“Time is a grammatical concept.” Sergey and Marina Dyachenko. Vita Nostra, Harper Voyager.
So, it was Friday morning and I was sitting next to Naida on the sofa. I was busy reading my newest fantasy novel. It was confusing me because there were no fairies, or magical Knights and the like and only people traveling helter-skelter to various worlds that seemed to lack animals but teemed with vegetation and a confused policewoman. Naida was on the phone to someone. My attention turned to her conversation when I picked up words like, “San Quentin”, “murder” and “rape”. These words were spoken in a surprisingly calm matter of fact way. I had never or rarely ever heard them spoken by Naida before. I was curious.
After she got off the phone, I asked her what it was all about. The story she told me was one of sadness and horror suffered by one family as they fell from grace and into a the deepest pits of hell imaginable. The “Bad Seed” and “Mikey” are light comedies compared to their story.
On a lighter note, the temperature in the Enchanted Forest climbed well into the 80s. I changed into my spring outfit. Gone was my black winter vest, replaced with a summery tan fly-fishing vest. Also, I abandoned my long-sleeved padded shirts for a plain cotton short sleeved one. Tomorrow, I hope to wear my first Hawaiian shirt of the season to the Saturday Morning Coffee.
Saturday, it was sunny and the temperature was expected to reach the mid-80s. We walked to the Coffee to find it was basically replaced that day by a community garage sale in the parking lot of the Nepenthe Club House. I spent most of the time there as I usually do lying on a lounge chair by the pool and dozing off in the shade.
Sunday was a lost day. Try as I might I couldn’t make anything out of it.
On Monday I left by train to SF. Naida’s daughter, Sarah, drove me to the station. The sun was shining and the day was warming up. The train was unusually crowded. Took the bus from Emeryville to downtown SF and then the J-Church to 24th street. The walk up 24th St exhausted me. Barrie cooked a fine dinner that finished with a delicious clam chowder and gnocchi. We talked a lot about India and a little more about Japan.
The next day, Barrie drove Pater to his physical therapy session and me to my medical appointment at UCSF. For unknown reasons I waited almost two hours before the doctors got to me. After plunging a mini camera up my nose and into my throat and reviewing the photos and my previous CT scans, they concluded that I had a non-cancerous polyp that needs to be surgically removed. While I was preparing to leave I looked at the photograph of my polyp and noticed there was a certain artistic appearance to it — sort of a bit modern arty. So, I took a photograph of it to memorialize it.
The grey section is the Polyp. The whiter portions are me. The black is what the area between the white is supposed to be. I decided to call it “Pookie’s Polyp.” I am thinking of writing poem or a story entitled “The Adventures of Pookie’s Polyp.”
Anyway, by the time I got out of there I had less than I half-hour to catch the bus that would take me to the train for Sacramento. I took the tram to Union Square with four of five long blocks and less than 15 minutes to make it to the bus. So this funny looking 83 year old man with a shillelagh shaped cane hobbled rapidly down those blocks and made it to the bus just as the driver was closing the door. On the bus, I sat there more exhausted than I recall having ever felt before. The exhaustion remained throughout the trip until I got home and put myself to bed.
The next morning I felt better. The sun was out and in was pleasantly warm. The Bang Bang Boys have moved on to other houses and is was quiet enough to calm the dog. We spent some time in the yard checking on things. The California Poppies were in bloom.
I was scheduled to have my weekly lunch with Hayden but yesterday he had injured his ankle playing basketball and was walking on crutches so we put of lunch until Friday.
Later I walked the dog. During the walk I sat on a shady bench enjoyed the view and tried to think of as little as I could.
After I returned home, Naida and I listened to Ella Fitzgerald and Louie Armstrong for about five hours until we went to bed. During all that time they never repeated a song. It was marvelous. I classify today as a “great” day.
On Thursday the temperature had risen up into the 90s. While you could feel the heat is was not too uncomfortable. After breakfast Naida and I walked to the Campus Commons Clubhouse by the lakes. We were attending a meeting with some of the people opposing a proposed development in Campus Commons that would tear down an architecturally significant mid-20th Century California office building (Sea Ranch style) and replace it with a high density 26 unit high income town-house project. Most of those living in Campus Commons oppose the development.
We met in the library room with a man of about my age named Carr Kunze and a woman connected to us by smart phone named Janet Buehler. Carr, an architect, told Naida and I that at one time in the past he had been retained by AID to assist the Ukrainian government after the fall of the Soviet Union in its efforts to convert some housing projects to market rate.* It was an interesting meeting. They very much have an uphill battle. I agreed to assist them as much as I can.
*Mr. Kunze served in a senior policy and multifamily underwriting role for California Housing Finance Agency, as an USAID sponsored resident advisor on housing privatization to the mayor of Kharkiv, Ukraine, as executive director for the Aspen, CO Housing Authority, and director of housing development for Fairfax County, VA Department of Housing and Community Development. He was a project manager for a non-profit developer and has provided consulting services in housing finance, market research and housing development.
The walk to and from the Club House was marvelous. The azalea’s, rhododendron and other flowering bushes were in full bloom.
After we returned home we took a long nap until it was time to take the dog on his evening walk.
The next day, was one of those perfect weather days that occur only two or three times per year. I drove into the Golden Hills for lunch with Hayden. He was still on his crutches from his fall while playing basketball. He does not believe it is broken but he still has not received the results of his X-rays. We drove to Town Center and decided this was the perfect day for enjoying our first Stromboli of the year and eating it outside. At a table overlooking the lakes we enjoyed our lunch and sat there talking for over two and a half hours. Our discussions ranged from examining plans for his future, through updates on his friends, and on to attempting to resolve some of his current personal problems. It was a thoroughly delightful afternoon.
At about 2 AM, I woke up and could not get back to sleep so I went downstairs and began reading my newest and exceptionally boring novel hoping that it would quickly put me back to sleep. I few minutes later Naida came down also. She went to sit at the piano and began playing Gershwin’s “Summertime.” After about a minute or two of playing the tune she transitioned into almost 10 minutes of magnificent improvisation. She seemed to leave behind the jazz and bluesy rhythms and launched herself into a complex exploration of the harmonics, each bit expressing itself briefly before passing on. I was mesmerized.
The next morning was Naida’s birthday. The sun was shining and the temperature was expected to reach into the high eighties. We attended the Saturday Morning Coffee and then returned home. At about noon Naida’s daughter Sarah arrive bringing some flowers from her garden and wishing Naida a Happy Birthday. Later in the early afternoon we returned to the Nepenthe Clubhouse to partake in democracy in action, the Nepenthe HOC board candidates forum.
That evening Naida and I travelled to downtown Sacramento to a restaurant named Estelle’s located near the Capitol building. It is a highly rated restaurant in Sacramento, more expensive and loud than posh. We sat outside and enjoyed a dinner of oysters, lobsters, gnocchi, truffles and the like. We sat outside at the corner of K St and 12th. It is a very bust corner. We were entertained by noise, low riders, bicycles and scooters festooned with lights and high school prom attendees flooding the sidewalks,
After dinner we returned to the parking garage to pick up our car. We inserted the parking garage ticket into the machine and paid the fee. The elevator was broken so we took the stairs to the sixth floor and searched around for the car. After driving down to the exit, I inserted the receipt into the machine. It charged me additional $4 for the time it took us from when we first paid and had gotten to the exit.
The next day, I was not feeling well so I stayed home mostly in bed. The following day was the first of May and the temperature dropped into the 50s. So, life trudges on. Frankly, I doubt I care much about what pretty little May may bring me.
“You can’t trust writers. They make up nonsense for a living.”
McDonnell, Caimh. Dead Man’s Sins (The Dublin Trilogy Book 5) . McFori Ink.
It is now Saturday the fourth day into February. Alas, I do not make up nonsense for a living, I do it because I have little else to do with my time. Today Naida and I went to the Saturday Morning Coffee as we usually do on Saturdays. There were not as many people there as on other Saturdays, only about 20 or so. The morning’s nonsense joke was:
“Who is the strongest thief?
Answer: A shoplifter.
Naida and the Reverend spent much of their time trying to console the Artist, an 86 or 87 year old ex-teacher of art and math named Shalla who was having a crisis over having lived as a Mormon but I wondering if she she should die as one. Although Naida and the Reverend urged her to find an different source of consolation, she seemed not too convinced but agreed to think it over. I as usual did not speak to anyone but I took photographs and listened. Someone brought lemons in a pail for us. She had picked them from a tree in her yard.
On top from left to right: The coffee set up and the pail of oranges; Naida and the Artist (Shalla). On the bottom: Some of my favorite stuffed animals. They have nothing to do with the coffee.
After the Coffee we went to Original Mel’s nearby. I had blueberry pancakes, two fried eggs over easy, and and Bacon. Naida ordered poached eggs with avocado. We also had coffee. After breakfast we went home and did nothing memorable for the rest of the day. I couldn’t sleep that night so I went downstairs and read for a few hours before returning to bed. The next morning I felt like an old used dishrag.
During breakfast, Naida kept up a running soliloquy about her memoir for over an hour and a half. She then found an old roll-a-dex of hers ( you have to be of our generation to know what that is). We looked through it trying to remember the people or organizations whose names appeared on the cards. This all made me sad. Not because it brought back memories, but because I really had nothing better to do. So, I did what I usually do when I come face to face with the question of the meaning of life. I went upstairs and took a nap.
After my nap I felt much better. Even the sun was shining outside. I thought about taking the dog for a walk. Then changed my mind. Then changed it again. I hooked-up the over excited Booboo to his leash and reached for my walking stick. It was gone. Not there. I ran around the house hysterically looking for it dragging the confused dog behind me. I could not find it. I began shouting somewhat hysterically “Naida, Naida my walking stick is gone.”
“No it’s not” she responded, “I put it somewhere we would be sure to find it, but I cannot remember where.” So we set about of a lengthy search through through the house until we found It in the back of one of the closets, Joy! I grabbed it and refrained from asking why she thought the closet was a more memorable place to store it that the stand by the door with all my other walking sticks. And so properly equipped I set off to walk the dog.
Actually, I was not walking the dog, He was walking me and we were not walking we were running. He flew out the door with me, one arm outstretched in front of me grasping the leash and, the other flying behind holding on to my walking stick. We ran that way down the path from the house to the street and up the street a ways until he veered off the road and up upon a small embankment to do his business. I was thankful for the moment of rest. He finished, turned, suddenly began barking and ran into the street pulling me along after him. I stumbled off the embankment and felt myself falling onto the tarmac. I pictured, broken ankles, knees and hips as I began tipping toward the ground. Suddenly my descent halted. I extended my ever present walking stick and saved myself from injury.
I then looked over and saw a woman of about my age wrapped in a dog leash at the end of which a tiny little creature tugged and yipped hysterically. It was mostly dark grey and at first I thought it was a rodent of some sort — Smaller than the gigantic Norwegian Roof Rats the haunted the walls of homes of my childhood back in NY and slightly larger than a mouse. Its longer legs indicated it was a dog — one of the smallest dogs I had ever seen.
