Slumber Party for Seventeen

Family converges for three or four days
From New York, Phoenix, and L.A.’s haze

The weather has turned; it’s icy here
Our guests in the “smoking room” may freeze, I fear.

Conscientious, they won’t pollute our house
They puff on the porch and don't even grouse

Braving the wind and the temperature drop
Still, they light-up why won’t they stop?

Stronger than addiction to sugar are cigs
Hopeful they don't grab our nieces' teen kids

What can we do but love ‘em up?
Invite ‘em in for hot drinks and sup



There is so much for which we are thankful
Music, family, friendship, and reserve tanks full

Of love so easily exchanged among folks
Who are family we’d choose as friends - like spokes

Relating to a central hub of kin
From which we spring; family all under the skin

Thursday’s feast, only for twenty, was smaller this year.
Extending the circle from our hearts, we send good cheer



Our Cousin Palooza Saturday gave rise
To connections made real, and teary g’byes

Forty four or so meeting, and making merry
Exchanging contact info and promises to ferry

Hellos back home to those unable
To join the festivities at the table.

Kids in the basement, kids in the stairwell
Kids in the playroom hating to bid farewell

To hordes of cousins they’d only just met
And played with so well and will never forget



Off to Alcatraz the final six go
This morning’s chill, freezing each toe.

They’ll fly off this evening for New York
Remembering how their road led to this fork

They leave behind echoes of laughter
Stuck to each wall, floor, heart, and rafter

So grateful are we for all our relations
Matakweasan, from every nation

Happy Holidays from our hearts
May your leftovers be yummy, and not give you gas




(With heart-felt gratitude to my honey Mark
Who supported the rhyme scheme, like a walk in the park.)

My grateful heart enfolds also our daughters and grandie
Whose expertise in the kitchen sure came in handy!

With two ovens acting up and unreliable
The dining schedule applied was pliable

No one here went hungry this week or feasting either day
Ovens fixed or no, next year, we'll eat too - either way

Lucky, lucky, we count ourselves blessed
We'd do it again in a heart-beat unstressed

After the ecstasy there's always the laundry
Where to put beds is the biggest quandary

Upstairs or down, garage or broken sauna
My honey can decide because I don't wanna!

Thankfully, There's YOU!

Wishing you and your dear ones a delightful day of doing nothing but celebrating whatcha got to be thankful for.

Whether it's a home, or a garden, a favorite tree or birdsong, person, puppy, pussycat, place, or thing, my wish for you this season is that you can feel the visceral delight deep in your core when you connect with that person, place, critter, or thing, that you can let the delight register in your marrow, and that the glow may sustain you on these long winter nights.

I'll resume writing after company returns to NY, AZ and So Cal.

With grateful heart,

Melinda in No Cal

(Does No Cal mean I can eat anything I want and that it's calorie free??)

Pass the Paleo Pumpkin Pudding, Please!

Noodling and Doodley Doo Time

Noodling is the thing I do when I'm trying to figure something out. I noodle out a melody on the piano or guitar, I noodle with the rhythm and rhyme scheme of a poem, my granddaughter noodles with a shoe lace willing the magic of knots and bows to manifest and hold fast.

When I was a kid, the hills of Echo Park were vast, expansive vistas to be explored. We didn't have much actual obligatory homework in elementary grades, so after the Mickey Mouse Club was over, we'd be out IN those hills, with seemingly endless hours of doodley doo time. Climbing trees afforded us the best views of the valley and Wilshire's Miracle Mile, way out there in the distance. Beyond that was a wee silver strip (or gold - depending on time of day) of The Pacific Ocean. It was a glorious place to grow up, and I'm grateful for the more user-friendly concept of the 1950's that allowed us kids to use our doodley do time as we chose.

Witnessing the pernicious and progressive whittling away of that precious un-dedicated time on the calendars of so many children worries me. Dance classes, science/math enrichment programs, and piano, oboe, viola, trumpet, or drum lessons may be important, but not at the expense of being out in the natural world being a scientist, musician, or dancer.

I am pleased that my granddaughter's new school seems less intent upon turning the kids into colorful parrots of useless information, and more intent upon supporting them to conceptualize the world around them, by giving them opportunities to manipulate it with their own two hands. The difference in her affect is striking. Instead of doing mimeographed (well, now Im' really dating myself... but at least, I'm dating!), let's say Xeroxed sheets (but since when did a corporation become a verb? I know a corporation is now a person, for gosh sake, but that's a topic for another blog), she now has time to run around in a pretty cool park with other kids working out whether their own loosely supervised play will take a Lord of the Flies bent or some other more humane path. These things have to be noodled out on the individual level, is my belief, not spoon fed with no ties to the creepy feeling in our stomach when someone is usurping power, putting others down, or we ourselves get carried away with extreme behavior.All this exploration needs to be done in doodley doo time.

