The Things We Do

I'm sitting in my dining room, eating an apple from my backyard tree, some salami and provolone and crackers. I just taught the short story "The Things They Carried" to a tenth grade boy at a small, specialized private school and am getting ready to read and grade a slew of essays on the "American Dream." These were written by my eleventh grade girls who are all part of a very conservative Jewish community. The apple is from the first crop of this little tree. It is green and blushed, tart yet sweet when it counts. The salami and cheese tastes a bit like packaging, and the crackers are banana-flavored, something I didn't notice when I bought them, but all together it hits the spot. As they say. It's all connected, in the end, maybe even by me. An apple tree in southern California, packaged salami and cheese, banana nut-flavored crackers, the Vietnam War and a boy who hasn't heard of it, the American Dream and a bunch of sheltered girls dreaming. That man sleeping on the sidewalk around the corner from my house with the apple tree in the backyard, his dirty feet and that woman walking, the crease where her ass hits her leg, a cup of bright red juice, the photo itself, me in my dining room, eating and reading, looking up at a small orchid, its magenta petals tipped by sun and the sound of leaves outside rustling a bit in a new fall wind.

Post Thanksgiving Catch-Up

I had all my chicks home for a long weekend, and that is a good thing.

I had such a good time talking with Henry about all kinds of stuff. It's hard to believe how grown he is, how self-possessed and on his way.

I baked a lot of apple pies.

If you peer into the distance, you can see some biscuits. I baked a lot of biscuits.

I baked a lot of pumpkin cheesecakes, too. They tend to split on the top, even though I refrained from over-mixing the batter (causes air bubbles that rise to surface and split the cake open while baking) and turned the oven off and left them in the oven for two hours after baking. Outside of using a water bath, do any of ya'll have any tips to avoid the splitting? Toasted meringue helped disguise the cracks and went beautifully with the pumpkin, if I do say so myself.

On Thanksgiving day, Carl, Henry, Oliver and I went down to Skid Row to help a wonderful organization feed the needy and the homeless for a few hours. It's shocking to see and disgraceful to accept the level of impoverishment in this beautiful city that I call home. I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that I can help more in whatever capacity.

And then there's Sophie. She is struggling. I don't know the answer and grow tired of living the questions. I had a mini-breakdown on Saturday night. Ok. It was a breakdown. I haven't cried that hard in a long time, the kind of cry where you might as well vomit up your heart, if not your guts. I thought a lot about what it means to be faithful. Faith full. Not to any god but to love and life. There's grace to that, an inversion. Prayer as incarnation, a calling forth, for something dark to be revealed.

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.

Shedding Skin

Any street in Los Angeles, CA

The numbing regularity of tent cities and my half sandwich (pastrami and coleslaw with Russian dressing on rye) wrapped in white paper, a grim and stupid offering that shreds the heart.

A Korean woman in a black bra and waist-high underpants scrubbed every inch (literal) of my body the other day. Face down, she said and shoved a folded-up towel under my cheek. Turn on side, she said and lay a steadying hand on my naked hip. I opened my eyes, ran my finger over the tiny gray balls and shreds on the table. She didn't say it but I knew it. Skin. My skin. Dead skin. I was a baby lying there, tended. My skin is olive and free of wrinkles, speckled with moles (I hate that word) yet soft, smooth, a place where a heart can slip out of its hiding and rest. I open doors and windows. I risk everything.

In the universe there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in-between there are doors. William Blake said that. He also said Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell's despair. 

I read past my bedtime, closing doors and windows, deep into Trollope, the tedium of it, then silence, the heart's slow beat, sleep.

Boy Talk, Part 468: On Inspiration

Quick, take a picture of that! I said to Oliver when we pulled up to a stoplight before entering the Target parking garage.

Why, Mom? he replied, Why do you need a photo of a homeless guy's stuff?

Well, to tell you the truth, I am inspired by the things that I see and then the photos that I take, I replied, I'll often take a photo and then look at it later and write off of it. 

