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.'