Memories

Last Wednesday, I ran into Alice, my mother's Alzheimer's buddy, when I was at Atria.  She's such a pleasant young woman.  She was the one who painted my mother's fingernails blue.

She suggested that I bring in a family scrapbook so she would have something to go over with her.  I decided to put a bunch of pictures on Snapfish and spent the day working on such a book.  I used to make a lot of books since I got a special deal for life from Snapfish, but then they didn't mean anything to my mother any more, so I stopped making them. I hadn't made one since 2015.

It's easy to do, the results are very nice (mine won't be as nice as many because so many of my photos were low resolution--but that really didn't matter.  That's not why I was making the book), but I'd forgotten how time consuming it is.  There's finding the photos, and either copying them or scanning them.  Then uploading them to Snapfish, deciding the layout and then realizing that you didn't have nearly as many as you thought you would, so looking for more picture two or three different times.  The whole thing is 20 pages long.

I tried to get photos from her younger days and to include photos of her family, which is one of the most important things for her.   

 

Plus, I wanted to remind her that she was a mother and a grandmother.  In the upper left corner is her step family, plus me, and the black and white picture was taken when m sister was a baby.

 

Of course I had to do a salute to cousins day.  I don't know if she remembers...

 

I loved the dog lover page.  

 

I made a 2-page spread about the ranch where she spent her youngest years, and the home in Inverness where my grandparents lived.

 

And I found the perfect photo to end it with.

 

I could have gone through a lot more places where I have photos and gotten better photos that would not be low resolution, but I wanted to get this sent off so maybe it will be back by the time Alice comes next week.  In any event, I don't know if she will really appreciate it, but you gotta keep trying!

My grandparents' wedding photo

(Ironically, my entry on this date last year was titled "I Miss 65" and was about missing our Cousins Day card games)

Mental Snapshots

You know how sometimes a picture just pops in your head for no reason at all.  You're peacefully minding your own business, watching some gruesome murder or something on TV and all of a sudden a totally unrelated picture pops into your head.

The picture that popped into my head last night was a menal "snapshot" that I frequently think about.  My mother sitting at our kitchen table in San Francisco, a bowl between her knees, an apple and a knife in her hands, and a bowl of sliced apples on the table next to her.  It is such a familiar sight.  In fact, over the years I have taken lots of photos of my mother peeling apples for apple pies.  I love thinking about that mental snapshot because it makes me remember the good times growing up.

(And as I write this, oatmeal cooking in apple cider is in the Instant pot, so I even have a smell track to accompany this memory!)

I have lots of mental snapshots which pop in from time to time and there is no rhyme or reason for them.  

There is the dark room where the only thing you can see is the glowing end of my father's cigarette, a familiar sight during the years when he was going though a major depression.  I think about those years and realize the importance of keeping questionable substances locked up.  I was curious to find out what a sleeping pill did, so snuck one of my father's.  I absolutely could NOT wake up for school the next morning.  My mother never knew why but I sure never tried one of his pills again.

Another vivid mental snapshot is one Sunday morning when we were returning home from church and saw a black wreath hanging on the door of the corner grocery store.  It may have been my first experience with the death of someone I knew--Angelina, the wife of Angelo, the proprietors who had been our friends for many years.

That reminds me of another death-related mental snapshot.  When I was about 5 my grandmother decided to take me, God knows what ever possessed her, to the wake of a friend of hers.  I was terrified being in the room with a dead person and I can still see the gardenia-draped coffin and just her nose sticking out, the only thing I could see from the back of the room.  For years after, the smell of gardenias nauseated me, which was awkward because it was one of my mother's favorite flowers and my father often bought her a corsage for special events.

There is the death-related snapshot of me standing in our kitchen washing dishes and my mother telling me she thought I was old enough to know that my godmother had cancer and was going to die.

(The mental snapshots are becoming a slide show, coming faster as I write this)

My mental snapshot of my godmother, Babe Fortner (the wife of my grandmother's cousin), is her sitting in a chair in our living room, wearing a bright blue knit dress which went beautifully with her snow white hair.  After she died, she had no children, so left her entire estate to my mother, which infuriated my grandmother who was counting on a big windfall from Babe's passing.  She was so livid that my mother gave her the choice of which of Babe's things she wanted and one of them was the blue knit dress.  It was the wrong color and wrong size for her (Babe was tall; my grandmother was sort) and she looked terrible in it, but she wore it defiantly.

Another snapshot, standing in the hall outside my senior homeroom hearing Sister Colette, who was not noted for being a "nice" person, reading the class the riot act about their lack of help with the yearbook, leaving me to do everything myself, resulting in the yearbook being published late.  After that lecture, nobody gave me a hard time about it, and my opinion of Sister Colette changed considerably.

Food tests!  Our kitchen had an attached laundry room with a window that faced into the kitchen.  My father liked to have blind taste tests with Karen and me.  He would go into the laundry room and peek through the window.  We would give him the choice of two different items and he chose which one he preferred.  The one I remember most was two different kinds of milk and which was the richest (we always chose the one with the most fat, a habit that has followed me throughout my life).

Another nice couple of mental images concern my cousin Peach, when I used to spend summers with her.  One is sitting under the weeping willow tree in her front yard harmonizing to "You are my sunshine."  The other was standing in the middle of the street, asphalt melting under our feet (it was nearly 113 degrees) while Peach braided my hair.

I have as many mental snapshots scattered around my head as I have physical photos scattered around the house.

It's either a lemon or a chicken

Walt knows I'm crazy, but occasionally I have to prove it to him.

Now  don't know if I can explain this properly, but often I get images floating through my head that don't really mean anything but are somehow associated with something I'm doing.  It happens often when I'm reading a book that in some part of my brain, I am picturing something that has nothing whatsoever to do with whatever it is I'm reading.  I might be reading a book about elephants and in some part of my brain there is a locomotive. This has happened my whole life and I just accept is as part of how my brain works.

But occasionally I stop and think about it .... what was that?

I was thinking about my pain the other day and remembering that it was on the right lower quadrant of my abdomen and when I thought of it, I thought of a picture frame around that area.  so far nothing that weird.

But then I realized that in thinking about the pain--every time, especially when describing it to a medical person, my brain pictured a rectangle with a yellow spot in the middle of it looking like a lemon...or maybe a baby chick.  I don't have a clue why it did that but I'm glad that the yellow spot is gone, finally.

So yesterday was returning to normal day.  I was scheduled for lunch with Char at the Red Lobster.  We planned this lunch during Red Lobster's crab fest but it had to be postponed because of my mother's broken bone.  Now crab fest is gone, but it's a time of endless shrimp and we both love shrimp, so we decided to go anyway.

My shrimp plate was huge (and I forgot to photograph it) and waaay more than someone in my abdominal condition should have ordered (so I brought home enough for Walt to have for dinner last night!).  But it was delicious, even if it did cause some minor abdominal distress.

