Still Amazed

The Good-bye Part

I make no apologies for it: when I am flying someplace, I go to the airport ridiculously early. I can’t help it. In my mind, the entire day is about the flight anyway, even if it is in the afternoon, as this one was. I just can’t relax when everything seems pending, can’t enjoy those last hours that become, it seems to me, just a prolonged good-bye, a sad song about leaving. I have been mercilessly mocked for this habit, and I know it makes me seem un-cool and neurotic (adjectives which, come to think of it, are not far off the mark) but I don’t care. I would rather be at the airport, all checked in and past security, reading a book among strangers, comfortably numb. 

I have never been good at the good-bye part of visits. I have said good-bye to too many people in my life, not knowing when I would see them again, and sometimes it turned out to be never. This has made me crisp and efficient about exits, contrary to my Italian heritage and my effusively affectionate tendencies. A few words and a brisk hug and I turn away and head for the limbo zone where nothing feels real. It’s like pulling the band-aid off quickly, and it’s better this way, especially when a vast distance is about to unroll between someone I love dearly and me.  

This time, in fact, I began to check out mentally the day before my departure. Miranda went to work and I stayed in the house, completely packed by noon, then walked into Oxford City Centre to meet Jill and her father for tea at the Vaults and Garden of St. Mary’s on the High Street. 

We sit at a table in the churchyard among graves and flowers and young girls laughing on the grass. Miranda and her boyfriend join us, and there are big white clouds floating above the old stone buildings, and Mr. Harbor is in a summer shirt eating a piece of chocolate cake, but my heart is heavy. I remember little about the rest of the day, but in the evening, Miranda and I go to an Italian restaurant where a waiter from Argentina tells us he is homesick for Los Angeles, and after we get home, Joseph comes over to hunt for a bow-tie, and none of this makes any sense at all, but it doesn’t matter because I am already practically gone.

No need to have set an alarm. I am awake with the first light of morning, checking my email, which, bizarrely, includes a message from my brother about a strange Google discovery: the house we grew up in burned down in 2008.  Someone has even posted images: firefighters on the roof, flames shooting out from the window of my former bedroom, a familiar chimney, a beloved old tree. Why does it affect me so profoundly?  We have been long gone from this place, but I see now that my heart was never emptied of it. 

And so in the still-white morning of my leaving, I take leave, unequivocally, of a part of my past. The house of broken dreams is there no longer. The metaphors and superstition come too easily; there is a strange inevitability about it and it should not matter at all but it evokes a sense of vulnerability and sadness. As with every loss and every good-bye I am reminded of our own evanescence. 

We are light.

Then Miranda emerges from her room upstairs ready to escort me to the bus stop. She wears a print dress and a green cardigan and wheels her bicycle beside me as I pull my wheeled suitcase and we stand together in front of the Thai restaurant on St. Clements, and I mutter a bit and give her my leftover British pounds sterling, relieved when the bus appears. The driver, who has witnessed many good-byes, tells me to run back for another hug, and I oblige, and off we go.

There is this: someone else I love is waiting for me at the airport in L.A. And the next day, when I awake, uncertain for a moment where I am, I see the hills already bleached by summer but soft with morning haze, and the peaceable cattle, and a welcoming sky.  

 

 

World Is Crazier and More of It Than We Think

First I must learn the art of waiting. It is what we seem to do here in this Neapolitan town. We walk, and we wait. We congregate, and we wait. There is always someone missing whose presence is essential, some preordained time that has not yet arrived, some inexplicable sequence of events that must unfold. The waiting is an integral part of the experience of being here, and because I do not speak the language and cannot fill it with words nor grab hold of the ones in the air around me, I am learning to sit still and observe. I am learning to be less intimidated by idleness and uncertainty, learning to relinquish a bit of control.

In fact, I began to write this in a notebook as I sat on a bench with my Zio Pinuccio at the edge of a municipal garden by the River Sarno in Scafati. My uncle told me (I think) that this river was once an important navigation route to the sea, which made this area the site of one of the earliest settlements in Italy. He said (I think) that in the old days the river was beautiful, and that people came to fish from its banks, but now it is polluted because of factories upstream. In our stroll around the park, we have contemplated an enormous palm tree whose huge trunk is riddled with bullet holes, enjoyed the shade of tall pines and the pinks and pale purples of hydrangea in bloom, and witnessed a peacock presenting an astonishing display of feathers to an indifferent hen. A group of teenagers loiter noisily by a fountain, a young couple is kissing on a secluded bench, and an old man pedals by on a bicycle. In short, there is nothing and everything happening, and we are sitting here to wait (I think) for Luca.

I don't mind, really. It's nice to sit in silence next to someone you like. I only wish I had brought along a book and a bottle of water. A few minutes ago I ventured to ask (no doubt in very distorted Italian) if there might be a place nearby where I could buy something for the two of us to drink, but the meaning of this question and its profound importance to me has somehow eluded my uncle, for he brushes it off with a phrase that ends in dopo, and we remain true to our single purpose, which apparently is to sit here waiting. At one point I invite him to listen to some music via my i-Pod, and at the sound of Bach's Goldberg Variations, he smiles, tilts his head back, closes his eyes and lets the pleasure of the music transport him. It becomes a moment I will never forget, and the Goldberg Variations will forever bring me back to it.

Zio Pinuccio's father and my grandfather were brothers, and because he is thus a first cousin to my own father, I feel a special bond with him, and in his eyes I see something familiar and dear. His eldest son, Gianni, who speaks English, tells me this about Zio Pinuccio: "He suffers because he is an idealist about the world and he is disappointed. He thought the world would change but it did not."

