. I remember looking at my grandmother's wedding ring and thinking how very thin it had become. Worn away by busy hands doing busy work every day for over seventy-five years! That was a long marriage.  The only time each of them married was that auspicious day, September 1, 1914, the day they both said, "Yes! I do."

My mother was born August 23, 1919. She would have been 100 years of age this past August. Her brother, my Uncle Larry, was born May 10, 1924, on the chicken ranch where they lived in San Bernardino. He was a twin. His brother, born dead, had a separate placenta which was not expelled during the birth process. Grammy got systemic blood poisoning. The invention of antibiotics was more than twenty years in the future. She was in bed for six months. Three of her sisters rotated caring for her, while my Granddad cared for the livestock and small garden. 

During her infirmity, my Grammy Florence cut and sewed together hundreds of pieces of fabric from her husband's worn-out shirts, her old dresses, and those of my mom, to make a quilt. She called it her agony quilt. It was a pre-depression era distraction. When complete, she shipped off the face of the quilt to her sister-in-law Wilhemina who, with her quilting bee in Marine City, Michigan, quilted it for her. It now hangs in the hallway downstairs here in this very house. The hand stitched border reminds me there are historical boundaries also; that our ancestral imprints, when understood, acknowledged, and healed in ourselves do not have to repeat in our own lifetime. I believe healing happens not only for ourselves but for future generations, and retroactively - back into history for the spirits of those who came before us.

Whenever I hear my ring singing along the wood bannister, I also think of my Grammy's thin gold band. A wonder it was, that it never got so thin that it actually broke. She was still wearing it when she died on October 16, 1991. We, her closest family, were there.  I heard my Gramps' voice come into the room, a few minutes before she took her last breath, to ask, "Florence, would you like to dance?" Her last breath came out as a resounding, "YES."  Nice ring to it, I think.

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May your Holly Daze be Joy-filled and cozy. 

May you ring in your New Fangled Year of 2020 with Delight, and may the next twelve months be bright with visions of peace dancing in your heart.

Hike At Golden Hour

Chevron shaped deer tracks mark the brown path

Sun has gone gold, gives green hills a bath

Stiff cold breeze blows my hair wild

Steel gray clouds mean business, child

Up with umbrellas, up with the collar

Lean into the wind climb higher and holler

Golden hour’s when pure magic’s about

Makes me walk faster and want to shout

The beauty around us, if only we grock it

Must be seen, smelled and felt, can’t go into a pocket

The beauty of light is fleeting and changing

Look NOW, in a minute, it’ll be rearranging

Gold to steel blue, without sun becomes purple

Crow riding currents caws hoping her chirp will

Bring to attention her stunning silhouette

We grock it and note our feet getting wet 

From skyline of city to bird flight so pretty

To miss this adventure would be such a pity

So, here we are with too thin a jacket

Still wouldn’t trade these clouds now all backlit

With crimson and silver, and eye squinting gold

Is our heavy breathing due to steepness or cold?

Climbing with you, my own dearest love

Washes me, cleansing with grace from above

Lifted my spirits, expanded my thanks

For this sweetest interlude ‘tween everyday tasks

Nature is sure to press "pause and refresh"

Internal computers note reduction in stress

Turn off the news, let the hills beckon

Climb us, sublime trust calls you to trek on

No matter the length of your walk/hike, go UP

Natural wonder will top off your cup

The One

In meditation this morning, I had the thought that at the moment of conception, the human conceptus is the embodiment of unity: Two cells become one. And the body and soul are one with the entire cosmos. 

Aaaah, would that we could simply savor that unity for a languid, luxurious length of time. 

However... next, comes a cleaving.

With the very first bifurcation or splitting of the one cell into two, there is the forgetting: The not remembering the truth that there is only ONE. WE ARE PART of everything... but we forget that. Our purpose as humans seems to be to re-member the truth, that ONE is all there is. We are but drops in an ocean of consciousness. We occupy an individual vessel for an eye blink of time in the grand scheme of things, but always, we are still part of the vast ocean of bliss. Pure consciousness.

Therein is the whole journey of human existence. Knowing, forgetting, and remembering again (with any luck!) that we are all pure consciousness. That's all, folks.

