Head Swimming with Wants

We're getting rain here in Los Angeles -- buckets and buckets of rain -- and the most beautiful winter sunsets. That picture above was taken on Saturday in Santa Monica. Carl and I were on the beach, and that's facing east, away from the ocean.

Turn around.

Today marked the first day of the second week of my new job teaching English to a group of eleventh and twelfth grade girls. I have three classes, two groups of eleventh graders and one group of twelfth. Each class is unique and one is particularly challenging. Anger and resistance make the air crackle in that room. Heads swim with wants. Take notes, I think. Keep taking notes. I have a mind and a memory like a steel trap, and these girls will join all the other hostages that wander the labyrinthine paths.

I get this newsletter every day from The New York Times newspaper cooking section. It's called What to Cook Right Now. I love it so much -- the recipes, the commentary, the links. Today I learned that it's the writer John Dos Passos' birthday (1896). I read nearly everything he wrote back in the last century, in my early twenties. I probably read him lying on a bed somewhere, maybe in the apartment where I lived with my first love, out in the country in Chapel Hill, a mattress on the floor at the top of the stairs, sandwiched between two walls and a window at the foot, a bookcase stuffed with used paperbacks. I might have been chewing on some Twizzlers when I read Dos Passos, red plastic mingling with brown must. Dos Passos was a hostage, though, wandering around my mind, lost down some dark corridor, until I read about him today.

Teaching these girls, doing the research for lesson plans, revisiting stories and poetry -- it's all packed in there, in my mind, and it seems that there's no end to what one can stuff into it. So, yeah. Take notes, I think. Keep taking notes.

Here's a passage from The 42nd Parallel that Sam Sifton, the guy from the NY Times newsletter thinks describes the writer's life. I agree.


The young man walks by himself, fast but not fast enough, far but not far enough (faces slide out of sight, talk trails into tattered scraps, footsteps tap fainter in alleys); he must catch the last subway, the streetcar, the bus, run up the gangplanks of all the steamboats, register at all the hotels, work in the cities, answer the want ads, learn the trades, take up the jobs, live in all the boarding houses, sleep in all the beds. One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough. At night, head swimming with wants, he walks by himself alone.

There's Everyone

La Brea Blvd. Los Angeles

I have been revising my "book" in the main library in Santa Monica. I wander past the main desk and the new books and walk up the stairs to look for an empty table. The library is filled with the homeless. They sit at the tables and in the few easy chairs. They shout at one another and murmur to themselves. Last week a man shouted and yelled and was forcibly removed, but no one looked up from their places as it was going on. Neither did I.  I sit at an empty table and take out my computer and the manuscript. I am typing all of it, from the beginning, into my laptop, revising and writing into and out of this decade-long effort. It's called There's Everyone and Then There's Us.  I sit down in a seat with my back to the library and the shelves of books, and I look out a big window at the palms swaying outside. A man's angry voice cuts into the quiet behind me. Why the fuck are you up here? he shouts, and I will myself not to turn around. A woman murmurs something to him, and he raises his voice more, slaps his hands together, and for a moment I think he's hit the woman. I've been looking everywhere for you and you're fucking here. You said you'd be there. The woman protests and the man keeps it up. He repeats the same sentence over and over. I've been looking everywhere for you and you're fucking here. You said you'd be there. I turn around, catch his eye. Oh, sorry, he says. She is surrounded by things. Paper bags stuffed full, a backpack, a small rolling suitcase. I don't see what she looks like because I avert my eyes. I only see her things. I turn back to my computer. Get out of here and don't come back, the woman says. I don't turn around, but there's quiet. A man with tight black curls, a red-checked shirt and black cotton pants stumbles along the wall behind my table and sits down across from me. He puts his hands in his lap and looks down. He has headphones over his ears, the giant squishy kind, and I can hear some tinny music through them. He fidgets and moans a bit, bangs his hands on the table and then places them again in his lap. I look up from my typing, try to catch his eye, but I don't. He smells of the street, but what do I know, especially, of the street? I know nothing.

He sits there with me, or I with him, for the next three hours.

Hallelujah on Adult Day Programs That Come Through and Gratitude for Your Tax Dollars at Work

at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

I wasn't going to say anything until it was a done deal, but it's a done deal for the most part and Sophie has finally started her day program in Santa Monica.

This is big.

This is HUGE.