And yet, there is no one more filled with wonder and appreciation than my uncle for beauty and art and the nobler gestures of humanity. We walk in the coolness of the church of S. Maria Vergini and he points to the graceful curves of marble decoration, the paintings on the domed ceiling, the way the light enters through an arched window. We wander slowly among the ruins of Herculaneum with Zia Titina, noticing the detail of a border on a wall, the precisely wrought image of a bird, the warm Pompeian reds. He navigates through the congested streets in his little green car, his hair an unruly cloud of white curls, and he points to Vesuvius, and even if I could speak perfect Italian, I would not be able to find the words to tell him how much he means to me.

Here I must learn to let go of the language that moors me and splash around in the sea of Italian. "It's a difficult language," admits Gianni. "So many tenses, so many nuances. English for me is crisp and clean, like programming a computer, but Italian is good for diplomacy. It leaves the listener more room for interpretation."

I am a very verbal person in my mother tongue, but I know already that I do not have a facility for foreign languages, and it is disconcerting indeed to forfeit comprehension and the ability to communicate. I carry my trusty dizionario and a book of verb conjugations everywhere I go. I periodically retreat into my notebook to painstakingly formulate my own awkward sentences, then recite them like a child to an indulgent audience. I listen for the occasional shine of meaning in the river of talk around me, and the sounds and rhythms of Italian begin to fill my very dreams. I see now what immersion really means, and I feel lost and helpless, at times shutting down with the exhaustion of trying to maintain meaningful engagement. I will not be here long enough to even begin to attain competence, but sometimes communication happens. Sometimes the words do come. Sometimes they are not needed.

I learn, too, to ignore the clock and say yes to new experiences and adventures. If you are offered a plate of chewy sconcigli or il piede e il muso (which may well give you pause), give it a try. If it is nearly eleven on a Monday night and you are mentally ready for bed and someone proclaims it a good time to see Napoli by night, the best response is andiamo. Espresso at midnight? You can sleep when you're dead. A ride with Luisa on the back of her motorcycle to an early morning market where you taste an icy granita for the first time and later wait for her while she buys an octopus for dinner? Si.  Invitations to meet distant relatives, friends of distant relatives, friends of friends of distant relatives? All wonderful and worthwhile. Hot, sweaty, bitten by mosquitoes? Deal with it. A spirit of openness and responsiveness begins to take hold, a spirit that I hope will carry over into my mundane, everyday life.

I have walked to a waterfall in the mountains above the Amalfi Coast with Luca and Maestro Vincenzo, heard Zio Mario sing an old street vendor song about zuppa di polpo, and drunk of the healing waters of the fountain at Castellammare di Stabia. I have been kissed and showered with love enough to last a lifetime. I will never be the same.

Which brings me to the most important thing I have learned: without taking it for granted, to gracefully accept when love is given. My grandfather left this place in 1905. Period. There is no other connection. Eighty years later I made the trip to his homeland and found these people, who might have easily and understandably dismissed me as a stranger. Instead, despite the remoteness of the connection and the barriers of language, culture, and distance, they took me into their hearts and have welcomed me each time I have returned during the past twenty-five years. No small gift, this. No small miracle.

I have already mentioned Zio Pinuccio and Zia Titina (a delightful person), Gianni (my lifeline), Luca (my tour guide and explainer of the Naples mind set), Luisa (my Italian sister, one of the most giving and loving people I have ever known), and Zio Mario (purveyor of song and story). On this visit I also saw Nello, Michele, Zia Maria, Zia Rosaria, Zia Anna, Pepe, Francesco...This is the family with whom I have had no pain, other than the sadness of saying good-bye each time. (It's a big journey, after all.)

And it is tempting to write it all off as a fantasy or a myth, but now it has been reaffirmed. They are my kind and generous relatives, and they are funny and crazy and have their own problems and hurts and complicated lives, but they saw fit to perceive me as real and to accept me as theirs.

Days later my daughter showed me a poem by Louis MacNeice which said:

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkeness of things being various.

And I thought about the narrow Neapolitan streets with laundry hanging from the windows, and lovers on benches by the sea, and late-night gatherings at tables covered with floral cloths. I remembered the fireworks of each nightly festa, laughter and arguments in that beautiful and elusive language, the  familiar profile of Vesuvius through the summer haze. We cross a difficult zone to enter something different, and it changes us, and I am still a bit drunk with it all.

Time is A Country

Miranda and I are taking the train from Oxford to Bath for a mother-daughter weekend before I go back home to California. We have chosen Bath on the basis of simplicity: it’s a short, easy trip, a manageable place, and a good setting in which to talk and relax. “It's where women of a certain age go to be pampered,” jokes her boyfriend, and I can't say this appeals to me.

But there seems to be more shopping than pampering taking place in Bath, and my daughter and I will do a bit of  that ourselves, stopping into bookstores and dress shops as we wander through the city, along the Royal Crescent, Parade Road, Cheap Street. We walk by the River Avon, through beautiful parks, past well-tended gardens and stately Georgian buildings. There are young mothers pushing strollers through the park, dads with babies on their shoulders, tattooed teenagers talking on cell phones, weighty matrons licking ice cream cones and trying on sensible shoes. 

First, though, we check into a bed and breakfast on a quiet street across from the park. It is run by a German woman named Inge who leads us upstairs to a pale green room overlooking a garden. There are twin beds, side by side, with a little lamp next to each, and it feels exactly right. We have come here to reconnect, to catch up, to get to know each other as we are. 