I waxed inspirational, then, the kind of blather that I'm sure my boys tolerate only by the skin of their teeth. I think I mentioned the video of the homeless man that I'd watched last night, like tens of millions of other people -- the one where a homeless man on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles is shot dead while being "subdued" by six LAPD. I can't tell you, Reader, how frenzied I felt while watching that video last night. My heart was literally pounding, and while the boys watched over my shoulder, I might have even screamed how much I hated guns and cops and this whole country. I went on and on, basically freaking out about the fact that thousands of people, many of them mentally ill, live in squalor on the streets even as people drive past in cars that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, blather, blather, blather. I might have cried, openly, I was so upset. But that was last night, and when I saw crap strewn all over the street outside of Target, I immediately thought of the video and knew that I wanted to write about it, somehow, if only to struggle with my own ineffectual place in all of this. Because, really, who am I to hate this situation and have no real power and even, sometimes, inclination, to actually do something about it. To tell you the truth, I feel like an asshole for complaining without a means to really help.

Today, I didn't say any of that -- I just made the comment about inspiration and writing and creativity when Oliver asked me why I wanted a photo.

You're a creative person, I said, what gives you ideas and inspires you? He thought for a moment, and then turned the dial of the radio up nearly all the way as we drove underground into the parking garage. All the Single Ladies was blaring out of the speakers in my sexy white Mazda, and I instinctively turned it down as low as it had been turned up. Let's face it, Reader, I'm not a Beyonce fan.

Mom! Oliver cried out and turned the knob back up. You don't turn DOWN Beyonce, you turn her UP. THAT'S what inspires me! He started dancing and bobbing in the seat next to me, doing his moves, and I was inspired, Reader, to actually join him.

This Is Also Los Angeles With Sophie

I took Sophie with me to the place across La Brea where they make a sparkly soda drink with lemon and thyme. We hobbled along, Sophie leaning into me, my too-big shoulder bag slipping down, my mouth set as it so often is until I consciously think relax. While we stood at the corner and waited for the light to change, Sophie kept trying to take steps. She can keep walking, but she can't stand still. I wished for a person in her life that might bring her on a walk, play with her for a couple of hours, give her and me and us a break. I'm resigned to the fact that I'll always be paying someone to do this, so it is -- in the end -- a matter of money. I've tamped down that frustration for a lot of years, When's the last time anyone offered? Never. I can't remember. I make those excuses. It's hard. I make those justifications. Everyone has their thing. I am understanding (they just don't know because how could they?) until I am not (no one gives a damn). On the way, I skirted the corner because a man in a bikini top and a pair of blue jeans was dancing around the Lenin statue, and he made me nervous. Every time I turned my head to check, he was standing and staring at us, staring at Sophie and her awkward gait. I should have whipped around and taken his photo, a #dontstarepaparazzi, but I had Sophie, and the drink and my too-big bag. He followed behind me a bit, two-stepping, me nervous, hustling Sophie along. A gardener came out from behind a hedge, and I asked him to keep an eye on the guy in the bikini top, and at first I thought he didn't understand English, but his voice was muffled behind a face-mask. He nodded his head and waved Sophie and me on, turned around to face the dancing man, was resolute like a sentinel with a pair of clippers.

About the City on Monday and Tuesday

Sophie playing with a hairbrush while waiting for the doctor.

Oliver just being Oliver.

A blooming bottle brush tree bloom:

A homeless guy camped out in front of a church door:

Westward Ho

La Brea and Melrose, Los Angeles
May 2014

On the way to my 17th IEP this morning, my eyes leaked tears and I swore to myself as I wiped them away. I won't bore you with the litany of complaints that preceded the tears, many of which are valid and most of which are pathetic, but at La Brea and Melrose, I got into the left turn lane behind a long line of cars and asked for help -- not from God, per se, although I still have vestiges of duty toward that possibility, but rather from the air, the universe, the divine, the whatever. I turned my head to my left and saw what you see above, felt an enormous slap upside the head as they say in the south. Yes, I took that photo while sitting in my car, my head smarting from the force of the blow, waiting through a few red lights, inching along, stripped of impatience, anger, sorrow and panic. Even tears, or tears, even.