All if favor of Doodley Dooing say Aye.

The Old Lady and the Whippersnappers

Moving from one city to another necessitates finding new doctors and all manner of support people.

So far, and it’s less than one year ago that we moved, I like the optometrist doc and the dermatologist. Each is similar in age to me, and quite conversational - verging on over-interested and flirting with me!(?) At least, I feel seen, heard, and attended to in the areas of eyes and skin.

The young whippersnapper GP, who I believe pretends to be more of an expert than he is about bio-identical hormones and life in general, is my least favorite new support person. I keep trying to find a reason to stay in his practice other than it’s a drag to start over and search-out qualified practitioners who provide what I'm accustomed to receiving. Because he has two different practices two doors down from one another in the same building, I sometimes get lost in the informational black hole between the two doors. “No, sorry, you’ll have to call the other office for that information." or "You'll have to make an appointment at the other office to discuss this with Dr. K.”

Unlike having two different docs for skin and eyes, I’d like my primary care doc to consider me a whole person whose body cannot be compartmentalized into hormone system and the rest of the bod. I distinctly dislike feeling as if I’m being had because I must make separate appointments to have all my parts checked. Medicare covers some parts, but not others. So, for now, I’m paying for gas and wear and tear on my car and calendar, in order to be seen as a part-filled whole person in this fellow’s practice. Bummer.

What I have to ask myself is this: What’s it going to be like in twenty years, when all the docs who are my age now are long retired, and all medical personnel look like whippersnappers? Will I be able to trust that they know what they’re doing? Will I be an impossible old lady with un-reachable standards?

I remember my Grammy Stern being so kind, sweet, and easy-going at every appointment. I remember my mother out-living most of her health-care-providers.

Maybe in twenty years, the Star Trek vision of Dr. Bones McCoy’s little cell-phone-size scanner will be a reality, and this pondering will be a moot point.

I’m hoping I can remain civil to all folks, no matter their age, experience, or business practices. Just remind me that I don’t need to stick around if the practice doesn’t suit me.

First Year: Sketches from October 2014 to October 2015

October 2014… Electrical Banana

I like typing Banana and Berkeley too... only one vowel each, appearing three times so they’re rhythmic to type.

I have a 5am waking thought at our daughter's house in Oakland, where I'm staying after completing a workshop, and receiving keys to our new house! Mark has gone back to L.A. Tonight is All Hallow's Eve, and I relish the opportunity to Trick-or-Treat with the Grandie. The thought went something like this: Electricity is a current topic. There was a whole riff... I got a charge out of the process.. after a day of dreaming about where to put our furniture, I cannot remember the electric riff... Oh, well.

The house on Englewood was almost ours. We made an offer. Luckily it fell through. We realized after the fact that smokers lived there for over twenty years, and the stench of stale smoke permeated every particle of the house to the floorboards and studs.

Not lost on me was the fact that this could have been our last house. Born in Inglewood; die on Englewood? Bookends.

Mercifully, Mark found another great house on line, and we are now due to move in December or January!

How do you move a household of 26 years?

Book by book.

How do you stay in touch with friends and family who remain 380 miles away?

Visit by visit, card by letter... then there’s email... which you can’t touch, smell, hear, or hug... only eye candy when friends fall into your inbox. Rats! It’s hard to say goodbye.

Writers! What about that Friday morning community of pen to paper people? I will miss them soooooooooo much! And Miss Andrea, our fearless leader!

Perhaps there’ll be groups up in the bay area to join. Different. Give it time. Don’t judge because they’re not yet familiar. Remember how shy and awkward and embarrassed you felt about reading out-loud, in the beginning, and how quickly these folks became your safe space for sharing from your heart.

Colleagues! What about the networks I’m part of professionally?

So many of them are up here as well.

What about my dear clients?

Grateful for my therapist's support on this one! Guilt hangs me up. I want to free them, and myself, to move forward. I shan’t be returning to L.A. every month or so, as I previously envisioned. Bless Sharon's brilliant strategies to help me through this one!

Writing by the Bay sounds pretty sweet!

Being with the grandie is the best lure to be here. Time spent with her is precious.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


October 2015

A year later, I’m looking out at the bay typing away, while seated in one of the blue chairs that used to be in my upstairs healing space, but both now reside in the new living room - not at the Englewood house, but rather a different one. We love this home. In some ways, more than the Studio City house, which was a lovely home for us for twenty-six years!

The essential rooms of this new place are all on one floor, so paramedics have straight access to us from the street - not even a step up or down from the front walk. Amazing. And comforting, too, as we plan to be here ’til we’re taken out feet first. A year of looking seems to have paid dividends.