In the evening we have dinner with a friend of Miranda's from school and her mother, V., who live in Bath. The daughters engage in animated conversation about their writing and their lives, and we mothers seem to know each other immediately. Both of us are still in a state of astonishment at how fast everything has happened, but as we watch our girls sail off into lives of their own, we are also hoping there is time for us to claim some small adventure for ourselves. V. has a chance to live for a year in Kenya, a prospect she finds both intriguing and daunting. She is disenchanted with her English life and ready for something new. 

"It's hard to find happy people here," says her daughter, who is planning a summer adventure involving a boyfriend, a motorcycle, and a continent or two.

As Miranda and I walk back to the guest house it seems the streets are filled with drunken carousers. One unappealing fellow is parading around with pants that open in the back to reveal his ass to all the world, and many of the girls are dressed like hookers in short, skin-tight skirts and precariously high heels, but there are also loud, laughing women in complicated hats and glitzy Saturday night costumes. It is like a procession of the badly dressed. 

"How is your writing going?" Miranda asks me. I hear myself using words like deflated. I talk about being in a lull, about maybe just trying to make my life be my art. I just don't know anymore if I will do any serious writing. 

"Well, you are almost sixty," she says, not unkindly. "It's not the same, is it?"

I suppose it's not.

A pair of hot air balloons cruise lazily in the air high above the rooftops and steeples. We walk through a park, now emptied of people, where vacant blue and white striped chairs are clustered in circles as if having a party of their own. When we return to our room, it is still illuminated by the lingering white light of this first night of summer.  

My daughter loves her life.  "If it helps to know this," she says, "I have never been happier."

It does help. 

The next day I buy her earrings, silver ballet flats from a charity store, a book by an Irish poet she likes named Louis MacNiece, whom I have never heard of, but he is wonderful. I open it at random: Time is a country, the present moment/a spotlight roving round the scene. 

On our last morning in Bath, we chat for a bit with Inge, who turns to Miranda as we leave and says, "Take good care of your mom." It's an innocent comment, but it makes me wonder if I am someone who seems in need of care, and I ponder this as we walk to the station. I worry sometimes about becoming one of those baffled and befuddled types who's in everybody's way. But for now I am feeling self-contained and unafraid, and hoping there might still be one good stretch ahead. 

And I came here not to be pampered but to pause, just to pause and focus on this interesting young woman who five minutes ago was a streak of color running through my house. I take her hand as we walk through a very green park. I smell roses and grass. A little girl in a red dress pedals by on a bicycle giggling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The City on the Vlatva

It is the last morning of our five days in Prague and I am in my transit mode. It is the morning that does not count as a real one, the morning that is entirely about being packed and ready and getting to the airport, and yet I cannot help but notice the sound of a pigeon’s wings in flight past the window above the bed, and the whiteness of the sky, and the books set upon the dresser and piled on the floor of this room in a friend’s apartment five flights up on a street called Malirska. I am aware of having stretched our welcome here by about two days -- some offers, while gracious, are best declined -- but our friend gives me coffee and plays Miriam Makeba singing Pata Pata, and for a moment I feel like crying because it is so sweet of him, and because I am very tired and have not been good at making sense of things lately, and because it is our last morning in Prague.

How would I begin to understand this complex place after five days spent wandering in a trance? It has been said that visiting Prague for the first time is like watching an intricate play that demands analysis and reflection; you get more meaning if you come back and see it again. It is a city of layers and contradictions, a collage of disparate elements. There are Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque facades, whimsical Art Nouveau details, bleak Communist-era buildings providing mute testimony to the recent past, innovative modern architecture, and irreverent Cerny-esque surprises. There are scenic overviews in fairy tale settings, magnificent historic districts, and tattered neighborhoods tagged with spray paint. Two men on a street corner lean into conversation, cigarette smoke swirling around their pallid faces; a beautiful girl with hair dyed bright ginger sails by on roller blades; an old woman with swollen ankles carries a poodle in a basket on the metro. “Oh, how I love Prague!” writes a girlfriend in an email sent from California. “Don’t you feel like you are in Dreamland?” I do, but it is the land of a dream in which things are not what they seem, a shape-shifting dream, a dream that stays with you long past waking and alters your perspective all day.

I view everything here through a veil of ambiguity. The language is unfamiliar, the rhythm of the city difficult to sense, the reality impossible to know. We have attempted to prepare ourselves by reading about the area and its history, but perhaps that has overly influenced what I perceive now. Is there indeed a residue of guardedness and disillusionment, or is that just the way it looks to two American tourists with only the most superficial opportunities and means to communicate?  We depend upon our Czech-speaking friend for interaction and transaction, and although this facilitates our exploration immeasurably maybe we also become a bit lazy and passive. Rather than participate, we watch. On our own we exchange a few words with waiters, a clerk in a bookshop, a fellow passenger on a train to Beroun, the mother of a charming little girl in a bakery near our friend’s house. (“Go ahead and say hello to her,” says the mother. “Her father is Finnish, but my boyfriend is from Britain, so she hears English all the time.”) Mostly we are an anonymous audience in the back of the theater, observing.