The woman and I, mutual apologies in our eyes and a silent mouthing of apologies on our lips untangled ourselves and dragged our snarling beasts in opposite directions and went upon our way.
It was Wednesday before I resumed writing here as far as I can recall the three days in between were at best “meh*” days, little to write about and little to remember. Last night however, Biden gave his second State of the Union address. It appeared to me to be one of the cleverest and politically adept State of the Union addresses I have ever seen. For an old guy, he gave the young toughs a licking — sort of like Clint Eastwood in his later movies. Or even better Gary Cooper in High Noon.
During the walk I noticed the multicolored chalk marks that had appeared on the streets a few dats ago. The marks were of different colors, red, blue, white, green and yellow as though some acid crazed tagger freak had run through the streets pretending to be Mondrian. I later learned the different colors were placed there by different companies to inform their various work gangs where and what to do in tearing up the streets.
I also took note of the brilliant Autumn colors of the leaves on the bushes that I passed during our walk.
Later when I considered how I felt about today, the best I could come up with was, “Hmm.”*
Thursday..;.
That is all I wrote on Thursday. It is now Friday evening. I seem to be losing interest in writing here. Maybe it’s temporary. Maybe not. If temporary, why? When I moved to Thailand 13 years ago, I would periodically send letters to a few friends and family members letting them know what I was up to. I also began keeping a Journal from which I would draw information and stories for those letters. After about four months, I combined the two to reduce the time and energy in what seemed like duplicative efforts and because felt it would encourage me to continue writing because it was easy to delude myself that someone depended on the receipt of my letters to brighten their day. Later, as I would now and then read some of my older post, I would enjoy being reminded of things I had forgotten. Recently, given how short my time here will probably be, writing new posts to remind me of thing seems to be a less useful means of self entertainment.
I did have lunch today with Hayden. He seems to have become more focused on his higher education and life goals. We ate Stromboli’s at the pizza place in the Golden Hills that we like so much. The day was another unseasonably warm and mostly sunny day with afternoon temperatures in the mid 60s. (Hmm*)
Saturday — Saturday Morning Coffee day. We drove to the Nepenthe Clubhouse because I had stubbed my small toe yesterday and it was still painful to walk. I will worry if it starts to turn black. Gerry our leader was not there. She must be ill again. Jan, Coach’s wife, told me that Coach had had brain surgery last week. She does not know if her will be able to walk, talk or even remember anything. Joan, Peter’s (The Nice Guy) GF reminisced about Italy 50 years ago. Some woman, who along with here husband splits living during the year between the Enchanted Forest and Pacific Grove talked to me about the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. As we were leaving, the short talkative Asian women who sometimes brings here two year old daughter to the coffee, complained that the “squad” as she referred to them told her not to bring her daughter to the coffee because she was too noisy. I told her, “You should do what I do when I disagree with a rule. Ignore it. If they still complain I will support you.” We then returned home and Naida played the piano while I wrote this. The weather outside was clear but chilly.
Having nothing better to do tonight, I thought I would insert here a few excerpts from one of my favorite political blogs — American Madness Journal by Shower Cap (https://showercapblog.com/):
Joe Biden > Howling Asshats, and Other Observations
The State of the Union put me in mind of my all-time favorite evening spent watching politics: the 2012 vice presidential debate. There’s something about watching Joe Biden play with his food that works for me.
It was like a nature show, only better; you were absolved of any feelings of sympathy for the wildebeests, because you knew from previous episodes that the wildebeests were assholes. The look on Joe’s face, when he saw how easy it had been to bait these dopes into a Social Security fight, I’ve never seen that look in real life, only on the faces of 8-year-old boys in black and white movies, when they race downstairs on Xmas morning to discover a bicycle-shaped package next the tree.
Jowls trembling with theatrical fury, they bellowed, “How dare you, sir? How darrrrrrrrre you accuse the Republican Party of seeking cuts to entitlements?” and Joe’s grin grew wider, visions of news cycles to come dancing in his eyes like sugarplum fairies.
(February 10)
All Things Being Equal, I’d Rather Be the Jobs Guy
Writing about Republican politics is like babysitting the shittiest kids in the world, and honestly, I feel like these little assholes owe us a good, long nap. Never a moment’s fucking peace. Little shits.
. (February 3)
Marjorie Taylor Greene and the 221 Dwarfs
Before we dive into the latest antics from Kevin’s kooky kakistocrats, let’s take a moment to remember the context: this is an audition, folks. This is the Republican Party putting its best foot forward. These are their church clothes, and this is their best behavior. Yikes. Yiiiiiiiiiiiikes.
(January 27)
So ends this day. A day I consider not bad*, not bad at all.
Sunday arrived with a thud. It was a day in which I promised myself I would not spend it riffing through the internet and typing T&T. We have just passed noon, I have spent the morning riffing through the internet and typing here in T&T. I am committed to do better this afternoon. The temperature today is expected to reach 70F here in the Sacramento Area (I need to find a better nickname for this City other than Sacratomato.). 70 degrees in mid-February, one would think I was living somewhere at the edge of the tropics instead of here in the middle of the Great Valley. I am confident, however, that February will not disappoint me and I will still suffer through several days of misery and darkness before the month of the roaring lion comes by to remind me that I still have another month to grumble about the weather before the flowers in the Enchanted Forest bloom again.
At about 4PM I took the dog for a walk while Naida napped upstairs. My toe felt a bit better she the walk was not unpleasant. The temperature still toyed with 70F and we walked a bit further than usual. I sat and rested on one of the benches along the way. While sitting there other dog walkers walked by on the path. The first ones do do caused Booboo to break into his usual hysterical barking and pulling on the leash. Surprisingly, the dogs ignored him completely. I think that humiliated him. He sunk onto the ground his head between his paws and did not utter a sound whenever other dogs and their walkers passed by our bench.
Today was not bad* either.
Monday, Monday, Monday — Lunch with Naida at Ettore’s. Later, a nap. Then a walk with Naida and Booboo the Barking Dog. Then a dinner of leftovers. Read a bit about Scipio Africanis Some television — The Reader a sad film about the Holocaust. And then to bed. Nothing.
That night I dreamt of my brother Jim. In the dream he died of suicide. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I went downstairs and watched the skies lighten and a new day begin—Valentine’s day
Some believe Valentine’s Day may have been created during the Middle Ages, when it was believed that birds paired as couples in mid-February. Others consider it was most likely created to replace the pagan Roman holiday, Lupercalia.
The Lupercalia had its own priesthood, the Luperci (“brothers of the wolf”). On February 15, a male goat (or goats) and a dog were sacrificed. An offering was also made of salted mealcakes, prepared by the Vestal Virgins. After the blood sacrifice, two Luperci foreheads were anointed with blood from the sacrificial knife, then wiped clean with wool soaked in milk, after which they were expected to laugh. This was followed by the sacrificial feast after which the Luperci cut thongs (known as februa) from the flayed skin of the animals sacrificed and ran with these, naked or near-naked widdershins along the Roman Palatine Hill after which many of the noble youths would run up through the city naked, striking those they meet with shaggy thongs. Many women of rank purposely got in their way, and like children at school present their hands to be struck, believing it would encourage pregnancy and ease delivery should they become so.
The first recorded association of Valentine’s Day with romantic love is believed to be in the Parliament of Fowls (1382) by Geoffrey Chaucer, honoring the first anniversary of the engagement of fifteen-year-old King Richard II of England to fifteen-year-old Anne of Bohemia.
In Middle English:
“For this was on seynt Valentynes day
Whan every foul cometh there to chese his make
Of every kynde that men thynke may
And that so huge a noyse gan they make
That erthe, and eyr, and tre, and every lake
So ful was, that unethe was there space
For me to stonde, so ful was al the place.”
In modern English:
“For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day
When every bird comes there to choose his mate
Of every kind that men may think of
And that so huge a noise they began to make
That earth and air and tree and every lake
Was so full, that not easily was there space
For me to stand—so full was all the place.”
Today is Wednesday, a spring like day with the sun shining and the temperature hovering in the low sixties. The local water company is putting in new water pipes in the subdivision. This morning they are doing so beside our house. Their activity has driven the dog into a frenzy of barking, At about noon I left for lunch with Hayden in the Golden Hills. We had a lunch of pizza at Nugget’s Supermarket in town center. While we were discussing old times we had together, he told me that when he was 5 years old he was so afraid of growing up that he made up a song entitled “I want to stay five forever,” which he would sing with tears in his eyes at bedtime until he fell asleep.
On Thursday after lunch at Ettore’s Naida and I took the dog for a walk along the American River. It was a grey chilly afternoon. The trees were mostly bare. The storms of last month left many of them toppled or broken. I had not walked along this section of the river since shortly after January’s deluge. At that time the paths that we usually walked on were submerged, flooded by the river. This evening the paths were passable the river receded about 15 feet or more. It still however covered the beach and low lying areas. As we walked along we could see the silt covered branches of the naked bushes and trees extending above our heads. It was hard to imagine this dark bleak landscape was the same as the one we walked through last Autumn.
The same area a little over a month before the storms began.
*Pookie’s classifications of the subjective quality of his days. In ascending order — “Shit,”(Sometimes, “Porca Miseria”) “Meh,” (I am not impressed), “Nothing” (nothing) “Eh”[maybe good maybe not so good], “Hmm,”(Get back to me later), “Not Bad” (But not too good either),”OK” (Good, not great but good), “Good” (Not bad at all), “Great” (Great!)
“[T]he things we mean to do rarely match the things we actually accomplish.”
Winter, Evan. The Fires of Vengeance: 2 (The Burning) (p. 440). Orbit. Kindle Edition.
I am not so sure that those things I may have actually accomplished were so much greater than I meant to do. I actually never had much ambition to do anything. When I was a wee nubbin, I was often asked by the big people that tainted my existence what I wanted to be when I grew up. I would always answer, “A bum, a tramp.” They would inevitably respond with a “Heh, Heh” like they were suffering a bout of constipation, formed their lips into a straight line that I assumed was a smile of some sort, and walk off.
In fact, I rarely recall doing something I really wanted to do. Usually, I generally would find myself with no option, or someone would ask me to do something and as a result I would find myself entangled in something I knew little about. In those cases, I would try to do my best — a very low standard of accomplishment for sure. As a result, usually whatever I accomplished generally exceeded my expectations.
This may explain why I have not mentioned the effects of the recent “River of Storms” here in the Enchanted Forest in Sacramento where I live.
For weeks now, it has been raining and windy while the local news readers on TV prattle on about this magnificently destructive event. I, during this time, refused to go outdoors if there was the slightest chance the I would become uncomfortably damp from the drizzle or cold from the wind. So, I would only go out when the weather was relatively dry and windless. I would on those days either go food shopping or visit Hayden for Lunch. On none of those excursion did I take any special notice of any particular evidence of the storm damaged landscape shown on the news.
