beauty and the beast

Many folks don't know that Minneapolis often gets previews of shows that move to Broadway. The Lion King previewed in Minneapolis before it became a blockbuster in New York City.

My Katie was always interested in a career as a performer (until she switched to The Hotel School at Cornell where hospitality is considered a performance art). I spent beaucoup dinero on theater tickets over the years. Minneapolis, of course, is a great theater town. I took her to tons of stuff.

She applied to High Mowing, a Waldorf boarding high school (she got in but she wouldn't go). On the application, they asked the prospective high school student, to list the theater productions the student had seen. Just for fun, we tried to make a complete list. We got several pages into the attachment before we gave up. I still think that was an interesting question to ask an eighth grader applying to a Waldorf boarding school. Any kid looking at High Mowing came from a family that, um, cared deeply about the kid's education.

We had season tickets to the Children's Theater while it was still age appropriate. We went to everything at The Guthrie. We caught a smattering of every theater season, all over town. Plus music. Plus dance. Like for a couple years, Katie thought she wanted to be an opera singer. She discovered opera and boing! She was in love. So we had opera season tickets for a couple years. I even sent her to 'opera camp' one summer. Katie used to go to one of those summer camps for gifted students and one year they offered a stream called 'opera camp'. She found out that she loved the pomp and emotion of opera and she loved to perform but, alas, she was not a singer. After that, for many years, her career goal was to win three Tonys on Broadway. Margot, a Waldorf classmate, used to ridicule Katie for that goal. Margot, who also aspired to Broadway, some of the time, had taken tap dance her entire life because her mother believed you had to tap to get on Broadway. For Margot, in those days, Broadway was all about big show tunes and tapping. For Katie, the theater was more Tennessee Williams and William Inge.

Margot and Katie were the smarted kids in their Waldorf class. Everyone, really everyone, agreed. The girls were fiercely competitive with one another.

In Waldorf schools, each class puts on a class play in the spring. The 8th grade play is the biggest deal. For their 8th grade play, Margot got her wish to do Arsenic and Old Lace and to be the sister with the most lines because Katie had gotten her wish to be Titania in Midsummer Night's Dream in the 7th grade. Margot, of course, had also coveted Titania but Mr. Maier gave the role to Katie. Margot's mom was always frustrated with David, Mr. Maier. She believed that he favored Katie. Well, Jennie, if you are reading this (I am sure she isn't), I have news for you.

Waldorf classes always go on camping trips in the spring, too. For the 6th grade campout, the class had camped on the St. Croix River, up by Taylor Falls State Park. You could rent canoes at Taylor Falls and paddle down to Stillwater, an easy, beautiful way to enjoy the river. Katie had ended up in Mr. Maier's canoe and she had suggested that their canoe sing Broadway show tunes, challening one another to see who knew the most. At age eleven, Katie knew more show tunes than anyone, including David. After the trip, he told me about that day in the canoe with Katie, how much fun he had with her. And then David gave me a prescious gift. How I love me David Maier. "I probably shouldn't say this," he said, suddenly getting emotional as he recounted the singing game in the canoe, "But Katie is my favorite student. She is such a whole person, multi-dimensional. I forget sometimes that she even is a kid. She is right there with me, emotionally, no matter where I go. How did she come to know all those Broadway songs? She's not old enough to have that much history." I don't exactly know how she came to know all those songs. I didn't, like, play that kind of music around the house. I did expose her to movies. Maybe she picked up the lyrics from movies. My Katie has an awesome capacity to memorize and to mimic.

One summer, after her first year in college, she had a marketing internship at Jacob's Pillow, the first and most prominent modern dance festival in this country. The interns got to stay in cabins that were just like going to summer camp. Plus they got to see tons of the best modern dance on the planet, day after day an extravaganza of art.

One aspect of the marketing intern's job was to give tours. There were three marketing interns and each of them were supposed to take turns giving the tours because that was not the most thrilling part of the job. All the girls wanted to interact with the artists and their companies, to talk to the New York Times to place reviews of the shows. Nobody wanted to give tours to little girls who showed up with their mother's to dream about being a dancer.

The tours weren't exactly scripted but Jacob's Pillow's archivist had written out the tour. He was very concerned that the tour presented an accurate history of Jacob's Pillow. I guess if you are an archivist for an arts organization you, like, care about its history.

So. All three marketing interns had to learn the tour information and then the archivist had each of the girls take him on a tour. Katie had memorized the whole thing. By then, Katie had been in many plays so she was accustomed to memorizing. Plus David Maier had the children memorize many poems in grade school. To this day I am pretty sure Katie could recite Poe's Raven.

I miss her so much.

In her freshman year in h.s. (I know, my mind is rambling all over the place, weaving in and out of time), between Christmas and New Year's, I splurged and got tickets to see Beauty and the Beast, previewing in Minneapolis. It was her first 'Broadway' show. To me, it was just another night at the theater but for her, it was a romantic thrill. Broadway. The play we would see would later be on Broadway. It was just like going to Broadway, right mom? I was so glad I had bought those tickets. I had no idea it was going to thrill her like that. The tix were a Xmas gift.

Katie got all dressed up. My daughter was born to be glamourous. She came out of the womb caring about clothes, I swear to goddess. Over the years, every friend I ever had and all my relatives poked fun of us. How did I get a fashion hound for a kid? Where did she get it? As soon as she could speak, she had definite opinions about clothes. Basically, when she was around two, she declared that she would only wear pink and purple. And she wouldn't. Just before she made that pronouncement, the pink and purple thing, I had bought her an adorable pair of Oshkosh by Gosh blue overalls. Powder blue with a floral trim. There was a teeny tiny smattering of pink in the floral trim. Over and over I pointed out that pink in the floral trim, trying to coax her into wearing that outfit. She would not.

Another thing she did, from her earliest days, was she would try on all her clothes. As soon as she learned how to get clothes on and off, she could get untold pleasure out of trying on all her clothes.

And my Katie was always very fussy. She really is obsessive compulsive but when she was two, we didn't think of it like that. We, well, I, thought it was cute that she fussed. She could easily go through all her clothes, trying them on, discarding them, trying more. And then, get this, she would refuse to wear them again until they had been laundered.

'But honey," I implored, "you only had this jumper on for two minutes. It doesn't need to be laundered again. I won't waste the water or the electricity."

My Katie had an iron will. Always. That's why I know she isn't coming back to me.

I would haul her discarded clothes to the laundry room. Then I told her that I laundered them while she was asleep.

I miss her so much.

The night we went to see Beauty and the Beast, she got dressed up in a brown velveteen dress, knit and clingy. She put on darker, more dramatic makeup than I had ever seen before. She make little spikes in her hair, which was very short. The spikes did not have a punk/goth effect. The spikes were hot, grown up. In the dark eyeliner and eyeshadow, the richly dark lipstick, the dramatic rouge on her cheeks, she was a woman. A very attractive woman. During the intermission, as she walked through the lobby of the ornate showplace theater lobby, almost every head turned to watch the beautiful young woman. How did she know how to make herself look like that? And how had I failed to notice before that evening that my little girl was gone.

In 2003, as my fiftieth birthday approach that August, I decided I did not want to turn fifty, not without my kid. When she was a baby and I was still married to her father and I was very, very depressed, I got some therapy. Over and over, back then, my therapist asked me 'where do you see yourself when you are fifty, what will your life look like?'. It's a standard shrink trick. He couldn't get me to see happiness in my short-term future so he was trying to lift my thoughts to the horizon, to rise above my present misery. At this time, I was legally separated from her father and we were locked in a custody fight. I could not see beyond the custody battle. If I lost custody of Katie, I could see no future for me. So Dr. Engler tried to get me to see some kind of future. Why did he pick fifty? Everytime he asked me about what my life would be like at fifty, I said "Katie will be twenty one then, safe from her father. When I am fifty, I want to be dead." Gosh, I was so miserable.

Then, in 2003, I was turning fifty and Katie was twenty one, safe not only from her father but safe from me. Over and over in that summer of 2003, I replayed those sessions with Dr. Engler. Over and over I told myself that the time had come to end my life.

I was still in touch with Katie, just a bit. She said to me that if I was going to kill myself, would I send her my books? And I did. I sent her my books and every photo I had. I thought it made simple good sense. I was living, at the time, on Whidbey. I had only been living there a short time. Nobody around me would know what to do with my belongings after I was found dead. I thought it made perfect sense to ship everything off before hand. Now I can see that what I did was gruesome. It must have been really awful to receive that stuff. Plus I sent her all mementos, all my jewelry. Box after box, I grimly packed and shipped. In my suicide note, all I said was please mail my laptop to my daughter and I gave her address

deep cleaning

I never have company. I have lived in this apartment fifteen months and I have only had company once. I think this phobia got started, avoiding having people in my space, when I lost my daughter. I am pretending this is not my real life. Massive life dysphoria. Is that psychosis? Delusion? Whatever?

I think everyone pretends everything, making it all up. Shakespeare said it all. He said nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.

OK, if a tree falls in the forest but no one hears it fall, does it make a sound?

It's all made up. So why not make up happy? Is it that simple?

I own few material things. Everything I own, except for some cash in a checking account, is in my studio apartment. Seriously, I own hardly anything. In recent days, though, I have been feeling

my so-called life

I have been watching, on DVD, the short-lived television series "My So-Called Life". My daughter and I watched it, both of us rapt, when it was on. Katie was in the fifth grade and we both felt that it was close to what she could expect in adolescence. I remember, now, that Katie thought the mother was a super bitch; she probably was too polite to say the mother reminded her of me. Although I don't think of my daughter as very much worried about being polite to me, like, ever.

Anyway. I'm watching it. I comb the netflix database for television shows to watch.

It's ostensibly about high school but it feels a bit like my life. In the past year or so, I have tried some dating, after a twenty five year hiatus. I was more mature about guys when I was a teenager than I am now.

