The Wild Blue Yonder

The first time I flew on a plane, I was nine years old and arrayed (surely the verb) in a travel suit: a  navy blue-and-white checked pleated skirt with a matching jacket.  I carried a stuffed autograph penguin, and I wore a white sailor hat with a red ribbon.  Ditto my sister, except she had a blue-trimmed sailor hat. These days no one in her right mind would put a nine-year old and a five-year old in such a get-up to fly for 10 hours, but not many kids flew then, and besides, everything was dressier. 

I thought about this after reading Jon Carroll's recent piece in the SF Chronicle about what it was like to fly years ago. No passengers in flip-flops and shorts;  no surly, burned-out flight attendants;  and always service with a smile.  Plus there was  room for your knees.

Back then, flight attendants were "air hostesses," and my sister and I coveted an air hostess kit that came on the market. My parents refused to buy it for us, but the Concello girls next door had one, and  the five of us would play with it for hours in our backyard.  There were navy blue hats and pin-on wings, trays and dishes,  even stationery.  The "passengers" would sit in a row of  patio chairs,  what my dad referred to as "ass baskets," and the hostesses would pretend they were Annette Funicello, heroine of the moment, and wait on people. Everyone wanted to be a hostess. It was boring being a passenger, and you didn't get to wear a hat.

Jerry's son is married to an airline pilot, and she doesn't think much of "FAs," as she refers to them.   She's a petite, glamorous  blonde who is sometimes mistaken for an FA, which does not please her, and she has a hat that's more like a policeman's, which she hates wearing.  She's in charge of everyone, even the ground crew, and the bar is hers to throw open if there are delays.  Hard for little girls to imagine in the Annette Funicello days, when, I might add, a hostess spilled orange salad dressing on my sailor hat.

Almshouses

Many of my forebears were in and out of British almshouses, according to my friend and diligent genealogist Mabry.  Flat broke agricultural laborers, they had no choice in the 18th and 19th centuries but to go live with other destitute people.  Complete and wretched bummer, but at least there were almshouses.

I didn't have a grasp of what almshouses were, except probably dirt-floored and with miserable outdoor plumbing.  Turns out they are a European Christian tradition dating back to the 10th century. Alms are "money and services donated to help the poor," and an almshouse is a home for the poor maintained by private charity.

Right away, I'm uneasy.  First, I have long-dead relatives who were so poor that they were homeless.  This seems tragic and vaguely shameful.  Second, I'm so seared by the thousand-points-of-light thing,  the concept that private charity is an excellent way to dodge to raising taxes, that I get my back up.

The wealthy English who endowed almshouses (and there are still 2,600 houses in the UK, mostly for the elderly) did a kind thing, but would they have consented to paying taxes for the good of all poor people, some not in their parish and some perhaps not even Christian?  You gotta wonder.  

Today, like the 18th century,  volunteers and donors choose their charities to support, but that would make for a hell of a fragile safety net if the government weren't involved in some sort of systematic way. 

On a happier note:  The Berkeley Food Pantry finally got its FEMA grant, cut nearly in half but enough so that the pantry can provide through the end of the year, including Thanksgiving "baskets," as the clients insist on calling them.  Sounds like something my almshouse-dwelling relatives would say.

Doctor in a Starched Pink Shirt

Most doctors these days ask questions without looking you in the eye.  They're busy typing your responses into a computer and then reading your history on the computer and then, I kid you not, the computer decides which drug to suggest.  If he agrees, the doctor then punches a button and tells another computer, maybe in Las Vegas, to send that drug to you.  End of story.

I went through this today with a gastroenterologist. He stared at the computer screen, fingering a pen.   I stared out the window behind him at the foothills of Mt. Diablo and wondered who fetched his pristine pink shirt from the cleaner's.

"You've tried ginger and cinnamon tea?" he asked, looking up from the screen.

"No," I said, bewildered.  This was startlingly low-tech.

He dropped his pen.

"No?" he said in his precise East Indian English. "Oh, my God."   His dark eyes were full of concern and empathy.  "That could clear up the entire problem."

He gave me directions:  I am  to chop up ginger and stick cinnamon, put the pieces in a pot of water, and boil it for 30 minutes.  With any luck, the tea will relax my digestive system.   In the meantime, he'd told the computer in Las Vegas to send a two-month supply of Elavil.

Then he gave me a light, encouraging touch on the back as he escorted me to the waiting room.

Manifesto of Washington-Weary Old Bag

I could not loathe the Republicans more than I do right now, their obstinacy over raising the debt ceiling,  their tenacious obeisance to the wealthy and powerful.  Really, I am at my wits end about it, and yes, shouting at the TV again.   Is Obama on  IV vodka?  How can he STAND dealing with these people?