It is a place not known for its culinary arts. (“I have had some fine meals [in Prague] over the years,” writes John Banville in Prague Pictures, “In general, however, it must be said, and I must say it, that the Czech cuisine is, well, no better than that of Bavaria, which statement is, as anyone who knows Bavaria will confirm, a ringing denunciation.”) My best meal turns out to be pork loin from the Café Louvre, an elegant restaurant on Narodni Street that opened its doors in 1902 and strives to retain its Old World ambiance. The meat was juicy, slightly pink inside, and seasoned subtly with mustard and sweet red cabbage, leading me to conclude that pork would generally be a good choice. On an afternoon when we went by train to Krivoklat near the Berounka River valley, we ate at the Restaurant Sykora, where the menu was entirely in Czech, and I ordered a dish that featured veprova pecinka, but it was a more desiccated version of pork, teamed with houskovy knedlik, those infamous white bread dumplings that seem designed to fill the empty space in one’s belly like an infusion of caulking. The pleasant atmosphere more than compensated; we sat outdoors with a handful of hikers, not far from the river, the Krivoklat Castle, and a cluster of charmingly shabby buildings adjacent to the forest, and even my Coke was served to me in an old-fashioned glass. (I do not drink beer, which is unfortunate, for this is a region where beer is subsidized and actually cheaper than water in a restaurant.)  Our meanderings include meals and pauses at casually hip coffee shops, a Spanish-style tapas place, an Irish pub, a sophisticated café in the Black Madonna House above the Museum of Czech Cubism, and a smoke-filled and unpretentiously working class bar. The best snacks of our time in Prague: blackberries and fresh pineapple from a Vietnamese market, and kolaches from a neighborhood place I thought was called Cukrárna, but I only just discovered that’s the generic word for bakery.

Our friend provides several whirlwind tours replete with stories that I wish I had written down, and we traipse everywhere, from morning to night, seeing the city from every angle, in every kind of light.  We wander through the Castle Quarter, Mala Strana, Old Town, and Nové Mesto. We walk across the Charles Bridge with all the other tourists and make sure to watch the spectacle of the Town Hall clock when it strikes on the hour. We enter the imposing St. Vitus Cathedral and the tranquil St. Agnes Convent, where an exquisite collection of Medieval art has been collected from all over Bohemia and Central Europe. We see the famous “Fred and Ginger” building designed by Frank Gehry, the statue of St. Wenceslas on his upright horse (and another on his upside-down horse, courtesy of David Cerny), parks, monuments, memorial shrines. But in addition to the must-see landmarks, we go to the Botanicka Zahrada on a rainy day and stroll through fragrant jungles that are humid and warm, and we take a train to Srbsko where we enter a church built into a limestone cave at the site of a sacred spring and walk to the top of a mountain.

At the same time we talk with our friend about Gaviota, our common ground, interests we share, and odd connections. It’s funny to be in the Czech Republic talking about these things, but sometimes Prague is about the flickering light of who someone is or is not, the permutations of identity, the sense of being no one when taken out of context. The soundtrack in my mind now is Tara Fuki, a female duo of classically trained cellists and vocalists that we listened to in our friend's apartment; the music is haunting and lovely, though I don't know what it means. 

“When I seek another word for mystery,” writes Angelo Maria Ripellino, “the only word I can find is Prague.” 

Maybe our friend was pulling our leg, but he said that if I touched the toe of a certain statue I would one day return to Prague, so I did, and I hope it works.

 

 

 

 

 

Between Paris and Munich

I am somewhere between France and Germany as I type this, and that is a statement I never dreamed I would utter. We are on board a train, swiftly gliding past field and forest, and the sky is very blue, and a chubby-cheeked attendant has presented us with pink striped boxes filled with clear plastic containers of chicken wraps with mustard, melon and prosciutto, and squares of chocolate mousse. Monte is reading The New Yorker and just pointed out a line in an article by Elizabeth Kolbert that says that 99% of all species that inhabited the earth are now extinct and so life as we know it might be considered not much more than a rounding error, but as it is my intent to try to focus on the moment, I refuse to go where that line of thought might take me. The chubby-cheeked attendant speaks just enough English to explain with regret that he has only French and German newspapers to offer us, but he just brought me a perfect little cup of strong coffee and seems genuinely concerned about my comfort. I adore him. His skin looks as soft as a child’s, his cheeks are truly rosy, his smile is sweetly cherubic, and if he once had aspirations other than being an attendant in the 1st Class section of the TGV from Paris to Munich, he does not make his disappointment my problem. He is a graceful host in a moving living room, and I cannot believe how luxurious and pleasant this feels.

I would love to think of myself as a traveler, but in truth I am a rather inexperienced one, and when I see the “where I’ve been” maps on the Facebook pages of people in their twenties who used to be my students, I am acutely aware of the fact that my own travel history is not very interesting. Ah, the places they have already been! Morocco. Patagonia. Zimbabwe. Indonesia. Vietnam. (And it is perhaps hard for young people today to fully grasp how profoundly my generation desired to avoid that last destination, and how many fundamental life decisions were shaped by what was happening there at the time, and the existence of the draft.) Still, many globetrotting, backpacking boomers took advantage of cheap airfares and managed to spend months wandering through Europe and beyond, or joined the Peace Corps as a way of broadening their horizons. For reasons too mundane and dreary to dwell upon, I was not among them, and I have no youthful journeys to report unless riding around on a Greyhound bus counts, or a miserable stint as a passenger in the back seat of a VW Bug from New York to Arizona, and brief moments of being foreign in Canada. I had never even been on an airplane until 1970 when I was nineteen and went to visit my boyfriend in Chicago on what was then called a “student standby” fare which, if memory serves, was about $40.

I finally made it to Europe in 1985, accompanied by my husband, and I have returned a few times since, but never with the same degree of excitement and wonder as that initial trip. I remember stashing my bags and running across the street from our London hotel just to wander in a city park where I was charmed even by pigeons because they were British pigeons, and an old man with a beard snoring on a bench. In Italy, where I met my relatives in the village my grandfather had left eighty years earlier, everything was miraculous, even the dirt, a bit of which I brought home in a tiny bottle. I suppose there is a special kind of enchantment connected to one’s first visit to a long-imagined elsewhere, particularly when one is young and in the proper frame of mind.