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The ovum sits there in her vastness waiting for something. She's not sure what. When the ONE comes knocking and banging his head, the zona pellucid (a translucent membrane that surrounds her) allows in the one chosen sperm. She opens to be penetrated by the ONE. She is calm and centered within her entire and whole self.

When the sperm is released and begins his grand journey of exploration to the site, his destination, his destiny, he is filled with motion, the opposite of sitting in quietude. Sperm behavior: "I don't know where I'm going I only know I've got to get there fast and beat out all these fellow flagellates to get there FIRST! I'm gonna elbow outa the way any one who gets in my way." (Do sperm have elbows?) 

She waits. She is expansive, passive, patient. He runs all out toward the finish line. 

It happens in a flash. One head of one sperm breaks through or is allowed through the zona pellucida into the interior of the ovum. Suddenly his head is absorbed into the ONE CELL. The two become ONE. His tail falls by the wayside. His mode of transportation no longer needed. Sperm’s job is transformed from going as fast as he can to being completely absorbed, dissolved, to become part of something entirely different from what he was. Poor sperm. 

For her part, the ovum is blasted, penetrated, shattered, poor egg, or willingly opened to the concept of LIFE flowing through into her heart of hearts. "YOU are the ONE. You are my reason for being. YOU make me complete. Together we will start something beautiful and new in the cosmos - a singularly unique new being."

The state of ONENESS lasts for a brief time. Then the ONE divides into TWO. Two cells as yet undifferentiated into any specific organs, bones, system parts, or nerves. Two cells, alike as they can be. And then THEY divide and begin the doubling of the doubling at a terrific rate, but seen in every corner of the world, simply because Nature is generous. 

The doubling and doubling again proliferates into the most amazing differentiation of cell tasks and shapes and purposes. It's a higher calling to be sure - to build and become a single part of a new human floating in his mother's dark and quiet. Long before the new mother is aware she is pregnant, the cells have already been imbued by the Breath of Life with a SOUL. A new incarnation of some soul who needed to come back to Earth School for new lessons in the grab bag of lessons all humans must learn to become free at last of incarnations on the planet. 

My belief is that nothing is lost forever. Veteran Recycler that I am, I firmly believe that what makes us alive, and vibrantly so to one another, is an essence, a unique soul that carries with it the sum total of all we've done on this planet for lifetime after lifetime. That essence is wise to some extent, for experiences understood become wisdom. Our aim is perfection; our condition is human. We are perfectly imperfect beings.  We ARE divinity incarnate and we make mistakes so we can learn from them. To greater or lesser degrees, we attain perfection with each lifetime spent on earth and perhaps on other planets as well. 

Reader's Digest Version:

Once upon a time, there was a little egg whose beloved was rushing toward her at the speed of light. When he finally bumped into his chosen beloved, he lost his head and was swallowed whole by her plump round body. The two became one. The one split and became many cells rubbing and bumping up against one another with such ferocious friction that they warmed the space in which they were growing and soon the host womb experienced such JOY that she, (yes, she; the only gender to grow and give birth to new life even at this current state of technology on the third planet from the Sun, in this solar system that is part of a galaxy we call the Milky Way, in a corner of the Uni-verse that sang us all), SHE rejoiced and grew contemplative about all the possibilities this new life - this new lover of life could bring to the planet.  

For father's part, he went along for the ride. The giver of life went elsewhere, leaving her to complete the project on her own. Perhaps he stuck around for the winter, bringing her foods and roots and berries to help sustain the life inside. Perhaps he abandoned her. Perhaps he stayed the course and became an active part in the raising and nurturing of new life. In any case, the child usually survives and brings to the world gifts the world is sorely in need of. Perhaps the gifts are misunderstood and criticized and made fun of because they are too radically new for a world so steeped in xenophobia it cannot open itself to new and different kinds of life flowing into and through it. 

Kindness is all. Loving kindness and compassion are the missing links in our long historical line of perceiving new life askance and with distrust rather than welcoming it with wide open arms as if our lives depended upon it. We are in great need of New Ideas. New approaches to husbanding the planet and her resources. In fact, our ives do depend entirely on a paradigm shift. 