Then over the weekend, I watched the DVD of "Inside Job," about the recent financial crisis.  They're ALL in bed with each other:  business, government, academics, the lot.  The rest of us are out in the cold, especially the line of people shivering in the fog of a Berkeley summer, waiting  for food hand-outs.

Wretched as it all is, the debt-ceiling mess has served to clarify a few things for me.  First, we might as well give up on the big  picture.   The people in Washington aren't going to do anything useful.  We out here in the country are invisible-- at best, abstractions--to them. 

Paying taxes and then moaning that the money is mis-spent is an easy out.  At the extreme, it's the position of the Tea Party, which wants to come in with a scythe and whack the hell out of everything and everybody.  Not good enough.  The government are us, but we are more than the government. We have phones and brains and computers and  canned goods to contribute.  Also hammers and plumbing snakes and screwdrivers and a working command of the English language. And cars.   From now on, I'm going with Act Locally and Radically.  No point in thinking globally. That way lies madness and possibly alcoholism.   Dumpster dive if necessary to feed the hungry (due to squeamishness,  I think I'm speaking metaphorically, but I'm not ruling it out.)

And speaking of dumpster diving: I'm enjoying the hell out of "Farm City," by  Novella Carpenter.  It's funny, uplifiting, quirky, well-written, and inspiring.  What this young  woman does with a vacant lot in the West Oakland ghetto is amazing.  Crops, chickens, rabbits, ducks, geese, bee hives,  you name it.  She and her boyfriend dumpster-dive in Chinatown to feed their rabbits and chickens and gather manure from stables in the East Bay hills to fertilize their crops.  They have an open-garden policy with their neighbors.

Wouldn't it be great to see John Boehner coming by his tan naturally by farming on an Oakland vacant lot, scaling a chainlink fences to save a goose from guard dogs, and drinking wine made from second-rate grapes he bartered honey for?

Murder-wise

Almost every Saturday night finds me sitting down at 10  to watch  "48 Hours Mystery."  I'm riveted.  I draw the line at looking at the crime scene photos--too real, too much blood, awful.  But I'm fascinated by the undergrowth of people's lives: the affairs, the bankruptcies, the drug or gambling addictions, the yearning for a new partner, and the imponderable resistance to the idea of divorce (vs. murder). 

Over the years, I've gleaned the following:

1. The murderer, often a sociopath, has the grandiose idea that no one will ever figure out the crime.

2. Given cell phone records, surveillance cameras, and DNA tests, the police almost always figure out the crime. 

3. Hardly anyone's what they seem.   Terrible things are going on behind closed doors and perfectly manicured lawns.  I find this oddly comforting  (schadenfreude?).  This is bad of me.

4. Left-brain people such as my husband and my friend Rebecca  hate this show and won't watch it with their spouses.

5. Right-brain people  such as Rebecca's husband, Leroy,  and I  love this show and have to watch it, even in re-runs.

6. Criminals are often really good, if illogical, liars.

7. If you want to know at the beginning of the show if a suspect ends up getting convicted,  check out what top they're wearing when they're interviewed: if it's orange or blue and has machine-stitching at the collarless neckline, they lost at trial.

In search of sanity in a loony tune world

I've had enough years of therapy to have a full toolbox of Things to Think/Do When Feeling Depressed or Manic or Just at Loose Ends.  Today the only tool I could think of was the car keys.  No place in my house was the right place to be, so I took to the road.  First to North Shattuck to check food offerings at the Gourmet Ghetto.  Did I want gelato?  soup?  sushi? Mexican? pizza? scone?

After a several-store survey, I bought a large chocolate chip cookie that  seemed to  include sesame seeds and sat on a bench outside The Cheeseboard watching tourists have their pictures taken in front of Chez Panisse.  Next to me on the bench was a young woman mesmerized by texting.  Every once in awhile, she'd furtively sneak another slice of pizza from the box on her lap. It seemed lonely.  I think we each would have profitted from a chat.

Then , still restless,  I drove to Fourth Street.   The last time I was there, I had an out-of-town pal with me, and she and I had to scream at each other over lunch at Cafe Rouge in order to be heard. This time a middle-aged woman was playing the national anthem on an accordion in front of Peet's. I could hardly believe it.  A lot of people were studiously ignoring her. Wrong audience on so many levels.

I came home with two new books: "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer," by Novella Carpenter and "Innocent" by Scott Turow.  Nothing else appealed.   When I left Fourth Street, the accordion lady was annihilating "More."