I watch DVDs sitting in my easy chair. I have a bunch of photos of my teenager taped to the wall. Some of the photos are ones from when she went to dances, coming down the stairs, her hair done up and lots of makeup. I am such a fucking moron. I thought I had tricked the Christmas ghosts this year. I thought I had sailed right through this one. I thought I was so clever, getting a bunch of netflix DVD's. I doubled my membership for this month, eight-at-a-time so I could anesthetize myself. Ha-ha-fucking-ha. Everything hurts. And I am eating bad food. And I skipped swimming today, always a bad sign.

I don't want to feel anything. I don't want to want anything. I don't drink alcohol or do drugs. If I can't escape with movies, I turn to food. I've been eating badly for a couple of days and I keep hearing myself resolving to go on a food bender. I guess it is okay to hate myself for a day or two but it's a slippery slope. What if I start sliding and don't stop? What if I outgrow my new jeans? I gave away all my jumbo clothes. I hate my so-called life.

Watching this show was a mistake. I don't know what I was thinking. It put me right back to living with my kid when she was in the fifth grade and I still thought I was going to have her forever. I shoulda seen that coming. Plus it hurts to compare my pathetic date life with the kids in the show. Does anyone, like, ever, get the dating/mating game right, and have, like a good time?

The show also reminds me of Katie's high school years. There is a great character in the show, Ricky, a more-or-less openly gay boy. This was the mid-nineties. Open homosexuality was pretty new. It is cool that they included this character in the show. Homosexuality was not new to me and the kid. My baby brother, her best uncle, is gay. And for a long time, my best friend was a lesbian named Joni and Katie thought I was gay. Gay was always cool for us.

Once, in her sophomore year in h.s., Katie asked a gay boy to one of those dances where the girls asked the boys. Rob was his name. Rob lived with his father because his mother threw him out of the house for being queer and his father openly despised him for being gay but at least he gave him shelter. And these ogre parents still popped for the fancy prep school, it's not like they totally abandoned the kid. And it was easy for me to be accepting of Rob's homosexuality, heck, he wasn't my kid, right? But still, Rob thought it was cool that Katie could tell me her date for the dance was gay. When he came to pick her up, I brought up his homosexuality. I was such a geek. Maybe he brought it up. Maybe he said it was a surprise to him that I didn't seem to care if katie went out with a gay boy and i said, well, wouldn't a gay boy be safer than a straight one? And I also told Rob to be patient, that once he got to college, being gay would get a lot easier. And he said that he sure hoped so and he was going to college in California. As I have watched this television series over the past few days, Rob has come to mind. I wonder if he is still on the West Coast. I recall that he was headed to a university in Redlands, California

honey in the heart: wallace Stevens poem

I first wrote this on Christmas Day, 2007. It looks like I was happy. I am resharing it to share this beautiful Wallace Stevens poem. One of the many things that has fascinated me since moving to CA eight years ago is there are many CA artists I did not hear about growing up and being educated in the Midwest. Chicago is as cosmopolitican as any world class city but its educational system, including the very good undergraduate university I attended, seemed to ignore the West Coast.

I lived in Massachusetts a couple years and I did not have a similar experience. I knew about most East Coast artists from my basic education and avid reading and study of art. I had never heard of Wallace Stevens until I moved here. this is a lovely poem. Enjoy it. I have not changed my Xmas Day 2007 post, only added these paragraphs on top.

It is Christmas and I am happy.

Wow.

It is a bright sunny day in Northern California and inside me. I feel golden, mellow and smooth.

Honey in the heart.*

*This is a line from 'The Well-Dressed Man" by the poet Wallace Stevens. Here is the whole poem, a good one.

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket's horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house...
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.


Yes is this present sun.  I wish I were a poet or a poetry professor or just a little bit more wonderful than I am.

If Stevens gets it right and the mind can never be satisfied, and I guess I agree with him, what about the heart, can the heart ever be?  I think yes.

regarding comfort food

A long time ago, I had a best friend named Joni. Both my daughter Katie and I loved Joni. We also loved her partner, Cary. And they loved us. It probably doesn't need to be said but I will concede that me and my Katie loved Joni more intently than we loved Cary and Cary loved us less than Joni did. But, still, for several happy years, we danced daily in each others' lives and it was a kind of heaven. When we broke up, it was a hard break, almost as bad as a divorce. When it was good, though, it was very, very good. When it was good, Joni and I used to have wonderful, ongoing debates about things that really mattered. Things like comfort food.

Me, all my life I thought comfort food was anything that I liked to eat when I was feeling a little blue, any food that I used to comfort myself. Like chocolate. Or pizza. Or spaghetti. Donuts could be comfort good. Cookies. Making cookies would be both comfort food and comfort activity. Smelling cookies baking in my oven, mmmmm. Comfort. Until I met Joni, I thought I understood comfort food.

One of my favorite comfort food habit was high butterfat ice cream. Once in awhile, when my dear little girl was extra unhappy, I would announce that I thought we were facing a situation that called for high butterfat ice cream. We lived in Minneapolis. There was an ice cream shop in St. Paul that had, according to the local newspaper, the highest butterfat content ice cream in the entire Twin Cities. Normally, my Katie and me, we went to Sebastian Joe's, a local coffee and ice cream chain. Also, we could get into the white chocolate mousse with raspberries parfait at TCBY. But in an emotional emergency, we went for the high butterfat content ice cream. I have no idea what this fine establishment was called. We never went there unless we were under some kind of emotional siege. And the ice cream was not the only soothing thing about going there. We had to bundle ourselves into the car, we had to head over to St. Paul. We had to sniffle and indulge in self pity on the way over. Also, we had a long time to speculate on the flavors we would choose once we got there. I kinda stumbled into this parenting trick but the ride over to St. Paul was probably the most important aspect of this homemade cure for a little girl's heartache. Knowing that good ice cream was coming, Katie would start to let go of her sadness, telling me, chapter and verse, the entire litany of whatever it was that was bruising her. I listened to her in the golden tunnel. I was at my best as a mother when Katie was sad. My love for her would grow more intense. I lit up inside as I amped up my love, trying to will her back to happy. I believed then and I believe now that my amped up love on the drive over to St. Paul was what cured her. Not the high butterfat ice cream. But, still, the indulgence, the decadence, of that high butterfat content. Good times.

Then we met Joni.

Joni, a genius, was/is an expert on many things. One of her primary areas of expertise is food. Joni loved food. She considered herself a gourmet cook and an advanced gourmand. She's no longer my friend. I love her and miss her and I always will. But that's another story, or two or three.

The relevant point, related to Joni, is that one day she overheard me begin a spiel for my unhappy child, dangling the trip over to that special ice cream store in St. Paul because my Katie was unhappy. Joni asked if she could come along. She was surprised to learn that there was an ice cream store in the Twin Cities that she had not yet discovered. Joni, like all wisewomen, understood ice cream's curative power.

"Katie, my love, my plumkin, my kitten, my dove" I began, "I think we have a situation here that calls for high butterfat ice cream. What do you think?"

Katie always agreed to go for ice cream, no matter how upset she was. In these days. Things changed later. Joni had been babysitting and she was a bit upset herself, anxious that she had not been able to console Katie. When I walked in to pick up my kid, she burst into tears, telling me about the injustice that had befallen her that day.

Like I said, Joni wanted to come with us for the ice cream. Sure, I agreed, come along.

In the car, I chattered about comfort food. Just talking, being me out loud. Sometimes I would turn on my chatter to distract Katie. Quite a lot of times, this worked. She was often absorbed by my rambling nonsense.

Well, I'm losing steam here. I have a bunch of stuff I have to get done yet today. I'll fast forward.

We learned on this drive with Joni that, according to her, comfort food had to be white.

She insisted that chocolate ice cream could not be comfort food because it was not white.

I thought she was kidding. What about peanut butter toast? I asked, indignant. What about tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches?

Nope, said Joni. Comfort food has to be white or very nearly white. Mashed potatoes and gravy with turkey. Buttered toast (the bread had to start out white). Pasta with white sauce but not with red. A tuna melt could be comfort food.

How could ice cream, especially chocolate, not be a comfort food?

Joni was a wise, brilliant woman. This is the only area in which I detected her underlying insanity.

Sugar cookies were comfort food. Gingerbread was not.

We returned to the topic many times. I so wanted her to yield, to change her position. My old anxiety is rising as I write this. Joni and I have lost touch with one another (she lives in Sebastopol, it would be so easy to see her again)

You could count a bagel with cream cheese, even if you added lox, according to Joni, because it was mostly white.

My Katie adored Joni. Sure, a debate about comfort food is unimportant. Or is it? Comfort is a central aspect of mothering. It rocked the mother in me to have one of my core mothering tools challenged. I wanted Joni to see comfort food my way. I still do. How could she limit comfort food to white? Please take this back, Joni. By some miracle, find my blog, read this post and allow that peanut butter toast with tea on an overcast, rainy day is comfort.

Well, I guess Joni would allow that peanut butter toast with tea could be comfort. But not comfort food.

This is driving me crazy all over again.

Joni is wrong. Peanut butter toast is comfort food.

I never buy bread these days. I control my carbohydrate intake carefully to manage my diabetes. I go for weeks, months even, without thinking about bread or pasta. Lately, I've been craving something. Craving, craving, craving. Tidying my kitchen a day or two ago, I noticed that I have a jar of peanut butter, unopened, in the cabinet. Eyeballing the peanut butter was almost unconscious. The peanut butter began to work me. I have been arguing with myself about opening the peanut butter. I have looked at the nutritional information a half dozen times, noting how many crabs are in a tablespoon of peanut butter. After I look at the label, noting the carb count, I mentally picture opening the jar, eating a tablespoon of butter. And then what?

the mists of mountain view

Okay. The best swimming conditions are in full bloom. It is cold and wet. When rain hits the water in the pool, mist rises and then drifts away. Mist is rising and drifting all over the pool. The swimmers move the water, which causes mists. The rain moves the water, more mist. The drift of the mist is mystery. Almost no one swimming so the pool is relatively quiet, a kind of still. It is way cold out of the water. Pretty cold in the water. This is awesome swimming. I think all the swimmers feel like heros when they get out. Yes, it is cold rushing out of the water and into the heated locker room but it is exhilerating cold. I am in a heaven.