This house comes as close to perfection for us as anything we could imagine… and someone built it seemingly knowing our taste! We didn’t have to lift a finger to change it to our liking. Well, there is one major repair of a garage beam to deal with, but apart from that, we’re even delighted with the color schemes: a green kitchen, a red, white and grey half-bath, with trivia wallpaper, and basic off-white paint in most of the rest of the house.

Oh, and a view came with. It surprised us. The day we met with our realtors a year ago, here to receive the keys, we had a toast and looked past the orange glare bouncing off the bay, and there, floating in the golden hour of molten sky, was the city of San Francisco.

“How did that get there?” Mark gestured with his glass of bubbly. “Was that view there when we came to look at the house before?” It truly is spectacular. From the lights of San Leandro, Oakland airport, San Francisco’s skyline, to the Bay Bridge, and way in the distance, a wee glimpse of the Golden Gate. Binoculars are a plus, but we rarely use them - preferring simply to take it in with naked eyes.

All good connections have a beginning point. Neighbor Jean is mine. One day, she said, “Why don’t you come with me to my ‘Church of Last Resort’ one Sunday?” I did. And through that simple introduction, a whole world of possibilities opened up. From that first service, where my tears were touched by words read, hymns sung, and invitations issued to be politically involved and active, and a story-tellers event that landed me next to a gal who invited me into a writing group that led to another writing group, and now a third, and a brand new friendship with that gal so similar to me as to be a long lost soul sister with a birthday in the same month, same year, and a family of origin configuration almost identical to my own. She invited me to meet with a group of writers with whom she’s been meeting for twenty three years. I feel so met and held and appropriately challenged to show up as my writerly self that I’m again moved to tears.

Colleagues are plentiful. I will perhaps take over hosting an occasional gathering of Somatic Experiencing Practitioners so we can support one another in our practices of listening to people with big owies, terrible knowledge, horrific stories of human suffering. It helps to be heard. It helps to be held by our peers. It helps to let fall from our shoulders the weight of all that impact of vicarious trauma. If it can flow through us and not land and take up lodging within us, we will be of better service to many more folks for many more years to come.

I plan to invest in a circular fire pit similar to the one my colleague uses, when she hosts these monthly gatherings. She is moving away to her family’s ranch a few hour’s drive south. A fire circle burns away the chaff; helps gold to coalesce.

Even though I’m so busy that I wonder how I ever had time to work as a trauma specialist, and am heading toward complete retirement and only writing, I like keeping in contact with these colleagues whose work inspires me.

The other night, when we were driving the Grandie back to her house for bed-time routine before her mama got back from her Montessori training, we played a word game volley, from back seat to front seat.

A: My name is Alison and I come from Albuquerque, my partner’s name is Alvin, and we sell Alabaster.

Our granddaughter loves these games. Perhaps I’ll change my name to Bertha and sell Bananas electrical in Berkeley. Or maybe I'll be simply a Berkeley writer for Halloween... and beyond...

Lost: One photo...

taken by my father, Howard Maxwell, of one Mr. Dougherty, a hermit who lived in Elysian Park near downtown Los Angeles in the early 1950’s. Before the term “homeless” entered our daily lexicon, Mr. Dougherty lived out-of-doors in the park. He wore a shabby tweed sports coat, with half a dozen short, stubby sharpened pencils, points up, in the breast pocket. He also wore an enigmatic smile.

Intrigued by his demeanor, the pristine pencils, and small pad of paper displayed with care in that pocket, Howard interviewed and photographed Mr. Dougherty for a human interest story that ran in the Los Angeles Times, where my dad was employed as a staff photographer. Mr. Dougherty told my dad that he could not read, that he signed his name with an “X”, but that he kept his pencils ever at-the-ready, just in case inspiration struck him. Dad said there was a bright twinkle in his eye as he spoke.

Hearing this story, when I was a child, touched my heart. It troubled me that the grown-ups relayed his tale looking down their noses, pinkies up, with a touch of meanness in their voices, as if his “preparedness” was a joke only they could understand.

What if inspiration did strike him, and he didn’t have the tools at hand to capture it? I’ve certainly been caught-out with no paper and pencil, when a song has entered my head, while driving down the road, and I wanted to jot it down, or a particularly gorgeous cast of the light was showing off in the sky and I wanted to capture it. Alas, no camera.

Perhaps, Mr. Dougherty’s deep connection with the “out of doors” from which many of us house-dwellers are disconnected, was something that inspired him daily, and he was only waiting for divine inspiration to teach him how to capture it on paper… with words or pictures. He certainly knew how to speak, and didn’t seem at all reticent to converse with my father.