Of course, we discussed the current political climate.  Discussions like this these days are so discouraging, so pointless, and so depressing.  You feel so totally helpless.  And we've come to accept lying as normal.  Owell, another lie, we say.

Ned pointed me to comedian Marc Maron, whom you can find on Netflix.  If you are feeling like I am, I STRONGLY urge you to check out his video, which is both hilarious and says it all.  The first set, about 10 minutes, perhaps, about Trump (in which he doesn't mention his name at all) is so spot on and says everything I'm been thinking and why I'm so depressed.

But other than that, it was a pleasant lunch.  It always is.  One of the things Maron talks about is that, at 53, he doesn't know how much time he has left and he thinks he doesn't have time to learn something new.  Like if Phish is a great band, if he listens t them, he doesn't have time to go back and get up to speed on their music because he might not have that much time left and he needs to concentrate on what he has NOW.

That's kind of what it's like in your 70s.  Do you have enough time left to start a brand new friendship? with all that entails?  

It's worked well for Char, who has a bunch of new friends in the senior living where she's moved, but here in Davis, where I'd have to go out looking for a new friendship, it's just not worth the bother.  So the friends of all my life become more and more precious to me.  They are the friends with whom you have verbal shorthand, where a word or two evokes a whole part of your life that you shared.  Char can say "I thought of Michele" and we both immediately are in the same place.

Those friends are becoming fewer and farther apart and I cherish the ones I have, Char at the top of the list.  Even if we both are so depressed about the world.  I decided that what we must do is not concentrate on what we have no power to change, but to find something where we can feel we are doing good in the world and that will have to sustain us.

When we parted, I drove to See's Candy in Vacaville and picked up a box of chocolates for my mother's birthday.  She's been 98 for four days and I hadn't seen her yet.  I stopped off at home to get Walt, who wanted to come with me, and we went to Atria.

She was thrilled to see me and wondered how long I'd been in town -- I really don't know who she thought I was.  We visited about an hour, I guess.

The most depressing thing, I guess, is that I imagined at at this age, we would sit back and reminisce about the old days.  But my mother can't remember old minutes, much less old days.  You can't remember the time Aunt Barb stripped at the family reunion or picking blackberries on grandma's farm, or talk about anybody in the family because she has no memory.

Then you realize that YOU are the only one with those memories and that is very lonely.

 

---

My sister died 45 years ago today.  I know my mother doesn't remember that.

From the Archives

As I have said many times, I am easily distractible, which is why this "straightening up" project is not happening.  Yesterday I was going to Get Serious about it.  But thefirst thing I picked up was a folder in which are a copies of letters I wrote to my friend Phil Dethlefsen in May and June of 1979  I don't have a clue why only those two months.

Phil's partner was the Lamplighters leading tenor during those days and Phil and I got to be friends because he had a lot of health problems and it seemed like he was forever hospitalized, so I started writing to him.  It evolved into my writing to him every day, sometimes more than once a day.  Somewhere I probably have a big folder of many, many letters over the years, but this is just a handful of them. 

Phil is dead now, as is his partner.  The friendship died in 1986.  Well, Phil's partner killed it the week Gilbert died.  Phil, whose last words to me were "don't worry about him.  I'll take care of it" was never heard from again an I suspect that they even changed their phone number (but I never tried to call it).  It was ugly...ugly...ugly (at one point Phil's partner sent a message via a mutual friend that I shoud go f**k myself) and the most hateful thing that had ever happened to me until Peggy came along.  But I digress.

It was interesting reading through these old letters and gives a good picture of all the kids during that time.  Jeri would have been 13 when I was writing, which would make Ned 12 and on down to David, who would have been 7.  Here are some of the things that kept me reading and not cleaning up.

Ned is indeed a challenge but the one advantage of dealing with him over, say, dealing with Jeri is that with Ned there is never any question about when he is feeling upset, what he is feeling upset about, or whether or not you are getting through to him.  With Jeri, she is so closed that you never know even IF she is unhappy about something.  But Ned's whole body scream it loud and clear and even if he shuts you out completely (as he did yesterday when I wouldn't take his side in the pitching debate) you can still pretty accurately read his needs.  Or a least it seems that way to me--I suppose I have to wait until he grows up to know for sure if I'm right .....

Ned and I just had our daily argument.  This one even sillier than the others that we have.  David and Tom are talking abut having a Kool-Aid stand this afternoon.  David told Ned that he would have to buy Kool-aide and that they wouldn't give him any. Ned came to me and said that it wasn't fair because when he had a cool aide stand, he gave some to tom and David and they didn't have to buy any.  I told Ned that I wouldn't talk abut it now because if we argued about it, which we would certainly do, we'd just have to argue abut it again when/if the stand became a reality and I didn't want two arguments in one day--and that it was silly to argue about something that might not even happen.  This was the basis for the argument which ended with his=me storming upstairs to go fold laundry and Ned slamming out of the house in a huff.  I don't know why we set each other so vehemently and so constantly....Now that I think of it, Jeri and Seymour (our dog) are a lot alike.  I was thinking of some way to compare Jeri to something and Seymour came to mind immediately.  I watched my father yesterday.  He was bound and determined to make friends with Seymour.  Well, you just don't do that to Seymour.  You can't talk to her, chirp at her, coo and cajole and expect her to warm up to you.  You have to leave her alone and let her make her advances in her own time.  Jeri is just the same.  We very seldom have any physical affection between us--Jeri just doesn't like it.  But I stopped attempting it long ago and that has had its rewards.  Last night she was so terribly upset about the play being over and she came downstairs and sat in m lap for about 15 minutes crying and talking it out.  She almost never does this, but when she does it's very special--and if you try to approach her on something like that, you just don't get anywhere and you spoil the somewhat delicate balance that your relationship hangs upon.

Strange how different kids are.  There is quiet, reserved Jeri.  Then we have volatile, bombastic Ned.  Paul, Tom and David all fall in between, with David closer to Ned than anyone else.  Tom requires a lot of love, a lot of physical affection and likes more than anything else to just sit here talking to me all afternoon.  Paul neither requires nor shuns affection.  It's just something which happens or not, depending on the situation  Of all the kids, he and I probably think the most alike and we have a nice chummy relationship.  I wonder what they are all going to be like when they grow up.

Well, I have the answer to that finally.  Jeri is much more affectionate the approachable than when she was 13  Ned is still as bombastic and we still have our regular arguments, though maybe fewer now that I let things go and he seems to be making an effort too.

I wonder what David and Paul would have been like in their 40s. We'll never know, but at the time of his death, Paul and I were still very close and the day he died he called on the phone, like he did every day, and asked me "do you think it's weird that I call my mother every day?".  I guess the one who has changed the most is Tom, who is too busy to sit and chat all afternoon, though he is still very physically affectionate and a real good guy.  I watch him as a father and it makes me feel like I must have done something right because he's the father I wish I had had.

---

I had lunch at Atria today. We had "avocado stuffed shrimp" ...

What is circled is about 1 Tbsp of smashed avocado...that's all the avocado in the dish; hardly "avocado-stuffed."  Then for dessert we had "banana cream pie."