But back to this train, which has just left a station called Karlsruhe, and where everything is an adventure to a woman in her 50s who is frayed around the edges and carrying psychological baggage far more weighty than that which we hoisted onto the overhead. The late afternoon sunlight is warming my arms, and I am lulled by motion and by morsels of conversation I cannot begin to understand, except for the prattle in German of two restless children shushed by a woman speaking universal Mom.  Houses and trees are slipping by, backyards and bits of faraway lives, unlikely and fleeting glimpses.

And now I am someone who has been to Paris. Shall I tell you what I liked? I liked that its rhythm was slower than London’s, so much so that you could feel it as soon as you stepped off the Metro and onto the street. It felt less driven, somehow, less purposeful. I liked the aging grandeur of its buildings, its variety of worldly goods, its extravagant interest in edibles, and even at times its unabashed materialism. I liked its lightness, its conceit, its confident air of indifference. Paris seemed unflappable to me. A delivery truck clogged a narrow street near the Museé Picasso, a bus pulled up behind it unable to pass or move forward, a long line of cars formed, and the bus driver looked as though he might just put up his feet up and have a cigarette break. Stylish women jauntily rode bicycles in streets I crossed on foot in terror. Workers paused in midday to watch tennis on a big screen in front of L’Hotel de Paris, or found a spot in which to stretch out and snooze in the sun, oblivious to sirens and exhaust fumes, while others lingered at street side cafés, the epitome of ennui. Days earlier an Air France jet had disappeared into the sea and now a crowd was beginning to gather for a memorial service at Notre Dame, but someone was playing a saxophone along the Seine. Its music drifted towards us as we walked across the bridge at Rue d'Arcole, and life and sorrow mingled in the air.

I liked finding flakes of my morning croissant in my purse and having too many pastries to choose from. I liked having a hotel window that opened to let a breeze in at night, and the first café au lait of the morning. I liked the weather, unusually mild, and the way the light lasted, and the narrow streets of Le Marais, and, perhaps most of all, that single scoop of poire sorbet I had one evening by the Seine, ambrosia that it was. I liked the bright affirmation of flowers against stone, and the iconic landmarks I had only seen in pictures, but I especially enjoyed going to the top of L'Institute du Monde Arab, where we sat outside and had tea with mint and a breathtaking view of the city.

I learned: That cigarette smoking is alive and well. That I should take more care with my appearance. That my high school French is worthless and no one is the least bit charmed by my efforts to use it. That it may be worth paying six Euros for a cup of coffee, but only once and under the proper circumstances. That the French have access to bread and eyeglass frames that are far, far better than ours, and I still can’t fathom why. That an annoying J’Adore billboard of Charlize Theron looking as glossy as gold is plastered everywhere, and she takes it all off in a television ad. That the prices of things in Paris are so staggeringly high as to defy credibility, and that’s just the way it is, but window shopping can be amusing. That a pause to sit on a bench in a park under leafy green trees is a sweet, free pleasure there for the taking. That you should always have coins at hand for the machines in the Metro station. That one must pass through a necessary barrier of discomfort in order to travel well. That the same old demons will somehow find their way all the way to Paris to haunt you in your hotel room in the middle of the night, but it’s still fun to wake up there.

Our stay in Munich will be brief. We are headed to Prague, and I can hardly wait.

In Oxford

We have emerged from the tunnel of time zones and sky to London, then Oxford, where we check into a modest guesthouse on Iffley Road. Then we wander the blustery streets in that strange transitional trance, wired but exhausted, and meet our daughter at the pub near her house.  She wears a black and silver scarf and a chunky line-up of bracelets, and her hair is pinned up to reveal dangling earrings shaped like leaves. She looks exotic and startlingly beautiful, and I suddenly see her as though she is someone other than my daughter, perhaps because that is exactly what she has become.

I thought Boston was far. Now taking a walk together or sitting across from her at a table like this demands all the time, expense and complexity of a transcontinental and transatlantic journey, and I see no sign of it changing anytime soon. Indeed she is as happy as I have ever seen her, and what mother wouldn’t want that for her child? She writes about Oxford in lyrical, luminous prose; its literary ghosts enchant her, as do its libraries and legends, as does its light, and the honey color of its stone buildings. She is astonished to have stepped into this dream and become a part of it. I try to look at the city through a lens like that, but its magic registers on me only in glimmers, and at times, particularly in the wind and the damp, I just feel lost. But of course, I am neither young nor newly in love. 

(“I grow old…I grow old…I shall wear the trousers of my pants rolled.”)

On this day there is sunshine and cinematic clouds and it’s windy and chilly but all the girls are defiantly underdressed, many pedaling along on their bicycles in tank tops and summer skirts. Students in subfusc hurry to exams; confetti litters cobblestone streets, and here and there we step past the remnants of a post-exam trashing of flour and eggs. I stop to marvel at a bed of bearded irises in a shade I have never seen, an almost black sort of aubergine. A russet-haired boy stands in front of a door painted cornflower blue. `The sky is still light at 9 p.m., a disorienting but beautiful sort of whiteness.

We sleep the sleep of the exhausted and confused.

The next morning is rainy, but breakfast includes a Chinese gooseberry and lemon marmalade, and we go to the Botanic Gardens where the colors are saturated and burgeoning beds of bearded irises are bejeweled with beads of raindrops. It does my heart good to see people hovering over flowers, pausing to marvel. It is in the garden that I come to terms with the divergence of our lives, my own and my daughter’s. It's an epiphany of sorts, and I try to explain to her afterwards that it hasn’t been easy but I am letting her go, a rhetorical statement to someone long gone. 