If we continue the metaphor of conception... Man on earth has penetrated Earth with such force that she has been shattered to the degree that she can no longer cope; cannot absorb that which has penetrated her, but has passed right through, shattering her core, devastating perhaps forever the harmony and beauty she once held for all. She now lies in between life and death - spinning out of control in the solar system in a corner of the galaxy and we're the only species with brains enough to save her. Let us hope our hubris gets reined in and that the tide is turned toward LIFE. 

Woe to him who regards not the divinity of nature, of Gaia, of our earth Mother. Woe to him whose hubris is larger than the Uni-verse that sang him into existence. Woe to him who has forgotten his origins lie in the One Ultimate Source. Remembering our unity is all that can save us. Remembering and LOVING the WHOLE will set us free. Unity wins. Divisiveness? Well, it divides us from ourselves, one another and from Source.

May 2020 bring us the capacity to see with clearer vision what our role must be going forward. May we come to see whether our daily actions contribute to Earth's demise or support our life boat Earth to turn back, to keep from tumbling into the abyss.

Good Bye Friendy Wendy

I shall miss the laugh, the smile, the ease you had with kidlettes of every age wherever you met them. The cooking feasts. The whole salmon you brought fresh from Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco to three young mamas with muddy kids in the Redwoods of Big Basin Park circa 1978. You wrapped it in foil with onions and lemon slices. You put it on the campfire grill, and when its fragrance reached the stars, you served us on real china plates, poured wine into crystal stemware, treated us like queens and we three mamas got down to kiss your feet in gratitude while young Mosa, Devon, and Corbin slept in the tent.

I have missed the you I knew from tenth grade until eight years ago when dementia  began to eat you, nibble by nibble, into an unrecognizable human. Who's to know what you could understand inside there? Who's to know what you wanted to have happen? Your beloved made some difficult and right-on decisions regarding your care, dear. I'm so glad I got to come down and care for you just after moving to Oakland, while Anne was leading a tour in Europe. I'm so glad your sister Barrie showed me the ropes. Queenie was a rock.

Queenie sings to you in a video posted on your beloved Anne's Face Book page. Angelic voice pouring out of the two dimensional screen gives me a wee bit of the flavor of your last days. I did not come see you at Silverado. I regret that even though Anne and Barrie said you wouldn't recognize me. You seem trapped inside yourself in the video, but loved-up right to the last moment of life. 

Your radiant soul has lifted off and the dust of your corporeal house is just that: dust. But the mind that created such wonder in the worlds of film and friendship, gallantry and gardening, fun and foolery was eaten away over these past years - tragically. 

What causes dementia? What initiates the voracious appetite of whatever IT is that has hunger for human brain tissue, memory, language?

I protest. I HATE dementia. I hate Alzheimer's. I hate Cancer. I hate losing friends, old and young to voracious appetites of evil. (Notice the handy dandy palindrome of Live and Evil. Hah! They are not truly one and the same with the letters simply rearranged. Nor are they opposites. Just a chance quirkitude of the English language.)

What are we to learn from death? What do we need to know? 

One: It is an equal opportunity destroyer.

Two: Life is terminal. We just don't know which terminal and when.

Three: Death is a release... somewhat like taking off a pair of very tight shoes, if we are to believe Emmanuel as channeled by Pat Rodegast. Or like stepping out of an overly hot, stuffy room where people have been smoking, and into a sparkling clear, cool, bright night. 

Four: For those left behind bereft and grieving the loss of a dear one, Death Sucks!

But we knew all that. Gee, Mr. Wizard, what else is there to learn from Death? 

Watch De Düva, a brilliant and hilarious send up of Ingmar Bergman's best films, the Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. De Düva was written by Sidney Davis, directed by George Coe and Anthony Lover. Madeline Kahn is one of the stars. Maybe you can find it on YouTube... Worth a look. 

You have to be able to LAUGH at death sometimes. It's just so random. The play Steam Bath highlights just how random it is in a funny, slow-dawning way. 

Thanksgiving time seems to open a window to the end of the year. Many choose to fly through this window. The dark of winter? Do folks choose to take the exit ramp marked "Holidays Ahead" to avoid another season of hyper-cheer, Xmas muzak, and garish lights? To avoid commercialism and the worst of human greed? Or do the shorter days simply beckon, "Come, there's more dark where this came from... come join me in the sweet dark forever..."