I left walking the dog on those more rainy and windy evenings to Naida. When she returned she would tell me stories about the flooding along the banks of the American river and the tree fall caused by the storms. I dismissed her stories as being generated by someone not used to real storms. New York City and the surrounding are where I grew up is one of the 3 or 4 stormiest cities in the United States. Even during the most average of its years there it has three to four times more annual rainfall than the Sacramento area. The 7 or so inches that could fall in a storm in California storm over a day or more would fall in three or four hours in New York.
As for flooding, the geology of the place was well suited to adsorb the water from the most severe storms. I lived perhaps 5 miles or less from the Hudson River and there were at least two major streams and many minor ones to carry away excess water even when the ground was saturated.
My town and the others often had been developed before the coming of the developers and their need to maximize their profit by covering as much or their land with salable product. The people building their homes at that time wanted little to nothing to do with potentially flooded land or the costs of the dikes or embankments and generally put their homes beyond the flood plain. Over the years these areas have become parks or natural areas along motorways. Often the smaller streams were encased in pipes large enough to handle most storm induced floodwater events. As a result, I treated the recent hysteria as a product of regional standards of natural disaster severity and ignored it.
Today, Monday June 9, 2023, Naida suggested we go for a walk with Booboo the dog along the American River that flows only about thee or so blocks from our house. I looked out the window and saw it wasn’t raining and the trees were not hysterically swaying from the buffeting of the wind. It must be a hiatus between the various storms I thought — so I agreed.
As soon as we stepped out of the door, I could see branches of thees lying on the path to the street. A house two or three doors down from ours I could see had a fallen tree lying across its crushed roof.
Tree fall blocked the path to the top levee of levee next to the house so we took a path further on. We walked up that path to the top or the levee and on to the flat lands that extend until they reacher the twenty foot or so bluffs that led down to the river. As we walked toward the river, we could see that the water had overtopped the bluffs and covered most of the path we used to walk on. The river looked at least twice the width that we were used to seeing, Many trees that used to grow on the bluff had fallen. Across the river we could see that the water was lapping at the base of the Levee. On our side, a rise in the river of of a foot or two would have it lapping at the levee here on out side. (Isn’t there a song named “Lapping at the River?)
Naida pointed out sink holes that had begun appearing on the flat lands and fresh landslides that appeared at the edge of the water. One landslide we discovered had begun to undermine the temporary road built to allow access to the crews and equipment to the billion dollar levee repair project.
From top left then Clockwise: Naida standing by the small creek that used to be the path along the bluff that we usually walked on; The bridle path also filled with water; Naida and Booboo passing under one of the trees uprooted by the storms;The American River bout twice as wide as usual.From top left and clockwise: View of the swollen American river from the top of the Levee; One of the sink holes just beginning; A small landslide along the river bank; The landslide undermining the roan to move men and equipment to repair the levee and the banks of the river.
We returned home then went out for dinner at Zoccolo’s a Mexican Restaurant we like after which we did some food shopping and returned home to nestle in and await the next storm expected to arrive later tonight.
It is now Wednesday. I do not recall going outside the last few days but I do recall spending most of my day in bed one of those days. Today, I am more animated. I have an appointment with a new dentist. I find that a welcome break from grey days and terminal ennui.
It was an interesting trip to the dentist. Her name is Smita Khandwala. She is from India, I believe, and has a heavy accent. I told her that all I want was for my remaining teeth to last for 5 years so that I can enjoy chewing my food until I die or trundle off to the old folks home. After a lot of X-ray’s and rooting around in my mouth, she said that she could probably give me only three years at best.
That night, Naida woke me up to tell me that she could not rid her mind of a song rattling around in her mind as she slept. She then sang it to me. Unfortunately, I was not wearing my hearing aids and could not make out the words or the tune. After that, we went back to sleep until the morning.
It was sunny that day and in the morning Naida accompanied by Booboo the Barking Dog took a walk around the neighborhood to examine the state of the clean-up from the storms. She did not get far. Two houses down from our house she came upon an Asian-American woman. She discovered that the woman and her 94 year old father had been living there for the past 25 years. In all the time Naida and I have been living here we had never seen either one. They talked awhile about the house across the path that had the tree crush its roof during the storms. After this she walked to the river and back and reported the river had receded a bit leaving behind layers of soft sand.
While Naida and Booboo were on their walk, I began reading a book by Benjamin Lqabatut entitled “When We Cease To Understand the World” that was given to us as a Christmas present by Peter and Barrie. It has been described as “…a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present.” I have only gotten through a few pages and find it intriguing. At one point, when discussing Fritz Haber the Jewish inventor of the poison gas used by the Germans so effectively during WWI only to find himself hounded from Germany15 years later by the Nazi’s. (Hitler himself present at perhaps the first use of Haber’s discovery, Ypres, was so horrified by its effects he banned its use by German forces in WWII. Another of Haber’s discoveries was the mechanism to extract Nitrogen from the air just when the natural sources of nitrogen for fertilizers (guano, corpses, etc. were becoming exhausted)
“The Haber–Bosch process is the most important chemical discovery of the twentieth century. By doubling the amount of disposable nitrogen, it provoked the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 to 7 billion in fewer than one hundred years. Today, nearly fifty per cent of the nitrogen atoms in our bodies are artificially created, and more than half the world population depends on foodstuffs fertilized thanks to Haber’s invention.”
Labatut, Benjamín. When We Cease to Understand the World (p. 28). New York Review Books.
Labatut points out that even Haber believed there is a dark downside to his discovery, in addition to the uncontrolled population growth it generated that threatened, humanity’s future.
“Among the few possessions Fritz Haber had with him when he died was a letter written to his wife. In it, he confessed that he felt an unbearable guilt; not for the part he had played, directly or indirectly, in the death of untold human beings, but because his method of extracting nitrogen from the air had so altered the natural equilibrium of the planet that he feared the world’s future belonged not to mankind but to plants, as all that was needed was a drop in population to pre-modern levels for just a few decades to allow them to grow without limit, taking advantage of the excess nutrients humanity had bestowed upon them to spread out across the earth and cover it completely, suffocating all forms of life beneath a terrible verdure.
Labatut, Benjamín. When We Cease to Understand the World (p. 34). New York Review Books.
I wonder if the coming collapse of human fertility rates will justify Haber’s fears, or will it have the opposite effect — providing the vegetative sustenance for humanity by replacing the caloric loss of animal food sources. I foresee someone writing a book about this in the near future either to justify vegetarianism or to confirm unbridled capitalism’s superiority because its invisible hand always produces a happy ending no matter how violent the rape.
On Friday, it rained hard enough that I had to cancel my lunch with Hayden. I slept for most of the day. Saturday I watched the Niner’s victory over the hated Seahawks in the first playoff game. Later I began reading the Biblical Books of Enoch. I had always wondered why, although they were part of the Hebrew canon even into to the third of fourth centuries AD, they were excluded in most Christian versions of the Bible. After reading about half of the first book, I began to understand why. It seemed like old Enoch was describing a universe that seemed closer to that of the other religions in the region than to that of the Hebrews.
Monday. It was clear and relatively warm outside. Since it was not raining, I drove into the Golden Hills for lunch with Hayden. Over meatball sandwiches at Subway’s, we discussed the Illuminati and the goings on at the Bohemian Grove. After I got home, I felt exhausted and took a nap. That evening after I woke up, we watched Antiques Road Show. There was a Walter Johnson signed baseball that was valued at $60,000. This is how we spend much of our time during our declining years. I’ve had worse times in my life.
Sometimes the least auspicious of days turn out to be, if not particularly glorious, than frustratingly interesting. On Wednesday, I woke up as usual, fairly late in the morning and ate breakfast in the early hours of the afternoon. My plans for the day included attending a meeting of Campus Commons home owners troubled by a proposed new development in the midst of the Enchanted Forest and later a visit from my sister Maryann who had driven from Mendocino to attend a meeting of the Economic Development Directors of California’s rural counties.
By about 3:30PM, I had dressed and set off to the meeting of concerned resident to see what the bru-ha-ha was all about. I myself was a bit upset by the proposal to tear down what I had thought one of the best designed commercial buildings in California and replace it with a residential development. The building was in the so-called “California Style” first popularized in the initial development at Sea Ranch by my friend Bill Turnbull.
About 50 people showed up. I approached a woman who was setting up an easel and appeared to be someone in charge. I asked her if she had a rendering of the proposed project. She said we were not here to talk about the project. “What were we her to talk about” I inquired somewhat taken aback. “We’re here to learn how organize ourselves for the meeting with the city councilman and the planning staff at the meeting two weeks from now” she responded. Being somewhat confused by her response, I decided to ask no more questions and I took my seat..
She began the meeting by announcing she was a meeting consultant and that we were here not to discuss the the project but to decide how we were going to prepare for the meeting in two weeks. I could not help but jump up and ask, “How are you going to get people prepared for a meeting about a project if they do not know what the project is about and its status?” Then all hell broke loose and people started shouting.
Now, I have been involved with meeting dynamics consultants of every philosophical and technical approach known to humankind and even a few that seemed derived from the animal kingdom — from the Harvard designed Synectics, to mom and pop operation and have found them fascinating in concept, fun in participation and useless in practice. Anyway, after a bit, she announced that if anyone wanted to find out more about the project they could meet with someone who knows outside. So I and a fairly large group trooped outside and gathered on the deck by the pool. We met with a woman who didn’t know much about what was going on about the project but was very firm and eloquent about her opposition to iot. She mentioned that at the developers presentation one of the developers, a member of a prestigious Sacramento real estate development family read to the group “if you feel my development is bad you should see what my cousin it planning to do on a parcel a few blocks away.” There was also a local real estate dealer there, a very old woman. Some of the people accused he of being a spy. She denied it claiming she was too old to be one. I noticed she was carrying some renderings and asked to see them. She showed them to me. When I saw the rendering I exclaimed, “That’s awful. That’s really awful. That’s really really awful.”
The existing commercial building sits on a berm about 20 feet high, it is set back well over 40 feet from the street. The area in front is well landscaped including several very large imposing trees. The development proposes to remove the commercial building, grade the berm down to to street level, remove all the trees and every ounce of vegetation and place thereon two solid ranks of attached, completely uninteresting three story homes with the first within three feet of the street and the project covering just about the entire site. Campus Commons that surrounds this proposal has a density of about two units per acre but the homes and placed it clusters of three up to about ten units to allow the trees, vegetation and screening that allows the arboreal, horticultural and environmental model development it been for about the past 50 years Now some argument could be made that this project was socially acceptable because it was city infill that would provide higher density lower costs dwellings that would alleviate the current housing crisis in the area. It could be that, except for the fact that the developer plans to market each unit at one million dollars or more more than twice the average going price for the other homes in the area.