This "pie" is a cake with what looks like a lot of banana pudding piled on top of it, with two slices of banana and then faux whipped cream.  The topping all slid off the cake before we could eat it.  It was tasty, but it was not my idea of "pie" at all.

Gourmet meals at Atria.

Looking Back, Part 2

I've been trying to do this every year toward the end of December, so here goes.  The whole questionnaire runs 50 questions.  Part 1 ran on December 28.

26. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
I can't remember back to the first part of the year, but I sure am excited about my new cell phone.

27. Did you drink a lot of alcohol in 2016?
I lost my taste for alcohol many years ago, and water is my drink of choice now (with the occasional coffee).  I may have an occasional glass of wine on a special occasion or maybe a gin and tonic if we are at a bar, but that is less than half a dozen times in the year.

28. Did you do a lot of drugs in 2016?
Only legally prescribed ones: for diabetes, for high blood pressure, and for cholesterol. Also some vitamins.

29. Did you treat somebody badly in 2016?
I hope not.  Not deliberately anyway.

30. Did somebody treat you badly in 2016?
Nobody that I can think of, though I have had a few disappointing encounters with my mother's long term care insurance provider.

32. What do you wish you'd done more of in 2016?
After seeing two movies this week, I wish I had seen more of them throughout the year instead of only six.  I also wish, as always, that there had been more socialization with female friends.

33. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Attend memorial services for friends (5 this year)

35. What was your favorite TV program(s)?
Jeopardy, Big Bang Theory, NCIS (the original as well as New Orleans and LA), Madam Secretary, The Blacklist, Designated Survivor, Criminal Minds, SVU, Speechless, Rachel Maddow and, when it returns, The Amazing Race.

36. What song will always remind you of 2016?
I can't think of one.

37. How many stage shows did you see in 2016?
According to the blog where I put my theater reviews, 76.

38. Did you have a favorite stage show in 2016?
I wrote this for one of the newspapers for which I am a critic:

There were several plays from which to choose in picking my five favorite productions this year. In no particular order...

Gospel According to First Squad is the very powerful third in Tom Burmester’s "War Cycle," which attempts to show the effects of war on the combatants and their families. It was presented by U.C. Davis and deserved a broader audience.

The Davis Musical Theater Company has grown a lot in its 30+ year history and its recent Music Man was excellent, with one of the best Harold Hills I’ve seen (Richard Wall, in his DMTC debut). It also produced a superlative Man of La Mancha, with a magnificent set and professional quality cast.
Bells are Ringing, part of the Davis Shakespeare Ensemble’s summer festival reminded us how good the old musicals are, and had the quintessential musical comedy couple in Gia Battista and Ian Hopps.

Capital Stage’s Blackberry Winter was a tour de force one woman show about the effects of Alzheimers on an adult daughter. Amy Resnick gave a riveting performance that was both heartbreaking and funny at the same time.

39. What was your greatest musical discovery?
You cannot hum the score to Rogue One

40. What was the best book you read?
"Elephant Memories: 13 Years in the Life of an Elephant Family" by Cynthia J. Moss
I loved this book.  Moss spent 13 years in Amboseli National Park, following elephants and observing their interactions, their behaviors, how they handle everything from birth to death.  A great book for an elephant lover.

41. What was your favorite film of this year?
We only saw six and of those, I think my favorite was Room because I had read the book and was glad to see it in "real" life.  I also loved Sully and cried all the way through it!

42. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 73 in February and we had no celebration on my birthday because we were both busy, but later in the week we went to a new-to-us restaurant, one where they set fire to your food in front of you before they serve it to you, and that was a lot of fun

43. What did you want and get?
A NEW CELL PHONE !!!!!  Better yet, an iPhone 7 which I had NO hope for, given the cost, but there was this deal .....

44. What did you want and not get?
A ceiling light for the kitchen and a Democratic president.

45. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
If Donald Trump had been devoured by a Chtorr.

46. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2016?
I don't need no stinking fashion concept.  I'm comfort all the way, in sweats, t-shirts, sweatshirts and fuzzy socks.

47. What kept you sane?
I guess writing, and communicating with women from SwapBot.  Also NCIS or SVU marathons to turn on when the news gets overwhelming.

48. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Cindy Stowell.  Check her story.  Amazing woman.

49. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2016.
Never trust all media stories, fact check everything, and even if you are the better candidate, an effective false smear campaign can lose you the election.

50. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
The old folk song by the Kingston Trio, the "Merry Minuet."  May its message please not be the song lyric that sums up 2017.

** HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYBODY! **

Looking Back, Part 1

I've been trying to do this every year toward the end of December, so here goes.  The whole questionnaire runs 50 questions, so this is just part 1

1. Was 2016 a good year for you?
On the whole, OK.  No serious complaints

2. What was your favorite moment(s) of the year?
Seeing Book of Mormon again, taking Walt to The Dead Fish for dinner, the 50th birthday party for the 5 Pinata kids who turned 50 this year, spending a week with Tom et al. over Halloween week.

3. What was your least favorite moment(s) of the year?
When Hillary Clinton conceded the election to Donald Trump.

4. What did you do in 2016 that you'd never done before?
I learned how to make pocket letters and have shared many of them with other people.  I don't consider myself crafty, so this was definitely new for me.

5. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I gave up making new year's resolutions because it's so depressing when I can't stick with them.

6. Where were you when 2016 began?
We went to the annual New Year's Eve party of The Psychiatrist (remember him?) and his wife, who have been hosting this party for 42 years.  This is a wonderful party, full of food, conversation and lots of music.

7. Who were you with?
With a lot of the people we have known the longest in Davis, coincidentally a lot of the town's movers and shakers who all started out as PTA friends back in the 70s.

8. Where will you be when 2016 ends?
At the same party.  I love being around lots of music.

9. Who will you be with when 2016 ends?
Same people as last year.

10. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Our dog sitter and good friend Ashley gave the world Gabriel (Gabe), who is now nearly 5 months old and militantly adorable.

 

11. Did you lose anybody close to you in 2016?
We lost several friends.  Richard, our friend from the 1960s when our kids went to nursery school together; Martha Dickman, heart of the Davis Comic Opera Company (DCOC); Arthur Sullivan, a wonderful man we had known for over 50 years after meeting him at the Lamplighters; and Larry Fanning, also from DCOC, whom we had also known forever.  Walt's old boss and friend Charles Davis also died.

12. Who did you miss?
The people who died, the people who disappeared without a trace, and especially lately my cousin Peach.  Sure could use her to talk to about my mother.  Heck, I even miss my sister for the same reason and she has been dead since 1971.

13. Who was the best new person you met in 2016?
Off hand, I can't think of any new person I met in 2016, other than some of the volunteers at Sutter Davis Hospital (but I haven't yet put names to faces, so I don't know which ones I like and which ones didn't make an impression!)

14. What was your favorite month of 2016?
June, because that's the month Ned finished my new office and I have been happily ensconced in here ever since!