And there is more.

I caught a bus for part of the trip back to my apartment after my swim. I feel lazy when I take the bus but on some days, if we include my swimming in the calculation, as well as the walking I do for my transportation, I exercise several hours a day. I get tired. Sometimes I have to take care of my self and take the bus. I wish I would not feel guilty when I hop on the bus but I nearly always do. What do I expect of myself? That I should never ride, that I should only walk?

So. I rushed to catch the 12:01 #34 at the corner of Shoreline and Rengsdorff, which saves me a mile's walk. I was high from the swim, thrilled by the cold wet. It is so wonderful to be out in the rain and properly dressed. I had on a rain parka, the hood up. The parka was soaked. My bags were dripping wet. But underneath my self care of gloves, hat, scarf, layers, I was toasty. My nose is always red but with the cold, it must have been Santa Claus red. And sniffling. My nose sniffles when it is cold. I like the sniffles. Am I weird?

I kinda danced from the locker room to my bus stop. And then I had a few minutes wait.

Right at the corner, there is a storm drain. I watched water moving along the curbs from all directions, water making its way around most obstacles, the power of gravity drawing the water down down down to the drain at the corner. The drain was completely covered with leaves. The water was not running, it was moving drip by drip.

I kicked the pile of leaves away to get the water moving. What a thrill as the water gushed. I got it into my head that if I cleared enough leaves away, the backlog of water could all drain into the sewer before the bus came. I stepped down into the water, to get a better angle on all those leaves, kicking and digging with my shoes. My shoes got wet and then they got soaked. I got wetter and wetter. Colder and colder. With each of my whooshing efforts, the water moved faster and faster. I couldn't stop. It was so much fun. I got soaking wet.

When the bus came, I was sorry it had come so soon. I felt that with just a bit more work, I coulda had that storm drain running so smooth. Oh well.

When I was a little girl, I spent lots of time most summers in Mitchell, South Dakota. My cousin Joy was an only child. I accompanied her and my aunt to visit our grandmother each summer. It was actually a bit like my summer job. My job was to be Joy's playmate. Neither Joy or my aunt Margaret ever let me forget that I was there to be Joy's playmates. Joy seemed to think this meant she owned me, much like she owned her dolls and kittens. She tended to think she had a right to tell me what to do and she ordered me about like a living puppet. My aunt tended to think Joy was perfect, that I was imperfect and that Joy was always right and as the older child and the hired playmate, I was supposed to suck it all up. Sometimes, also, I was reminded that my mother had lots of kids back home and she needed me gone to save her some trouble, like I wasn't quite welcome at home, quite like I had been farmed out as a hired hand. I loved and hated these trips. I loved my grandma. I loved eating in restaurants on the trip there and back to Chicago. My aunt spent money a bit more freely than my folks. More ice cream cones. More movies. But I hated the way my cousin Joy, younger than me, was allowed to bully me.

Joy and I also had fun to. It gets very hot in South Dakota midsummer. Very hot. Like 109 degrees. It's pretty dry and much less humid than other parts of the Midwest where I have summered. Our all time favorite summer activity was went it rained, which it never did enough of. My cousin's father, my uncle Charlie, his people farmed in Indiana. I spent a lot of my summers on their Indiana farm, too. When it rained, in SoDak or Indiana, we put on our swimsuits, grabbed umbrellas and went out and played in the puddles. Water gushing at the curbside of streets gets dirty so we got plenty dirty. We had to hose ourselves down before being allowed back into the house. We loved hosing ourselves in the rain. We liked to stomp in the puddles as hard as we could, making the biggest possible splashes. Also, we like to sit down in the puddle streams and create bridges with twigs and leaves, create barriers and rivers in the street puddles.

I was reminded of these good times as I cleaned out those leaves waiting for the bus this morning. I kinda wanted to keep working, to let go of the constraint of staying clean. What difference does it make if I get wet and dirty? Why not enjoy that wet, dirty pile of leaves?

I came home and changed into dry clothes, retained my adult role.

pie on the mind

Last year, round about this time of year, I wrote about my cranberry pear pie. It was so much fun writing about that pie. I've been hoping to recruit the cosy comfort I got out of writing about pie last year. A gal in Denmark (or somewhere Nordic) actually wrote to me and said she was going to make that pie with her kids, although she was going to substitute something for the cranberries. Her favorite part of my recipe was loving the assistant chefs/children. I don't think any berry would be a good sub for a cranberry. A cranberry's tartness is special but what the heck. I hope she succeeded with lingonberries or something else red.

I have just remembered another pie I used to prepare. Cheese, tomato and onion pie. Sometimes when I served it, people suggested it was a quiche. If it does qualify as quiche, my cheese, tomato and onion pie would be the only quiche I've ever made cause I've never made one intentionally. Isn't this fascinating, me writing about nothing but still me having fun? Entertaining myself. There are lots of eggs in this pie.

So you make a pie crust. You don't need a top crust for this one.

Slice up a whole bunch of onions. A lot. If you can get a variety of onions, go for it. Use at least a pound of onions. Slice them as thin as you can. Well, if you are looking for interesting texture, you could vary the slices, some thick, some super thin. That could be interesting. Then you saute all the sliced onion in butter until the onions become translucent. If you don't know what I mean, keep sauting. Once the translucence occurs, you will know.

Drain the buttery yumness of those onions. It is nice to keep all the butter but resist this urge. If you keep all the butter, your pie will be messy, which is okay, I guess but if you are presenting this to honored guests, it is nice to fuss about appearance. Dump all the onions on your pie crust.

Oh, it is a good idea to prebake the crust, just for a few minutes at 350 degrees. This is a soggy pie. Bake the crust to keep it dry. Dry-ish. This is a gooey mess of a pie, it will be messy but prebake in hope.

Next, take all your evenly sliced tomatoes, lots of tomatoes, upwards of a pound, and layer them like bricks over the onions. If you like, you can hold back a bit of onion and put onion on top of the tomato but I prefer to end with tomatos on top. Later, then the cheese bakes, the tomatos peek through the cheesiness beautifully but you lost the peek-a-boo effect of the red tomatos under the cheese if you finish with onions. Try it both ways, find out what you like.

Then you take some milk (cream if you are feeling decadent and why not, you are already larded up with butter in the crust and butter in the onions, prudence no longer applies, go for the cream), about a cup of milk. One cup of grated gruyere cheese, one cup of swiss cheese. You could use other cheese, but stick with white ones, sharp white ones are best. Also hard cheese is good. I hate to keep dwelling on the gooeyness of this pie but the onions dripping with butter make for a wet wet dish. Hard cheese helps holds things together.

Beat the milk and cheese with a couple eggs. I haven't made this pie in a long time. I forget how many eggs. Actually, I am making up all the amounts given here, from ancient memory. I got this pie from one of Anna Thomas's Vegetarian Gourmet cookbooks. She called it 'savory cheese and onion pie' but I have always felt the tomatos deserved billing. If you care about quanitites, look for her recipe.

Sprinkle some parsley or chives over everything, just a little tiny bit. The green can be pretty.

I haven't made this pie in years. I stopped making it cause people would grouse about the cholesterol. It is no fun serving yummy comfort food just to hear whines about cholesterol. Itis particularly irritating to watch the whiners scarf this extremely delicious concoction down after their ungracious plaint. I used to want to snatch the forks out of their hands and take back this hot, creamy, cheesey, tomato-y delight.

A friend of mine told me a story awhile aback about the time he made a bunch of onion pizzas for a party. He said his guests scarfed down his pie. I bet they did. In my humble opinion, not enough people know how fabulous it is to combine hot cheese and onions.

One time, my sister, her husband and my niece went on a prepaid tour of China, the kind of tour where all your meals are part of a set package price. They were living in Korea when they decided to visit China over their Christmas holiday. I guess it is pretty cheap to get to China from S. Korea. The tour was going to take them to some rural areas, places where restaurants were no common. they were advised to take a tour with meals because in some places, it would otherwise be hard to find something to eat. So they signed up for some package. They spent two weeks crawling over rural China on a crowded bus, staying in farm houses. They had a good time. How could you not have a good time, traveling around China? The newness of everything would be awesome. One meal on this trip was particularly memorable. The meal consisted of onions and rice. As they gathered for their dinner and realized onions and rice was all they were going to get, their hostess explained to them that they were eating three kinds of onion.

meow

In June, I flew to Chicago to see my family, sister, brothers, nieces, nephews, mom. I had last seen them in February 2006, before I had lost any weight. By the time I saw them in June, I had lost seventy pounds. Yes, even with seventy pounds gone, I still had a lot to lose. And now, in November, yes, I've lost more and yes, I still have plenty more fat to unload. And I will. But still, seventy pounds is a big change.

So my sis picks me up at Midway and we saunter down to the baggage claim area. I had chattered, at length, to my sister, over the phone about my weight loss, my exercise, the changes in my eating habits. It was a big deal to me, right? And it should be a big deal. Losing seventy pounds is something I was rightfully proud of. I expected my sister to not just notice the big change in me (it has, ahem, been a year and a half since I had seen her, and seventy pounds!) but she said nothing. She fretted about the speed of the luggage arrival. She vented a bit about her recent week-long visit with our mother. She spoke of her children. I was like a kid waiting for Santa Claus. I engaged in polite chit chat but inside myself I was straining for the weight loss compliments. Finally, I brought it up myself, a little crestfallen that she had not said anything on her own.