After that, I returned to the meeting inside which now was being conducted by an elderly gentleman (perhaps younger than me) in a walker who had taken over the meeting and was explaining the issues involved with the development and writing them of a sheet of paper. After a while he stopped and asked, “Mr land use attorney do you have anything to add?” Well at first I did not know he was talking to me because my hearing aids are not particularly effective at meetings. Eventually someone next to me got me to understand it was. I answered, “ I wouldn’t know. I could not hear a word you said, nor is my eyesight strong enough to see what you wrote.” However,” I continued, “if you email your list to me I will look it over and if I see anything I will let you know.” This was met with a lot of laughter after which I slipped out and returned home.
About a half hour after I returned home my sister Maryann arrived. We went out to have dinner at Ettore a bakery/restaurant Naida and I enjoyed. The food was good and we had a fine time. After returning home Naida was not feeling well and went to bed. Maryann and I decided to set up the television that my grandchildren Anthony and Aaron got us for Christmas to replace the older smaller one we have been using.So, we took the new one out of its wrapper and box. Read the directions. Screwed and fitted what needed to be screwed and fitted. Plugged in this and that into where and wherever until finally I turned it on and it worked. That was when I made a shocking discovery. This was a smart TV. Unlike the TVs I was used to where you are automatically contacted with network television and have to contract with streaming channels, these smart TVs come streaming channels ready and one has to do a number of complicated things to hook up to the network channels. I asked my sister if she knew what to do. She said, “I don’t watch network television. Anyway, I live on the Mendocino Coast we don’t really don’t get network television. So, I don’t know what to do.”
We spent the next hour trying and failing. I then sent Mary up to bed because she had to depart early the next morning to get to her meeting. I spent a couple of hours more. I had no success but learned I probably needed to get a special antenna. So, acknowledging defeat, I went up to bed.
At about 1:30AM I woke up from one of those terrible nightmares that I had not had for several months. No not about Smart TVs. It was more like a violent version of my fantasy novels. I won’t tell the story here but in it I was involved in a cross country battle with hoards of white creatures. It was frightening and exhausting, so I woke myself up. Although, I knew I could fall asleep again, I was too exhausted to continue the fighting, so I got up and went down stairs to read for a while. I had little interest it returning to The Books of Enoch I had been reading because frankly it resembled my dream, all flying through the air, battles with demons and the like so while searched through my library for an alternative I came across a book with the simple title of “Debt: The First 5,000 Years .” I had gotten it because I had wanted to have a better understanding of debt since I had always believed debt predated money and the modern merchants of debt were not really a part of whatever we think capitalism is although it may be a controlling if not actually the controlling influence on it,
The first chapter of the book was entitled “On the experience of moral confusion.” It was followed by:
debt
• noun 1 a sum of money owed. 2 the state of owing money. 3 a feeling of gratitude for a favour or service. Oxford English Dictionary
If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, debt • noun 1 a sum of money owed. 2 the state of owing money. 3 a feeling of gratitude for a favour or service. —
Oxford English Dictionary If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars,
This made me a little dubious about my choice of reading matter. As I got further into the book, however, I could not help to notice the facility and thoughtfulness of the authors writing. A few pages in I ran across the following passage
For almost two years, I had lived in the highlands of Madagascar. Shortly before I arrived, there had been an outbreak of malaria. It was a particularly virulent outbreak because malaria had been wiped out in highland Madagascar many years before, so that, after a couple of generations, most people had lost their immunity. The problem was, it took money to maintain the mosquito eradication program, since there had to be periodic tests to make sure mosquitoes weren’t starting to breed again and spraying campaigns if it was discovered that they were. Not a lot of money. But owing to IMF-imposed austerity programs, the government had to cut the monitoring program. Ten thousand people died. I met young mothers grieving for lost children. One might think it would be hard to make a case that the loss of ten thousand human lives is really justified in order to ensure that Citibank wouldn’t have to cut its losses on one irresponsible loan that wasn’t particularly important to its balance sheet anyway.
This reminded me of the writing of David Graeber the co-author of the magnificent anthropological masterpiece The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. So I stopped reading and returned to the front of the book and sure enough it was. Unfortunately, in 2020, he died on a visit to Venice. He was only 59 years old.
I returned to the body of the book where he begins to overturn the the traditional assumptions of economists that existed since Adam Smith created their profession which later practitioners attempted to claim it to be a science.
Lewis Henry Morgan’s descriptions of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, among others, were widely published—and they made clear that the main economic institution among the Iroquois nations were longhouses where most goods were stockpiled and then allocated by women’s councils, and no one ever traded arrowheads for slabs of meat.
Graeber, David. Debt (p. 47). Melville House.
With this and other examples as far back as Mesopotamia and earlier, we learned there was never a barter economy that morphed into a money based economy as the economists opined.
So at that, I closed the book promising myself to read further into it during the next few days, went back upstairs and returned to bed. I did not dream that I could remember and woke up late in the morning as usual. In thinking about the previous evening and night, I felt I had experienced one of those days, neither good nor bad but interesting none the less.
I restored our old TV to its pace of honor. Naida went out to the banks and Social Security offices nearby to replace the documents that she had lost when her wallet was stolen a week or so ago. I did nothing much except walk the dog as the day slithered from slightly sunny to grey and dropped silently into night. We watched The Conversation on the restored TV, I wrote this and we then trundled off to bed.
“Age was an implacable opponent that even he had to concede ground to.”
Liu, Ken. Speaking Bones (The Dandelion Dynasty Book 4) (p. 231). Gallery / Saga Press.
It has been a week since we returned to Sacramento from our trip to Italy. Since then, after suffering through two days or more of horrid jet lag, I have had lunch with Hayden, experienced fatigue, depression, and constipation, did some grocery shopping, and after about five day’s finally got around to unpackingonly to discover I had lost that marvelous belt that Naida had bought for my birthday. So ends all adventures — with memories and losses.
On Saturday, we went to the Saturday Morning Coffee. I wanted to wear the spiffy birthday shirt and belt to the coffee, but being so bummed out by the loss of the belt, I was unable to console myself by wearing only my new shirt. So, I wore my usual outfit and sat silently in my chair drinking coffee and listening to the jokes, announcements and discussions. This time I was able to hear the bad jokes, but I still don’t remember any of them. At some point we were joined by a mysterious visitor who seemed to mirror my emotions at the time.
The Saturday Morning Coffee and the mysterious visitor in the background.
Autumn has arrived in the Enchanted Forest. The weather it still warm and dry but not as hot as the summer months. The afternoon are in the high 70F and Low 80F, a bit cooler than it was in Italy. There is a wind that picks up now and then that was absent in the summer. The leaves have not turned color much and mort of the trees seem to be holding on to their foliage. Nevertheless, the ground is covered in detritus fallen from the trees that crackle as you walk along.
On Wednesday, I drove into the Golden Hills for my weekly lunch with Hayden. I met him at his house and he drove us to the take out pizza place we like so much located in Town Center called Formaggio Pizza. We decided to order something developed by the owner called a Stromboli. It is a concoction made of pizza dough, filled with the usual toppings, shaped like a burrito, sliced and heated in the oven like an ordinary pizza. It was absolutely delicious.
The Stromboli
The owner of the place, a pleasant young Armenian man who we have become friendly with during our many visits to his place told us his goal was to open two or three more places and then franchise the operation. We took the Stromboli and our drinks to a table behind the place that overlooks the lake. Hayden, had been telling me for several months now that he wanted to open a few pizza places of his own. He had been asked by the Armenian to come and work with him and wondered whether he should do so and learn more about running a pizza place and franchising. Restaurants are a difficult and risky business, I know. My family owned many restaurants while I was growing up, each failing or succeeding on almost a monthly basis. On the other hand franchising anything, if it takes off is a money making machine.
We then talked about his friends, school. and dreams after which he returned home and I drove back to the Enchanted Forest. The next evening Naida and I had dinner with her daughter Jennifer at Lemon Grass a Vietnamese restaurant we all enjoy. It was very good to see Jennifer again. She and Naida carried the conversation while I concentrated on the good food. They mostly discussed physical ailments, especially high blood pressure.
Days drifted by. The weather has become cooler. Since they have closed the pools for swimming, I have began a light upper body weight lifting regime at the gym in the clubhouse. I try to exercise there every other day.
Saturday arrived again along with the Saturday Morning Coffee. This morning I had a pleasant conversation with a women on the Architectural-Design Committee. It is the committee that controls what residents can do with the exteriors of their property. After, I sat by the pool and stared at the trees until Naida finished her socializing, roused me from my stupor, and we walked back home.
On Sunday, we attended the community Halloween Party. The party, organized by members of the Saturday Morning Coffee was the first large scale event they had gotten to put on since the end of the pandemic. Naida thought we should dress up in costumes for the party. I was dubious. Nevertheless she insisted and ran upstairs and brought down a long black wig for her and a Man In The Iron Mask mask for me. Apparently they had come from a long ago Halloween Party she had attended and for some reason she kept in a drawer somewhere. We donned them and walked to the Nepenthe Club House where the party was about to begin.
We thoroughly enjoyed the festivities. There was a hay ride:
Cute kids in adorable costumes:
Bizarre Costumes:
And more traditional ones:
And a few more photographs:
The next day, Halloween itself, we spent most of it sleeping. It the evening we went out for a take out dinner. There were no Halloween revelers out and about. We thought that was strange. At home we watched a program about Zombies. After that, we went to bed. Tomorrow November begins. It has all the makings of possibly one of the worst months of our lives.
“Humans are fundamentally limited, generalising creatures, living on auto-pilot, who straighten out curved streets in their minds, which explains why they get lost all the time.”
Haig, Matt. The Midnight Library (p. 149). Penguin Publishing Group.
Let’s begin this post with the Saturday Morning Coffee at the Nepenthe clubhouse since it seems to be the steadily reoccurring event that marks the current phase of my life here in the Enchanted Forest.
The Saturday Morning Coffee crowd. More or less from left to right: On the far left are a group of four, three men and one woman (only two of the group are visible). Of that group two are reputed to have been spies for the US government. I do not know which two. Behind the big man in the chair who I refer to as Big Bill sits Naida. Next to her is the most recently elected member to the HOA. I do not know the next two woman to the right, but next to them holding a cup of coffee is Gerry with a G, our fearless leader. I do not recognize the rest of them except for the man in the far right whose head is sticking out into the photo. He is the Reverend.s
There were at least thirty-people there this week. The Reverend sat down next to me. I like the Reverend. He is a Methodist minister and a good talker. What I do not like about him is that he gets me to talk — to talk too much. I do not remember what I talked about but it must have been good because I was embarrassed at the end. Luckily at that point, Gerry with a G, our leader rang her little bell and silence spread throughout the room. Sometimes I think I show up to these things only to hear her ring her little bell and see the room go quiet. “That’s real power,” my sister said at the time she attended one of these coffees.
The meeting began, as it usually does, with a few rounds of dumb jokes. Then my hearing aid battery died and I could not hear the rest of the announcements so I spent the time taking photographs. After the meeting Naida and I sat and talked with a Japanese woman who lived near the clubhouse. We invited her to meet with my son’s wife Hiromi when she arrives tomorrow with Jason and my granddaughter Amanda.