15. Did you travel outside of the US in 2016?
Not this year.

16. How many different states did you travel to in 2016?
I don't think I left California this year, which is unusual.

17. What would you like to have in 2017 that you lacked in 2016?
My mother's brain back!!!  But that ain't gonna happen.

18. What date from 2016 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
I wouldn't be able to tell you the date, but it was probably the first time I got a call from Atria telling me they had taken my mother to the hospital.  Now, sadly, it has become old hat.  :(

19. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Nothing tremendous, but I am proud of managing to keep up with reviewing for two newspapers.  I am officially a "writer."  Whoda thunk?  I was even interviewed on the local PBS station.

20. What was your biggest failure?
I know it's not my fault and I can do nothing about it, but I always feel like I should be able to do something to help my mother feel more comfortable with her dementia, especially when she has one of her anxiety attacks.

21. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nope.  Clumsy though I may be, I have avoided injury and other than my normal cough, which usually plagues me from September to January, no illness.

22. What was the best thing you bought?
Definitely the new iPhone 7!!

23. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Ned wins top honors, for all the hours and days and weeks he spent building me a new office. I will be forever grateful.

24. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Good lord, could there be any other answer to this:  Donald Trump.

25. Where did most of your money go?
The bulk of my "discretionary spending" goes to the kids I sponsor through Compassion, International.

Down Memory Lane

It took me two hours to clean out a box 9" x 10" x 10" deep.  It was filled with miscellaneous sundries, mostly letters that for one reason or another I have saved over the years.

I threw away a lot, but kept the special ones.  I also read a lot of the letters

The thing is that it was like a walk through the last 30 or so years of my life.  I found letters from a few people who have dropped me from their lives.  It was nice to remember when we were friends and all was good. 

I had forgotten that I corresponded with Gilbert's sister in Oklahoma for quite awhile after his death.  We probably parted company when I told her I had started seeing a therapist to deal with the grief over his death and she told me that "therapy is only for crazy people" and yet she mourned his death for the rest of her life, while I managed to work my way through it.

There were many glowing letters from people I don't remember thanking me for doing things that I don't remember doing, but it was a real boost to my ego to know that people, at some time, felt fondly about me.

The best of this was a letter from the high school music teacher thanking me for a thank you letter I had sent him, after our last kid left his jazz choir class.  The letter was beautiful and there is no way I can throw that away.

There is a typed letter dated 1987 that is unsigned and I can't figure out who it's from but I was amused to read, "Don't worry about getting a modem.  My modeming affair is on the skids already.  Just one of those things (Very time consuming!) And it would certainly not be cheaper to send letters over the phone line rather than my UB post  Just the novelty of it was appealing for awhile..."  H/She then goes on to talk about the advantages of having a modem, but ends up feeling it will never catch on.

Wish I knew who wrote this letter.  I'd like to see if he/she is on Facebook.  :)

There were, of course, the letters from people no longer with us.  Lots of letters from my friend Will Connelly and a very long missive from my friend Diane in Seattle, whom I still miss very much.  There were also several "what I'm doing now" letters from the founder of the Sunshine Children's Theater, who left Davis many years ago.  I decided it was time to throw these away.

There were letters from Yvonne Kalman and Donald Madgwick.  Kalman was the daughter of Emerich Kalman, the composer of the operetta Countess  Maritza, which The Lamplighters performed.  I had found a letter from him among Gilbert's belongings after he died and I wrote to him to let him know of Gilbert's death.  We had a brief, nice correspondence and I was looking forward to meeting him when we traveled with The Lamplighters to a Gilbert & Sullivan festival in Buxton, England.  We met...and he was this nerdy, really unlikeable little guy.  We did not see each other further during the festival.

As for Yvonne, I interviewed her before we did her father's operetta and she was a very nice lady.  She made a special trip from Los Angeles to attend Gilbert's memorial service and I think she shocked the bejeezus out of her because she came to the house first for dinner.  His family, myself, and his best friend had been dealing with Gilbert's death and all the "business" concerning a death and planning a memorial service and we were, by this time, pretty giddy.  I think she was shocked at our lack of respect and our dumb jokes and giggling.

I received more letters than I remembered from my high school typing teacher and life-long friend, Sister Anne.  She wrote eloquent letters in that beautiful handwriting of her.  I last saw her when I was at a conference in St. Louis and she brought me to the motherhouse, where she now lived, in Indiana.  Later, she sent me a lovely beautiful videotape, which I treasure.  She then wrote that she had non-Hodgkins lymphoma and it was a shock, when we sent an announcement of Ned and Marta's wedding, to learn that she died a few months before.  I decided to keep her letters.

There were also more letters than I remembered receiving from my old Physics Department boss, now an emeritus professor from Carnegie Melon. I saw Fred about 20 years ago when I spent the weekend with him and his wife. He had many health problems at that time, so it's a surprise to me that he is still living, into his late 80s.  He doesn't write long chatty letters any more, but he does send e-mail once or twice a year, after I send him a birthday card and a Christmas card.

Awhile ago, I linked to a video that I found on YouTube, the first of four, in which he tells the story of his family and how they escaped the holocaust and came to the United States.  I learned a lot that I'd never known about him before, and when I wrote to him to congratulate him on the video, he was surprised I had seen it because he had no idea it was on the internet.

I cringed a little when I saw the familiar handwriting of my father in the stack of letters.  Our last years were not good and he would send me letters that were so hurtful that whenever a letter arrived, I would put it next to me on the couch and hold it at arm's length and just glance at it a little bit at a time.  So I wondered what this letter contained and why he had sent it.

But it was one of his very rambling letters about music.  My father's passion was music, specifically jazz, and he lived to share his knowledge with others, but he was terrible at doing it.  He always started out OK, but as he warmed to his subject he wanted to include more and more and more so that you got the total of his knowledge in one session.  When I was a child he gave up on teaching me his knowledge of jazz because I was so obviously not interested

But the last time we saw him -- my very best time with him, ever -- he suddenly discovered that his grandchildren shared his love of jazz.  For years, ever since they started becoming teenagers, he assumed they had nothing in common because he hated rock and roll.  What a surprise it was when they started playing jazz for him and he positively glowed when he sat down and joined them in a jam session.  "Whoever thought I would have a jam session with my grandchildren" he said at the time and I felt so good because I realized that I had finally done something that made hi happy.

He started teaching Jeri about jazz and, as usual, overdid it.  At first she was enjoying it but as it went on and on and on, I saw that trapped look in her eyes.

This letter, rather than letting me know what I was doing wrong, started out "will you give this to David, please.  I have already sent it to Ned and to Paul."  It was four pages, back to back about music, chords (my god did he loved chords! I swear an augmented something could give him an orgasm) and suggestions for how to play and what musicians to listen to.  You could tell that he was frantic as he was writing it, trying to get it all down, because the handwriting got more and more illegible as he warmed to his subject, plus the pen he used bled through to the back, so it was very difficult to read.  I don't think I ever gave the letter to David.  Just something else I had done that would have made my father angry if he ever knew.