David Arrives

Jerry's son, David, arrived from Texas this morning on an early flight.  I met him when he was 14 years old, and he is now nearly 50.   The boy who broke everything he looked at and tried to jump a bicycle over a row of lined-up ice chests (result: broken collarbone) now has hair graying at the temples and a pair of half-glasses so he can read.  We're getting awfully old over here.

There's a peach pie downstairs for tonight's dessert, plus fresh corn on the cob, strawberries, and tiny, tender French green beans.  Killing the fatted calf.

The weather is perfect, and if the fog holds back, we can eat outside.  The hedge fund manager who's been in England for a year has returned to the house behind us,  and I can hear the thump of a basketball as he and his son make shots.

Miss Craig

In the early seventies, two pals and I,  recently out of college and sitting at desks all day, decided we were out of shape.  One of us came across a book called, "Miss Craig's 21-Day Shape Up: A Plan of Natural Movement Exercises for Anyone in Search of a Trim and Healthy Body."  We each bought a copy.  Inside were numerous photos of Miss Craig herself,  thin as a whippet, demonstrating her exercises while wearing a turtleneck leotard and fishnet stockings. She had short curly blonde hair and never, not once in about a hundred photos, did she smile, although the accompanying text was very encouraging.

There we were,  three women in their early twenties, no one weighing more than 125 pounds, lying on the floor of a student apartment doing "Frog Legs" and "Upper Hip Rolls,"  and a real killer called "Figure Eight."  After 21 days, we reached maintenance level and all we had to do was continue for the next 50 years or so.

That didn't happen, although occasionally I do have another go at Miss Craig, who was head of the Body Department at Elizabeth Arden New York for 30 years.  My recent fling with British desserts has been catastrophic for the midriff area, specifically a bulging tummy, so last week I got out the book yet again.  Right off the bat, Miss C. says I could look five pounds thinner if I stood up straight, so I'm doing her posture exercises once a day.  We live in hope.

A check online revealed that Miss Craig's book is out of print, although you can find a used copy on Amazon or Alibris with prices ranging from $4.95 to $240.  The book has excellent reviews from people who, as New York Magazine put it in a 1970 article, "want exercise that eliminates grunt and groan calisthenics."

And Miss Craig herself?  She died in 2003 at the age of 90, possibly in a turtleneck leotard and fishnet stockings.

Moving with Velveeta

This weekend I helped my friend Suzanne move into her new house.  My area of expertise is unpacking boxes in the kitchen.  I like to get in there and organize the hell out of it--where silverware? where plates? where glasses?  And will this kitchen work for the poor frazzled person directing moving men with furniture?

In this case, the kitchen is circa 1928, the year the house was built, and there are few built-in cupboards, though there is an old Wedgewood stove with mysterious, greasy-dark storage compartments.  I didn't venture much into those. There was way more stuff than could be fit  in the kitchen, and I made a lot of executive decisions about what would go to temporary shelves in a small breakfast room.  Suzanne was totally hands-off in all this. My sister, a designer, was pacing around measuring the kitchen for an eventual remodel and didn't interfere, either.  Bliss.

The first boxes I unpacked were so organized it was scary:  all the grains together, all the baking stuff,  all the dried legumes in a handsome basket.  But the last-packed boxes were a random collection of  things: dishtowels, coffee table books, a sponge, a corkscrew.  At the bottom of one box I found a treasure: a slim booklet called, "Creative Cooking with Velveeta."  All action stopped while Suzanne, my sister, and I marveled at this.

"Creative cooking?" my sister said in wonderment.  Velveeta, described in the booklet as "Pasteurized Processed Cheese Spread," was a staple in our house when we were growing up.  My mother loved it.  We always had a box in the fridge.  I probably ate my last slice in 1968.

Suzanne had no idea where this booklet had come from.  I flipped through it.  Every single recipe was creamy-gooey, with names like "Crab Grandee,"  "Creamy Clam Dip," and, of course, "Buenos Nachos."  It was the memento of the day.

After that, I ran around the house placing clocks and Kleenex boxes and figuring out reading lights and switching out rugs.  I wanted it to feel homey ASAP, and to some degree it worked.  Suzanne seemed very pleased.  The bed was made, her cosmetics were on the bathroom shelves, a small desk was set up. Her cats, though, cowered in a downstairs closet, unpersuaded, poor things.

Libby and Me

Libby McCann is the daughter of one of my college roommates, and she has a blog called "Style Extraordinaire."  It's a fresh, engaging blog with on-the-mark fashion updates geared mostly for women considerably younger than I am.  She's 25 and a fashion stylist in LA.