That's all I've got for today. The IEP went just fine. When I came home, I lay down on my bed, closed my eyes, thought of other things.

Homelessness, Racism, the Sports-Industrial Complex, and Dyslexia

Skid Row, Los Angeles

I've mentioned it before, but my son Oliver has a pretty severe case of dyslexia and associated learning difficulties. While the few months we've been homeschooling have done wonders for his self-esteem, he continues to struggle with his feelings for the disorder, and while the prevailing one is shame (and very common in dyslexics), he is also impatient with it and at best, angry, as opposed to accepting. Oliver is with me much of the time as I traverse this great and diverse city, and one of our favorite sights is in the heart of Hollywood, right at the intersection of Hollywood Blvd and Highland. If we're lucky enough to catch a red light, we look at the opposite corner to see the same elderly man holding up a cardboard sign that says, FUCK YOU. I don't know why this makes us laugh -- perhaps it's the audaciousness of it, mixed as it is among the crowds of tourists, the hucksters dressed as superheroes, the equally elderly man perched on top of a U.S. mailbox with the sign YOU'RE GOING TO HELL, JESUS SAVES (who I've always thought was incredibly hopeful and ambitious, given the location).  Yesterday, we were pulling out of a Chick-Fil-A (I know, we're not supposed to support a homophobic organization, but this is the Hollywood Chick-Fil-A), when we noticed a guy sitting on the curb across the street with his homemade sign that read I WOULD BE ALERT BUT I'M HOMELESS AND HUNGRY. I HAVE MORALS AND HERPES. Oh good Lord, I thought, steeling myself for Oliver's questions. Sure enough, he asked me what it all meant, so I told him. He thought for a few seconds and then said, Well, anyone who can spell those words is probably fine. That made me laugh out loud and then think in my mind about just how hard it is for Oliver to be dyslexic -- so hard that a man with apparently no possessions other than a dirty, weird sign would seem, to Oliver, to be in a better position. Then I worried that Oliver might need a little more perspective, so I lectured a bit, as I am wont, on compassion and perspective, and he tolerated it. Later on in the day, when I heard for the gazillionth time about the asshole basketball team owner and his sordid mistress and the outcome of his racist conversation being his swift dismissal and ban from the NBA, I wondered why some wrongs get such quick and relatively easy responses from the Powers That Be. Privacy issues aside, and trust me, I don't give a flying foo-foo about sports in general, much less the business of sports, what about that particular story warranted the enormous outcry that something like the growing number of homeless people living on our streets doesn't -- or children being denied medication like medical marijuana -- or women not making the same amount of money as men in similar jobs -- or people getting laid off when the CEOs of their companies pull in tens of millions of dollars in salary alone? Or, let's face it -- the growing number of citizens here who live in poverty alongside people who buy and drive $150,000 cars, or send their children to elementary schools that cost $40,000 a year?

Is it all relative?

One of my Facebook acquaintances (let's face it, not all of our Facebook peeps are friends) posted something about how awful it is that Obama had something to say about that basketball owner but, so far, hasn't said anything about removing marijuana from the Schedule 1 class of drugs. He was pretty angry about that as were most of his "friends," and if it weren't for the many racist comments on that string (not from him), I would have agreed with his frustration. I'm not a moral relativist and actually hate the expression it's all relative, but I have to wonder what, exactly, drives people other than money. I'm curious why, exactly, this particular instance got this particular enormous response. I guess it's a good thing, but it does make me wonder. Oliver's anguish over dyslexia seems to trump the homelessness of that man in his mind. Obama not taking a stand on medical marijuana trumps his taking a stand against racism for some. Freely using the word retarded which basically dehumanizes and denigrates millions of people is not nearly as bad, apparently, as denigrating millions of black people.

I don't know what to think, but I'm thinking. And it makes me think the guy with the FUCK YOU sign might have the answer.