Maybe I'm cynical.  Maybe I'm pissed off. Maybe I'm just tired of people dying in droves. Three in one week is too many... well, four if I count my neighbor's rabbit Inkspot. And I do. I count critters. People love their catkins and puppies and bunnies and birdies. When a friend of any stripe dies, it's a loss. And a new loss triggers all the other losses that come up and try to squeeze out our tear ducts all at the same time. It's good for Kleenex stock prices, but hard on the eyeballs and nose. 

Happy Ho Hos and let's hold onto and enjoy our loved ones... for as long as ever we can!

Good December... full of light... inner light.

Is That Your Final Antler?

A couple of neighbors are at odds with one another without even knowing they are. It's all in my head. Each carries a different opinion about what causes the markings on trees, or rather the purpose of the markings on trees in the neighborhood. Deer are part of our surround here in Oakland. Mark, our neighbor who planted over one hundred trees on his property, says that the male deer leave their scent for the females by rubbing their antlers against the bark - especially of tender young trunks which then bear the scars for the rest of their lives. Think of it like a man leaving a calling card on a woman's doorstep, or graffiti in the men's room advertising studliness... only no one is generally scarred by calling cards or graffiti.

The other neighbor, Victor, is convinced that the dear deer are only trying to shed their antlers and in fact he has found several in the park onto which his property faces. Victor is a dear fellow who singlehandedly cares for the weak and new trees just getting their start in the park. He puts up wire cages around them as protection from the deer. Victor also is a scavenger, artist, and contractor who built a most marvelous tree house in one of the stately pines on his lot. Years of drought have weakened many of the old pines in Knowland Park, making them susceptible to bark beetle. Carcasses of many conifers are decaying, becoming homes to termites, ants, and beetles who then attract the woodpeckers, who go to work, finding the bugs both delicious and nourishing. Nature will reclaim, repurpose, recycle, and reuse everything in her time. Left on the ground, those shed antlers would take a very long time to decompose, but eventually, would give back to the soil much calcium, magnesium, and other minerals good for growing stout, healthy trees... IF there were enough water to support them. I'm glad Victor has repurposed the antlers as part of artful designs in his back yard which all can see and admire as we walk the trail . Alongside the evenly cut and precisely stacked fire-place-sized trunks and branches which Victor and his beloved use as their sole source of heat in winter, the antlers are like found sculpture.

I'm left with a dilemma about the deer stories: Which version of deer scraping trees do I prefer? Clearly the anthropomorphic version of the buck stopping here to leave his  e-scent-ial calling card is more appealing, because it corresponds to a behavior I can relate to: The courting dance. I have no antlers. That is beyond my experience. While I have hefted a moose antler above my head while visiting the Yukon, I do not have the experience of wearing TWO sixty pound horns on my head day in and day out. I can only think: HEADACHE! What strong neck muscles those moose must have!

So, neighbor Mark's story / surmise is most appealing to me of the two. I wonder if antlers make the deer itch when they're first breaking through the skin/fur of their wee heads. Could it be that, like teeth coming through tender baby gums, antlers could cause some irritation and make the deer or moose or elk or antelope or rhinos want to rub up against something sturdy and fixed so as to ease the discomfort?

Whatever the cause, I've taken to looking more closely at the markings left on many of the trees in our neighborhood - mostly oak - to try and read the meaning.

Victor and Mark only know of one another through my relating the other's story to each of them. Perhaps one day they'll meet. Then again, perhaps they never will. I'm glad of two tree responsive neighbors with whom to converse on my frequent walkabouts in the hood.

Great Gloptious Gigantic Portions of Gratitude to you and your dear ones. 

May the spirit of Thanksgiving sneak into every day of the coming year!