It was a roller coaster of emotions as I continued to the bottom of this box.  I saved maybe a dozen letters -- everything from the kids, everything from Sister Anne and a few others that were special to me.

I think the favorite thing I found in the box was an envelope that had this piece of paper in it

When I unfolded it I found this

Why you don't just toss things willy nilly and why you take two hours to go thrugh everything to make sure it is something you really want to throw away...

Marvelous Martha

They say deaths come in threes.  Today we lost the third friend in three days.  This one, like Richard's death, hurts.

In between Richard's death on Thursday and today's sad passing of Martha Dickman, Walt lost his co-worker and friend of more than 50 years, Al Almquist, whose 100th birthday party we attended last year.  Obviously his death was not a shock, but every death is a shock, isn't it?

Martha was one of those people that I considered friend, though I don't know that we ever had in-depth conversations.  We just were involved in the same things and around each other often, at various times in our lives and saw each other frequently enough that it never occurred to me that she was anything other than a friend.  I interviewed her several times for one newspaper article or another.

She was a member of the Davis Comic Opera Co. throughout its entire thirty year history, whether performing or helping put the production together.

She was a soloist in a blues band for many years.

When Citizens Who Care, that group that gives care to the frail elderly and their caregivers here in Davis, was looking for a fund raiser, Martha and Stephen Peithman formed a group which performed for some 12 years, the largest CWC fund raiser each year, giving unselfishly of their talents to raise money for a good cause.

I don't know which year this photo was taken, but several years ago.  The make-up of the group changed over the years but Martha and Steve (standing next to her in the back) produced and were in every show.  

When Martha's voice began to lose its oomph, she performed with a mic (by their last performance, in 2014, many other aging performers were now using mics).  Martha also loaned her grand piano, which was transferred to and from the theater every year.

But over and above the performing, I will always remember Martha as a gentle, elegant lady, always willing to help young performers (when, in the early days of Lawsuit, Paul was having trouble sustaining his voice throughout a 2 hour show, she worked with him to give him tricks for how to keep his voice going).

"She was one of a kind. And one of the kindest, most loving and supportive people in my theatre family," wrote someone on Facebook.  "Martha was a personal inspiration and force of nature, and always made my heart sing." wrote another. "A sweet and gentle person."

The last time I saw Martha was at a thank you reception last fall for those involved with CWC, where she was specially honored.  They encouraged her to sing a bit and today I am regretting that I only recorded about 45 seconds of her song....but obviously even at 90, the pipes were still strong.

NOTICE TO THE WORLD:  I do not want to write another obituary for several months, please!

One of the Good Guys

The Pinata Group lost another one today.  Richard died after a short stay in the hospital following a heart attack.  Richard was one of the good guys.  I really loved that man.

Richard and his wife Michele came into our lives, not through the Newman Club, as all the rest of the Pinata group did, but when we put our kids into Tiny Tots nursery school in Oakland, where their son Eric was also enrolled.

From the beginning, we all just "clicked."  As we began our New Year's Day pinata parties, we always included Michele, Richard and Eric, and in short order they were just one of the group and we forgot where the Newman folks ended and the Havel folks began.

Richard and Michele owned property in Mendocino county, which was nicknamed and is still called "Eric's Property."  We had many, many camping and huckleberry hunting expeditions on that property.  Richard mixed gin fizzes by attaching his blender to the motor of his beloved "White Elephant."  

We have always teased Richard about his built in nose and glasses.  In fact, when he turned 50 (he was the oldest of us, by quite a bit), Michele threw a surprise party for him where everyone, including his 80-something mother and the stripper hired for entertainment, all wore Groucho glasses.  I'd love to post a photo of this event, but we missed it.  We were hosting our first foreign student, Eduardo from Brasil, and we gave him the choice of going to the party or driving up to Washington/Oregon on a camping trip right after Mt. St. Helen's erupted.  Being from Brasil, especially Rio de Janeiro, the prospect of seeing a nude woman was nothing special, but the chance to collect volcanic ash was something he would not get to do in Brasil.  So we missed the party of the century.

When Char and Mike sold their house in Oakland, they sold it to Michele and Richard, to keep it in the family.  They took over their house and their dog Rocky.  We had so many parties in that house, always with a big bowl of clam dip as the center of attention (we made sure the boys didn't hover).

When they sold the house, Ned and Paul made a video about it.

We lost Michele in 2007.  She and Richard had bought a house up in the Sierra foothills.  Richard was delivering Meals on Wheels that morning and when he left the house, he noticed Michele sleeping on the bed.  When he returned home, she hadn't moved and he discovered she was gone.  It was a terrible blow to all of us, because who would have thought that someone so young and so healthy would be one of the first to leave us.  We scattered part of her ashes on Eric's Property and Char and I took some with us to France when we went there with the girls in 2009.  Michele, a French major, always wanted to visit France and never made it.  Now some of her ashes rest somewhere off the coast of Nice.

Richard continued to live in the house, the old man on the hill.  Char and I drove up and visited him a couple of times and have been talking about driving up there again, but now it's too late.  Proving once again the necessity of not putting things like this off.  I don't feel guilty for not going to see him, but sad for us that we missed the chance for one more visit.  I think the last time we saw him was a Mike's funeral.

We are of an age (at 73 I am the youngest of the pinata group) when the death of one of our good friends is not unexpected, but it's always a big punch in the gut to realize that we are a little smaller and a little less rich now.

Richard made it to the other side to be with Michele again...and just in time for David's birthday.

Outhouses, Bears and Ants...oh MY!

Laurel posted a photo of Bri on Facebook today that brought back a flood of memories.  

Here is an excerpt from my journal entry from August 1974, on a trip to Yosemite, in the days before Funny the World.  (Paul would have been 5):

The drive up was rather uneventful. We drove without stopping until we were well into downtown Sacramento (20 miles), where we made our first stop at McDonald's for the usual stuff, which we washed down with Kool Aid. The kids went to sleep and probably slept in shifts for most of the trip. It was after 6 when we got to the park and we had no trouble finding a campsite at Porcupine Flat. It was really a very nice place. We had a log, which made a very comfortable niche for sitting, a stump which was just the right height for cooking, a slightly warped and slanting, but nonetheless useful picnic table, and a flat, relatively unrocky space for a tent. We ended up staying there for the whole four days, in spite of the bears...but more about them later.

On Tuesday we took our first side trip to Devil's Post Pile which, if you have never been there, is something really worth seeing. Large columns of basalt looking like they were carved there and a mountain of pieces which had been broken off by a passing glacier.

The road to Devil's Post Pile is under construction, so we were stopped for a long while (during which we fixed and ate lunch), but eventually we bumped our way down the rutted dirt road until we got to the place. It's rather disheartening to follow 8 miles of twisted, rocky, dirt road and get to the bottom to find a traffic jam! We had a hard time finding a parking place in the very large parking lot.