I tell her I am happy for her and ready to revisit some dreams of my own, and I chatter nonsensically until Monte says, “Leave it to Mom to say whatever happens to pop into her mind at any given moment.” 

But that isn’t why I stop talking. I stop because I realize that I am trying to convey an experience for which there exists no translation to a person in her twenties.

Dinner with our friends that night, including Mr. Harbor, who has heard that we are planning a trip to the Lake District and brought us a map and two old books of black and white photographs from 1951, with pastoral views of dirt roads through mountains, grazing sheep, stone bridges and cottages. He cycled there as a boy with his father, and it holds many fond memories for him.

The prevailing conversation is downright frothy and includes a lively discussion on the pronunciation of saws, source, sores, sauce, and sausage. But Mr. Harbor is preoccupied, for he is dealing with hard times. He is nattily dressed in his suit and vest but he has no appetite, and there is a great sadness emanating from him. 

“I know it isn’t easy,” I say to him, in a well-intentioned if lame attempt at sympathy.

“It surely isn’t,” is his only response. He is 89 and too gracious to mock me, but I am beginning to know that I don't really know.

New topic: He has heard that I am going to Italy in a few weeks. “I went to Italy once,” he says. “In 1957. Padua. I didn’t like it very much. I came back early.”

I ask him what his favorite trip was, the best place ever, the place where he was happiest.

 “Right here,” he says, pointing to the Lake District books. And perhaps for a moment he is a young man again cresting a hill, descending into green, everything in front of him. 

Afterwards we walk with our daughter through the quiet streets and hug her good-bye at the door of the house she calls home.  

Letters

I was a woman of letters in my youth. Evidence of this fact remains even today in my garage where a large cardboard box labeled “Letters” sits in a corner awaiting its destiny, probably incineration. Most of these letters are part of a voluminous correspondence I had with my friend Cydnie over the course of many years beginning in 1971. We poured our hearts and souls into these letters, and neither of us ever threw any away, so certain were we of their sentimental value and enduring significance. In a breathtaking moment of 1980s narcissism we even conjured up the illusion that they contained enough material for an epic coming-of-age novel about two women of our generation. I was to be the archivist and scribe who would piece together whatever narrative they provided, and Cyd actually returned the ones I wrote to her so that I would have the complete set. Monte saw this merely as a transfer of clutter from her garage to ours. He has thus far proven correct.

In any case, it will certainly take a few more years before I can read these letters without wincing. I am sure I come across as melodramatic and self-absorbed, forever torn between the lure of a life of my own and the needs and expectations of my family, and perennially paralyzed by questions whose answers seem so obvious now. But the voices of these letters are real, both my own and Cyd's, and thus I keep postponing their destruction.

And it isn’t just the voices. It is also the feel of the envelopes, some of them thick with folded notebook pages crammed inside, others already yellowed and soft, some with carefully wrought cursive writing, some typed with an IBM Selectric and bearing the return address of a long-defunct business on East Wacker Drive, and all of them posted with beautiful stamps whose very few cents sufficed to send them far and wide.

I have other piles of letters here and there: a tidy stack from my father to his brother written during the war; random words from friends that I deemed worth hanging onto; everything my sister ever wrote to me before email came and rendered into digital bits the last few years of our communication. How I wish we hadn't switched so readily in favor of a more daily if cursory sort of contact. I liked that familiar left-handed writing of hers, always a little messy, and I liked the little note cards she chose, and the simple surprise of finding a letter in the mailbox, followed swiftly by the pleasure of opening it, usually standing right there at the box. I did not know it would all be so suddenly and irretrievably gone. 

The convenience of email has usurped the more time-consuming hands-on labor of love that was the writing of a letter. I’m not complaining, though. (Or am I?) After all, email is direct, spontaneous, free of paper and postage, and has certainly put millions of people back in touch. I’m just a bit reactionary and romantic at times. 

Yes, sometimes I sigh for a letter.

I had been thinking along these lines already when I had an exchange with the poet Dan Gerber on the topic, and I think his comment is worth sharing here. It began when I apologized to him (in an email) for the wordiness of my email, which needed only to have been a simple answer to a question but included tangential quotes, a bit of philosophizing, and my usual meandering. I felt self-conscious about it afterwards, probably because of Monte’s frequent admonition that I do not grasp the intended purpose of email, i.e., quick dispatches of information. One of Monte’s principles: Busy people appreciate brevity.

“I’d say your husband might be right if people still wrote letters,” Gerber responded. “I think we will lose so much of our sense of what went on inside people without the record of their letters, which are, perhaps, my favorite reading. So I guess we have to allow emails their reach to compensate for this dying art.”

So now we have the poet’s take on this.

Coincidentally, a good friend of mine is about to leave for a summer-long escape in a trailer that she and her husband will park on some property of theirs in rural Pennsylvania. There will be no computer, just an emergency cell phone number and a weekly trip to the post office. “What will we do?” I asked. 

“How about we write letters?” was her reply, “Just like the old days.” In fact, I have a few letters from this friend too that date back a good thirty years -- many husbands, cities, and lifetimes ago. 

I hope that I will set aside some time with pen in hand to share my heart this summer.

A letter is fun to get, after all. And it keeps. But having fallen out of the habit, I am remembering the care, initiative, and follow-through required for the writing and the sending, and I am a little daunted by it. It takes a decision, a pause, a sustained focus. A real letter is composed in a way that email precludes.

In the meantime, although it is a poor substitute, I like to think that this blog is at least a little like a letter -- an ongoing letter to friends that I have met and some that I have not met. That's what I am striving for anyway. 