Sophie "graduated" from the LAUSD over a year and a half ago. She's been on a waiting list for years for this place, got a place and then we basically had to wait a million years for the right aide and the right paperwork and the right funding and you know the drill. Sophie has been at home with me and Saint Mirtha for all this time, and I can tell you that I'm a really boring mother at this point and an even more boring entertainer/cruise director/activities coordinator. I'm not lying. I am as burnt out as they come, and I'm making no apologies for that. Catholic girls have enough guilt flying around their parts to cover it, and while I've sworn off the Catholic church, I can't swear off the guilt. Saint Mirtha's got some chops in all those fields, but Sophie has basically been hanging around us or a bunch of toddlers and babies and nannies at the neighborhood park. Nothing wrong with that, actually, as Sophie is very interested in babies, and I've fantasized about her taking on a second job (when she gets off her Uber shift) as a baby whisperer.

But this day program is the bomb. It's community-based, so the young men and women go out everyday into the community and do stuff. If they're able, they work, go to the YMCA and work out or learn a trade. If they're like Sophie, they go to museums, the park, the beach, have music therapy, learn self-help skills, learn how to better communicate their needs and -- well -- make friendships and enjoy their lives.

on a Metro bus, on her way to the mall

The drive to the program is pretty brutal because I live in Los Angeles and the program is in Santa Monica. I'm talking about 9.8 miles but forty-five minutes on the highway, but I'm happy to drive to the proverbial Timbuktu if it means Sophie is happy and getting what she needs to lead a good, dignified life of value.

I found out today that she has several classmates from her PRESCHOOL in an LAUSD program at UCLA. That was back in the last century! I've lost touch with nearly all of those families in the last twenty years, mainly because we don't live on the west side where most of them still reside, but I have such good memories of those early days, and I'm thrilled to get acquainted again. Sadly, several of the children that Sophie began her school years with have passed away -- in those early childhood days, it was not unusual to go to at least one funeral a year of a young person. Looking at these grown men and women and imagining all that they've been through is emotional for me in bittersweet ways.

Saint Mirtha is training Sophie's fabulous new aide, Lauren, this week. I dropped them off both mornings, went for a walk on the beach and then did some freelance writing work yesterday, another interview for a possible job today and then -- wait for it --

began revising my manuscript at the public library.















The universe is abundant.

Another Day in Paradise

I took Oliver and Sophie to the beach in the late afternoon yesterday so that we could walk for a bit, eat dinner at our favorite beachside cafe and then watch the sunset.

The sky turned pinker and pinker as we left, but since I was driving I couldn't get a good shot. Here's one I took at a stoplight before Oliver screamed at me to not text and drive. Even though I wasn't texting and driving, he was right that I shouldn't have been so distracted.

Homeschool PE at the Beach and Just Enough Snow

Oliver and I went for a very long walk today in Santa Monica. It was a blustery day and incredibly beautiful. He actually skateboarded while I walked briskly, and I called it Home-school Physical Education. My sister, who lives in St. Louis, texted me the question how is the homeschool thing going? The meaty stuff?

I told her great. I told her that we would be doing another unit of history when we got home and then some English Language Arts. The more I do this, though, the more I realize that it might be the best way to educate, even to live. I wake up every morning in some bit of existential distress. What's it all about? I think. How do we keep on keeping on? There's so much suffering. I'm getting old. What if Sophie lives forever? What if I do? What if I don't? What if the world melts? What if the Republicans win in 2016? How will I afford college for Henry? Who's going to take care of this world? How do we go on? Why are we so lame? You know the drill. After working with Oliver, though, and learning myself, going on these outings, opening my eyes to the very real goodness that is my life, the existential angst recedes. I move outward, see blue.

On the way home, we faced the mountains, covered in snow. I decided that was all the snow I needed to see at just the right distance.

