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.

A Window on the World

In the human race, mom certainly did not come in last. Smart, beautiful, resourceful and with a keen sense of humor, she got to work making a home for herself and me after my father left. Brother Mel had moved away before the end times. I envied him his distance from the nightly fights before Dad moved to Hermosa Beach. Mel lived at Knott’s Berry Farm and managed Ye Olde Mill Stream trout farm run for the Knott family by our friend Cole Weston. Mel got paid under the counter to stock the ponds and haul bags of fish food and teach kids how to fish on weekends. He had a room to sleep in behind the ticket booth and commuted to Marshall High School in Silverlake, Monday through Friday, driving his sea green mist Chevy. 

Mom had always voted with her feet. She found a job at The Lung Association in the Public Relations office. Conscientiously, she hired the same folks to work for her at home  as our neighbors hired. When Luis and Bess had to move back to Mississippi and could no longer serve as occasional handyman and monthly maid, mom turned to the wondrous being of Sue Jones whose ancestors were from Holland. Sue could've stepped off the page of a Van Gough  sketch, all knobs and bumps, with gnarly thumbs, fingers, elbows and knees. She always took off her shoes when she mopped the red cement floors of our flat-to-the-earth, redwood and glass rectangle of a house, scrubbing by hand with rags and buckets full of scalding, soapy, pine-scented water. Knurls on her toes turned as red as the floor, knees too.  She’d move wispy almost white tendrils of hair out of her face with the back of her wrist while she lectured me about life and laws of nature. 

Without Mel at home, and all my best buds moved away, my days seemed endless. I spent a lot of time in Sue’s company after school whenever she was there. 

Sue had a way of incorporating nature teachings pitched solely at me. Whenever she wiped the counters free of the teeny tiny grease ants that loved to make a conga line from their home in the wall to the butter dish, she would do so gently and with a prayer under her breath: May you come back as a beautiful butterfly. Hers was the first finger pointing me toward things beyond the day to day life I knew at ten years of age. God, angels, sprites and spirits were of the realm Sue Jones inhabited. Resurrection and reincarnation. In her book, bugs, animals, and people all had a chance at moving up some mystical magical spiral staircase of consciousness. I imagined a gauzy pastel chiffon draped circular staircase, every step filled with ascending critters of all kinds disappearing into the clouds as she spoke.

At twelve, I read a library book called The Astonishing Ant. From it I learned about societal constructs and hierarchies these six-legged creatures were capable of creating. There was a huge hill of black ants at the base of the four by four wood post holding up our mail box and another even more elaborate red-ant hill out back by the tall eucalyptus that was planted way before my parents bought the iconic John Lautner mid-century modern home in 1949. I liked to imagine in three dimensions the two colonies’ underground tunnels, rooms and nurseries. 

Quite a distance separated the tribe of red from the tribe of black ants, but I fed both the same snacks of 'Nilla Wafer cookie crumbs and tiny individual capsules carefully culled from oranges cut into quarters for my after school snack. Black ants were more socialized. They gladly accepted what was put in their path. Red ants walked around the orange capsules but hoisted the crumbs onto their backs to take down into the hole in the center of the crumbly earthen hill. Summer afternoons during the three years between my father leaving home and mom marrying Leo were spent, in part, exploring just what ants liked best.

The summer I found Ray Bradbury, I set out to read everything he wrote. I gorged myself on oranges and cookies and books with my foot wedged into the top-most V in the tree. My  shaggy bark reading room was high above the old playhouse that my father built for me when I turned four. Brother Mel used to smoke out in the play house. Mom eventually took it over as her writing space. From tree top, besides all the eucalyptus pods and crescent shaped leaves on the play house roof, I could see all the way to the Pacific Ocean - out beyond Miracle Mile and Century City. I’d read up there for hours, mostly R is for Rocket and Martian Chronicles. Something Wicked This Way Comes creeped me out a bit, but I could read Dandelion Wine three times a week, so intoxicating, it was. 

