Something There Is That Doesn't Love A Wall

The party is going on. I'm on the other side of the wall. Feeling like Typhoid Mary, relegated to the bedroom on account of a flu bug. Being set apart seems to be a recurring life theme…

The head of my childhood bed was up against the wall of the dining room. On the other side of the wall was Mom's Wurlitzer Organ - complete with base-pedals. When Mom and Dad hosted a jam session and I was too little to participate but too old to be on her lap, Mom said, "Go to your room and go to sleep! And don't come out again."

Dad lowered his scary eyebrows toward each other and moved his ears back - making his storm-brewing face. That sealed the deal. I went to my room. But the bed was shaking with those base pedals booming long, loud roars up against the redwood and plywood walls. It was deafening. I held my ears crying. Brother Mel headed out the back door in our shared space and up into Elysian Park. I begged him to take me with him. I was 7. He was 13. NO, he glared... squeezing his scary brows together just like Dad.

I piled all the soft things I could find: Stuffed animals and clothes. I even snatched some towels from the linen closet across the hall when the coast was clear. I tried to cushion myself from the painful loud.

Parties stopped when Dad left in 1959. I was ten. Mel left home the same year when he was sixteen.

*.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  

Aunt Nora and Uncle Bob lived in a one room adobe with an out-house in Redondo Beach. When I was six, they began a long process of adding on to their home. They raised the roof, added three bedrooms and two INDOOR bathrooms, and landscaped the heck out of the back yard where we kids were always instructed to Go bury the garbage! 

Once all the construction was done, they began painting everything. They were doing it themselves. The one room adobe part was intact, but Aunt Nora had always hated the dark green paint on the bricks, so she got us kids to help sand it so she could paint the walls white. If you've ever had a chance to sand mud bricks, you may know that soft silky dust pours off with every stroke of sand paper. It’s quite magical as it floats in the air for quite some time before hitting the floor, your feet, your clothing.

In that dust were small miracles. Mica flakes caught the afternoon motes of sunlight coming through the shutters, creating fairy dust before our eyes. I'm guessing Aunt Nora and Uncle Bob didn't think of that dust entering our young lungs. Brother Mel, Cousins Eric & Debby and I were having a pretty good time working in the golden light. Our part to sand was from our shoulder height downward. Eventually, we were sitting on, the floor. 

The second day of Mel's and my visit with them, (Mom and Dad were not there), I spiked a fever of 102 degrees and had a wracking cough. They put me in one of the new bedrooms. I hated being alone and separated from the fun again. I could hear laughter going on - just the other side of the wall but I had fever dreams and could not join in - just in case it was a catchy kind of sickness.

*.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  

At nineteen, (healthy), my high school buddy Judy and I rented an apartment near Los Angeles City College. On Maltman Avenue were several two-story buildings with long balconies on the second floor with stairways at both ends. Each apartment door opened onto the balcony. I always thought of the building as a beehive. If you took the whole front wall off, you’d see little cells teeming with life - one right next to the other. 

One evening I was brushing my teeth before bed and opened the medicine cabinet. Potent garlic flowed into our bathroom. Ours backed up to another family’s medicine cabinet on the other side of the wall. The couple were good cooks and the scent of garlic pasta or garlic toast or whatever it was came wafting in and made me want to have dinner all over again. 

How thin were those walls?

One morning, again brushing my teeth before leaving for work. The person on the other side of the medicine cabinet sneezed. I said Gezundheidt. He said Thank You. We both laughed.

*.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  

This past weekend, The Painted Turtle Camp Crew was here for a reunion at our home by the Bay. They were here making lots of fun noises. Counselors, kids of counselors and staff. I wanted to be out there beyond the walls of the bedroom where I'm trying to kick flu's butt. It would not be fair to mix and mingle and infect these revelers with the plague. Being removed has brought up memories of other separations by walls.

*.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  

What's on the other side of the proposed wall at our southern border? Hunger. Fear. Terror, I believe, not terrorists. Families. Not rapists, and drug dealers. Emma Lazarus called them out under Liberty’s Light: 

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, 

I lift my lamp beside the golden door. 

I know how some get to the other side of the wall now. And how some die on the way. I suppose some may have ill intentions, but I believe most are simply desperate to have a better chance at life and want to work hard to make that happen for themselves and their children. I know the costs and I know the urgency. I feel in my heart people fleeing danger must be given an option to struggling by themselves without support. Some U.S. citizens are working really hard to make it easier for refugees to apply for asylum. Churches and families on this side of the wall are opening hearts and doors.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

There's a new musical in San Francisco called “Come From Away” about a small Canadian town called Gander where people opened their hearts and doors to air travelers who couldn't land at New York’s airports on September 11, 2001, after the towers went down. Ten years later, the townsfolk and the refugees had joyous reunions, so bonded had they become during the crisis.

We can hope that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats may prevail on behalf of the part of each one of us that does not love a wall. The insanity of trapping migrating critters has not been mentioned much. I think they, too, must be part of the conversation.

Some walls must be good, useful, protective. Others seem just plain spiteful and ill-thought out.