You walk 0.4 miles to the post pile and once again there we managed to draw attention to ourselves. First of all, you can take a trail to the top of the pile, which Walt and the kids did, while I stationed myself down below with the camera so I could photograph my children perched precariously atop these columns which appear in danger of falling at any moment. Then they came down again and we were the only people there. The mountain of falling posts is such an invitation for climbing that we couldn't resist letting the kids scamper about on the rocks--even David (though Walt followed him up the slopes after Tom got caught half-way up and had to be carried down). While the kids were engaged in the delights of climbing, investigating the passing frogs, etc., all of those people in the parking lot began to wander by--including a pack of Boy Scouts. 

All of a sudden, when a sufficient crowd had gathered, Paul, who was right at the very top, began to scream and scream and scream. You could have heard him all the way back to Yosemite. We were sure he was at least ready to fall down the mountain, and the whole pack of Scouts, on orders shouted by their leader (a chubby, grey crew-cut gentleman in a Scout uniform) -- "Men, help that child!" -- started climbing rapidly over the rocks to save him. Walt left David to race up and save him. People were gasping and clutching each other. I had the good grace NOT to take his picture. And for several tense minutes, the world listened to the hysterical screams of this five year old trapped on top of the mountain. Walt reached him first and the cries abruptly stopped. His problem? An ant was crawling over him!! What do you say when a 50 year old Scout leader looks at you accusingly and asks, "that your kid, lady?"

Everything after that was rather anticlimactic. We made it back to the car with no other disasters occurring and except for one stop at a Safeway, we went straight back to camp. The Safeway, by the way, was another experience. How often do you stand in a check out line and hear one checker shout to another, "Hey, Charlie, how much are the worms?"

(there is more to this story, like "the night of the bear" and "the wet night," for example, but I won't print it all.  It can, however, be read in its entirety here)

Tom sent us a video of Brianna recreating Paul's fright on the rocks and both Ned and I agreed there wasn't nearly enough screaming and Walt asked if there were any Boy Scouts around  Everyone's a smartass!

PTDSD

I wonder what our kids remember of the family dinner table.  I remember the dinner table of my childhood.  The kitchen was right opposite the front door.  You walked in the door, turned right into the bedroom I shared with my sister, left to go down the hall to the living room/dining room (also my parents' bedroom and the bathroom), and straight ahead into the kitchen.  There was a chrome table with a yellow formica top.  My father sat at the left end of the table, and while dinner was being prepared that's where he sat for his nightly cocktail.  My mother sat at the right end of the table, opposite the stove.  I sat on the side, with my back facing the front door.  Karen sat across from me.

We ate dinner together as a family every night.  On nights when my father was gone (he worked the mail on the train to Los Angeles, so was gone two or three nights a week), my mother would prepare something odd for dinner -- scrambled eggs, pancakes, "milk toast" (buttered toast with warm milk poured over it) and things like that. Something easy. When Daddy was home it was meat and potatoes and vegetables...and dessert.  

Dessert was always a part of dinner.  It wasn't always something easy like ice cream, but she would make pies or cakes or cookies for dinner.  I remember my father getting angry with me one time because I decided I didn't feel like dessert.  Strange reaction to a fat kid who definitely didn't need dessert. But then "getting angry" was what my father did best.

I wish I could remember that we had long, interesting talks over dinner, but dinner was usually a time of tension.  My father chose dinnertime to air his grievances, either against us or against the world.  And lord help us if the phone rang.  Whether we were eating at 5 or at 8, anybody who made the mistake of calling ruined the rest of dinner for all of us.  My sister and I reacted differently -- I learned to eat as fast as I could so I could get away from the table, she ate so slowly she was often still at the table two hours later (because you had to finish dinner before you could get down).

As Karen got older and began to form her own opinions on the topics of the day, dinnertime was the time for loud and angry arguments because she almost always disagreed with my father.  My mother and I fled and let my father and Karen fight it out.  Whatever the issue was, it was never something that was forgotten when dinner was over, but would fester until the next day.

I loved the nights when I got invited to my friend Gayle's house for dinner and tried to hang out there every night so they would invite me.  They had nice dinners and I don't remember anybody getting angry with anybody, but my mother eventually told me that I was being a nuisance (which I'm sure I was) and I didn't eat there as often any more.

For holidays, we ate in the dining room.  Dinner always included my father's parents and one or two others, usually including my godfather (my grandfather's brother who had lived alone most of his life, after his wife left him -- a good Catholic, he would not remarry, or even date).  We had a table cloth, cloth napkins, the good silverware and good china, and on top of the dish cabinet behind where my father always sat was the 2 pound box of See's candy which my godfather always brought to dinner, which we would pass around after dessert had been finished.  Things weren't quite so tense at holidays, but tension was never far from the surface, especially with my grandmother, whom my father did not like, and my grandfather, whom my grandmother didn't like much.

When I moved away from home (and I couldn't get away soon enough!) I don't really remember anything about the dining room of the dorm where I lived because I eventually started cooking for the house where Walt and six other guys lived, so ate there every night. This is where I learned how to cook, because my mother never taught me anything about cooking.  I became a fairly decent cook, and especially good at making something tasty with a very very small budget.  But the quality of my cooking aside, dinners were fun.  There were always guests, so maybe 10 or 12 people at the table.  I loved those dinners.  There was laughter and fun and conversation, the kind I thought famlies had at the dinner table.

We married and started having children.  Like my family, we always had dinner together at the table...almost never fast food picked up, but food I cooked.  In our Oakland house, the stove even had a soup burner, where I could keep stock simmering on the stove all day.  I tried to have "meaningful dinners," but over the years I found that there was some residual PTDSD (Post Traumatic Dinner Stress Disorder) in me that made me very nervous when we sat down to the table to eat.  I usually served everyone and then found things to do in the kitchen to avoid sitting down many nights.

It was better in the years when we had foreign students, when I worked to involve them in the conversation at dinner each night, despite their English limitations.  We had Nelson and Sonia here once, both from Brasil, and we made some nights Portuguese night, where you could only speak in Portuguese.  The best sentence we all had was "how do you say this in Portuguese," as we lifted something up to show the Brasilians in order to get the word.

We had a lot of fun when Chieko (Japan), Juan (Venezuela) and Ndangi (Congo) were here together, all learning English and laughing together over dinner.

I think I finally got over PTDSD during those 10 years of feeling I had to take care of the foreigners living with us.  And we had the holidays dinners that were times of great crisis, but also great fun, with as many as 24 people sitting at one long table that entirely filled our family room. How I loved that!

Dinners at my mother's house after she finally left my father and married Fred were usually OK, devoid of stress unless Fred's mother, who thought we were vermin not worth her time, was at the table, when she steadfastly refused to look up from her plate, answer anything directed to her, and left as soon as she had eaten.  Ned, bless him, decided one night that he was going to get through to her, but she was, as my mother was fond of describing any of Fred's relatives "a stubborn Dutchman" and she never did come to accept us. But we had a good time without her.