For two days I have been keeping in mind something I wanted to write here, but I have now forgotten it… Wait, I think I remember… it may be or not be what it was but it will do. Anyway, my last T&T post prompted responses that humbled me. Thank you all.
Sunday, It has been almost a week of temperatures in the 100sF. It has another three or four more days before it dips again into the 90sF. The heat certainly tires out this old fella. Anyway, we spent the day cleaning up the house and grocery shopping in preparation for my son’s visit this evening. At about 3:30 in the afternoon, we decided to quit for a while so, I wrote this while Naida read me interesting bits of the obituaries that appeared in the Sunday edition of the local newspaper. I refuse to read the obituaries, but Naida seems to like to. The stories she chooses to read to me are interesting at times — not the deaths, but the weirdness the deceased had gotten into during his or her life.
While sitting here on the sofa together, Naida looked at the painting I had done of a man standing in a canoe. It sits above her desk. I have always pointed out to anyone whe may have inquires about it that, as attractive as the painting may be, someone who tries to stand up in a canoe is sure to find himself soon in the water. Naida said she thinks the painting represents looking into the future. “He has rowed far down a long placid river,” she mused, “and he has just gotten up to see what is ahead of him. Far off he sees the river sliding into the ocean and the great ocean waves breaking there are sure to capsize him.” I don’t know about that. I painted it from a postcard I liked. It was the color and the melodrama (kitschiness) of the scene.
At about 8:30, Jason, Hiromi, and Amanda arrived. Amanda planned to participate in a week-long Girls’ Government event at Sacramento State University. We en joyed a pleasant dinner together.
Clockwise from the upper left: Jason watching Naida cooking; sitting down at dinner; dinner featuring petrale sole, mozzarella and prosciutto, and a kale salad; Naida and Amanda in the guest bedroom, Amanda and I listening to Naida play the piano; a toast for the family get-together.
The following morning, we dropped my granddaughter off at Sacramento State University where she was to attend the event called Girls Government, or something like that, where the atendees assume the roles of participants in State and local legislatures.
After seeing Amanda off to her dormitory, Jason drove off to play a round of golf at a nearby golf course and Hiromi and I took a nice long walk across the Guy West bridge and then through the Enchanted Forest back to the house.
Following a few hours of rest from our long walk, we set off to visit the Japanese woman, Setsuko Matsui Colby, we had met at the Saturday Morning Coffee. She moved into Campus Commons in January and was very lonely because she knew very few people in the area. Setsuko, the daughter of a wealthy Japanese family, had been married to a professor of psychology and had lived in Irvine California. Her two grown children eventually came to live with her.
At the Saturday Morning Coffee, I had mentioned my daughter-in-law was Japanese and would be visiting us in a few days. Setsuko was very eager to meet her.
We were met at the door by her son a thin pleasant young man in his early thirties. Setsuko came down stairs and was very happy to see us, especially Hiromi. They both sat there grinning and exuberantly speaking with each other in Japanese. It was so poignant that Naida and I began to cry. Setsuko then told us her story — about coming from a wealthy Japanese family and living in a home in Japan that occupied several floors at the top of a high-rise — About being married off to an abusive, wealthy American and being forced to live in Orange County — about a high-performing son attending one of the the most prestigious academies in Boston who after a terrible life threatening motorcycle accident experiencing serious psychological problems. We then toured the house. She described the various Japanese artworks and mementos she had preserved.
After a couple of pleasant hours, we left and returned home.
From upper left clockwise: Setsuko and Hiromi; Naida and Setsuko’s son; Hiromi; Naida; Setsuko; me.
(This morning while typing this, the television was on as usual. An item came on about the recent US Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade. Naida went off on a rant, unusual for her, attacking the decision and listing its dolorous effects on women and society. Go Naida.)
Anyway, Jason then returned from his golfing excursion and we all took naps. A bit after we got up at about 5 or 6PM they left and returned to San Francisco.
On Tuesday, the 11th or 12th day of plus 100F, we spent most of the day avoiding the heat. We watched the January 6th congressional hearings marveling and grunting at the testimony as appropriate .
Later we drove to the repair shop to pick up the automobile and return the car we had been using to the rental agency. When we got home we were exhausted from the heat and I took a nice one hour nap.
That evening at about 6 PM, the temperature had just dropped to 99F I went for a swim in the pool. There were no children this evening. As I was swimming my laps three large women jumped into the pool. They were carrying containers holding cocktails and their bodies were encircled by flotation devices. They floated about the deep end indiscriminately like a mote subject to Brownian motion. When one swims through swarms of small children they simply bounce of you and move on. These woman,however, were solid enough and their movements so haphazard that I had little doubt that I would crash into one and sink to the bottom of the pool, So I got out of the water and sat in to sun to dry off. Eventually, they coalesced so that all three congregated in a spall corner of the pool and partied, leaving the rest of the pool free for me to resume swimming. I did not do so, however, because I have a rule against returning to the water once I get out. So, after a while, I gathered my things and returned home.
The women partying in the pool.
On Wednesday the high temperature dropped to 98F. I cannot say I could feel the difference. I stayed in the house reading and puttering around in my computer until 4:30 when the temperature dropped to below 95. I then went to the pharmacy and grocery shopping.
Well, I did not actually get to go shopping. As I opened the garage and prepared to get into the car, I felt dizzy, faint, and nauseous. I returned to the house and laid back down of the sofa in the studio and took my blood pressure. I was very low 113 over 52. I had not eaten lunch so Naida prepared some scrambled eggs with onions and mushrooms.
By the evening, I felt better. I wonder what that was all about.
Thursday morning. I am still feeling a bit dizzy. The outside temperature has fallen substantially. It is 9AM and the temperature is in the mid 60sF. The high for the day is expected to reach only into the upper 80sF.
I set off to do the shopping I failed to do yesterday. When I think about it, my life now primarily consists of playing on the internet, napping, medical appointments, grocery shopping, and now and then lunches with HRM. I used to subscribe to the philosophy of whenever you are given a choice in life choose the most interesting unless it will harm someone more than you will harm yourself. Now even if life gives you a choice, it is your body that makes the choice and that choice seems usually to be, “Sorry perhaps some other time. I don’t feel up to it right now.” It seems to me odd that now when our tomorrows are becoming fewer we appear to be more inclined to primes ourselves to do tomorrow what we could have done today.
After shopping, I ate lunch and took a nap and then went for a swim and a pleasant walk. That evening we watched an interesting western on TCM called Dead Man. It starred Johnny Depp and was directed by Jim Jarmusch one of my favorite directors. As one would expect from a collaboration between professional weirdos like Depp and Jarmusch it was bizarre. I couldn’t possibly describe the plot except to say it concerned Indians and everyone dies in the end.
That night, I experienced another bout of dizziness and did not sleep well. Also my throat hurt and my back itched. Nevertheless tomorrow is another day.
The next morning, Naida and I had an argument about how to work the TV remote. (we only argue about how those modern implements of torture, TV remotes, computers, and smart-phones operate) So we shut it off and she went upstairs to dress for the day and I wrote this. The dog slept through it all.
As I write this now, I do not recall what else happened on Friday. I think we shopped for tomorrow’s lunch with Jason’s family. Later, I believe I went swimming. Anyway, it is now Saturday at about 4PM. This morning Jason and Hiromi arrived at about 8AM. After coffee and a quick breakfast Jason drove off to play golf. Hiromi, Naida, and I walked to Setsuko’s house. It was surprisingly chilly this morning with the temperature expected to barely exceed 80F at its high point later in the day. Upon arriving at Setsuko’s, we found that her and her daughter had prepared some food for us for lunch although it was not even 10AM. It was a special Japanese dish with noodles fresh vegetables and eggs. I ate a bit. It was quite good. Naida ate a large dish because she had not eaten breakfast. We also had some delicious Japanese green tee and were given instructions on how to properly drink it. While we sat there, we were treated with another display of oozing happiness shared by Hiromi and Setsuko. Again my eyes teared up.
At 10 o’clock, Hiromi, Naida, and I crossed the street and entered the Nepenthe Clubhouse for the Saturday Morning Coffee. I will leave off describing the coffee because it was like it always is except that Hiromi had a wonderful time talking with everyone, taking photographs, and even helping out. At one point, she came up to me and said, “I love it here. Everyone is so nice.”
After the coffee we returned to Setsuko’s house, ate more of the lunch, drank more green tea and talked. Eventually Hiromi and I left to go to Sacramento State to pick up Amanda after her week at the Girls Governance event.
On the way back Amanda told us about some or her experiences at the conference. We returned to Setsuko’s house, picked up Naida, drove home and we all took about a two hour nap.
From upper left clockwise: Jason and I after they arrived; Naida and I at the Saturday Morning Coffee; Amanda leaving the conference; Amanda and he friends at the conference; Naida and Amanda begin preparing dinner.
Jason returned from his golfing expedition. He and I left to go to take a dip in the hot tub, leaving Naida to begin dinner with Hiromi. Amanda remained asleep. We returned and ate a magnificent Sea Bass dinner prepared by Naida from a recipe she found somewhere. Then Jason, Hiromi, and Amanda left to return to San Francisco and I went to walk the dog.
From upper left clockwise: Jason in the Jacuzzi; Naida and Amanda bring out the dinner; Amanda by the table; Us at dinner; Naida and Amanda say goodby; Me and Amanda before she gets in the car to leave for San Francisco.
When I returned, Naida was at the piano playing Loch Lomond (“The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond”). She told me a story about her grandmother:
Elizabeth Syman was born in Scotland in the ancient city of Perth, “The Gateway to the Highlands. She grew up and attended Edinburgh University, rare for a woman at the time. She had a boyfriend and they were deeply in love. After, graduation with a degree in teaching, she discovered there were very few jobs available to her as most teaching positions were held by men and if any positions were available for women the pay, if they got paid at all, was negligible. She discovered that the best paying jobs in the world for teachers at the time was in the US and the best of those were in Utah. There being no other family members living in her town at that time, she decided to emigrate. The day before she was to leave for Manchester to catch the boat to the US she and the boy she was going to leave bought a pair of kid gloves, one of the gloves for her to keep and one for him. She kept that glove in a drawer in her bedroom for the rest of life. Also, that same day before she left Scotland forever, the two of them spent the day walking along the banks of Loch Lomond.
By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes,
Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomond,
Where me and my true love were ever wont to gae,
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomond.
O ye’ll tak’ the high road, and I’ll tak’ the low road,
And I’ll be in Scotland a’fore ye,
But me and my true love will never meet again,
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomond.
‘Twas there that we parted, in yon shady glen,
On the steep, steep side o’ Ben Lomond,
Where in soft purple hue, the highland hills we view,
And the moon coming out in the gloaming.
Later, Naida showed me a photograph of the family and described how they all died.