Maybe we can expect a trickle down effect from the country to our North! May the kindness of Gander's folk prevail!

Mending Wall

Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs.  The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,

One on a side.  It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.'

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

'Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn’t it

Where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.'  I could say ‘Elves’ to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself.  I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.'

Camp As Congregation

Saturday, my beloved and I attended a Tri-Faith event called "Living Room Conversations." Twenty-five people met at Temple Kehilla in Oakland. We came from three different traditions:  Islamic Cultural Center, my "Church of Last Resort" - a Presbyterian Church, which is how I found out about this first time event happening, and, of course, our hosts, Kehilla Synagogue. We separated out into groups of four to six participants at four different tables, making sure each had at least one participant from each of the three congregations.

A list of questions to address was handed out so we could get to know one another.  Two hours flew by as we responded to the following... 

Why Are We Here?

What interested you or drew you to this conversation?

Round 1: Core Values

Answer one or more of the following:

• What sense of purpose / mission / duty guides you in your life?
• What would your best friend say about who you are and what inspires you?
• What are your hopes and concerns for your community and/or the country?

Round 2: 

What are your thoughts on Faith Community: 

The Way Forward?

Remember that the goal for this Living Room Conversation is for all of us to listen and learn about where we have different opinions and where we have shared interests, intentions and goals. Answer one or more of the following questions:

• What is the promise of our faith community to its members?  To the surrounding community?
• How are we living up to our promise to each other and to our faith promises?
• If you could change one thing about our faith community, what would it be? What experience brings you to this perspective?
• If you were creating a reconciling agenda for change to unite and energize our community, what would be on it?

Round 3: Reflection & Next Steps

Answer one or more of the following questions:

• In one sentence, share what was most meaningful or valuable to you in the experience of this Living Room Conversation?
• What new understanding or common ground did you find within this topic?
• Has this conversation changed your perception of anyone in this group, including yourself?
• Name one important thing that was accomplished here.
• Is there a next step you would like to take based upon the conversation you just had?

I was so glad to be at the table with my husband. He and a gal from Kehilla represented the Jewish tradition, while one gentle-man was from Islamic Cultural Center. A church friend and I represented Montclair Presbyterian Church. 

My husband spoke of his early roots as a cultural Jew in Queens, New York and how he not only became a Bar Mitzvah, but also continued to a confirmation ceremony at age sixteen. The confirmation was new information for me. (Or forgotten and now it seemed new.) In high school, he felt estranged from all formal religions whose trappings separated people from one another rather than unifying us.

When it was my time to respond to the round one core values question, I said I had never joined a church, (After nearly four years attending irregularly, I'm  technically still a "friend" of MPC, not a member, even though I teach yoga and meditation courses there and am a student of other classes). I do not consider myself a Christian. The only other sustained church experience I had was in eighth grade when my mom parked me at the teen program of the Eighth Street Unitarian Church in downtown Los Angeles so she could find herself again after she and my dad divorced. 

The reason I hang around with the Presbyterians is because I was so starved for community when we first moved to Oakland from Studio City four years ago. I saw a lovely group of aging hippies, musicians, artists, writers, who were politically active folk. I felt - still feel - right at home and have been nourished by three different writing groups originating at MPC. I do have to let the God and Jesus stuff roll off my back. It doesn't make sense to me to put a brand name on spirituality.

Both Mark and I spoke of our camp experiences and how the camp communities feel like family; feel like our houses of worship - only we're not worshiping a divine super-power, but rather the soul shining out of every pair of eyes into which we look deeply. COmmunity. COmmunion. COnnection. COmmon ground. We have so much more in common with other humans than ever we have at odds with one another. We have the same need for community; for shining the light for others and for allowing others to shine a light for us as well. It is part and parcel of being human. We thrive when we feel we belong.

I think the questions were designed for people who were much more fundamentalist in their views and the author imagined a huge gaping void among the beliefs of Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Maybe our group was precocious or ready to accept anyone, but we didn't have those vast differences among us, so there was only a gentle slide of micro-millimeters toward one another. So close were we in our core beliefs and values.

When it was time to leave, we all agreed it was important to include even more diversity at these conversations. I wonder how we might reach out to a church whose congregants look different from how we twenty-five caucasians appeared.

Black churches may have the same brand name, but seem to do business differently from how the more reserved Montclair Presbyterians do.

I'd like to participate again in the conversations, and hope my beloved may as well. I OWE him at least one watching of a program on World Wrestling Federation network, now that he's come to an ooowie ooowie land event with me!

Mercifully, we have camp in common!

From a Northern California counselor and medical staff reunion at our home 1-17-19

The Letter

She’s the last sentient, salient speaker of my parent’s generation left in my circle of kin. She’s 87 and dying of liver cancer ~ as her husband, my Uncle Bob, died 30 years ago. What do I want to know before she goes? What stories can possibly soothe my incessant enquirer? What keys do I think she has to understanding my father and mother and brother before I was born?