I have been wondering lately what happens to the blog after I am gone. How long does it hang here? Where does it go? My extreme lack of techni-ness renders the whole thing a vast mystery. One thing is certain. There will be nothing to hold onto. 

At least it won’t be cluttering up anyone’s garage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Acciones, Mas Que Palabras...

Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you find a friend.  You might think you have made all the real friends you’re ever gonna have, and you content yourself with that. And then, unexpectedly, inexplicably, and to your never-ending gratitude, you find a brand new friend, and you know it right away. That’s how it was for me with Ted.  I would come to work early in the morning and feel a sense of reassurance that Ted was already there, already humming. He became my Yaqui Indian guru, mentor teacher, and confidante all rolled into one. Ted had a funny way of helping me to believe in myself but not take myself too seriously, either.

I soon found out that others felt the same way about Ted.  He was the special gift of Vista de Las Cruces School. I’m not even sure what his official job title was -- maybe custodian? -- but teacher would have been more accurate. Children learn not by what we say, but by what we do, which means that for many years Ted was quietly teaching our kids about service, about respect, and about love for humanity.  Ted drove a school bus, translated at Spanish-speaking parent conferences, informally counseled and mentored kids in a way no one else could, and kept our campus ship-shape. He turned a plot of sand into a cactus garden. He turned feeling into a song. He turned pain into wisdom. He turned barbecued tri-tip into a work of art.

Even after I left Vista, Ted continued to be my buddy. He would surprise me in my new classroom at Dunn Middle School, often with a king-size apple fritter or a box of donuts for the kids. Ted grew up with music, from church choir to honky tonk, and when I briefly flirted with learning to play the guitar, he brought me an Ernie Ball beginner's book and an enthusiasm I didn't deserve. (I dropped the fantasy very quickly.) Whenever our good friend Mort, the third musketeer, came into town we would meet in Solvang and they would make music and I would wish I could, but it was great fun just to listen. One day Ted gave me an old framed photograph of himself with his brothers and their music teacher, a slender lady wearing glasses and a 1950s schoolteacher dress. She beams with pride and all of the boys are grinning and holding their guitars. The picture has a prominent place on a bookshelf in my living room.

I was still teaching at Vista when Ted decided to retire. I realized that we needed to do something special for him and I am pleased to say I led a movement to name the auditorium in his honor. On the night of its dedication, the entire school assembled there along with friends and family of Ted’s from near and far. There was a concert, of course, and a rendition of “Chunk of Coal” which is sort of Ted’s theme song and in truth belongs to all of us who are aspiring to become better versions of ourselves. 

I was one of the speakers. “Listen closely," I proclaimed, "for this room rings with the voices of children, it echoes with music, it is filled with life. We have feasted in here, we have sung songs and performed plays, we have played games and even lassoed a piñata. This noisy and wonderful room buzzes with activity and warmth. It is the center of the school, the place where we gather together and know that we are not alone. From this day forward, this room shall be called The Ted Martinez Auditorium.”

I'm so glad we did that. 

About a year or two ago, Ted had a heart attack, with all sorts of complications, and he abruptly withdrew from social contact, preferring to be private in his frailty and suffering. The last time I talked to him was on the phone last summer. I asked if I could stop by and visit him sometime, and he said he wasn’t ready. “If I’m gonna have a conversation with anyone, I wanna be able to be at least a 50% participant. I’ll let you know.” 

And I never heard from him again, but I managed to connect with his wife Angie a few weeks ago.  I learned that Ted is living in the desert now.  That old Yaqui Indian, he always did like the desert. Angie says he’s comfortable.

Recently I went back to Vista for an art show and fund-raising event held in the auditorium. I paused at the entrance to look again at the plaque that bears Ted’s name and this inscription, “Acciones, mas que palabras, son las pruebas de amor.” (Works, more than words, are the proofs of love.) I mentioned to the principal that I knew the man for whom this auditorium was named, but the principal didn’t appear to be even remotely interested. In fact, I had a hard time finding anyone there who had known Ted. I suppose that’s because the kids whose lives he touched have grown up and scattered. But you know what? Living on in many hearts is way more meaningful than having your name attached to a building.

I am fond of a certain poem by Luis Omar Salinas that he wrote about his father. It makes me think of my own father, of course, but also of Ted. And I offer it here this time for Ted, my good friend in the desert, a man with dignity, an old chunk of coal who long ago became a diamond. It concludes:

  The truth of it is, he’s the scholar,

         and when the bitter-hard reality

         comes at me like a punishing

         evil stranger, I can always

         remember that here was a man

         who was a worker and provider,

         who learned the simple facts

         in life and lived by them,

         who held no pretense.

         And when he leaves without

         benefit of fanfare or applause

         I shall have learned what little

         there is about greatness.

 

 

The Way It Is Sometimes

Life here: Jesusito fire raging to the south, fire fighter planes flying overhead, that stark light, the crazy winds howling, and now May's bright full Flower Moon illuminating the hills... but the image of these white doves, white wings flickering, as the bells of the schoolhouse were rung (and I'll tell you about that another time), that's the one I want to share today.  

I asked the bird keeper, a fellow named David, if the winds weren't a bit too strong for them. 

"I've trained them in all conditions," he said. "They understand wind. Look at 'em. They're circling to get the currents. And now they're playing, just playing with the wind."

And then they were off, vanishing far beyond the hills. 

"I expect them to be waiting for me at home in Santa Maria when I get back," said David.

Pure poetry, I said. A miracle. 