Musing on Walking

Elysian Park. Scent of Eucalypts after rain. Decomposed granite gritty through sandals. It's winter, but sandals are preferable to heavy shoes on any sort of walk. Many times I walk barefoot on the DG paths of Griffith Park, but today, the road is all mine here, near my childhood haunts. Mulch, peat moss, humus rich with growth possibilities reach out to insist their life-full odors into my nose. Greens of the complete spectrum ~ vivid Springgreen of Los Angeles’s winter grasses to winter evergreens dark, towering trees. Silvers, pinks and lavenders of Eucalyptus leaves and grey-green Scottish Pines. Gold barks shout hello from trunks of every hue. Barefoot here would be lovely, but for the dog shit and swathes of mud that have eaten entire paths in parts.

Walking briskly in the brisk cool, is slow enough to see hummingbirds swoop and vrrrrrt, vrrrrrrrrrt me as if imploring, "did you bring some sugar water with you?" Too early for many blossoms to pop up. What do they eat? Where do they sip?

Throwing my arms together forward and back gives momentum variation: Legs fast forward  when arms go ahead; slow forward when arms go back.  Meander bed of my mind lets me flow along with thoughts just long enough to change course, skip to new direction, sometimes related, sometimes un.

Spinning is a favorite break from left, right, left right. I like to see and feel the park go by over my outstretched arms. If I stare at one up pointing thumb, I do not get dizzy in the slightest, until I stop and then the world goes tick, tick tick side to side for several long breaths. I like this disorientation. I like being off kilter in a semi-controlled way. Likewise I recall Tibetan Monks walk the ancient Swansoo, swastika shaped figures, native to many cultures before Adolph bastardized them. The thought behind the ninety-degree angle change in direction is that 90 is the angle of greatest change. If we go 180, we're merely going back the way we came. Fork left, walk a bit, fork right, walk a bit; keep forking around and you’re bound to change something in your mind, heart, beliefs, and soul.

As a kid, when I walked up our very steep cement street hill after school, I made switch back patterns, perhaps, thirty to forty-five degree angles of change each turn, simply to vary the walk and so as not to get too exhausted charging straight up - which left even us children breathless, on account of the incline. It's like walking a bit then saying, “but then on the other hand… let’s go this way for a bit."

Walking around Echo Park Lake was always a moist adventure. Sprinklers on the grass had to be dodged, wind blowing lake water from the geyser like fountain onto passers-by, and ducks scrambling out of the shallows and shaking themselves in a wiggle-waggle of murky lake-water-spray were fine to encounter on a hot summer's day, but not welcomed during winter walks. 

Our Lady of the Lake's statue was always covered in pigeon poop. Her head was the tallest vantage point at that North end of the lake, apart from the bridge to the island. The old green wood rotted and the bridge was dismantled altogether within the last twenty years. The Lady's featureless face and rounded shoulders gave away her birth date, sometime in the 1930s Art Deco era. We loved, as small fries, to run around her base, extending a hand to feel the rough granite of her long straight robes.

Walking an infinity figure as the sun is coming up has been part of my waking routine for the last twelve years or so. Here in Oakland, I like fixing my eyes on some distant point of light across the Bay in San Francisco or closer-up, on the turquoise, black, and white paisley print planter on the patio. Looking over my shoulder as I return to center of my imagined infinity sign and swinging my arms left right left right gives my whole body a wake up that feels right. In my head I hear the music of Marin Marais's La Sonnerie (The Carillon) de Sainte Geneviève du Mont de Paris off an album Mark bought for me when he was in New York in mid 1980s on business. He'd been walking the city and went into a bookshop where this was playing and thought of me. It's a favorite album and the three-quarter rhythm of the first cut just suits walking in an infinity shape in the pre-dawn den. No one is up yet, except Mama Skunk or maybe a neighbor's cat trying to get a jump on the early bird - out to get those  worms. There must be some worms out there. Our soil is so poor, but worms seem to be more plentiful since I spread out a bunch of hay bales over the weeds, over the cardboard I laid down, to discourage the weeds that grew through the black porous garden cloth that was supposed to prevent weeds taking-over the sad, top-of-the-hill-missing-its-minerals-earth. The soil is so full of rocks and weed seeds, it's a work in progress even after nearly five years of living here. Wishing for some of that wonderful peat moss of Elysian Park after a rain. For now, compost and other amendments will have to suffice. 

Waking by walking... now, there's something to ponder. I wonder as I ponder and wander the neighborhood if, when we lose Daylight Savings Time, it will be light enough in the mornings to walk outside so early??