Her blog for today is "Beauty sleep prep," and she lays out--literally, in a compact arrangement she photographed--the products and implements she uses at bedtime.  I took it all in, from make-up remover to acne wash to clarifying lotion and on through eye cream.  Plus a Mason Pearson hairbrush.

My own sleep time prep starts with a heavy emphasis on dental equipment.  First, floss.  Then an egg cup of toothpicks and an implement I stick a toothpick into, tighten, and then poke around at my teeth with so I can avoid gum disease.  Then floss again. After that, a quick face wash with some blue stuff called "Lait Nettoyant," which is overpriced but I've used it for years and don't want to change horses.  That's followed by "Creme 28," which is for dehydrated skin, or "peaux deshydratees," as the French manufacturer calls it, which sounds a bit more glammy. Oh, and occasionally I work some age-spot fading cream from an ancient sample tube given to me by a dermatologist and dab that on.  All this in my salle de bains.

Check out Libby's blog.   It's fun to read and a bit nostalgic.

Hens

A house not far from me has a big pen of chickens in the front yard.   Stationed next to it is an old-fashioned gumball machine full of chicken feed.  For a quarter, you get a small handful of feed to toss through the wire to the hens, who are hip to the ritual and rush over as soon as they see anyone.  My friend Anne pointed out the gumball machine to me one day when we were taking a walk.  We thought it was just a fun thing to do, inventive on the part of the homeowners.

Yesterday I  noticed a sign dangling from the gumball machine.  The quarters from passersby have added up to 14 flocks of chickens being donated to people around the world by an organization called "Heifer International."  Each flock costs $20.

I investigated Heifer International online. Turns out you can donate the equivalent cost of  rabbits, geese, water buffalo (!), llamas, sheep, goats, and of course heifers, which comprised the very first shipment, in 1944, to Puerto Rico.  Recipients eat the eggs or milk or the animal and sign a contract agreeing to give the first offspring of the animal to another family.  Dan West, the founder of Heifer International, came up with the motto, "Give not a cup, but a cow."  The only critic I found online sounded like a crank and a vegetarian.

Mornings

I have a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson taped to my work table: 

"For each new morning
with its light. For rest
and shelter of the
night.  For health and
food, for love and
friends. For everything
thy goodness sends."

I'm not a religious person, but I love this poem.  It's calming, and its simple message rings true.

But the morning is not so new by the time I get up.   This morning I came downstairs determined to be contemplative, to savor what I ate for breakfast,  to  breathe deeply and sit up straight (working on posture).  Jerry was already there, eating his customized mix of cereals, reading an article in the New York Times magazine about the popularity of baby names.

"This graph makes no sense," he said.
"Mmm."  I was determined to stay contemplative and thankful.
"The square for 2004-2010 isn't big enough."
"Mmm."
"Why would anyone spell Khloe with a 'K'?"
"The Kardashians?"
"Who?"

He dropped the lid of the peanut butter jar on the counter,  thinga-thinga-thinga all the way to still.  Then he put his toast plate down on his napkin and jerked the napkin out from under it in several movements, rattle-rattle-rattle.

"For God's sake!" I shouted.  "Just pick it up!  And stop with the baby names."

He bent over his toast and smiled.

Clara and Violet and Daisy

Last weekend, my sister dug a photo album out of the closet in her spare room, and my genealogy research took off.  Or rather, my friend Mabry's did.  She has a passion for genealogy, and she's doing the lion's share of figuring out where my dad's family came from and how his mother got here from England. The photographs in the album were labeled, unlike the most old  pictures I have,  and we got names to pursue.

Hearing about other people's genealogy can be as boring other people's vacation pictures, but if it's your own, it's fascinating.  At least it is to me.  My sister and I have no American relatives that we know of, and the only English relatives we know are on our mother's side.  But my father's mother, Daisy,  was English, too.  How did she get here, I wondered, and where did she come from?

Well, she got here in 1912 via ship to Ellis Island and train to Oakland, where she joined her married sister, Violet.  Before that, she was a servant in various capacities in London.  She literally set sail for a better life.  I don't know if she felt she got one: She lived 37 years as a street car conductor's wife in East Oakland and had two children, one my father.  She died in 1949 in a bus accident coming home from a Piedmont society wedding that she'd crashed in a quiet, well-dressed way,  a past-time of hers.   My father never mentioned the servant angle, or that his grandmother Clara was married to a fishmonger, or that his forebearers hailed from a village in East Bergholt, Suffolk, where many people are listed in the 1891 census as "farm lab," or farm laborers.