When our nest was empty, we had a few years of "entertaining."  There were a few people with whom we exchanged dinner dates and I loved those times, especially when our guests were interesting conversationalists.  But the 3 dogs and my perennial inability to keep a clean house eventually put an end to our entertaining, and with that our invitations to others' homes ended as well.

Now dinners are quiet.  Walt and I don't have much to say to each other at dinner, so the TV is on while we eat (thought we still eat at the table...we don't own TV trays).  When I go to Atria, if my mother and I are sitting by ourselves, lunch is a continuation of visiting at the apartment, answering the same questions over and over again.  

The fun of the dinner is when we go to our children's homes where we usually have peaceful meals with interesting conversation, even with the grandkids, and I hope that somehow my kids avoided PTDSD and actually have the kind of idealistic dinners I thought families usually had together.

Day 30:  Happiness is my afternoon nap

City Girl

This is another of those "For Our Children's Children" type of entries.

Today I received an e-mail from a woman named Audrey Long who works for a company named Live Oak Legacies, a family history service that helps families capture and preserve the most important family memories, to save for future generations.

A growing number of families are turning to professionals to record their family stories, employing “personal historians” to sit and ask the open-ended questions they don’t have time to ask during the rush of holiday gatherings or the sporadic bursts of long-distance communication.

She wanted to write a brief entry for this journal, but I told her that as for me personally, I've been preserving our own family history for years, in photos, journal entries, videos, and interviews.  I wished her well in her endeavors and I've included a link to her page for those who might be interested in checking it out.

The brief exchange had me thinking of preserving more of my own history.  It's so different from our children's.

We moved here to Davis in 1973.  We are 2-1/2 blocks from the elementary school, it's another 2 blocks to the middle school and two blocks to the high school.  The library and theater (where they performed) are just on the other side of the high school across the street from the Catholic church.

So this was a biking family.  It was before people started being so protective of their kids and from the beginning, the kids rode their bikes to school.   

I lived on a steep hill and even if I wanted to ride my bike home, I would have to get off the bike to go either up or down the hill.  It was a concrete world with no trees (now there are trees planted in front of our flat and it looks very strange!)

Grammar school was 0.8 miles from our house.  I don't know how old I was when I started walking to school, but pretty young, I think.  I walked two blocks to my friend Gayle's house.  On the way I passed Macondray Lane, the little alley that Armisted Maupin's "Tales of the City" described as "Barbary Lane." 

From Gayle's house, we walked and picked up Maryanne, who lived a block away, and then Georgette, who lived 3 blocks from there. When we got Georgette we were at the halfway point and we continued on to school.  I carried a metal lunchbox.   I think it was just a plain colored lid--in the early days it may have been in the days before they started putting TV shows on lunch boxes.

My mother always made me a sandwich with balloon bread and it varied among peanutbutter and jelly, bologna with mayonnaise, salami with butter (I never did figure out why no mayo on the salami), or American cheese with mayo.  Never lettuce or tomato on the sandwiches.  Sometimes she made deviled egg or tuna salad.  She always cut the sandwiches into two triangles and wrapped them in waxed paper.  The lunch was rounded out by a piece of fruit and some sort of sweet--cookies or cake or something like that.  I also had a thermos bottle of milk.  I can't begin to count the number of thermos bottles I broke when I dropped it, breaking the glass lining!

If we brought our lunch, we ate in the multi purposes room, where we sat on benches around the side of the room.  I probably bought lunch now and then, but I don't really remember doing that much.  Except that is where I learned to hate canned green beans.  We ate bought lunches in the cafeteria.

Our school was a big concrete block.

The school went from kindergarten to 8th grade and the 7th and 8th graders were on the top floor.  They had their own bathroom because it had Kotex for the girls and we younger kids weren't supposed to know about things like that.

It was a mile and a half to St. Vincent High School and I used public transportation.  The No. 41 Union bus stopped at the top of our hill and I would take that down to Van Ness Ave. (4 blocks) and transfer to the 45 Van Ness and take that to Geary Blvd.  But my alternate route, and my preferred one, was to walk a block to Hyde Street and catch the cable car (at that hour of the day it was tourist-free) and take it dwn to Geary Blvd, and then get on the 38 bus and ride up to the stop right by my school.  We had school bus passes and it cost 15 cents, even for the cable car.

The school didn't look particularly special from the outside.

But inside it was gorgeous.  The students entered by that door behind the car on the left, but if you were coming for the first time, or a parent coming to see the sisters, you entered by the big door on the right, in front of the light colored car.  Inside the building was beautiful wood paneling, with a sweeping staircase on the right that went up to the school chapel (the rounded windows at the top on the right)

That school no longer exists.  It was torn down so the Bishop could build his new cathedral there, forever identified as the washing machine agitator. The old cathedral had burned down (we always suspected the Bishop set it on fire so he could get rid of it) and our school was combined with Sacred Heart School, which was the boys' high school a block away.

Sadly, the new school is "Sacred Heart-Cathedral School" so St. Vincent has disappeared completely. It killed me to think of that beautiful staircase being torn down.

Moving the schools into new buildings and building the church involved tearing down all the slum housing in the neighborhood and putting up high priced high rises.  I have often wondered what happened to all those poor people when they evicted them to erect that monstrosity.  I remember one Chinese family of 8 living in a one room apartment across the street from the school.  The nuns used to bring them food and when the kids were baptized, I was godmother to two of them.

Later, when I graduated from high school and changed my mind about entering the convent, for the six months before I was to start UC Berkeley, I attended night school at the University of San Francisco, where I took French. That commute was fun because I rode the cable car all the way down to the end of the line on Market Street.   Coming back after class, I often watched A Star Is Born, which seemed to run forever at a little theater right where the cable car turns around.   It only cost 50 cents to get in and even if I only saw the last half hour of the movie, that was fine.

My kids have traveled by bus from time to time (obviously more now that they are middle-aged), but as a City Girl I traveled all over San Francisco on public transportation.  I loved to go downtown on a Saturday.  We always dressed up to go downtown...I even wore heels and gloves.  Gloves.  My word!   That seems a very long time ago.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

I found this quote in the first book I picked up to look through today at Logos:

What a wonderful life I've had
I only wish I realized it sooner.
-- Colette

It kind of dovetailed into a comment I heard recently, that someone here in town had referred to the "Sykes Dynasty."  My heavens.  I had no idea!

But I started to think of all the things I have lived through in my 70 years, some good, some bad, some historical.  As I was walking back to the desk, I spied this book.

It's filled with photos that Life magazine thinks are the best from its history to that point.  It got my brain working, looking at how many people and events and gadgets I remember.