#IloveLosAngeles

Summer Poem

Summer Song

William Carlos Williams, 1883 - 1963

Wanderer moon
smiling a
faintly ironical smile
at this
brilliant, dew-moistened
summer morning,—
a detached
sleepily indifferent
smile, a
wanderer’s smile,—
if I should
buy a shirt
your color and
put on a necktie
sky-blue
where would they carry me?

via Poets.org

Incongruity

I hate to sully the pages of the blog with the photo above, but it struck me today that it's the perfect adornment for the mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it. Those words are Sri Nisargadatta's -- an Indian philosopher, spiritual teacher and guru, and they appeared in my inbox this morning. When the giant pick-up truck pulled into the parking space a couple spaces over from mine yesterday, I was sitting in the back seat of the car, reading. It was a glorious day in Santa Monica, a quintessential southern California day, and the beach was packed. I had sat in the sun too long the weekend before and gotten a nasty sunburn on my neck and shoulders, so I dropped Sophie and Mirtha off to walk and stretched out in the back seat with my book, the first of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. When I looked up to muse about my life -- all its incongruities -- the Confederate flag fluttered into view, and I thought at first it was part of a movie shoot. I grew up in the south, and it's not an unfamiliar sight there -- flying stubbornly off of houses and trucks on the backroads of the country with all its menacing history, but on the shimmery coast of southern California, it's virtually unknown. You'll have to forgive my pious intake of breath. The beaches here are public -- the entire coastline is public -- and on a sunny winter day in Santa Monica, the variety of people out enjoying themselves is staggering. There are Latino families and aging surfers, middle-aged women in bikinis on roller-blades, RVs parked in handicapped spaces with stuffed animals hanging off of bumpers and old men in lawn chairs sitting on the roofs of cars. There are families of gods and goddesses, and eighty year old muscle men in tiny bikini shorts. There are tourists who stumble through the light, uncomprehending that this is where people actually live. I have never seen a Confederate flag flying, though, so I got out of the car, curious, and took a picture when I realized it was not a shoot but a real group of people. I confess to wondering what the two dark guys sitting on the concrete barrier where pavement turns to sand thought about it. Someone asked me later whether anyone had said anything, had been anything but passive. I told her that having grown up in the south, I wouldn't mess with those people, the type that fly Confederate flags, that they're mean, mean in the sense of stupidity, obdurate. There's something unfathomable about the obdurate, incongruous.

The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.

There's no but between abyss and heart, only a comma, a pause. I have much that is incongruous in my life right now, some of it unfolding here, much of it unbloggable.  I am at once holding the match, looking over my shoulder -- pause -- and a pile of ashes, smoldering. The Confederate flag -- pause --  blue skies and a rainbow of people, beating hearts, thump. Thump -- pause -- thump.

Biking from Venice Beach to Santa Monica, Moonshine, Walter White and Looking for a Job

I actually rode my bike with Henry and D from Venice Beach to Santa Monica this afternoon. It was completely overcast when we started, as the summer beach often is, but after lunch and before we biked back to Venice, the sky had opened up to a glorious blue.

Outrageously tiny skaters were racing, jumping and otherwise defying death at this skate park.  It made me want to watch Lords of Dogtown again. Have ya'll seen that? Along with my desire to come back in another life as a surfer is the desire that I have a child who competes in the X Games. Don't tell Henry or Oliver that.

We jumped off our bikes somewhere along the way in Venice Beach, and Henry entertained us in feats of athletic skill. Even at 15 years old, though, he was no match for a guy who looked at least fifty, sported tattoo sleeves, a long ponytail, purple shorts with a spiked belt and was about as agile as a monkey.

I can't figure out how to upload this video properly, but that guy in the beige suit and fancy dress shirt walked up the boulevard screaming for the salvation of our souls. He carried a Bible and was seriously loud. Proselytizers are so interesting to me, and I often wonder how effective they are. As I sit here at my desk at 8:30 in the evening, the sprinklers hissing on, my legs sore and my feet still sandy, I hear his voice shouting Hallelujah, The Lord Jesus Will Save You! in my head, and I wonder what he's up to right this moment.

Ouch.

Tongva Park, Santa Monica

When I got home and Saint Mirtha had left, I lay on my bed with Sophie and read magazines.She slept and occasionally jerked in what I thought was a seizure -- many times -- but then decided was not. Sigh. I read an interesting article in MORE Magazine (for women over forty, ONLY) about a woman in Asheville, North Carolina who produces the best tasting moonshine in the country. Her company is called Troy and Sons. The story was fascinating and very inspiring as she is the mother to three sons, two of whom, now in their mid-twenties are severely disabled. Most of you out there in extreme parenting land know how difficult it is to have a job and take care of your child. Those of you not in extreme parenting land should know that many of us would have a job or wanted to have a job or a career but are unable to do so given the demands of extreme parenting. This is no argument between women who work and women who stay at home -- have I told you before how much I despise that discussion and find it so boring it makes me cry?