Golden Hour Revisited

Voluptuous sky

Three bodacious bold gold palm trunks, naked across the street

Cooper's hawk on the wire for a minute...  off for smaller birds or voles

Greens of fern, acacia, and pine go vwubba, vwubba in this, the Golden Hour

Charcoal clouds glide behind in peacock breast blue sky.

Sunday dinner on the front stoop calms and fortifies.

Feet bare on Mother Earth let us soak in the goodness of her.

Patchamama. Gaia. Turtle Island. California. Oakland. Chabot Park. This home. This man. This me.

End of summer. Equinox hours.

Balance a raw egg on its end this day of all days

Bring balance back to all

Even the president's men cannot pull me down this day

I. am. going. to. enjoy. this. golden hour. period.

When in Rome, I see golden light the same as Northern California's

When in Oakland, I see hills so pettable they turn their bellies skyward to be scritch-scratched

Wild turkeys galavant in gangs of twenty or thirty, giving the scratch dance honors to the hills

Hummers come to vvvvrrrrrrrrtttt vvvvvvvvvvrrrrrrrrrrrrttttt over the sweet water feeder.

One just-right twig on the plum tree, next to the red glass bottle becomes the park bench in the sky

Anna's humming birds take turns sitting and admiring the view and...

(ya can't fool me, hummers), get all territorial about "MY feeder. MY branch!"

Gold palm trunks loosing vibrancy, fade to tans, browns, grays

Charcoal cloud streaks turn salmony, lit from below.

Does color tickle the puffs of formerly white & gray?

Supper is et and tea is a boilin'

When the sun drops into the sea will it be a boilin' too?

Silver expanse of bay outlined in purple land spits

Square bridge over untroubled water

Too rich to eat all I see...

Save some beauty for another day

Tummy full

Overflowing gratitude

Sunset's a grace

Safe at Last with Chin Whiskers to Prove It

It was in the basement, she said, The hope chest. My brother's gun shot holes in it. He didn't. Just his gun. I wanted to hear the story,  but too many rounds of ammo shot into stumps across the trout pond from my own brother's 22 at Weston's trout farm in Big Sur made me hear too loudly the rounds she described. I saw, in my mind's eye, the holey chest full of linens, smoke rising out the holes. The linens hoping for a better spot in life... in someone's life maybe even in the life of my friend, now telling me about the hope chest full of holes in the basement. I'm glad the gun didn't shoot her in the chest. 

In 1954, the summer I was six and my brother was twelve, he pointed his 22 at my head by the back door we shared. The parents were home, but not really there. They were drinking and talking but not yet fighting. A glass door in a wood frame went out our bedrooms to the yard. His bigger bedroom was separated from mine only by a hinged heavy plywood trifold wall on wheels. He could throw things over the top of the ziggedy zaggedy door. He could also, because he was six years older than I, leave whenever he pleased out that door and run free into the wilds of Elysian Park. I was too little he'd say. With the gun to my temple this summer night, he told me he’d be doing the world a favor if he pulled the trigger. Mom and dad didn’t love me. I was adopted that’s why I was freakish with red hair and freckles. And didn’t I ever notice they all had black hair?  I held still as the red concrete floor. I held my breath. We heard the parents moving around. He put his gun back in the closet and left out that glass door. I stayed behind and plugged my ears with my pillow against the yelling and sounds of glass breaking as my parents fought in the living room. That's where they lived. They were always living there and yelling... or at least he was. She was often hiding or playing the Wurlitzer organ loudly - leaning heavily into the bass notes of the foot pedals - trying to shake down the house around us I thought. I hoped some nights she would. Eventually, I got my wish. Daddy left four months before my eleventh birthday and that shook everything. Mom took me to Mexico. She swore, after seventeen years she’d had enough and got brave enough to put him out. She told him she was leaving and he needed to be gone before we got back. Mom told dad's friend Jim to make sure he DID leave. It was Jim who told mom my dad was going to kill her for putting him out, so she'd best get out of town for a couple months, let him cool down and he would watch out for my dad, help him move. So we left. Brother Mel was living that summer down in Anaheim at Ye Olde Mill Stream, Cole Weston's trout fishing concession at Knott's Berry Farm.  Brother Mel made one big sandwich once a week out of a long loaf of sourdough with salami, bologna, and cheese and mustard and he'd cut off a hunk every time he got hungry. He kept that sandwich in the refrigerator alongside the fish bait. 