Naida edited and published a fascinating book written by one of her uncles entitled Symon’s Daughter. Before, going to bed Naida read to me from the book. It was both fascinating and horrid. They were very religious. The father was a Presbyterian minister. They did not celebrate Christmas.
On Sunday I slept until 4PM. I must have had a busy week.
One day, the afternoon had been quite hot, so we waited until dusk to take the dog on his walk. As we walked through the Enchanted Forest, Naida mentioned a woman who she had met on her walk a few days ago. The woman had been a singer with the Sacramento Opera and also, much to the amusement of her neighbors liked to periodically dress up a statue of a duck that stood next to the path. As chance would have it, as we passed the duck, now festooned with bright yellow flowers, we were hailed by someone in a nearby house. It was the woman. So, while carefully keeping social distance, we visited with her and learned that she had been a lead singer in the Opera; was a close friend of Bing Crosby who had fostered her career, worked as a US Marshall and was assigned to be the Marshall in charge of Squeaky Fromm; and was buddies with Naida’s friends, the Van Vleck’s who owned the massive cattle ranches along the Cosumnes River. Another bit of evidence that there are really only 400 people in the world or that those who dress up stone ducks have all the fun.
Days have gone by. I lost everything that I had written here except for the above paragraph. It is a shame really, What is lost from memory or some other means of preservation, at least as far as I am concerned, might very well not have happened. On the other hand, most of us carry memories and beliefs in our consciousness that never really existed, at least not as we remember them. I guess that makes us some sort of hybrid creature, half memory, and half fantasy. Humans are centaurs of consciousness, half real, half bullshit. That sounds about right.
The temperature outside for the past few days has topped 100 degrees. We wait until dusk before walking the dog. It is still hot and stuffy but the shadows and the lamplight adds a bit of mystery to our stroll through the Enchanted Forests. Some paths take us within a few feet of a house and the shock of a light from a window — at other times we see the houses, windows glowing softly, cluster under the trees across a meadow.
This evening we went for our usual walk. The jasmine were in bloom and their delightful aroma accompanied us as we strolled around. Upon our return to the house, we watched on CNN the burning of Minneapolis a city I always enjoyed visiting. TCM’s Edward G. Robinson festival continued for the third day.
Today I did not get out of bed until noon. Naida recognizing my commitment to lazing in bed that morning brought me my breakfast. After finishing breakfast, a little hanky-panky, and a romp with the dog, I got down to lying there with my smartphone searching the internet for the latest news of interest to me.
The first thing I came across was He Who Is Not My President’s heroic retreat to a bunker beneath the White House while those Americans who were not being felled by a pandemic were being endangered by rioting to protest police brutality. I thought back to the actions taken by the great Presidents of our history during times of crisis. This is not one of them. The current incumbent in the White House seems to be little more than an evil corrosive clown.
This evening, the Corrosive Clown in Chief had peaceful protesters attacked beaten and tear-gassed so that he could stroll across the street for a photo-op of him holding up a book he has never read while standing on property to which he was not invited. He now threatens to call out the military to attack the legitimate protestors and looters alike. And, I and most of the rest of us sit here and watch it all in shock and horror and wonder deep in our consciousness whether the spectator is really not much better than an accomplice. And then, I think again and tell myself am too old to be involved.
We have entered another spate of days where the temperature has exceeded 100 degrees. We sit indoors with the A/C turned on high, watching TV or in Naida’s case working on her memoir while I content myself with frequent naps, contemplating boredom, death, and strategies to keep Boo-Boo the Barking Dog from barking.
One morning, several days after I wrote the above paragraph, as I struggled to open my sleep encrusted eyes, across the room Naida sang and danced and the dog barked. All seemed well with my little corner of the world.
Of course, during confinement, adventures are hard to come by. Unless, they are in our dreams, or in books and media or whatever people can make up to keep themselves sane — or not. Actually, the “not” sounds more adventuresome. One can always, however, find adventure vicariously in someone else’s life or works.
For the last few weeks or so, I found myself rattling around in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. A pleasant enough pastime to avoid spending my time talking to myself. Of course, I talk to Naida and yes, I talk to the dog also — sometimes fairly lengthy conversations. True, it is mostly me doing the talking, but he does look at me with those wet and very understanding eyes, especially when it is getting close to dinner or walk time.
About a week ago, I plunged back into the blogs written by my dear friend Richard Diran or as he is sometimes referred to, Burma Richard. I found things there I had not noticed before. So, for the next week or two, I expect I will become somewhat fixated on him and his works.
The weather in the Great Valley has cooled considerably in the last few days — from the sweltering mid-90s to the brisk sixties. One day, a little after one o’clock, tiring of staring at the cloudy sky, and having little to do but finish a bowl of leftover pesto gnocchi for lunch, I decided to check my Facebook posts. In response to a collage of photographs of Trumpsters haunting the White House bearing the title “When he goes, they go too” that I had shared, Neal the Fish-Man replied:
“I’d like to see Eric locked up with that guy who beat up Jeffrey Epstein in prison the day before he killed himself. Miller should be burned at the stake. The rest of them should just be thrown off cliffs.”
That made my day.
This morning I had a Zoom conference with another doctor at UCSF about the potentially cancerous nodule discovered a few weeks ago in my lung. He confirmed the opinion of my oncologist that, although it may well be cancerous, it is too small and poorly placed to be biopsied. He did add that, in his opinion, it was of the slow-growing kind and would review it again after my next CT scan in three months. Meanwhile, he said he will confer with the surgeons about the viability of an operation to remove it.
Today Naida and I spent some time in the yard examining bugs. Actually one bug in particular. Naida discovered it crawling among the roses and wanted to know if it was a good bug or a bad bug. After some research on the internet, we decided it was a good bug and so she allowed it to live. So goes another exciting day in this age of self-quarantine.
So, the days wander by, I do not remember how many. I am tired of writing about the nothing during this season of our self-quarantine. I decided to go back to reading all day. I have collected a bunch of the silliest books I could find and nestled down to read them. Outside of that, I do not remember what we did, so as far as I am concerned whatever it was it does not exist.
Ok — I will break from my self-imposed silence to mention that last night while preparing for bed a tune was going through my mind but the only words that rattled through my head were “strawberry jam,” “Casey,” and a band playing. I asked Naida, who is a walking encyclopedia of music, what the actual lyrics were. She immediately sang out:
Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde And the band played on. He’d glide ‘cross the floor with the girl he adored And the band played on. But his brain was so loaded it nearly exploded; The poor girl would shake with alarm. He’d ne’er leave the girl with the strawberry curls And the band played on.
When she finished, I asked, “Was that before or after the game or did he strike out with the strawberry blond?” (For those under 70, this no doubt means nothing to you. For those over 70 it probably leaves you with an upset stomach.)
Speaking of upset stomachs more or less, the next morning both Naida and I woke up with massive attacks of diarrhea. I reasoned that there could be three causes for this — first embarrassment over our colloquy of the previous evening; second the onset of coronavirus; and third, the most likely, the effects of the fresh elderberry pancakes we ate that evening made from the elderberry flowers we picked on our walk along the American River yesterday. I also seem to have lost my smart-phone. All in all, I am having a thoroughly horrible morning and that’s not even including the dreadful dreams that kept me awake most of the night. Sharks — they were about sharks — everywhere. Why sharks? There are no sharks in the Enchanted Forest. Perhaps elderberry flowers beside their laxative powers were also hallucinogenic. Sharks — they were all over the place — coming through the windows, up the pipes, through the new floor — ugh…
The Elderberry Flowers
Today, a few days after I wrote the previous paragraph, my telephone showed up. I had searched for it using a find-your-phone app. The app indicated the phone was in a house a few doors away from ours. After two days of leaving notes and banging on doors with no response, I decided to explore the possibility that the app had identified the wrong house. So, guessing that the phone may be located in the same area of our house as the neighbor’s, I searched that area again — first in our downstairs with great vigor — to no avail. I went upstairs to the bedroom where the app showed that the phone lay on our bed about where the dog places his nose whenever he crawls under the covers at night. We had torn the bed apart previously but apparently not this tiny spot and sure enough there it was. I decided to forgo wrestling with the many questions and recriminations that passed through my mind and be happy in a melancholy sort of way.
Today, Naida discovered a spider that eats the bug that eats the mites that eat her roses. Somewhere there is a nursery rhyme in this. In was also the morning the garbage trucks and the leaf blowers came around the neighborhood. Boo-boo the Barking Dog doing what he does best — barked.
I drove into the Golden Hills to check up on HRM and the Scooter Gang. Tyson one of the original members is moving to Roseville. Kaleb, the youngest and most troubled is much happier because his older brother who bullied him has moved out. Of course HRM and Jake seem to float about happily in their automobile obsessions. I am pleased.
Today begins the Memorial Day weekend. We have no plans. I know I will take a lot of naps. I will walk the dog several times, watch the news and several movies on TV, read at least two novels, visit HRM once, look up something odd on the internet, and fall asleep on the chair in the garden one sunny afternoon. Life is full of surprises. Like this evening. We watched cartoon fairy tales.
That night in bed, N and I hugged and sang a bit of “Yes Sir! That’s My Baby” to each other and then fell asleep.
Take care. Keep on social distancing. And don’t forget to stop and smell the flowers.
Argh! This morning after I had written a substantial portion of this post, somehow I managed to erase it all. I spent much of the day trying various apps and searching the net for help retrieving it. Eventually, I gave up and tried to recreate it from memory — with only partial success. Some things are gone forever from the computer and others just from my memory but gone nonetheless.
It seems that at my age, adventures are more medical than physical, more psychological than hazardous and more fantasy than reality. Nevertheless, they remain as idiosyncratic and as personal as ever. Unfortunately, for me and for anyone who chooses to read or listen to them they become more garrulous and tedious the older I get. Forgive me my trespasses O. Lord for I am rounding the far turn and on my way home.
The early summer heat has settled on the Great Valley. The breezes of springtime have begun to slow and the sun’s warmth lightly caresses the morning. It is a fine day.
Today, I received a message from Hayden insisting I pick him up at the skatepark after school. I was worried. He rarely demands my assistance. So, I drove off into the Golden Hills. I stopped for lunch at an upscale Italian restaurant near Town Center. I had wanted to try it out for some time now. Its interior reeked of suburban elegance. It’s menu limited but expensive. The wine list, however, was extensive but overpriced. I ordered gnocchi in a squash and butter cream sauce along with a glass of prosecco. The meal was tasty but too heavy for my liking.
After lunch, I picked up Hayden along with his buddies Jake and Caleb. As he was getting into the car, I asked him what was so urgent. He said, “I want to buy a hat for my trip this summer to Cozumel with Jake and his family. I picked one out at Tilly’s in Folsom.” So, off we drove to Tilly’s in Folsom to buy the hat following which I drove them back to Dick’s house where, after warning them not to get into too much trouble, I drove out of the foothills and back to the Enchanted Forest.