Crumbs and peelings at the bottom of the tree were the only evidence of human activity outside our house. If only my mom had looked up, she would have found me. I much preferred not to be found. By then, Peter and Angelika's mother had died and the twins' dad moved with them to their family’s summer home in Running Springs. Jacky moved from the bottom of our hill on Avon Street to Santa Monica when we were in fourth grade. Julie was the first of my best friends to move from Echo Park all the way over to Miracle Mile off Wilshire Boulevard. From my tree perch, I fancied I could see her walking home from school… if only I had a telescope.

By thirteen, I'd outgrown 'Nilla Wafers and segmenting oranges, but found both colonies of ants liked dabs of butter and sugar that fell off my toast on which I slathered layers and layers of both until the creamy coating was almost as thick as the bread and spread evenly crust to crust. I was taught not to waste crusts, so they got slathered extra high and often to the delight of the ants, little chunks would fall into their domain while I watched their scurrying forms heft many times their weight. 

In seventh grade, Rhonda Dunstan became my new bestie. She lived all the way down Echo Park Boulevard almost to Sunset Boulevard. Our mothers would drive us most often to one another's homes for playdates. Sometimes we’d walk. Our favorite thing to do was to buy penny candies at El Batey liquor store near the corner of Morton. We’d walk from her house to El Batey, use our allowance on candy, and climb up onto the garage roof of the apartment building next door to hers and eat every bit of what we bought. One day, we'd gotten what we thought were giant purple grape-flavored jaw breakers for our thirty-two cents to share equally. Eight jaw-breakers each at two pennies a piece. Our eyes widened at the same moment when we discovered the center was soft gooey grapey-good gum! We giggled and chewed, giggled and chewed. One ball after another. Purple spit ran out the corners of our mouths and dripped off our chins. Whatever possessed us to think of throwing the wads of partially chewed purple gloptiousness onto the neighboring garage wall, I do not recall, but throw them we did - small chunks at a time. All told, there must've been two-dozen globs of purple gum wads randomly decorating the expanse of otherwise beige stucco.

One of the neighbors was a fink. Rhonda's grandmother confronted us when we went inside. No use denying it. We were purple from face to knees. She said someone had just called her saying she saw us throwing stuff at the wall and now we had to clean it off. I took a page from Sue Jones book. We got two bowls of hot soapy water, rags and a step ladder and whistled while we worked. We also wrote a note to the nosey neighbor apologizing (that was gran’s idea) for our lapse in sanity… or something as high-falootin. 

I told Rhonda I hoped Miss Nosey Neighbor would come back as a beautiful butterfly… and soon!

Dear Diary

Dear Diary,

This blog I keep (mostly) is about Birth, Death, and the Stuff In Between. That offers a pretty wide open range of topics.

Once in a while I get political. 

Dropping a bomb on NRA Headquarters would be my best political act today, except then I'd become one of them. Them, being the strong gun lobby folk who won't budge an inch on bump-stocks and machine guns. How DARE the Wayne La Pierre's of the world hold the rest of us hostage because of their fear of losing one scintilla of their "Right to Bear Arms.” The Second Amendment says nothing of assault rifles. It was put into the Bill or Rights long before anyone invented machine guns and assault rifles.

How dare anyone make children suffer. How dare sickos make immigrants suffer at the hands of our white supremacists and in the hands of our racist culture. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves for not booting out the Dumpling Donald/Dumping the Trump years ago. You cannot have free speech if that speech incites violence. It’s like yelling fire in a crowded movie theater. POTUS’s rhetoric does just that… incites and makes dangerous most public gathering places because those inclined toward expressing their hatred, bigotry, and ignorance hear the dog-whistle Trump uses regularly to keep us just off balance enough so he can continue to dismantle Democracy. That seems his greatest agenda... after making himself and his friends and family fabulously wealthy. I would love to see his tax returns.