Mom and I flew from Los Angeles to Guadalajara. Her college friend Margo and Margo's daughter Elli who was four years younger than I met us at the airport. Margo was born and raised in Mexico. Her husband worked with my dad at the Los Angeles Times. Elli's brother was about the same age as my brother Mel. The flight was memorable. It was my very first plane ride. The Pan Am propeller plane got caught in a lightning storm. All the cabin lights went out and the walls, ceilings, and floor were bathed in blue-white light with every crackle. I looked out the window and saw the lit-up clouds going up and down very fast. Mom tightened her already white knuckles around my skinny arm. Elli and I got along well enough in the back of the bronze colored VW bug that was Margo's. As long as we kept some of the luggage between us and she didn’t cross onto my side, everything was all right. A little whiney, Elli would often say, I wish I could have such and such… and sigh deeply. Her mama gave her almost everything she sighed for. We could only drink Squirt - grapefruit flavored soda pop. No water. No milk. In Mexico it was unsafe to drink those things in 1959 and the mothers wouldn’t let us have Coke.

In Guadalajara, we stayed at the Grand Hotel. A green pool with moss on the sides was so cool and welcomed in the heat of the June swelter. Elli and I got to the business of playing as best an almost eleven year old  and six year old could play. She was tiny with long black braids looped behind her head and tied with flowery ribbons. I was white as a sheet, and looked like a stick figure drawing of a human with wavy sproingy orange hair sticking out the top. Mom made me wear a rubber bathing cap in the water because my hair would get so ratsy matsy and neither one of us liked her to comb it out. The cap was white with three red rubber flowers on it. I didn’t like the smell of the rubber, but it got familiar and if I dared put my head under water, it filled with air and seemed to help me float to the top. My bones stuck out everywhere. My bathing suit swam on me. I did not know how to swim. My dad and brother tried to teach me how when I was six, at the Hollywood YMCA on Friday Family Night, but that meant each picked up one of my arms and one of my legs and on THREE they threw me into the water and stood on the edge shouting swim, swim! I swallowed a lot of water and went to stand under the hot shower in the women's area and stayed under the blasting hot water long after I stopped coughing and shaking. I stayed in the shower until I was beet red and Friday Family Night was over. I learned to swim at age 25. 

In the green cool pool, at the Grand Hotel, in Guadalajara, Mexico, Elli and I clung to the sides. Hailstones began to fall. We ducked under. I didn't dare let go of the side. My feet couldn't touch the bottom. My toes were clinging to the long strands of moss on the sides. My hands got bruised by the golf ball sized hail. It was a toss-up when we were in the car whether to stop under a tree so the hail wouldn't crack the windshield or to keep driving because to be under a tree meant we might get struck by lightning.

We drove all over Mexico in that bug, but we never got to test the rumor that it could float. We encountered neither flood nor stream. We sang. Mom was a good singer. Margo so-so. Elli and I alternately rolled our eyes or sang along depending on which song it was. We liked This Land Is Your Land. 

One day, in Guanajuato, the grown-ups wanted to go into the catacombs. I asked what that was. Bones of people who couldn’t pay rent on their graves, so their bones got stacked in a big cave under the graveyard, the mothers said. No thank you, I said. I’ll wait for you right here. Elli trailed after the mothers. Traitor. I was waiting in the graveyard when the next big lightning storm passed through. The only people I knew in all of Mexico were under the ground with dead people. It was hot, but I was trembling with fear. The wind so fierce it blew the green umbrella inside out. At least I caught some hail in it like a bowl. I hoped it wouldn't melt before mom and Margo and Elli came back up. Hail on the corrugated tin roof of the nearby open market was deafening. 