Mabry says results of genealogical research can "grab you by the heart."  You find out that  you're anchored to a clan, even if you don't know them, and you might begin to get at the answer to some poignant family mysteries.











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Hunting Butterflies on Yerba Buena Island...

...is what Jerry and I did over Fourth of July weekend.  That's the island the Bay Bridge tunnel goes through.  You hardly notice it from a speeding car.  I got a closer look.

The island is steep and vaguely round. Lots of eucalpytus trees, native plants, chain-linked fences, and  former military housing terraced up the steep sides, much of that now rented out to whoever wants to live in the middle of the bay without a grocery store.  The views are startling: everywhere you turn you see San Francisco or the East Bay Hills or Marin County or the Golden Gate.  There's a small cove of a beach and an isthmus that connects Yerba Buena to Treasure Island,  landfill built on the shoals of Yerba Buena for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition.   One way or another, Yerba Buena Island has been a military outpost since the 1870's. The Navy left, but the Coast Guard is still active.

What we were doing there:  Counting individuals and species for the San Francisco Fourth of July Butterfly Count.  These counts happen nationwide at many localities within a month of the Fourth of July.  It is very eccentric and Gary Larson-ish, people with nets and binoculars looking for butterflies and taking notes.   I can hardly tell one butterfly from another, but my eyes are better than Jerry's, so I spotted, and he counted.  All over San Francisco that day, people were counting in parks, gardens, and weedy patches.  Yerba Buena Island now counts as part of San Francisco.

High point of the day:  Snooping around Quarters One, otherwise known as the "Nimitz House," a big white Classical Revival pile located near the water on the northeast side of Yerba Buena Island.  Built in 1900, it has pillars and dormer windows and a broad, friendly porch.   It no longer affords the view it did before the Bay Bridge was built in the 1930's.  Then the view was of the East Bay hills and ferries plying the waters between Oakland and San Francisco.  Now the view is of the underpinnings of the old and new approaches of the  Bay Bridge.  And let me tell you, the new approach may seem sleek viewed from above, but underneath it looks like a demented organ, hundreds of slender pipes holding it up.

You can get inside the Nimitz House only if you attend an event organized by the designated caterer-manager, but I checked out what I could through undraped windows. Renovated and impressive.  A hundred people can be seated at round tables downstairs, I read online.  In case you're wondering.

The house is named after Chester Nimitz, a five-star admiral who commanded the Pacific Fleet during World War II.  He signed for the U.S. when Japan formally surrendered on a military ship in Tokyo Bay.  After a long and distinguished career, he moved into Quarters One, where he died in 1966.  Long-time Bay Area-ites think of Freeway 880 between San Jose and Oakland as "The Nimitz Freeway," but I greatly prefer his house.

Being 98

I met Evelyn when she was 89 and regularly attending a pool exercise class I was in.    I remember when she turned 90, and we all sang Happy Birthday.  She was still re-upholstering sofas, going on trips, and driving around  friends who were younger but more frail than she was.   And all this cheerfully, with a joie de vivre that was inspiring.  She'd been widowed about 15 years at that point,  but  although she still missed her husband, she'd gotten on with her life in a Big Way.  Trips, bridge club, volunteer work of all kinds, a wide circle of friends.

 She hasn't been able to come to the pool for several years now.  This afternoon, another pool chum and I went to visit her.  We found the front door of her house unlocked for us, and Evelyn herself sitting in a favorite chair in the living room, her  walker-with-a-seat parked nearby.  

I asked her how she was doing, and she smiled and said, "Oh,  gradually slipping," making a downward motion with her hand.  This despite her still-optimistic personality,  her mental sharpness, and her pluck.   It's hard for her to walk.  She's afraid of falling.  She can't drive or shop for food anymore, and cooking, which she likes to do, is a trial.  She has to hang on to the kitchen  counters to make sure she doesn't fall.   She watches a lot of television.  She rarely goes out anymore, though she has a large and supportive family that lives over the hill in Orinda/Moraga/Lafayette. The family wants her to hire a helper.  Evelyn can't figure out how this person would fit into her life. 

She lights up when she talks about trips she and her husband made, tours they took, the ships they sailed on.  I can imagine her in the 1950's, a tall, pretty woman with a ready sense of humor and a winning smile, given to graceful self-deprecation.  I remember that time, when people who would now be in their nineties (my parents' age if they were still alive)wore full skirts and high heels and hats. Evelyn mentioned "cocktails" several times in the course of her stories, and I thought about the cocktail hats of the fifties and high heels and pincurls.  She says she doesn't need photographs to remind her of those times; she has pictures stored in her head.

I'm thinking this is as good as it gets at 98.