"Well, let me take a look," she said, scanning her eyes up and down, scrutinizing me. She put her hand under her chin, with the forefinger pointed up, the gesture emphasizing that she was having to look hard to see the change in me. She had her arms crossed, resting the raised hand in the palm of the other arm. Her gestures were broad, as if she were intentionally emphasizing how hard she had to look to see a change. Her eyes went up and down the length of me a few times. Me, I'm a little kid inside myself, waiting for her approval, waiting for an extra scoop of ice cream. Please love me, sister mine. "Now that you have pointed it out, yes, I can say that I see a change in you. Before you looked very fat, you know?" She paused, signaling that she was measuring her words carefully, bending over backwards to find something nice to say. "Now you still look fat but you look ordinary fat. Before, it was grossly fat. Now you look good, you look like an ordinary fat person."

I swear to goddess that this is very close to what she actually said.

The visit that ensued between us was a disaster. I don't think she will be speaking to me again for a long, long time, probably not until I win a big lottery or something and she wants to hit me up for moolah. I'm serious. Her husband actually hit me near the end, hard enough to give me a bruise (which is not saying all that much, cause I do bruise like an overripe peach but still, he hauled off and socked me, he really did. Nobody has hit me since I was married and that wasn't okay either.)

At one point during the week, while I was driving, my sister in the passenger seat and my niece behind us, my niece said "Mom, if Aunt Therese is wearing size sixteens now, what size are you?" My sister evaded the query. But I can tell you what size she was wearing. She was also wearing a few sixteens. My sister has never been morbidly obese, as I used to be. And she is much bigger than me in general. She is much taller, more broadly built. As she has pointed out to me many times, Marilyn Monroe was a size sixteen. My sister is a Marilyn Monroe kind of size sixteen. Like all the women in our clan, she has a full bosom. She is very beautiful and not small. She likes to be down at size twelve, she is content at fourteen, she chafes at sixteens but at any of these sizes, my sister is gorgeous. Plus she is catnip to men. She has a voluptuous, sensual beauty that I didn't get. When my niece asked her mother what size she wears, I could have answered for her but I said nothing. My sister has a right to feel beautiful and to keep any secrets of vanity that she chooses. Isabelle, my niece, does not have our body type. Well, we'll have to see what her breasts do. Yes, Isbee buds have begun to bloom but it is too soon to see if hers will be humongous. Mine were humongous from day one. I swear that my first bra was a 36C. It aint easy being a 36C in the sixth grade, I can tell you. My daughter, she got the family bosom. Even when Katie was a size zero (and she was, when she was sick), she had a full bosom. It used to amaze everyone, that she could look like a skeleton and still have a full bosom. I wonder what Katie's body looks like these days. When last I saw her, she was very voluptuous and I am not using the word voluptuous to imply that she was plump. Not a bit. She was sensuously curvy and thin, with full bosom and hips. Until I saw my daughter evolve into a sensuous, voluptuous woman, I never really understood how some women were just naturally hot, giving off a ripe heat without trying. Katie has that kind of beauty. She was a hot, voluptuous woman the last time I saw her and I am sure she is even hotter and more beautiful now. And so does my sister. Is, we have to wait and see.

Well, I'm nattering aimlessly. The point here is that I am writing this with my brand new pair of size fourteen jeans on. True, I have a couple pairs of size sixteens that fit me just fine. It's also true that I can only stuff myself into one particular brand of size fourteen pants. But, oh my gosh, my fourteens are making me happy. I feel hot. I feel gorgeous. I feel beautiful. I feel young.

And I am dying to tell my sister about the size fourteen.

She is having Thanksgiving dinner with my dolly Dave tomorrow, my baby brother. I have called him each day this week to remind him about the size fourteens, to be sure he remembers to tell her.

Meow.

a tuna melt

I was diagnosed with diabetes in the summer of 2003. I don't think I have bought a loaf of bread since then. My metabolic system just can't handle the unnecessary carbohydrates in bread. Oh, sure, I have eaten bread since then, in restaurants or in a friend's home for a meal but buying an entire loaf of bread, given that I live alone, well, it was like making a plan to binge. My nutritionist advises me to limit my carbs to between 90 and 110 daily. I'd have to blow most of my carbs on a sandwich. Most of the time, I'll pass on bread.

Last Wednesday, while in the city for a weekly commitment, I was early. I am almost always early for everything. So I went strolling. And I read menus posted on restaurants. I almost never eat out in restaurants. I am disciplined about spending money and I can eat cheaper at home. And I am disciplined about what I eat; it is easier to eat healthy at home. I like to eat out, of course. I have read all the menus posted along Castro street, the main drag, of Mountain View. A small, stupid thing I do. So last Wednesday, I'm killing time, reading menus and other signs on storefronts when I read about a tuna melt.

I have not thought about tuna melts in years, certainly not since I gave up buying bread.

I wanted a tuna melt last Wednesday. Oh my gosh, how I wanted it.

But, as I have mentioned, I am a disciplined eater. I had already eaten all that I was going to eat last Wednesday. My inner voice, who was in a bratty mood, was petulant, whining as she demanded a tuna melt. I gave in to her quite like I used to give in to my dolly girl Katie. I promised her I would think about it, take it under advisement. Note: whenever Katie asked for things, especially when she had a bad case of the gimmees, I would say "I'll keep it in mind, I'll take that under advisement". This seemed to signal to her, when she was basking in greed, that I was going to give it to her and it would tend to shut her up. As she got older and wiser, she understood that I was blowing her off politely, that when I said "I'll think about it" I was mostly thinking "sure, honey, on a cold day in hell, I'll buy you that Barbie doll".

My inner voice is not as gullible as my little girl once was so when I tried to hush my longing for that tuna melt up, my inner voice grew more strident. She, me, really wanted a tuna melt.

The aforementioned tuna melt floated through me all week. When Wednesday came round again, as it did yesterday, as it does every week, I decided, in the morning, as I planned my food for the day, that I would have a tuna melt in that restaurant for dinner before my meeting.

And I did. Tuna melts. How can you go wrong? Tuna, mayo, cheese. All warmed up and gooey. It was delicious. A homemade one would have been better. A better tuna, a finer cheese, butter for the grill, better bread. But still, it was yummy. It was perfection. I savored every bite. And you know what? I am sated. I don't want another one. It's like that tuna melt is still satisfying me.

gosh golly

It has been so much fun to be back at the pool. Lots of people greet me with whoops of pleasure. All my homies had heard some version of what happened to me. Flattop had emailed me right after the conflict and I told him that the police had told me I was banned from the pool for life. The life banishment turned out to be cop bluster but my homies didn't know that. They organized a petition, to demand that I be allowed to return. Lots of them were willing to vouchsafe for me, even willing to say that if I had a problem with another swimmer, it was unlikely to be my fault. (and it wasn't my fault: that guy who slugged me was a newbie, nobody had ever seen him before).

Kay hugged me twice. Kay kept saying, in her cute, choppy accent, "You no kill somebody, why they no let you swim. Come on. You no kill anybody!" And, over and over she said, "So good to have you back. You swim with me."

Rebecca said "Ms. Pearls is back. I've missed you." Rebecca always notices my pearls. She says she imagines me swimming in them every time she sees me.

Lots of folks who knew nothing about my fracas had just plain old missed me. "Haven't see you in awhile! Nice to see you again!"

Those cops had made me feel like a slug, a worm, a crud. It felt so nice to be warmly greeted back.

Margaret, the head lifeguard, said "Welcome!" when she punched my ticket. Henry, the head recreation guy at the park system, the guy who had to let me back in, told me that as far as he and his entire staff is concerned, nothing ever happened. The slate is clean. Then he said he'd let Margaret know I was coming back so there wouldn't be a problem being admitted and I said "I don't embarass easy, Henry. If I did, I wouldn't be back at all."

Color me happy. It was hard to be banned from the pool but, gosh, I wouldn't feel as loved and popular as I do if it hadn't happened.

a regular or harmonious pattern

My rhythm, my regular, harmonious pattern, has been restored. I feel the universe rocking me as I swim. I feel grounded once more.

Praise goddess. I get to swim.

another poem

For My Daughter

When I die choose a star
and name it after me
that you may know
I have not abandoned
or forgotten you.
You were such a star to me,
following you through birth
and childhood, my hand
in your hand.

When I die
choose a star and name it
after me so that I may shine
down on you, until you join
me in darkness and silence
together.

--David Ignatow

So What

So What by Kim Addonizio

Guess what. If love is only chemistry--
phenylethylamine, that molecule
that dizzies up the brain's back room, smoky
with hot bebop, it won't be long until
a single worker's mopping up the scuffed
and littered floor, whistling tunelessly,
each endorphin cooling like a snuffed
glass candle, the air stale with memory.
So what, you say; outside, a shadow lifts
a trumpet from its case, lifts it like an ingot
and scatters a few virtuosic riffs
towards the locked-down stores. You've quit
believing that there's more, but you're still stirred
enough to stop, and wait, listening hard.

a beautiful day

I

the summer of love

The 'Summer of Love' began in San Francisco, unleashing widespread awareness of the hippie counterculture. This refrain, from a song from John Phillips, of The Mamas and The Papas, evokes the mood of that time.

If you're going to San Francisco,
be sure to wear some flowers in your hair...
If you're going to San Francisco,
Summertime will be a love-in there.

This Sunday, September 2nd, there will be a free, all-day concert commerating the fortieth anniversary of The Summer of Love. I'll be there, maybe even with some flowers in my hair. I suppose the flowers ought to be real?

I turned fourteen in August, 1967. My baby sister, my only sister, was born that June. I already had four brothers. I had already lost two baby sisters to infant deaths. All I cared about that summer was Margaret. She and I shared a bedroom. All that summer, every single night, when she awoke in the night to eat, I got up, changed her diapers, took her to my mother's bed and went back to sleep. Then, after a short nap, I reawakened, retrieved my baby sister and tucked her back into the crib in our shared room. My mother never even had to get out of bed.