Anyhoo.

I'm currently looking for a job, as the big contract I had with a national organization is finished, and the other contract I have with an organization that helps children in foster care, doesn't have enough work for me. Did you even know that I actually have a job and have been working nearly thirty hours a week, off and on for over six years? I like to work, and I need to work -- both because it's stimulating and because I need the money. These jobs have been perfect because they're flexible and allow me to work, for the most part, from home. I get to do what I do best -- write and inspire and advocate for children with special healthcare needs. When Sophie isn't doing well, I can take care of her and stay at home. After reading that article about the woman who makes kick-ass moonshine, I felt inspired to get creative. I'm never going to support myself baking cakes, but there must be something I can spin my skills toward and make a living.

Wait, isn't that what Walter White thought when he broke bad?

Shiny Bits

Today on my walk I listened to the writer David Gilbert talk to Terri Gross of Fresh Air, and at some point he answered a question about writing and creativity, explained that his best are the shiny bits. The Dog and I walked through the fancy neighborhood adjacent to ours, past mansions and bougainvillea, film production trucks and nannies pushing baby carriages. It's sunny here, as usual, and not too hot. The sky is blue, as usual, birds sing and crows caw. I could hear it all through the voices in my ears, even the chink of a hammer on metal, the rev up of a motorcycle behind a hedge. The Dog looked for other creatures, sniffing along familiar paths, but we were both spooked when a beast hurtled itself against a wooden door to our right, the thud so loud the wood seemed to buckle. Jesus Christ! I said and yanked The Dog away, picked up my pace, my ears turned away from the rough barking and back to Terri and David. A block later, The Dog lunged again, I looked up and into the incline of a driveway where, at the top, stood a dog muzzled in black leather, his body wrapped in leather and chains, a ripped-up frisbee hanging from his mouth, the canine equivalent of a bouncer at an S&M bar in Hollywood. I thought about yesterday, the shiny bits. I took Sophie for a brief visit with the gynecologist that prescribes progesterone for her. I left the wheelchair in the car and walked Sophie in. I was optimistic. We waited for nearly an hour before we saw the doctor in her tiny examining room. I held Sophie awkwardly in my lap, her legs whipped up into a cross-legged position. The Gynecologist and I talked about hormones and bloodwork. We talked about medical marijuana. Sophie had a seizure, a huge seizure, and I contained it and her, still on my lap, the jerking, the drooling, the banging. The Gynecologist had tears in her eyes. She waited and offered to help. She said I don't know how you do it. I laughed with rue, squared my shoulders, relied on my physical strength. When Sophie recovered, we left the office and walked back out into the Santa Monica afternoon, the air shiny bitten by sun. I cried all the way home.

The Santa Monica Pier, Costumes and Carnivals

I know it's freezing in much of the country, but here in southern California, it's decidedly spring, cloudy in the morning and clearing to a glorious blue in the afternoon. The boys are sleeping in every morning, their laundry is done with the only error being two ink pens found in the washer, thankfully not broken open, and the red-buds are blooming over the winter's roses. We went to the pier yesterday in Santa Monica, and I shot the above photo of Henry in front of the ferris wheel. Carnivals lend themselves to easy art, but I've already grown tired of conjecturing how the Men and Women in Robes will decide the gay marriage case, enervated by the spectacle of some of the Men in Robes equating marriage with procreation or as having the novelty of the cell phone or the internet. It's difficult to take seriously those who put on costumes to do their job, no matter their beliefs (I have the same trouble with the supposedly holy Cardinals in Robes in Rome) and while I've a fantasy of ordering a chauffeur's costume to finish out the job of mothering over the next decade or so, I prefer to be naked.

What are you up to today in your corner of the world?

Dragging All Over Kingdom Come

This has been one hell of a weekend so far, what with Oliver acting in OLIVER!, Henry getting into the high school that he wanted, baseball season beginning (good Lord, already?) and me dragging my parents all over kingdom come. Here are some random photos, and now I'm collapsing into bed.

Oliver in OLIVER!

Henry and my father

A cactus in Santa Monica

Tulips at the Farmer's Market in Santa Monica

Damn Wonderful Santa Monica Saturday

Santa Monica Blues

 Thank God I live out here, because when I have the blues, like I had today, there's nothing to do but take a quick ride to the beach and sit in the sand with a book.

Oh, and take surreptitious photos of surfers undressing.