On Saturday morning, we attended the Saturday Morning Coffee at the Nepenthe Club House. Winnie, the ex-model was there. She had not attended the Coffee for several months. She told me she is suffering from inoperable brain and lung cancer and is now on immunotherapy. Her prognosis is bleak and she began to cry as she told me this. She said she now spends her days walking her dog through the neighborhood enjoying the trees and flowers. She said that she had hoped to live into her nineties but now she would be fortunate to live until year’s end. After she left, I sat there for a while trying to asses how I felt after talking to her. Sad for her yes but in general puzzled about the lack of any depth to my feelings as though a barrier had been thrown up to mask my own fear.
On Mothers’ Day, we had Naida’s daughter, Sarah, her husband, Mark, and their son, Charlie over for lunch and had an enjoyable discussion about our respective travel adventures in Europe. We toasted all our moms. There were a lot of flowers also — mostly roses.
In the evening we watched the movie “I Remember Mama” on television. Although it all could be considered a pleasant Mother’s Day, still my mom wasn’t there. I miss her. Mother’s Day seems like just any other day without her around.
As a counterpoint to the day, that evening I watched Episode 5, Season 8 of The Game of Thrones in which the mother from hell, Cersei Lannister gets buried alive along with Jamie Lannister her lover, father of her children and twin brother (all one person) while Daenerys Storm-born of the house Targaryen, first of her name, the unburnt, queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar and the first men, queen of Meereen, Khaleesi of the great grass sea, protector of the realm, lady regnant of the seven kingdoms, breaker of chains and mother of dragons, from the back of her fire breathing dragon, Drogon, goes bat-shit crazy and destroys Kings Landing as well as burning to a crisp thousands of innocent woman and children who lived there. Sleep well tonight Pookie.
I did nothing the next day except sit in my chair, play on my computer and doze. That evening, Naida and I watched the Orson Wells directed movie, Mr. Arkadin. The movie featured Wells fondness for sometimes fascinating and at other times annoying camera angles and idiosyncratic plotting. In fact, when the movie was over, I realized I did not understand it at all, so the next morning I tried to find a synopsis of the plot. The first thing I discovered was that the critics understood what they saw as little as I did. Eventually, I found an adequate summary, but it still left me confused, not anymore about what occurred on the screen but why and who cares. Wells never finished editing the film before the producers forced its release. Some critics have called it one of the greatest movies ever made. Wells considered it a “disaster.” Oh, before I forget, there were a lot of close-ups of Wells’ face all bearded and goggle-eyed.
For the past eight months or so, I have published my various blog posts on Facebook in order to increase the “hits” on my blogs — not because I cared who or if anyone read them but to “beat my yearly hits record,” a game on which I spent not a little of my time. Now I believe Facebook has completely cut off my postings of the blog articles. Perhaps, they think I am a Russian bot.
Last night, Naida described how that morning she marveled at the many odd angles I had contorted my limbs into while I slept. We agreed on a new nick-name for me, Pythagorean Pookie. I like it.
On Tuesday, Maryann and George arrived. Maryann had to attend a training session regarding Federal Economic Development regulations in preparation for an exam she was to take on Monday that would if she passes, authorize her to administer ED grants. George had recently had his hip replaced needed someone to keep him company — just another decrepit old man with a cane like me. After they arrived, we had dinner in a local Mexican restaurant. The next day, Mary trundled off to her conference and George and I headed out for breakfast. Following breakfast, we drove to EDH to pick up HRM from school and drive him home. In mid-afternoon, after finishing her review course, Mary picked up George at our house and drove off to far Mendocino.
The next day, Suzie arrived in Sacramento for a meeting at a State Agency. After her meeting, Naida and I picked her up and drove to a local Japanese sushi restaurant for lunch. It was great to see her again. It has been too long. Naida and Suzie discussed growing up in Carmel. And we all told mostly funny stories about our experiences in coastal protection and politics as well as a few always interesting and often amusing tales featuring Terry and his many imbroglios.
The weekend arrived not as a lion nor for that matter as a welcome respite from the boredom or irritations of the week but unobtrusively sliding in like an introvert slipping into to a raucous party. The weather was meh, neither warm nor cold, nor sunny or stormy. I had no expectations or plans but an abiding curiosity to see what if anything may meander past my window.
On Friday, I picked up HRM and as I dropped him off told him the following: “Let me know if you need transportation this weekend. I say this not because I am eager to be your chauffeur, but because seniors like me approaching decrepitude just like adolescents often find themselves bored and for similar reasons. We need each other.” He seemed to grunt an assent as he exited the car.
Saturday brought the Saturday Morning Coffee again. Winnie was there. She seemed better this week. Back at the house, I watched, The Men from Laramie with Jimmie Stewart then took a nap. Followed that with The Manchurian Candidate, and Cabin in the Sky. Then I looked out the window to see if there were any meanderers passing by. It was raining, no meanderers out and about yet.
Waking up Sunday morning in Naida’s arms was delightful. The weather, however, was not. It broke grey and drizzly, The needles on the Deodar Cedars drooping by our window glistened with tiny droplets of water. But for the ashen skies, it might have added a sparkling beauty to the morning. Later, while standing before the mirror, I noticed my neck appeared a bit swollen in the area around my tumor. It felt so too. Naida also examined it and said, “I really feel no difference — but then my opinion may be affected by my not wanting to find any change and yours colored by your fear that there may be.” Perhaps next Saturday I can challenge Winnie to a race to the finish line. In any event, tomorrow is another day, a new week begins, additional adventures loom. As Rosanna Rosannadanna sagely observed, “It’s always something.”
These are gloomy days. Moody skies cover the Enchanted Forest as the winter storms pass over the Great Valley. Threatening they may look, but they leave behind only a ceaseless cold drizzle and little silver droplets on the branches of the trees — the only bright spot in the muted and silent landscape. I assume the storms reserve their wrath for the mountains depositing layers of new snow to the delight of skiers and those who fret about reservoir levels.
My mood is bleak also. There are three daggers aimed at me now. My cancer of course, but also an enhanced threat of infection and a shut down of my ability to pee threatening irreparable damage to my kidneys.
Naida had a bad cold. We walk around the house with masks on, wash our hands constantly and I try to avoid touching places she has touched as though…well, as though a dread disease lurks there — which of course it does. As Rosanna Rosannadanna says, “It’s always something.” And, at my age, that is probably truer than ever.
My daughter Jessica is in San Francisco, thanks in part to the government shutdown and to attend a funeral she is hesitant to talk about. I am very excited to see her. It has been a long time, perhaps two years, maybe more.
(Note: As I type this, I am also watching a movie about Giant carnivorous rabbits attacking a town in the western US. This has got to be the nadir of my existence.)
During the past few days, a lot of the usual annoyances of life sped by — towing my car and the rush to get it out of the pound, confusing discussions with pharmacists and medical professionals, and so on. Naida remains sick, Trump remains not my president, life continues as it usually does until it doesn’t, and I find myself unusually bored. But, tomorrow is another day (Scarlett O’Hara).
On Sunday, my daughter Jessica arrived. She drove up from San Francisco to see me. Seeing her after almost three years made me very happy. It has been too long. She looks well. She’s recovering from a series of concussions she experienced playing soccer over the years. The concussion injury to her brain caused several perception and other problems. We talked about our various maladies and other things. He Who is Not My President’s governmental shutdown has had one good result, my daughter, furloughed by the shutdown, was able to return to California and visit with me.
It is now Tuesday night. What I wanted to write here since that time has passed on from when I thought it important or at least depressed enough to think so. It appears another of my medicines had caused an allergic reaction that resulted in me wanting to simply give up. It has passed.
I don’t often give up. Not giving up has always been important to me. In the almost incessant fights I found myself in during my youth, I would not give up no matter how badly I was beaten. And, I was beaten most of the time.
During my years as a trial lawyer, I asked only to be assigned cases no one in the office would touch because they believed those cases were losers. I still managed to amass the third longest string of consecutive victories at the beginning of a career in the history of New York (while also losing my marriage because of my obsession).
I refused to be daunted by opposition from the medical profession and my own colleagues in setting up NY’s Mental Health Information Service that reformed NY’s mental health hospital system from the horror it inflicted on my mom and innumerable others. It became the model for the nation. That agency still exists today.
There was no option for me other than the approval of California’s Coastal Program as it was expected to be, and the successful establishment and financing of the innovative California Coastal Conservancy no matter the cost to me (another marriage) and to those that worked for me. That occupied 13 years of my life.
The same can be said for the law firm on whose management committee I served and obsessively fought against often unanimous opposition to alter the economic and social mores of the firm for the benefit of the workers, women attorney’s and the firm as a whole by, among other things, demonstrating that the health and profitability of the firm did not depend solely upon the efforts of those with the largest books of business who inevitably end up plundering the firm for their own benefit. The health of a firm depended as much upon the lowliest of paralegals and junior partners and that balanced practice groups are necessary in order to weather the effects of the various business cycles and that those groups adversely affected by a business cycle should not be punished by those groups benefiting from the cycle (e.g., bankruptcy and real estate often operate on opposing cycles).
As a member and later Chairman of California’s High Speed Rail Commission during a period when it appeared to be foundering, I put it back on track so to speak, by pushing through its EIR, changing its tendency for locating its stations at the edges of the cities to bringing them downtown where they would revitalize the communities, developing the concept of the HS network as a backbone transportation system for California whereby multiple regional transportation systems could connect to the downtown stations and service the entire region; and finally fighting against the rapacious efforts of the four of five large engineering firms who sought to control the process for their own benefit and who, I believe, can be blamed for much of the criticism HSR has been subject to since I was removed by Governor Schwarzenegger over the issue.
On the other hand, when I lost (most often a marriage), I usually ran away and started again and again somewhere else. From New York to Pennsylvania, to Rome Italy, to back to the US, to San Francisco, to Thailand, to The Golden Hills and now to the Enchanted Forest. In each place, often penniless, I licked my wounds, struggled with despair, indulged in excess and dreamed of renewal, a new life somehow somewhere, and ultimately I moved on. There was, however, even during these times always something I could not give up on, first Jason, then Jessica and now HRM. I may not always have been successful in their view, but I tried and they kept me more alive and happy than I am sure they believe I have benefitted them. But no more now, they are grown (perhaps not HRM) and despair now is reserved for those times when the pains and discomfort of my various maladies become too much and instead of not giving up, I sometimes long for the peace of oblivion.
Talk about depressing things, the HAC just towed our automobile again. I left them a nasty message and threatened to sue them.
B. UPDATE ON THE MYSTERIOUS ORB.
For those interested in the odd adventures of the Mysterious Orb, it has moved slightly from when it emerged from the bush behind which it had been hiding to show Nikki the way to our house. It has now rolled on a short way and appears to be intending to hide behind another bush to await for whatever the orb waits for next.
It moved from its hiding place behind the smaller bush on the right where it had hidden for a few weeks to the center of the space where Nikki saw it. The Orb has since then moved on toward the bush on the left. Whether it will choose to hide behind that bush or proceed on up the alleyway, I can only guess. I await the next episode in the adventures of the Odd and Mysterious Orb.