Take the telephone, for example.   When I was in grammar school, we had a heavy black phone with a receiver that sat on a cradle (my grandmother had the candlestick kind where the earpiece hung from the side of the phone).  We had a party line in the early days and I liked to eavesdrop on whoever was on the party line.  San Francisco also had telephone numbers that started with words, like Juno, Prospect, Tuxedo, Luxor.  The first two letters started your phone number and five numbers followed it.  We eventually got a single party line and I don't remember how long it was before I had a push button phone...that may not have come along until after Walt and I were married.  When cell phones came along, our first one looked like something out of Get Smart, like holding a shoe to your ear,  Eventually we got flip phones, like Star Trek communicators and now we both have the Android phones, which look like faux iPhones.  

We used to have to be careful of long distances charges, which I could (and did) rack up with regularity.  Now we can call just about anywhere at no extra charge with our cell phones.

My very first typewriter was a portable that fit inside a little suitcase so I could take it anywhere.  Then I got a big office-sized typewriter, then an electric typewriter, then an electric typewriter with interchangeable keys.  Now I have a computer and can even write messages on my cell phone. 

My first computer had no disc drive.  My first "real" computer had a whopping 60 mg of storage.  Now I have 250 gigs plus TWO external hard drives, one of which is a terrabyte.  I had my first modem before there was an internet that could be easily accessed.  I remember when Jon Lee first installed Mosaic on my computer and I saw my first web page.  I remember learning HTML because there was no WYSIWYG program available.

I remember the McCarthy hearings (not well, but I was aware of them), the gay witchhunts in San Francisco (not too far where gay weddings are now performed).   I photographed the Free Speech demonstrations, knew Mario Savio, and remember when the windows on Telegraph Avenue were boarded up for fear of broken windows.

I remember the horror of November 11, 1963 and that surreal week end, remembering at the time that I had just seen President Kennedy live in a car passing by Newman Hall about a month before. That car was a covertible too. Presidents don't ride in convertibles any more.

I remember how frightened I was when Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were killed...and nobody who lived through that time has not stopped to wonder at least once what life in this country would be like today if the two Kennedys and Dr. King had not died.

I remember how hard I campaigned for LBJ, working with Scientists and Engineers for Johnson, a group which was determined to keep Goldwater out of office.   In retrospect, I wonder if we were right...  But I cast my very first vote for Johnson and was thrilled when he won.

I remember the violence at Kent State and how shocked we were that national guardsmen would fire on unarmed students.  And I remember demonstrators putting little pink carnations in the barrels of rifles aimed at them.

I will never forget that we landed a man on the moon in 1969 because I took a picture of each of the then-3 kids with the newspaper headline, and Paul is a baby in a baby seat.  He was born in 1969.

Our first TV set was a black and white Muntz that my father bought in the early 1950s.  The first program I ever watched was Life with Luigi.   My mother never missed Bishop Fulton Sheen or The Loretta Young Show.   My father always watched boxing, loving particularly the heavy weight matches. I remember that the TV day ended at midnight with a recording of the Star Spangled Banner while a flag waved and then it went to a test pattern until the morning.

We didn't have a color set until Walt and I had kids.  I remember Ozzie and Harriet, Howdy Doody, Laugh-In, Star Trek (the original series), Ed Sullivan, and the last episode of M*A*S*H.

I used to make all of our bread by hand, kneading it on the bread board and scaring the dog when I slammed it down to work the gluten better ... and I now have a bread machine.

I remember beatniks in North Beach in the 50s and hippies in the Haight Ashbury in the 60s.

I remember watching the coronation of Queen Elizabeth and the funeral of Egypt's Nasser and far too many political figures lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC.

I got to shake hands with Judy Garland and Tipper Gore and got a kiss from D'Oyly Carte's leading patterman for many years, John Reed (a favorite of mine). I went to an opening night party at Sardi's, where I met Theodore Bikel and Piper Laurie. 

 

And apparently I am a part of a local Dynasty.  Who knew?

I was also starting to read Tom Brokaw's "Boom," today, which is his look at the 60s.  He describes himself as straddling two generations, the boomers of the 60 and the traditional families of the 50s.  I feel the same way.   I missed being in the "boomer generation" by a few years, so there is not really a demographic for me.

When I think of the big and little changes that have taken place in the world during my lifetime, it boggles my mind to think what my mother has seen in her 93 years.  Good lord, no WONDER she has memory problems!

On the Eve of My 70th Birthday

On February 17, I will finally cross over the line into the 70s, so on that eve, I will do this meme, which l'empress reminded me she did back in 2005.  (Thank goodness for saved Christmas letters!)

30 years ago...

* Our children were still in school, and we were hosting foreign students (ultimately 70 from 14 different countries over 10 years)
* I was volunteering at The Lamplighters one day a week, Gilbert was my best friend, and we wrote Major General Hospital, which revolutionized Lamplighters Galas
* I was also working for Women's Health Associates, before it joined with Sutter, which ruined it.

20 years ago

* Walt and I returned to England and Ireland, visited Cousin Nora in Ireland and our friend Jane and her family in England
* We planned a huge birthday picnic for Walt's mother's 80th birthday (which was a big success)
* The Band Lawsuit was going hot and heavy and was nominated for a Sammie award this year (losing out to their friends, Mumbo Gumbo).  We attended a lot of Lawsuit concerts.

10 years ago

* I lost 85 lbs through Weight Watchers (and then gained most of it back)
* Walt and I went on a charity bike ride and I had my bike accident, which dislocated my shoulder and ruined my knee
* I went to Australia

8 years ago

* We were working with the SPCA fostering dogs and feeding orphan puppies
* I flew to Los Angeles for the re-opening of The Big Voice: God or Merman
* Walt and I went to Milwaukee for what I think was our last Netstock, and to St. Louis to see the first production directed by Gilbert's niece, Rachel Blackburn.

5 years ago

* We became grandparents -- Brianna was born!
* Jeri and Phil married in a beautiful beach ceremony presided over by Marta
* I met Tony Kahn at a taping of Says You in Los Angeles

3 years ago

* Walt and I went to Russia with the Blackfords on our first Viking Cruise
* I began sponsoring children through Compassion, International
* I attended my 50th high school reunion

1 year ago

* We took the Grand European cruise from Prague to Amsterdam with the Blackfords and then visited Jeri & Phil in Boston
* I started volunteering at Logos Books
* Lacie celebrated her first birthday...we now have two grandchildren!

So far this year I

* Have been thoroughly enjoying bonding with my new iPad
* Enjoyed time with Jeri, when she was here last month
* Started having weekly lunches with my mother

Yesterday I

* Met with Shelley about coming back to the Lamplighters history project
* Reveled in the beautiful blossoms in Berkeley
* Made a delicious tortellini dinner

Today I

* wrote the review for the show we saw on Thursday night
* am working on an article I will submit to the newspaper by Monday
* am trying some of the lovely tea I received from the owner of Logos for my birthday.
* Watched Gigi on TV and discovered that when he made that film and sang "I'm glad I'm not young anymore," Maurice Chevalier was 70 years old.    Sigh.

Tomorrow I will

* Turn 70
* Attend a birthday party for me, for Rich (who will be 75), and for Tavie (the first of our Pinata kids to turn 50)
* Wonder how I got to be this old so quickly.