David clearly agreed. He told me of his love for the doves, his respect for them, the way he got started taking care of them. He was understandably proud, one might even say misty-eyed, as he handed me his card, a sky blue affair with heavenly clouds and a bird: WHITE ANGLES. DOVES RELEASED FOR WEDDINGS, ANNIVERSARIES, FUNERALS, SPECIAL EVENTS, AND PARTIES. VERY AFFORDABLE.

An orange and white air tanker flew above us toward Santa Barbara carrying another precious load of fire retardant to the mountains. The wild oats undulated like the sea. I ate a strawberry and walked down the hill.

Random Objects, Artifacts, and Totems

I have always been fascinated by the randomness of what survives, in particular how certain odd objects settle into a life, and while thousands of other things are broken, given away, conspicuously lost, or simply vanish without notice, these few odd artifacts somehow remain. In many cases they have no real significance other than the longevity of possession. You sort of get used to having them, and I suppose there is a certain sentiment attached to an object you once held with your chubby childhood hands.

Case in point: the denim pouch. Its zipper is broken, its fabric is stained, its capacity is paltry and the loops in the back for attaching to one’s belt no longer seem as clever and innovative as they once did.  I have had this thing for as long as I can remember. As a little girl, it gave me a sense of Huck Finn-ish autonomy to think that I could stash some snacks or vague necessities inside, hook it to the belt of my dungarees (not that I owned a belt), and take off on some adventure, hands free.  A pouch like this implied potential. Perhaps it enhanced my sense of mobility and independence in the days before I discovered that this was what a bicycle was for. (I did not get one of those until I was ten or eleven.) The sad truth, though, is that the pouch and I never went anyplace. But somehow I have never had the heart to give it away, and somehow it has stuck with me through all of my peregrinations and incarnations, half a century at least. So I put it back at the top of my closet with scarves and eyeglass cases and I imagine that someday after I am gone my daughter will look at it for a baffled instant before tossing it into the trash. 

Random survivor #2: the dress clip. I am not even sure what this thing is for, but I do remember its being designated “dress clip.” It dates back to the 1940s at least. It is plastic, and the pronged metal clip part at the back says “Made in U.S.A.” and it is not a particularly pretty thing, but there is something functional and substantial about. I suppose in its day it rendered open necklines more modest, kept cleavage concealed, held button-less cardigans together. I have never used it and never expect to.  Back it goes into my so-called jewelry box. It would be a betrayal to get rid of it now after its tenacious years of service and long subsequent retirement in my possession.

Survivor #3: the snowman. Now this one begins to make sense. Mrs. Montgomery, my Sunday school teacher, gave him to me for Christmas sometime back in the late 1950s. He is hand-sewn of felt with lovely bits of rickrack and sequins; he wears a smart red jacket (as you can see) and his nose is a tiny red bead. A small brass safety pin at the back allows you to wear him on the lapel of your winter coat. Now who wouldn’t treasure such a gift? The snowman, in fact, represents a transitional type of possession, somewhere beyond random sentimental artifact, something closer to totem. Almost-totem because it was an object that while I wore it had some power to change the way I felt about myself or the way I navigated through the world. In a funny way the snowman protected me, or if not quite protected me, at least cheered me, and there is strength in that. I am not sure what was in my head back then to render him so dear, but now I think of EE Cummings’: If every friend became a foe, he’d laugh and build a world with snow. The sunny and ridiculous countenance of the plush little snowman gave me that kind of feeling.  I haven’t pinned him to my coat in years, but I just may, and I certainly intend to keep him.

Another odd survivor/religious artifact category: the Stern Nun’s rosary beads. She caught me as I tried to slip out of mass at Holy Innocents before it was over. She handed me these very beads and sent me back inside. I was seven years old, both embarrassed and terrified, and I will never know if the rosary beads were intended as a gift or a loan, but I have had them ever since. It is a serious-looking thing, this rosary, with its ebony beads and tiny detailed crucifix, and it brings clearly to mind the demeanor of the disapproving nun who stood in the shadowed lobby preventing the escape of foolish children for our own good. I suppose I have let the Stern Nun down. To call me a lapsed Catholic would be quite an understatement, and I have never used the beads for prayer -- but they hang above my dresser as they have in every place I have lived, and I cannot imagine being without them.

Religious artifact #2 or maybe it’s just magic: My dear friend Ted Martinez gave this St. Christopher medal to me several years ago. It’s a Johnny-come-lately compared to the other objects I have been talking about, but I include it here because of its power. Ever since Ted gave it to me, I have brought it with me on every journey I have taken, particularly those that involve flying, and so far I have always returned home safely, which opens up the possibility that it really works, and therefore I can never again travel without it.

And time for a genuine totem: this walking stick that Cresensio  made for me. It is a work of art, in my opinion, with its carved antler, its horse hair tails and abalone adornment, its tiny suede bag of secret offerings. It, too, is a newcomer into my life, a mere decade old, but not something I am likely to lose track of. I know it is extravagant and impractical, as walking sticks go, but when I take it with me and walk up the canyon, I feel invincible.

Well, I’ve listed six random objects, and once I’ve added pictures this blog post is going to resemble an e-bay page. But I hope it is not seen as a tribute to stuff because in truth I am more inclined to shed than to acquire these days. Perhaps I’m just taking inventory. If I can figure out why one thing has meaning or why another has managed to elude the thrift shop donation bag most of my life, maybe I can glean some knowledge of myself.

When I first came out to California in 1982, I packed most of my possessions into the famous avocado green Buick but left a carton of stuff in Syracuse for a friend to ship to me later if I ever found a home. History shows that I did find a home, and the carton arrived, and I opened it with great anticipation. Most of it was junk.