Pátzcuaro was a tiny town on the shore of lake Janítzio. Fishermen used butterfly nets that looked to me like huge dragonfly wings. Translucent but with a touch of blueish-lavender. We were there to see the cathedral. As we approached, I saw on the steps a statue of a one-legged man with a stick, I thought, and a dog at his feet. As we got closer, the statues moved. The man was real. His eyeball was hanging on his left cheek. His dog was so skinny, I could see all its ribs and every knob of its back bone. His dog eyes were huge and sad. I gripped my mom’s hand so tight, I had white knuckles. I was afraid the two hungry ones, man and dog would die right there outside the church. Mom pulled me away through the heavy wooden door and inside the church, reminding me it’s not polite to stare. Once our eyes got accustomed to the dimness, I saw the entire back wall behind where the priest stands, was made of gold. It shone in the afternoon sun bathing it through stained glass. It was dazzling how gold it was. Shiny, luminous, bright gold statues of Jesus and Mary and angels and seraphim and cherubim. I squeezed and pulled my mom’s hand and scowled till she looked down at me. WHAT? She bark-whispered. Make them take down this gold right now and buy that man and that dog some food. DO it NOW. I whisper-cried. I was frantic to make sure the man and his dog wouldn’t die right there on the steps while all this gold was just sitting there looking pretty but not helping anybody.

San Blas was on the edge of the jungle, la selva. The ocean was made gentle by the curve of the coast containing the water like a giant bathtub. We walked into the tub-like warmth of the salt water for what felt like miles and it only came up to our waists - even little Elli could walk way far out.  In that water, I floated like an air mattress. So buoyant, even without my airhead bathing cap trick.  One rubber flower had torn loose against the edge of the cardboard suitcase making a hole in the cap so I couldn’t do the airhead floating device trick anymore. It was there in San Blas where I got bit by one teeny tiny mosquito and my right calf swelled to three times its normal size. I kind of enjoyed imagining what I might look like if I had a little meat on my bones. It felt strange when it jiggled as I walked downstairs from our room on the second floor. A cold bottle of Squirt held on my calf made it feel better and less hot. The next day we went on a boat ride up river from the bay. The dug-out log came with a guide. He had a long pole he used to push us along upstream. Maybe I was logy from the bite. I leaned my head against my arm on the edge of the boat and watched the black water as the orchid pink reflections from the live canopy of flowers above us danced by each time he pushed us along. The jungle came all the way to the edge of the river. Trees, fronds, flowers, a few people on the shores. I sat up for the people. They were waving. I waved to, then rested again. I saw the reflection of the guide’s pole suddenly out of the water and a white squirmy bundle as long as the pole was coiling and uncoiling, then splashing into the black water. The mirror full of pink orchids shattered. Mom and Margo screamed. I sat up. The man was laughing. Elli gripped her mama’s hand. We were lucky. The guide kept the snake from landing in the boat on top of us. 

Soon we drifted into a circular pool, the birthplace of the river we were told. It was a cold spring and felt delightful to splash in, such contrast to the throbbing heat of the air so thick with steam it was hard to move it down into our lungs. Elli and I put on our swimsuits in the talapa and went to play in the shallows. The cold water soothed my swelled leg. Mom and Margo, already dressed for water, waded over to the palm covered bar and ordered drinks. 

Next stop: Mazatlán where the Bel Mar Hotel behind a huge sea wall kept cobras in baskets in the dining room to let out at night so they could keep the rodent population down.

Forty years later, well past mom’s eightieth birthday, I asked her about that trip. What she told me warmed my heart. She had tried for so long to save her marriage to my father and finally realized he was an empty well. Even if she could have thrown her entire life down into his hollowness, he could never be filled. She couldn’t fix what was wrong with him. For her children’s sake, she had to leave his loud and scary and crazy-when-he-drank sorry ass. 

Now that I live by the Bay, I see my childhood friend Elli from time to time. She's become a wise woman, potter, and lawyer. Over lunch recently, we looked at some of the photos from our time together that summer of '59. She corroborated my recollections of that San Blas boat ride and the cobra baskets in the Bel Mar Hotel in Mazatlán. It's reassuring to know we share the memories.

My friend with the holey chest in the basement must have some stories to tell. I think we may be sisters under the skin having survived our earlier lives by the hair of our chinny-chin-chins. I have lots of hairs on my chinny-chin-chin lately. They're a reminder to me I made it through some big bad wolf times. I am very lucky.