I started high school that fall, probably in late August, probably forty years ago this week. After less than two weeks of high school, I went to my mother and said that it was too hard for me to do get up in the mornings for school and I was going to stop getting up with the baby. My mother was furious. I was very ashamed of my selfishness. To this day, if you mention the Catholic girls' high school that I attended, Queen of Peace, in front of my mother, even with her dementia, she'll say "Oh, well, Queen of Peace, that is the school where the nuns taught your sister how to be selfish."

I was aware of hippies. I had heard of Haight Asbury. In general, I liked the idea of a counterculture, a peace movement in opposition to the Viet Nam War, free love, flowers and tie dye. But for me, the sixties were about caring for my baby brother Dave, born in 1964 and my baby sister, Margaret, born in 1967. I was aware of demonstrations, riots like the Chicago Democratic Convention (I lived in Chicago!) and Kent State. Me, I lived in a cocoon of loving those babies.

In June, 1971, I graduated from high school. A few days later, my parents had a divorce hearing that they did not tell us kids about. While I was at work at my summer job in the public library, mom showed up at the house with a moving van and took almost all the furniture in our home. And she took David and Margaret. She had told the divorce judge, under oath, that she would not remove them from the State of Illinois. Then, that very same day, she took them, disappearing for the next couple years. She took my babies away.

Mom had gone back to college while I was in high school. She liked to say that by helping her go to college (she could not have done it without my childcare), she would help me. I very seriously believed that I was preparing for my own future when I sacrificed extracurricular activities throughout high school (I would have loved to be in a school play, to be on student council, to work on the school paper but I could never stay after school, I had to get to the babies). I loved them like a mother loves her babies.

And then they were gone.

Just to show you what a dope I am, it wasn't until I was in my forties, my late forties, that I realized that mom had made sure she got her education and her divorce before I left home for college. She had carefully planned her escape on my back.

Oh my god, it damned near killed me the way David and Margaret disappeared from my life. I had never had any adults participating in my life, giving me guidance on how to cope with anything so there was no one around to suggest that my grief was normal, that my loss was real. I lost a couple years to that heartache. It was worse to lose my daughter but not by much.

I am going to the Summer of Love 40th Anniversary Concert in Golden Gate Park this Sunday. The hippie movement kinda passed me by in a blur. I am curious to see who turns up. Will it be old hippies? Young people? I looked at the website and it looks like Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war activist, is going to be there. I was sorry to see that. I just want to hear music and watch people play frisbee.

full moon rising

There will be a full moon tonight, with a lunar eclipse around 2 a.m. Sigh. I want to view it from a beach. I hardly ever wish I had a car but I do right now. My walk on the beach in Santz Cruz yesterday has stirred an interest in the beach. There are lots of things I want to see in California. Having a car would enable me to get around more. I want to take long hikes in nature. Most public parks are not readily accessible by public transit.

I am full of unquenched desires today.

I have a growing appetite for walking. In the past year, I have walked a lot as transportation. I am fit enough, now, to walk several hours at a time. I am craving walks in nature. I am going to look for hiking/walking clubs.

under the boardwalk

I took a day trip to Santa Cruz today. I am a hick tourist from the Midwest.

Santa Cruz has a beautiful beach front. There's an amusement park, roller coasters, a ferris wheel, right on the beach. There is the Pacific Ocean. There is the beautiful beach, which was full of people. People actually in the water. Blankets. Sand castles. Music blaring on bad sound systems. Carnival games. Bad food.

When I was nineteen, I lived in Bogota, Colombia for a year, studying at Universidad de los Andes. For the first several months, each time I tried to imagine where I was in the world, inside my own thoughts, I had to picture myself in Chicago, my hometown and then mentally picture myself being not in Chicago but in South America. I had to 'see' Bogota, Colombia, South America on a map in my head and then place myself 'down' there. For many months, I had to make a mental leap, to know where I was on planet earth. Gradually, I was able to 'know' that I was in South America. But at the beginning, my frame of reference was the Midwest and I couldn't quite picture myself being based on another continent. It was an interesting disconnect.

I have a similar disconnect about living in California. I do live here. I really do. Right? Sometimes, though, I am still 'in' Chicago, as a child, imagining California. Like maybe as a teenager, reading about Haight Asbury District in San Francisco, I would imagine a far-off jewel-of-a-city with what I imagined hippies looked like. Or when I imagined L.A., it was all palm trees with an ocean in the distance. It was all distant, dreamy, unreal.

Well, California is distant, dreamy and unreal to me now, even though I live here. I am pretty sure that this is my true, physical-plane, material-based reality: I live in California. Not that it really matters. Who knows? Maybe I am a pulse of energy, lost in time and space and I don't have a physical existence. How can I be sure?

In my heart, California is distant, dreamy and unreal. But it is real. I am pretty sure.

So. I am pretty sure I really was in Santa Cruz, California today. I am pretty sure I had a great time. We actually did walk under the boardwalk. And I sang the lines I know from the pop song 'under the boardwalk' and I asked my friend to pretend that I was the first person ever to crack such a dumb joke.

Under the boardwalk, we'll be having some fun. Under the boardwalk, out of the sun. Boardwalk!

I had lots of fun today.

King Oscar in a can

Thinking about my dad and a joke he played as a boy on Chicago's South Side. Dad grew up in an Irish ghetto. His very first job, which he quit after a day or two, was delivering milk from a horse-drawn wagon. He had to get up at what he considered an godawful, early hour but he quite, he told us, because he had not anticipated that he would have to clean up horse dung. The combination of very early rising and cleaning up horse shit was too much for my adolescent dad.

Anyway.

Before he was old enough to get paid employment, dad ran loose in his tenement neighborhood with his 'homies', other Irish-American, Catholic lads. Good kids, basically, but, boys. They needed to stir something up.

One of my dad's first displays of poor public behavior involved going into a local shop and asking the shopkeeper "Do you have King Oscar in a can?" King Oscar is a brand of canned sardines. When the shopkeeper would say 'Yes, we do!" dad and his cohorts would squeal "Well, then let him out!" and rush out of the shop, thrilled at their own bravado.

I loved listening to my dad tell me any stories about his boyhood. He didn't tell many. Dad had beautiful blue eyes that never twinkled enough with happiness. His eyes had a happy glow when he recalled his rebel days and King Oscar.

I believe there was also a brand of canned tobacco named after a king. Dad also liked to go into tobacco stores and ask for the canned, king tobacco.

Yesterday, I spotted King Oscar in a can at Trader Joe's. I suppose Trade Joe's sells King Oscar all the time but I rarely shop for canned fish. When I saw King Oscar yesterday, I bought one can. My dad has been with me, smiling and happy.

Maybe I was thinking about my dad before I saw the sardines. I've been recalling an unhappy story about my dad. Which came first, the happy or the sad story?

My dad was a gambler. Every once in awhile, in the fifties and sixties (I was born in 1953), dad would blow his whole paycheck on the ponies. Harness racing. If ever there was a chump bet, it's harness racing. My dad was a chump gambler. When I was five years old, we had a baby girl, Mary Ann, who only lived two months. On the morning of her funeral, unable to cover the entire cost of the funeral, my dad stopped by my grandpa's house, the same tenement where dad had grown up, and grandpa gave him the money for the funeral home. Then dad went to the tracked and put the entire amount down on a horse, losing, of course. Dad said that he couldn't believe god would let him loose on the day he had to bury his baby daughter. Oh my gosh, the day of Mary Ann's funeral was awful. None of the adults in my orbit ever told me much of anything. Even Mary Ann's death was treated a bit hush hush, like the grown ups wanted me to pretend I didn't notice that my baby sister had ever lived or something. I sure wasn't supposed to act sad or anything and be a burden to my folks.

I was floundering with the loss of my baby sister (I had two brothers, thank you very much, I took the loss of my sister very deeply, sure that a sister would somehow bring me happiness)
trying to hide my sorrow as I was pressured by various aunts and uncles to do. We were all waiting at the house to head to the funeral home, waiting for dad to come with the money to pay the funeral home. We couldn't go without the money. How mortifying to not be able to pay to bury our baby. We kids weren't supposed to know about the money but we did, of course.

Dad was expected home long before he arrived. Then he walked in and ushered mom into the bedroom to tell her what he had done.

What a weak, foolish man.

My grandfather showed up with more money. The funeral went ahead. Dad's gambling took the sting out of losing my baby sister. Even though I was only five and I was not supposed to know what was going on, I did know. I remember being very angry at my dad for causing us more pain on that dad. Somehow, in my five-year-old mind, his gambling away the funeral money tore me apart as much, if not more, than Mary Ann's death.

In recent days, I've been thinking about my dad's choice to do something to hurt himself and his whole family on such an unhappy day. Suddenly, I have great empathy for him. Suddenly, I think I understand why he did it. It was weak and foolish. It caused him a lot more pain. But focussing on the pain of his gambling might have taken the focus off the fact that our baby had died. The gambling pain took the focus -- and maybe some of the sting? -- out of our sorrow. I am pretty sure my dad had borderline personality disorder. It is so borderline to cause one's self pain as a way to spare one's self other pain.

I've also been recalling an incident that occurred after Mary Ann died. Maybe I was seven.

On a Sunday morning, as we scrambled to get ready for mass, Mom announced that she had no money and no food for Sunday dinner. She was hurt and angry. Dad had, once again, gambled his paycheck, although this was not voiced out loud by my mom. The fact of dad's gambling was always supposed to be hidden. In actual fact, until I was in my forties, I never once voiced out loud to any member of my family of origin that my dad was a gambler. We never discussed it, not once. The closest it got to being out in the open would be when mom would complain that she had no money for food in front of us kids. I think she was shaming dad. Or something.

Dad said "I have money, Mary Ann. Let me take the kids to mass and then we'll stop at the grocery store."