I’d like to think that my dad’s intent was pure; that he saw in Mr. Dougherty a quiet dignity, and that it troubled him too, that his colleagues and friends, and even my mother, were off-base in their derision. I’d like to think Howard wanted to inspire Los Angeles with the simple, unaffected dearness of one corner of humanity.

Kindness and open-heartedness inspire me.

Recently, a colleague shared with me how she figured out a way to connect with an elderly woman she’d seen several times from a distance in her neighborhood. It seems that the image of the woman’s bent figure, painfully slow gait, and utter aloneness touched my colleague’s heart with compassion. After perhaps a week, J finally recognized her stooped posture right up close, in front of her, in line at the grocery store. A conversation unfolded organically. The old woman’s face lit up, J said, just to have another human reach out to her. Now they wave and smile at one another in passing. I was moved to tears by J’s tender persistence to find just the right bridge to walk over and acknowledge and say “howdy” to a familiar stranger in her hometown.

I certainly know very shy places inside myself, that at times keep me from reaching out to others, even when I’m longing to give or receive contact.

What might our world be like if we erred on the side of thinking that everyone, on some level, desires contact with others of their species? What if we, like my colleague J, sought and found an opportunity to acknowledge the humanity of a seemingly lost soul? A simple smile with eyes open to receive another’s human essence may shift something in both hearts.

Namasté is a greeting on the streets in India, not just an oooey, ooooey saying at the end of a yoga class. Ram Dass is credited with this definition:

Namasté… I honor the place in you
in which the entire universe dwells.
I honor the place in you which is of love,
or truth, of light, and of peace.
When you are in that place in you, and
I am in that place in me,
We are One


God/Nature/Humanity has many faces - including our own.

A woman I got to know a little bit at a recent women's retreat shared a practice of setting aside 50 one dollar bills each month to be kept ever at-the-ready. When she sees someone who looks as if s/he could use a buck or two, she extends her hand, her heart, and a genuine eye-to-eye smile with a couple of bills. Such a simple act, honoring that place which is or light, of love, of truth, and perhaps hungry and down on her/his luck.





I wish I could find the lost box of photos that was always in the living room cupboard as I was growing up. So many of my father’s photos were brilliant capturings of beautiful souls, tortured souls, and the wreckage of acts of human souls gone astray from the blueprint of their uniquely human and perhaps meant-to-be humane journey.

Is there a GPS App for getting our lost parts back on track?

When the sky is the color of a New England slate gray, clap-board house that teeters on a rocky promontory, the kind of blue-gray that mirrors the stormy sea, then all plants dressed in green come alive in such a way as to make their singing audible. Can you hear them?

“Vwuhbba, Vwwwuhbbbaaa,” they sing. “We’re alive! We’re alive, a-l-i-i-i-iv-e!!! And we can feel the moisture in the air, so we’re celebrating with little thirsty tree dances, and bristly bush dances, and dry twiggy-straw-in-the-dust dances.”

That perfect gray is the color of pure potential and impending good.

It’s not only the color that electrifies mammals and causes crows to crow and owls to hoot. The color coincides with a particular freshness in the air, a coolness, a quickening, a curious unknown, yet familiar, palpable unknowable something; a change for the better.

People come alive.

Often, these pre-storm skies come in October in northern latitudes; once the laziness of summer has been booted. A friend, Lynn Lopez, once wrote, “October, and finally the air has some authority.”

I find myself bouncing, not walking. Grinning ear to ear, not simply smiling. Eyes wild and wide. Blood dancing. Toes alternately digging into the earth in exploratory joy, and sproinging off of it into the rarified realm of air-borne leaves and bird glide. I cannot sit still. I must be out IN it. IN the electrified atmosphere.

Thanks be to the change. Thanks be to the change of season, the change of trajectory, the change of dry into moist.

Yet, the suddenness of the change gives me pause.

Flash floods caught so many unawares in Southern California last Friday. A friend had to be pulled from her car on Lake Elizabeth Road. The Grape Vine, a mountain pass between northern Los Angeles County and California’s Central Valley became the Scrape Vine… as many cars had to be scraped out of the settling mud-flows.

Near our beloved Painted Turtle Camp in Lake Hughes, cars were buried up to the level of their roofs!

Fires, then floods, fooey!

Nature is truly an awesome force.

But the pre-transition from drought to deluge? Beautiful! That in-between place… Dva da Shanta (Peaceful Place in between, in Sanskrit), Half-way-down-the-stairs, that isn't up and isn't down, as A.A. Milne tells us, between day and night, between night and the coming dawn… that place where what we’ve been no longer has hold of us, but our new self is not quite gelled… Powerful places to be.

May we pause to appreciate the pauses, however minuscule, between what we're leaving behind, and what we're embracing the next moment... and the next... and the next...

San Francisco skyline, between dark cloud cover and drench of morning sun. 10-19-15