The Mysterious Orb —Photograph Taken From Our Garage.
Today about four days after the above was written, the Orb made its decision and is now well hidden behind the bush on the left.
A few days later, during an early morning walk, I passed by the alley where the Odd Orb was hiding. I noticed one of the Turkey Gangs pecking around that part of the alley near where the Orb was hiding. It got me thinking. Do you suppose it is the Turkey Gangs that are moving the Orb around? The birds are big enough to do so. If so, why? Another mystery.
C. OFF TO THE BIG ENDIVE ON THE BAY.
First, we bailed the car out of impoundment. I grumbled and plotted revenge on those I believed targeted me specifically. On the drive home in response to my complaints, Naida said, “I guess we know now that there is a wicked witch in the Enchanted Forest.”
Then we spent some time on our computers doing last minute things. Finally, we and the dog set off to the Big Endive on the Bay. We arrived at Peter’s house in late afternoon. My daughter arrived soon after. We had a pleasant evening reminiscing. Jessica planned to leave on Friday to go back to Washington DC. I will be sad to see her go I do not know when I will see her again.
The next day I met with my doctor and received the first glimmer of good news in at least the past three months. He said that cancer had shrunk enough to bring the possibility of an operation to remove it before the board of surgeons. They then efficiently scheduled all tests and my infusion to occur the remainder of the day.
That night we had dinner at a local Italian Restaurant that I used to enjoy when I lived in that neighborhood years ago. It used to cost about $10 for the same meal I enjoyed that night. Now, that same meal cost me $70. Nothing had changed but the wealth of those that now live in the neighborhood.
Later, Hiromi and my granddaughter Amanda arrived at Peter’s house for a visit.
D. BACK TO THE ENCHANTED FOREST.
We returned to the Enchanted Forest on Friday. On Saturday I drove into the Golden Hills to drive the Scooter Gang around. While we were driving HRM turned to me with a big smile on his face and said, “Pookie, I have a girlfriend.” How does one respond to that? I settled on, “Good for you” and high-fived him. Now I worry.
Among the books I have read so far this month was James Lee Burke’s most recent Robicheaux and Purcell saga. The boys are getting old — and they know it. They still, however, act like adolescents while Burke places in their minds the sorrows and sadness of aging heroes approaching their end. Although, the novel takes place by Bayou Teche in Louisiana and Monument Valley Arizona, the epilogue has Dave, Clete and Dave’s adopted daughter Alifair recovering from their efforts and injuries in a motel in Bodega Bay California and traveling up and down Highway One for entertainment.
Alas, I just got word that Lucia’s bar in Sacile, a place I always considered the happiest place on earth, is no more. It has succumbed to the downsizing of the nearby American military base and the Italian economy’s multi-year depression. Lucia is now working as a barista in one of the other cafes in the town. This is all so sad.
I am losing my hair as a result of the chemo. Great gobs of hair flitter down from my head often falling into my food as I eat, making it even more unappetizing than usual. It all amuses me. If it continues I will become the first person in my direct ancestry to go bald in at least five generations. My head looks like it is covered with down.
Thanksgiving Day brought with it an intermittent sun playing hide and seek with the rain. We had lunch in the Golden Hills with HRM, Uncle Mask, Adrian and N. I was surprised to see N there. She had come to California a few days before and will remain until late December when she will take HRM to Italy for the Holidays. The lunch featured a well-made ham with several toppings to choose from. I was a bit disconcerted because I had expected I would be minding H during Dick’s absence in early December but with N there, I expect that would not be necessary.
N and HRM
Later, we drove back to Sacramento for dinner with Naida’s Daughter Sarah, her family, and their two dogs, a black and white brindled standard poodle named George Washington and Franklyn Delano Roosevelt, a large mixed pit bull and retriever. We brought along Boo-boo, a mixed Chihuahua and whatever, who although he may have lacked the size and prestigious name of the other two dogs, by the end of the night had clearly acquitted himself as an equal.
Dinner included turkey with all the fixings and pumpkin pie and cheesecake for dessert. The cheesecake made by Sarah’s son Charlie, who happily explained to all of us the secret of making a perfect cheesecake — first rule “do not beat your eggs,” mix them slowly using only a certain rotation of one’s arms and shoulders. He then demonstrated the movement. It looked quite painful
B. POOKIE’S ADVENTURES IN THE ENCHANTED FOREST:
The rains have returned soft and gentle. The streets, lawns, and pathways in the Enchanted Forest glisten a brilliant red and yellow. Here and there pods from the Deodar Cedar litter the walkway like little banana slugs. For the first time, it seemed like autumn.
As usual, we attended the Saturday morning coffee at the clubhouse. Surprisingly, as many men attended this week as women. I sat a bit off to the side, observing as I often do. I could not help noticing the usual neatly coiffed hair on the spy who goes by the name “Ducky.” It always looks as though she just came from the hairdresser. Unlike most of us at this advanced age whose hair of various colors gone drab, interlaced with streaks or dreary grey, and winds about our heads like birds nests, hers, a brilliant white, sparkled like icy snow in the sunlight.
I decided to survey hands today. Most of the woman had long slender fingers gone knobby with age. The model’s fingers were the longest. Like many whose movements are often characterized as elegant, the tips of her fingers seemed to move as though they were independent of the hands to which they were attached. Naida’s hands, unlike the others, were the hands of someone who spent a life of a farm or a ranch, thick and strong.
I noticed while most kept their hands relatively still when they talked they would now and then gesture whenever they were making a point. Naida again was an outlier. Her hands flew about vigorously as she talked. She would not be out of place in Southern Italy. In fact, in Sicily, the Sicilians would consider her an uplifting and ebullient person before even hearing a word she had spoken. Alas, to these same people, her hand movements would appear to them as gibberish — meaningless noise. Americans use their hands while speaking only as punctuation. Without words it is meaningless. In Sicily, the gestures are words and have meaning independent of what is spoken.
We then returned to the house, Naida to work on her Memoir and me to write this. Later we walked the dog along the levee beside the American River. The setting sun shining through air recently washed clean by the rains lit up the autumn colors like fireworks.
On Sunday we sat around the house. Naida read to me sections from her memoir. As she read the words, my mind transformed them into scenes from a movie — the frightening 25 mile skate down the frozen Big Hole River; learning of her parents divorce; the comical introduction to her father’s new girlfriend; the infatuation of a 13 year old girl with her handsome uncle; the fight with her brother over a plate of macaroni and cheese; the dreams, the fears and the sorrows… It will be a wonderful book — aLittle Women with real drama.
The Author at Work in Her Studio
Monday I had an appointment with my primary care physician. As he entered the examining room, I said, “Since my surgeons agree I am a dead man walking, I intend to go out happy, pain-free and without my bowels turned into cement. So, I need you to prescribe the pills that will allow me to do so.”
“We are from birth all dead men walking, ” he responded. “Nevertheless, I think I can provide what you need. I even know of something that relieves pain without constipation.” He added that he understood what I was going through because he has had two bouts of his own with cancer. Also, his seven-year-old child was struck with bone cancer and had to have his leg amputated below the knee.
Once again, I found myself embarrassed and humiliated by my misplaced sense of humor.
The doctor a youngish man, in his late thirties or early forties, is built like an NFL linebacker and specializes in sports medicine. At my prior visits to his office, I noticed a deep sadness in his eyes that made me wonder. Now I know why.
He prescribed a healthy supply of Xanax to keep my spirits up, a pain reliever that keeps my bowels lubricated and even a topical that eliminates the irritation caused by my clothing rubbing against the tumor. Finally, he explained that the most important thing he’d learned from his own experience with cancer was that one ought not to concern one’s self about the future but concentrate only on what needs to be done that day. In other words, take it one day at a time. I am not a fan of platitudes (unless they are my own, of course) but appreciated the effort.
C. TO SAN FRANCISCO AND BACK AGAIN:
On Tuesday we left for San Francisco to spend the evening with Peter and Barrie before my visit with the physician at UCSF early the next day. We brought the dog along with us because Barrie thought it would be a good idea to see how he got along with their dog, Ramsey.
That evening, leaving the dogs with Barrie, Naida and I went to a French restaurant on 24th Street where Peter’s trio was performing. They were very good, as was the food. Peter played bass, the leader of the group, guitar, and the third member, the violin. Peter told us he (the violinist) is or was first violinist in the LA Symphony. If you’re ever in the Noe Valley area on a night they are playing you should drop in.
The Boys in the Band.
The next day, I met with the oncologist at UCSF to explore potential treatment options including clinical trials. As usual, I began with an inappropriate joke. When the doctor entered the room and settled into the chair opposite me, I said, “Now that two surgeons have agreed that ripping out a part of my throat and slicing off parts of my body with which to fill the resulting hole was not advisable, what options are available to me?”
The doctor a youngish Korean-American oncologist with a national reputation was not amused. Nevertheless, after asking some questions he played out a treatment program that appeared to me to be promising if we could get the insurance company to approve it in a reasonable amount of time.
D. BACK IN THE ENCHANTED FOREST AND A VISIT TO THE RIVER OF RED GOLD:
On Wednesday, I rested all day and Thursday, I turned my attention primarily to a request of Terry’s that I am sure, as usual, will turn out more interesting than beneficial. I also received a call from my doctors that the insurance company approved my treatment plan and it will start early next week. Hooray!
If I have learned anything from life (I am pretty sure I have not), it is that that one learns less from success than from failure and it’s more interesting too. Also, behaving foolishly is a lot more fun than propriety could ever be.
On Friday, I accompanied Naida to Meadowlark Inn at Slough-house on the old Jackson Highway. There Naida had a luncheon with a small book club (about eight women). They discussed her California Gold Trilogy. Later we all went to the historical Slough-house cemetery several of the characters mentioned in her books were buried. Naida told some fascinating stories about the area — the Native American, Chinese and European settlers, the gold discoveries, the massacres and the private lives of the people buried in the cemetery that she had garnered from their diaries. She even found the grave of the old woman who had become her friend and whose diary had begun her interest in the area and became an important part of her books.
The Girls at the Cemetery.
Following that, we drove to the bank of the Cosumnes River in Rancho Murieta where the Indian village described in her books stood. She became quite upset when she saw that the great old mother oak, sacred to the Native Americans who were buried in the ancient midden that lay beneath its branches, had been chopped down by the developer (despite his promises not to.) We then walked along the river bank and explored the rocks containing many native grinding holes and the stepped stone platform where she was sure the natives gathered to listen to the orations of the head man whenever there was a festival or a party. Naida mentioned that the area was so productive that it has been estimated the average time native male worked (built things, hunted and so-on) was only 45 minutes a day and the average women 3 hours. It was a peaceful paradise that existed for over 600 years until it was utterly destroyed by European immigrants from the United State in less than twenty.
Papa Joe's Tales, Fables and Parables 