My dad rarely went to Sunday mass. Me, Chuck and Joe went to church with dad for a change. I don't know about my brothers but I was aware of the tension. I was very anxious that we were going to run out of food. I wanted what my dad had said to be true, that he had money and there was nothing to worry about.

So, we go to mass and then dad takes us to an unfamiliar grocery store, one I had certainly never been in before. He stopped in the meat eye and handled a packaged smoked butt, some kind of pork. I noted that he handled it, taking it up, putting it down. He didn't put it in the shopping cart. Then he bought something, a loaf of bread, I think. I remember eyeing the items he bought and thinking that he had not bought something that would add up to dinner. I dread the fight mom and dad were going to have about food and money. I felt so sorry for my dad, my mom, all of us. I felt so very bad.

I acted like I did not notice the contents of the shopping cart, keeping my eyes averted.

Dad put the grocery bag on the floor behind the driver's seat. We all piled in and went home.

Getting out of the car, dad lifted a smoked butt from the floor of the car and slipped it into the grocery sack. Aghast, I realized my dad had stolen that meat.

"Did you still that, dad?" I asked, horrified.

"No, no, that was already in the car."

It made me sick that my dad had stolen. And what I did might still be making me a little bit sick today. I pretended, right inside my own self, that I believed dad. I pretended I did not think he stole.

Now, in 2007, I don't really care if my dad stole a few dollars worth of meat. A gambler is a dishonest man. My dad would have stolen anything that he could get away with stealing. The thing about these memories that are bruising me even now is remembering how I created a fiction and substituted it for my reality. In order to survive childhood with my parents, I had to live in a world of artificial assumptions, lies, inventions and pretend I believed them to be true. I disciplined myself to belief that black was white, that up was down. In doing so, I built the foundation of who I am on shifting sands of falsehood and, in many ways, I am still living my life from such shifting sands.

I miss

you can always go downtown

Seventies pop music is zinging through me. Yesterday, it was Dionne Warwick singing 'Do you know the way to San Jose?". Today, Petula Clark is belting out 'When you're alone and life is making you lonely you can always go, downtown!".

Maybe I could turn back the hands of time, go back to when these songs were on the radio and make different choices for my life. Gee whiz.

I am going downtown tomorrow. San Francisco. The city!

I don't think too many mothers in all of history have sung more to their children than I used to sing to my Katie. Sometimes I would get into a groove in which I would sing-song everything, rhyming almost nonstop for hours. I wrote many songs for her. I changed the lyrics to dozens of pop songs. Lots of parents do this. How I loved to sing to her.

Downtown was our first duet, the first non-kid song she learned. In the beginning, when she was barely two, I would sing 'when you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go . . ." and then I would pause, dramatically waiving her into the act. She would come in on cue and chirp out 'Downtown!'. She was so proud that she could sing a duet with me. At two she could tell that 'Downtown' was way cooler than 'Twinkle twinkle'.

My Katie was a funny kid. She liked to tease me.

One day I was chortling out 'Downtown', with her in a car seat, on our way home from daycare, when she was still two. She warbled 'downtown' on cue for the first couple verses. And then, with no warning, when it was her turn to say 'downtown' she said 'cookie monster'!

It was so funny that I had to stop the car to enjoy my laughter. She was over-the-moon with pride. Oh my gosh, it was her first perfect joke. She was wearing lavendar Osh-Kosh overalls, pink high top shoes and a pink floral print blouse with ruffles on the sleeves. Her hair was up in two tiny pigtails on either side of her head, with pink ribbons bouncing as she giggled. The bells on her shoes tinkled as she kicked in glee. I had to turn the car off and go around to her side of the car and smother her with kisses. To those of you wondering about heaven, this is one way heaven is.

Katie loved her frills and ribbons. I've never been much for feminine things but she always wanted to dress very daintily. As soon as she could voice a preference, she declared that she would only wear pink or purple. And she meant it. I could never figure out how she got her preferences. How did I give birth to such a girly girl?! Years ago, I had a business partner named Lynn. Lynn said that she thought I dressed Katie the way I really wished to dress myself. She said that she 'got' that I am a very feminine woman, even though I don't think of myself that way. High venus, she said. My Katie is high venus, that's for sure.

From that day onward, every time we sang our duet, Downtown, she said 'cookie monster' as one of the refrains. Most kids that entered our orbit learned to do the same, silly thing. In June, I tried to teach my two-year-old nephew Arthur to do this duet with me. And my eleven-year-old niece Isabelle sang 'cookie monster' to show Artie how it goes. It is a family tradition.

As Katie got older, like, she would ask me to tell her stories about when she was little. She loved it when I told the cookie monster story.

Katie must occasionally hear Petula Clark singing Downtown. She must remember our old duet. I can't imagine that she does not love me when she remembers. If I someday learn that my Katie has had children without allowing me to share in my grandchildren's lives, I don't think I would live a moment longer after I learned such a thing. All summer, I have been thinking Katie is having a child now.

We all know love is a risky business but, gosh, back when Katie and I were singing our earliest duets, if someone had suggested she would one day leave me, I would have said pishposh. I could not have believed such a thing could be possible. Tonight, the idea of risking myself to love is making it hard for me to breathe. I don't want to live in the world without love. Sometimes, I have absolutely no ability to believe that there is anything lovable about me. I poured the absolute best of me into my little girl. If that wasn't enough to earn her love, I must be unlovable.

What got me started? Oh, I remember. I'm spending the day in the city with a friend. Downtown. Well, sorta downtown. In the Castro. I'll make a full report. I try to always have a social date on my calendar, something always on my horizon, preciselly to get me through moments like this when I am heartbroken about Katie. Having a date on my calendar, knowing there are, praise goddess, miracle of miracles, actually people on this planet who want to spend time with me, well, it has saved my life, literally, on many occasions.

Note: Everyone, just about, in my whole clan has blue eyes. Katie's are very big and very brown. Until I gazed into her newborn eyes, I had never noticed that the diameters of people's eyes varied from one to another. The size of her browns was, unquestionably, larger than the size of my blues. I had always believed blue eyes to be the best. What a ridiculous notion, eh? But there you have it; I believed brown eyes to be dull. Oh no, No, no, no. Deeply dark, very large, limpid brown eyes are exceptionally fine. I am sitting here enjoying my memory of how happy her eyes were when she first cracked her cookie monster joke. I would give anything to see her eyes lit like that again. Anything. Maybe I am maudlin cause of my birthday. Let's see: there's the Xmas hellhole w/no Katie, there is her birthday in June and my birthday. I really hate myself this evening. Thank goodness I have face time with humans tomorrow. I been alone too long.

the tortoise and the hares at eagle park pool

I don't know why but new signs have been put up at my pool. There used to be two designated slow lanes. Now there are four slow lanes. This small change brings me real joy.

It is stressful to swim with faster swimmers. I don't mind if the fast guys (the pushy ones are always male) pass me but the fast guys aren't satisfied just passing me up. They expect slow swimmers to get out of their way. If they are coming to the end of a length, they expect the slow swimmers to stop and wait for them to finish one length and begin the next. I understand that they get a better workout if they can keep swimming without stopping because, hey, I get a better workout if I keep swimming. I don't mind pausing once in awhile to let someone pass me but when fast swimmers get in the lane with me, I would have to stop quite a lot.

A lap pool is such a pond of humanity. How is it that when it comes to physical exercise that folks seem to assume that the faster athletes have superior rights?

These fast guys really drive me nuts. They are so macho.

a sacristy light

In Catholic churches, there is always a lantern lit to represent the eternal, living Christ. I don't know the customs of other Christian denominations.

I like the idea of an eternal flame. I have one lit for my Katie so she will be able to find me.

the way to San Jose

I ran an errand in downtown San Jose today. I very much love the public transit here. Trains and light rail being my favorite. I love taking Caltrain to downtown San Jose. When I leave the station, I always pretend that the characters from East of Eden are sending off all that doomed lettuce. Abra, the sweetheart in the Steinbeck novel, is giving her man a hug. I imagine the rail cars packed with ice and lettuce, already beginning to melt and rot. I imagine the hopes of early agribusiness trying to figure out how to haul California's produce to the rest of the country. I swear I feel human striving as I listen to the train whistles. I wonder if humans were wise to try to ship West Coast lettuce to the Midwest.

My errand complete, I decided to walk to the San Jose Museum of Art. I had a vague idea which direction I should take and then I zigged and zagged my way there. I am curious about San Jose, the tenth largest U.S. city, much larger than San Francisco. Around these parts, when folks speak of 'going to the city', they invariably reference San Francisco.

The Dionne Warwick song 'Do you know the way to San Jose?' always echoes within me when I go to San Jose. I want San Jose to be a happy city.

There is a lot of public art in downtown San Jose. And there are many thoughtful pocket parks, tucked here and there. Many more palm trees in San Jose than in Mountain View. I feel more like I am in California when I am down there than I do at home. I stumble along San Jose streets and think 'gee, I guess I really do live in California now!' Every time I think this, I am just as happy as the first time.

Outside the museum, workers were installing a stage. When I left the museum, a rock band was playing. Rock music at four in the afternoon?! Of course, I swung by and danced a bit. I longed for a companion to hang out with me, to wait for the evening show, to dance with me.

As always, there are interesting, well-curated shows at the museum.

What experiences might I seek out so that I might feel like I have really experienced San Jose? I always feel like a dullard when I am there. There must be all kinds of things to do besides that art museum. But I don't know what that might be.

There's a jazz festival coming up.

Going to San Jose has filled me with a yen for California adventure. I long to go to a beach. I wonder which beaches are accessible to me on public transport? Ocean beaches, not the bay. The bay is just east of my home; I can get there by talking two miles. I want to stand at the ocean and feel queasy (being beside ocean has always made me queasy; the vastness dizzies). I want to walk on a beach with waves big enough to mist me if I walk close enough. I want to feel vaguely afraid of all that water.