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I went to a poetry reading Sunday afternoon with some writing buddies. It was not something my beloved would stay awake for, so he sat this one out. His surgery is coming up Wednesday to rebuild his right thumb joint and move some tendons around to hold it all in place. Twelve weeks later, Dr. Chin says Mark’ll get some Physical Therapy  sessions. Then we'll see how he's recovering. If all goes well, Mark may elect to have the other thumb joint rebuilt. A full year in recovery mode sounds daunting but really is just a hiccup in the long arc of a life. Aren't we lucky to live in an age when such miraculous treatments are available??!!

My beloved came to watch folk dancing Saturday night. It was my second time joining in at a nearby venue where Circle Dances are taught. Not yet ready to dance on account of his hurt paw and sore ankle, Mark watched this time. Soon, we hope he may give it a try. We used to enjoy folk dancing together very much. He would meet me at Silverlake Parks and Recreation Center on his way home from Hollywood. I came from working downtown and we'd meet up to dance, then caravan home to Studio City separately on Thursday evenings. So much fun. It was in the days when I was making Banana nut bread for Garden of Eatin’ - a little health food restaurant on Echo Park Boulevard.  We once calculated that I was losing only a dollar and a quarter per loaf, contrasting the cost of ingredients and gas to deliver the breads with what the restaurant owner was paying me... not counting the time it took to cook and deliver! Ha ha ha. Short-lived career. 

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Once upon a time there was a funny dog named Fairfax. His owners were Mark, Melinda, Mosa and Megan. When she was two years old, our daughter Megan couldn't quite pronounce the dog's name, and called him Fucka. Older sister Mosa was outraged at what she knew was a “bad word” coming out of Megan’s little Kewpie Doll mouth and tried to get her sister to say the dog's name correctly. 

"Megan, say 'Fair.'"   

"Fair."  

"Megan, say ‘Fax.’"    

"Fax."

“Megan, say ‘FAIRFAX!’" 

"Fucka." 

Giggles ensued, which reinforced Megan's mispronunciation. They tried this exercise many more times, with increased glee and giggles. 

So it was that Fairfax came also to be known as Fucka.

Devlyn, the granddaughter at ten years of age loves hearing family funnies like this.

She has been asking for them repeatedly each visit here or when we’re in the car en route to one of her many lessons… horseback riding, piano, or homeschooling art or math lessons with her dad…

Friday, we had her here at our house. Our daughter Megan, who knows now how to say Fairfax, had driven up from San Luis Obispo area for a visit with us Tuesday and Wednesday. She helped us out with a combination crossword / jigsaw puzzle that's been languishing on the dining room table, where we left it stalled-out for months. Gran’Pun and I got re-inspired with Megan's enthusiasm and worked on it intermittently through Thursday night after Megan went home. Dev came over Friday morning and was impressed with the progress. She had helped solve the crossword portion of it and put in many pieces months back, when the putting in pieces of type-face clues was quite a bit easier than all the black and white letters of the crossword boxes and we all got frustrated with it. 

Friday, we three worked on it for a good forty minutes or more, then she put in the last few pieces by herself to our great delight. Dev got that sense of accomplishment so satisfying to both us Grandies and to her Grand Self.

She also had a horseback riding lesson on Friday, which I took her to after a trip to the zoo, where we saw Luca, the jaguar - sleeping. We saw one of two adult wolves. Four young pups are still hiding in the den. (Probably watching re-runs of Rin Tin Tin on TV.) We saw bison in the distance, bears close-up dancing, or sparring, or engaged in foreplay - hard to tell, and six wonderfully graceful giraffes with the dorkiest sweetest faces. Gotta love giraffe’s eyelashes and “smiles."  

To the tiger in the zoo, Madeleine just said, “Pooh, Pooh!” Tigers seem best suited to sleeping. Watching their stripes expand and contract as they breathe entertained D for about ninety-seconds. Then off to the baboons and bunnies. 

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Weekends are for lounging. So we only washed both cars, dusted and vacuumed the house, and watered the garden. Then we read a lot. 

Time to start a new puzzle… or finish the thousand piece giant view of the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay! Oy Vey! Come back, Megan!