What I really want to say is: 

Dear Auntie Nora, 

Stick around and tell me all I want to know!! They’re all gone but you. Mom’s still alive but cannot speak, damn the stroke eight years ago!

Dad’s gone since 1965, Bob since 1978. Poor Brother Mel has been inebriated or otherwise absent since he was ten in 1952.

Everything is in divine right order for Uncle Larry, mom’s brother and he would never dare to rumple the surface of his Lake Placid of emotions. His wife, my aunt Mickey, lost her mind over the decades, little bit by little bit. As her teeth dropped out one by one, so did her ability to think, remember or make any sense.

So, how’re we going to sneak in some conversations here, dear, while you still move teacup from saucer to lips; while you still rub your forefinger absentmindedly against your thumb as you think and remember? Your mind is so sharp.

Could my insatiable curiosity be quelled by one of your recollections without taxing you too much? Do I really WANT to know all that happened between Bobby and Howard?

All I know is I want to give it a go, while there’s still life in me and in you, dear Auntie. 

See you Sunday.

Love,

Melinda

Stinky Start

Perhaps it’s the Skunk of Christmas Past.

Every year on the twenty-third of December, since our very first weekend here in our new home, we’ve been treated to the powerful but not overwhelming odor of essence of skunk coming through the heater vents.

That first year was a doozy. It was twenty-eight degrees outside. Both daughters and their beaus were here helping us unpack moving boxes, hang curtains, and organize the kitchen. During a well-deserved after-dinner rest, we watched a movie on a small black and white TV in the partially furnished living room. A movement outside caught my eye. I saw a black cat digging in the dirt between the Juniper hedge and the French door. “It’s just a cat,” I said. “Oh, how darling! The kitty has two white stripes down her back,” I reported as I stood to get a better look. “She’s turned her back to us and is digging furiously in the earth, sending dirt our way… and oh, she’s lifting her tail and, oh, no! We’ve been skunked!”

I don’t know where she lives, though I suspect she’s moved in under a garden shed we had installed soon after the last moving boxes were flattened and passed along to someone else who was about to move. I’ve seen her (I call her Skunky) only a handful of times, but have recognized her aromatic presence innumerable times through the heater vents. 

Maybe she's still upset that we encroached on her territory. She had the house and yard to herself for almost a year and a half after the former owner died here. The children didn’t get around to selling their childhood home for quite some time.

Shortly after the move, we had a heater duct cleaner service come. Using a camera on a long flexible cable, Mr. Oren showed us pictures of the inside of one of the ducts. Evidently, it had been appropriated by Skunky as a nest for her family. The fiberglass insulation inside the duct must have made for a scratchy beginning for her newborn kitts. They’d all made quite a mess of the duct. Mr. Oren said the best thing to do was to make sure they’d all moved out (they had) and crimp and seal off that duct so no air would move through it again. This he did.

When I see her lumbering along at dawn or dusk in the back yard, I smile. I like that she feels at home. I do too. Is it possible to live amicably with such a powerful neighbor? I think so. It requires getting accustomed to the scent that is akin to marijuana smoke, but stronger, and hoping she lives up to her job description: Good ratter. Blessings on your sleek black and white body, Skunky, and may the Source be with you and the wind blowing the other way.

*.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  

Oh, dear. It’s been nearly two weeks since our annual scentual bath and the skunky scent is so over-powering that my eyes are streaming and my nostrils and trachea burn. I'm in the master-bedroom, where humans sleep! I’ve made a circuit of the outside and see there are no openings. She is not under the house. We can see the entirety of the well-lit dirt and floor joists from the boiler room. Also, there's no smell of skunk there. 

I surmise that she’s living under the stairs that go from outside our bedroom door to the lower garden. The scent is strongest inside downstairs, not outside the house, and it’s strongest of all at the bottom of the indoor stairs. In fact, I’ve narrowed it down to the top of the wall at the bottom of the stairs. 

Early on, I hung a photo of a Kiva ladder on that wall. The earth tone photo used to hang in my healing room at the old house. Just above the frame looks to be about level with the landing of the outdoor steps. I think she must’ve burrowed under that landing and has built a cozy nest right up against the foundation - just on the other side of the Kiva photo and the wall above it.

At the end of the hallway downstairs is an intake filter for the heater for the bedroom side of the house. EVERY room smells of skunk from that one stinky wall!

We had an estimator come give us a bid for closing off the under-the-stairs-access to critters. The fellow said he could see her nest. My hunch was right. The nose knows.

We have to trap her humanely and be sure there are no kitts in the nest before sealing off access. I left a message with animal control and vector control and expect a call back this week.  We hope they may be able to relocate her to Knowland Park or somewhere comfortable…. and far away.

Not sure if it helped, but just to follow-up on a suggestion I saw online about spraying predator's urine around the yard, my husband and I both peed near the entry to Skunky’s burrow. I hope she takes the hint. Not that we'd treat her as prey... although could we eat prey and still love?  (*g*r*o*a*n)

It’s been a stinky start to this new-fangled year of 2019. 

Here’s hoping yours is less dramatically aromatic and filled with JOY. 

(Now, THAT makes scents!)