And I want my Katie to come back to me. Whenever I remember that I live in California now, I next remember that Katie does not know where I live.

sitting in the fire

Hi. You know, having such a personal blog is an emergent thing. I don't know what I'm doing with this blog. Sometimes it energizes my 'real' writing. Sometimes it feels like my 'real' writing. Sometimes it feels like I'm having a dialogue with a few readers. I don't have many regular readers but, amazingly, some folks keep reading. Sometimes I have gotten calls and emails from friends who read something that caused them to worry about me, whatever that means.

Folks, I'm living my life. I am in quite a lot of emotional pain right now but this is, well, normal for me. I been under pressure my whole life to hide who I really am and now I'm trying to just show up however I am and that's what I use the blog for, to normalize, for myself my emotional lability. Being emotionally labile IS normal for a borderline. I'm just being me and I am experimenting with losing the veneer. I'm tired of vague social pressure to conform to norms that don't really apply to me: I'm not normal so why try to be? Why not engage in this experiment? It's not like I have any responsbilities to anyone. I know that at least a couple people read this who care about me so I have been putting up poems to signal that I'm okay. I have to be okay to cut and paste a poem, alive and breathing, right?

I am in a tough, painful hole right now. It's about as ugly as my emotional pain gets, too. It will pass, right? I won't be miserable forever.

In the meantime, I have no experience being with people when I am like this. I've been experimenting, over the past year, with being open about the deep pain I sometimes stumble into. I am finding that this weirds people out and they want to do something. I don't know what people want from me when it hurts to breathe. From my perspective, it takes every bit of energy I've got just to keep breathing and I am not accustomed to solicitous phone calls or emails and I'm used to coping on my own and hey I'm fine. I'm here doing my best to get through this snag and I get people calling or writing. Calling or writing for what? There's nothing anyone else can do, unless you can get my kid to come back to me . . . well, I had to toss that in but, to tell you the truth, having Katie would not help me tonight. Something other than Katie is breaking my heart.

So.

I don't want anyone worrying about me. I'm not suicidal, that's about as good as I'm gonna be for awhile, not suicidal.

I know this is a goofy post and I probably won't leave it up. But if you are someone who's emailing me (I have not read any emails for several weeks) or calling me (I have not answered my phone since before my last trip to Seattle in early May), well, get back to your lives.

I think it's going to take me a long time to dig myself out of this whole. Please don't worry about me. Leave me be. In the end, I have to figure it out on my own so leave me alone and maybe I'll get better quicker.

I'm swimming. I swam two hours this morning. I love swimming more each day. I actually went a little longer this morning. Somehow, I manage to feel numb while I'm swimming and I hardly have any thoughts and I am just a being moving through the dazzling, diffused light, breathing rhythmically, almost blank. I can't keep the two-hours daily up, it's too much exercise. I walk to and from the pool, too, and I can't keep up this pace, my body is getting pushed too hard. Still, it's so great, the swimming. I would like to swim less and still enjoy myself but right now, I am compelled to do the full two hours. And I can't stop and chat like many of the regulars: I have to keep moving no matter what.

Kay returned from her latest trip to Bangkok this morning. After ninety minutes, as she wrapped up her swim, she said to me, "Are you finished now?" I said "Oh, no, I've got a long way to go," and for the next lap, I felt discouraged. I have learned, with all this swimming, that very tiny things can cause my motivation to slip. For several weeks, Giuseppi has been taunting me, telling me as I complete each lap, "Stop now, stop now, you are swimming too long today" and I know he's just a thoughtless dope who thinks he's being cute but, gosh, his words sometimes make me want to cry. A few days ago, and I am very ashamed of this, I pulled up next to Giuseppi and, huffing to catch my breath, I said, "Giuseppi, I am in this pool working on my personal goals. When you talk to me like this, I feel discouraged. I feel bad. I keep trying to assume you mean well but, gee, do you think you could stop talking to me like this?" I felt really bad afterwards, rebuking myself, thinking I had been too harsh on Giusuppi. He's been taunting me for many weeks, maybe as long as two months. Who knows what is going on with him? I don't know him, except he swims in the lane next to me on MWF. I don't see him in the locker room and he always comes after I'm in the pool so IN the pool is the only place I can communicate with him. I know it's been indicative of my unhappy state that Giuseppi's goofing has been wearing me down. I have considered apologizing to Giuseppi but what did I do wrong? I've probably been too hard on myself.

I was, like, pathetically happy to see Kay this morning because Kay is always positive, cheerful and supportive. She makes a big deal of my lengthy workouts and she steadily admires my steady weight loss. I don't really know her but her support means a lot to me. I have missed her, hard, these past two weeks. She got to the pool a little late this morning so I was in 'her' spot. As soon as I saw her, I shifted over, yielding her spot to her, which was completely nice of me and it made me feel pretty good, to do that little thing to welcome her back. Then, when she said, after 'only' ninety minutes, "are you stopping now?' well, I felt a tinge of despair. I looked at the clock and I started to convince myself to stop. Kay didn't mean anything, she was just being friendly, but for the next lap I allowed her words to discourage me. How could she have forgotten that I do two hours now? Was she suggesting that I couldn't do more than ninety minutes? I am proud to report that I shook this negativity off. I resolved to finish my two hours. I paused at the end of my next lap to massage my face. My goggles cut into my face after ninety minutes. I have to stop and massage my face in order to reach my two hour goal. As I stood at the end of the pool, massaging my face, Kay stopped next to me again. "You do two hours? Very good for you, very good." It was such a tiny thing. I don't know this woman. But I am pretty sure that between the time she first spoke to me and the second time, when she encouraged me to finish my two hour session, that she had, simply, remembered that I do two hours now. I am pretty sure she was mending the tiny tear in my motivation. Maybe it was my imagination but I choose to believe that Kay was intentionally being supportive, that she had realized that she had forgotten this tiny detail about me, the two hour detail. I'm so glad Kay is back from Bangkok. This was a very, very small event in my life but, for a few moments, I was near tears and then Kay said something different and I felt better.

Maybe it would help me to talk to friends when I am in the kind of irrational pain I am in right now but I have never had friends who bothered. I literally have no idea how to be around other people when I hurt this bad. I am so glad Kay is back.

we no have fun

My aquageezer buddy, Kay, often speaks with choppy, broken English. I think she does it because she knows it is adorable because she is also an amazing, brilliant English speaker. When we anointed ourselves the 'aquageezers', she had me write down the word geezer. Then she googled it and came back the next day to discuss the word some more. A few months ago, she was all het up about the word 'lameduck'. If you ask me, any foreigner that researches the meaning of words like lameduck and geezer knows plenty good English.

"Oh, Tree," said China girl, aka Kay, "You back early. This very good. Very good." She holds her arms out to indicate she wants a hug. As we embrace, she explains to Whitey, a swimmer we only see on the weekends, that the weekday aquageezers missed me all week.

"Tree no come, we no have fun, not so much talk," she said, smiling, nodding, laughing. "Tree come, talk very good. Very much fun. Good Tree is back, yes?"

Whitey agrees pleasantly enough although he has never really drunk the pleasures of Tree. Whitey never talks to me. He always brings the current Time magazine and stands reading it intently, giving off the vibe, to me anyway, that he doesn't want anyone to approach him. So I don't. But when Kay comes (sometimes she comes late on the weekends so Whitey and I stand, silently, at the gate), Whitey puts away his magazine and chats about Asia. I think this is odd and, also, adorable. Whitey once had a job that took him to Bangkok many times each year. Whenever Kay shows up, he talks about Bangkok, sometimes veering into other parts of Asia, but mostly Bangkok. It amuses me that he seems crabby, taciturn but then he lights up with talk of Bangkok.

Thailand has been a little scary lately, as Kay herself declared this morning. "My country, it shame me sometime," she said. Then Whitey went down the list of Asian countries that oppress human rights even more than Thailand, like Burma or Cambodia. This conversation stream fascinates me. I note, at least I think I do, that Kay doesn't really like to talk about the politics of Thailand. I note, at least I think I do, that Whitey seems oblivious to Kay's discomfort. I note, I think, that Whitey just can't resist revisiting the time in his life when internaitonal travel was routine and that is probably why he is a bit insensitive to Kay's discomfort.

But enough about other people. Let's keep the focus on me.

Gosh golly, I am flying high over Kay's warm greeting. Tree no come, we no have fun. I love being loved by people much more than not being loved by them. How was it that I lived for so many years without this simple joy? I know why. I was very sick. And I have worked hard to be well. But I only really stepped into the sunlight, the joy of simple, routine love, when my friend Marc came along and saw me whole. I was ready to be seen. Someone would have sooner or later. But he's the one who came along at the right moment. I love him the most out of everybody these days. Keep in mind that the prize of being my favorite person is bestowed on a daily basis, it must be earned anew and I reserve the right to move on to another favorite person tomorrow. Today, my favorites are Marc and Kay.

I love everybody again today. For a week or so, I have been feeling really dark. I didn't go swimming five days in a row. In true borderline fashion, I thought, a day or two ago, that I was done swimming forever. We borderlines tend to see things in black and white, which is why we are so often suicidal. There is no ebb and flow in a borderline's inner horizon: there is a horizon or there isn't a horizon. There is no mid-distance view, no pause to wait for the tide to change. So, after I missed my swim for several days, I was a little depressed, telling myself my swimming was all over and now I would regain all the weight I have lost and woe-is-me, I lamented, I just gave away all my fattest clothes and now when I regain eighty pounds I will have to buy new ones and now no one is ever going to come along and date me and love me and when I regain the weight, I will get fatter than before and soon I will explode because I am so fat, which is, when you think about it, what fat people do: they do blow up with high blood pressure or a stroke, which is like blowing up, right? Anyway, that was yesterday.

I went to bed thinking, my good, new life is over and I'll never swim again. I didn't even set the alarm for swimming. I told myself that if I was going to get up and swim again, well, I'd have to wake up on my own, dammit.

And I did wake up on my own.

So grudgingly, very grudgingly, I put on my suit and packed my swim bag and trudged over to the pool. Harhumph. I was grouchy. I didn't listen to my iPod. I breathed fire at passing traffic. Snarl.

I wasn't going to swim two hours. I was just going to do thirty minutes. Fuck swimming. Fuck my health.

Then Kay said "Tree no come, we no have fun. Tree come, everything very good."

I am such a baby.

Seriously, I am grossly immature. But hear this, pay attention to me and read on. If I was reborn on the 5th of May last year, and those who love me will agree that I was, well, then, goodness, I am a toddler now. I am just beginning the terrible twos. Toddlers are often crabby for no good reason and they are often cajoled out of their distemper with a cooing chirp from a caring adult. Kay chirped happily at me this morning and poof! my distemper evaporated.

I am going to have to live in California forever, I see now. I need to swim outdoors. All the pools in Seattle seem dank and dreary to me. Well, they are dreary compared to Midwestern indoor pools, if you ask me.

portal to heaven

I've been thinking of a movie, Cocoon. A bunch of aliens had to leave planet Earth in a hurry and they didn't have enough room on their spaceship for everyone. Some aliens were left behind. These aliens that were left behind were sealed into some kind of pods and left at the bottom of the ocean, just off California.

As the movie opens, Brian Dennehy, the head alien, rents a boat so he and his alien crew can retrieve all the cocoons at the bottom of the ocean and bring their comrades back to their planet. Brian wears a disguise most of the time, looking just like a human. Everyone on his crew wears human disguises but every once in awhile, the viewer gets a glimpse of their 'true' nature: the aliens are pure radiance. When they shed their human costumes, they are pure, radiant light.

So, the crew goes out to the ocean each day and brings in a few cocoons. Then they put the cocoons in a swimming pool, to keep them safe until they can all board the ship home. Brian rented a mansion with a great indoor pool to store his comrades-in-the-pods until the time came to put them on the spaceship home.

This pool is next door to a senior citizen center. Some of the seniors start sneaking into the pool, just to go swimming. And all of the seniors who swim in the pool are rejuvenated. All their aches and pains go away. Illnesses go into remission. It gradually dawns on these seniors that the pool has a 'fountain-of-youth' affect on them. They noticed, of course, the pods at the bottom of the pool and they are curious, but for the most part, they are harmless old folks enjoying their respite from old age, enjoying renewed vigor.

The plot goes on. The old folks get carried away. One of the pods is broken open and the alien contained in the pod dies: we see its lifeforce get snuffed out. That part is  sad.

Brian, the head alien, forgives everybody. And then he offers to bring the old people back to his planet, where they will be forever young and happy. Some of the old people agree to go, some agree to stay and age normally, accepting their mortality.

The thing I loved about Cocoon when it first came out was the image of the alien beings as being pure, radiant light. I have had some visions where I saw myself with such radiance, as well as having seen others that way. At the time the movie came out, I often got a vision when I meditated that whispered to me "It is time to reveal your heart to the world" and then a light would begin to emanate from my chest, growing ever more glowing and radiant until I was nothing BUT light. I loved this meditative experience and those light beings in the movie looked just like my glowing, irridescent heart looked in my vision.

Nowadays, however, I am beginning to think that the Eagle Park Pool has special energy, similar to the energy in the pool in Cocoon. There are no pods in this public pool. But there is a great radiance. Light, light, light.

I could be wrong but I am starting to think that the Eagle Park Pool is a portal to heaven. Maybe I am gathering heavenly, happy power in its clear, blue, light-filled water. I seem to get a jolt of ecstasy during my hour in the pool and this zap of wonderful floats through the rest of my day with me. And then I get another zap the next day.

I am happy. Me like happy.

my dewdrop has written a haiku

My niece, my noodle, my darling delight, Ruby, has entered a haiku contest. She wrote a haiku about her violin:

A shimmering peak
Fluttering ever upward
To reach that sweet note


I have loved my Ruby imperfectly. She has forgiven me for my recent, imperfect love. I sent her some Christmas presents. When she did not acknowledge them, I complained, telling her I might not feel like sending her gifts for her February birthday if she did not acknowledge my Xmas gifts.

Ruby was miffed at my manipulative loving, telling me that I was wrong for having said she was wrong. I sought comfort from my friend Tall, who has not raised children and who really should know better than to tell a wounded mother anything at all about children (it is like approaching a black bear caught in a metal trap in the woods). Tall took Ruby's side, sniffing about how the best gifts are given freely.

I stewed, I simmered, I burnt. Of course I was right. Expecting a thank you note from a talented, ten-year-old writer is not an unreasonable thing. Gradually, however, I realized that I don't want to be right about Ruby and her thank you notes. I want to be happy loving my Bibbsey. And, worst of all, I saw that Tall was right.

I asked Ruby's forgiveness. I am pleased to report that she has agreed to accept gifts from me once more, all the while reserving her absolute right to blow me off. Tomorrow, I will be mailing off a fantastic bundle of birthday presents. I included a gift each for her baby brother, her mom and her dad. Birthday favors. We are all very happy that my Bibbsey is turning eleven and everyone, I decided, should have a present to open.

We see the teen years, looming threateningly, on our horizon. All we can do is hope for the best, pray that we will survive her adolescence and love her as much as possible in the meantime. Ruby has assured me that she loves me forever but I've heard that from little girls before, eh?

assuming a Starbucks name

A few days ago, I introduced myself to Lawrence, a guy who has been turning up with me and Larry at Starbucks. Lawrence is getting, or, at least, so he said, a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford. I always ask people 'what in?' when they say they are getting a doctorate. When I was fresh out of college, I wanted to go to grad school in English lit. I wanted to be a writer and I thought that would advance my goal. My dad pressured me to go to law school instead, telling me lawyers did a lot of writing. I have met quite a lot of lawyers who fell for the same feint. Yes, I have a doctorate but it's in law. That's like going to trade school. I am mildly envious of everyone who gets to devote several years of their life to research, even if it is meaningless research. Always and forever, I guess, I want a real doctorate to call my own.

Last Friday, I took my mother's pearls to a jewelry store in Palo Alto to have them restrung. I had a lot of fun with Ruth, who let me try on all the strands of pearls they had in the store, helping me choose the length. Twenty inches, we decided. Now I have to decide what to do with my leftover three inches of pearls. Another salesperson helped a good-looking, blonde young man who was picking up a diamond ring. Ooh-la-la! Right away I wondered, "Has he popped the question? If not, what's his plan?" I didn't ask him, though, because I was having fun with Ruth. Then, however, I overheard him say he is getting a doctorate at Stanford. I had to know, "What are you studying?"

He said, "Mechanical engineering."

"Then you must know Lawrence, a guy from my coffee shop."

"I don't know anyone named Lawrence. I don't know any grad students in my department who have time for coffee shops. Maybe your Lawrence is more advanced."

"Lawrence would be hard to miss. He is very tall, very good-looking and he is African American. There can't be too many guys like that in any PhD program anywhere."

Diamond-ring guy paused, considered, and, shaking his head, said, "There are definitely no African Americans in Mechanical Engineering named Lawrence." I did not press this guy but I wanted to ask him if there was a tall, good-looking African American with a different name. I didn't want to put him on the spot.

Ah-ha! I couldn't wait to tell Larry. This suggested to me, and, of course, to Larry that this so-called Lawrence has assumed a fake identity for Starbucks. Larry and I are rubes in the world of coffeehouse living. We go around telling people our real names. Larry is not Larry's real name. I named him Larry because he reminds me of a guy I knew in college and I gave him a name before we ever actually spoke to each other and he has amiably agreed to let me call him Larry.

Larry and I have decided to give ourselves a do-over. We are going to choose fake Starbucks names to use in our slacker, coffeeshop lives.

And don't you worry. We'll keep an eye out for this so-called Lawrence. We'll find out his story. Or not!

aging not for sissies

A now-departed, close friend of mine, Kathie, loved to say 'old age isn't for sissies'. At fifty three, I am not exactly old, but I am keenly conscious of my aging related to my health. For quite a long time now, I have followed my health care providers advice, eating carefully, exercising, losing a lot of weight. I've been thinking lately of stories I've read in the media of guys who were fitness fanatics their whole life and they keel over dead with seemingly no warning. There seems little hope for me to improve my long term health if lifelong fitness buffs can drop dead running a marathon. Fretting, fretting. Fretting does no good, of course. All I can do is what I can do, take the steps that are available to me and choose to be happy no matter what.

There is an arcade game that has been on my mind. The version that I am specifically recalling is called "Rats in the Hole". There are nine holes with mechanical 'rats' that keep popping up erratically. The object of the game is to take the big hammer and whack the rat during the instant its head pops up, catching it before the head goes back down the hole. Each landed blow yields a point. Win enough points and you get to play the game another time for free. I have also seen this game called "Beat the Gopher". And other goofy names. It is, in my humble opinion, a violent, ugly game. Perplexingly, it seems to be designed for very little children, to get them started in the world of arcade gaming. It is easy to play, easy to win and parents line up their little kids so they have some success in the game arcade. I met this game whiling away happy days in amusement parks with my kid and it was the first game she was ever able to win. Whack, whack, whack. What was I thinking when I paid to let her play such a nasty game, beating back rodents!

I sometimes feel like my life is a game of "Rats in the Hole", that I am futilely whacking away at random problems as they surface, landing a few blows in my efforts at self care, but, ultimately, just like slot machines in Vegas, the odds are stacked against me. I cannot alter the nature of this dissipative universe with my puny little efforts. What else can I do but persevere and choose to be happy?

Now I'm thinking of Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into the Good Night". I aspire to step into each moment as gently as possible. I do not think anyone should rail against the dying of light. It is my aspiration to greet each moment with love. It is my aspiration to surrender, never rail. On and on.