Thursday Thirteen

Thirteen things you should see/do in San Francisco

1. Everybody goes to see the Golden Gate Bridge, but drive UNDER the bridge to Fort Point and climb to the top floor of the old fort and see the underside of the bridge.
2. The view from Twin Peaks
3. Drive through the Haight-Ashbury District
4. Wander around the Palace of Fine Arts and maybe go to the Exploratorium
5. The Lombard Street hill (and if you REALLY want to feel "In" see its counterpart on Vermont St.)
6. Drive down Filbert Street from Hyde to Leavenworth--it's the steepest street in the city
7. Drive through Sea Cliff and see if you can spot Robin Williams' house
8. Have lunch at the Seal Rock Inn...some of the best omelets ever and if you crane your neck, you can even see the ocean and the much more expensive Cliff House.
9. If you go into St. Mary's Cathedral (the one that looks like a washing machine agitator), realize that when I grew up there, the whole area was a slum and where the cathedral stands was the site of my old high school.
10. Go to Golden Gate Park and visit the Conservatory, the DeYoung Museum, the Japanese Tea Garden, and the new Science Building (but not all in one day)
11. Watch them hang glide at Fort Funston
12. Take your picture on the steps of St. Peter & Paul church in North Beach, the place where Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe had their wedding picture taken so that Joe's Mama would think they had been married in a church.
13. See the "Portals of the Past" in Golden Gate Park, which people don't realize is all that was left of a big mansion that was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake

Why I Have No Degree

I watched Up the Down Staircase this afternoon. Sandy Dennis as an idealistic young teacher on her first assignment, in a slum school in New York (probably would be good on a double bill with To Sir, With Love).

As I watched the frustrations of someone imbued with the love of transferring knowledge to students, coming up against a group of hardened slum teenagers who want nothing to do with the study of Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson, I shuddered and thought about why it is that I have no college degree.

When I graduated from grammar school, most of the girls in my school went to Presentation High School. I had struggled for years to be first in my class, but I could never get higher than third. I figured if I went to a different school from the top two girls in my grammar school class, I might be able to do better.

Presentation was a college prep school. St. Vincent's was the best school in the city for teaching secretarial skills, but had recently added a college prep course to its curriculum.

There was never any question about whether I would go to college. My father insisted on it. He himself had only lasted one semester at San Francisco City College and then quit and I think he was ashamed of that his whole life. Nobody in my mother's family had gone to college and so I would be the very first person on either side of the family to go to college. My maternal grandmother was in a nursing home unable to speak but I remember the glow of pride on her face when my mother told her I was going to college.

I loved high school and I particularly loved the secretarial courses, but I took the college prep courses as well. I excelled in English and French, did miserably in math and fair-to-middlin' in sciences. (Ironically, I graduated third in my class of 60!)

Somewhere in my junior year, I decided I would become a nun. My father was furious. He saw that as a waste of my life, but my mother took my side and he reluctantly gave his permission for me to enter the Daughters of Charity.

In truth, I don't think I ever really wanted to be a nun, but I was carried away with the romanticism of it all. When push came to shove and I had to start assembling my trunk and buying things I would need in the convent, I was less and less enthused, though too embarrassed to admit that. My fears about entering had nothing to do with religion. They were fear that I would not be able to take care of my hair (my mother styled my hair until I was 18 and I was afraid I wouldn't know how to do it). There were fears of what it would be like to wear wool in the St. Louis summers. The Daughters of Charity had three areas of emphasis. Sisters were either teachers or nurses or concentrated on social work. I knew I didn't have the stomach for nursing and knew that I didn't want to be a teacher, but also knew that I would have no choice of what I would be assigned.

In the summer after I graduated, Sister Anne, my good friend and typing teacher, who had been transferred to Phoenix the year before, came back for a visit. I wonder if she came back specifically to talk with me. She did talk with me and gently suggested a 6 month postponement of my entrance into the convent. I would, instead, work at the school while I pondered my decision.

In the end, of course, I decided not to go. Instead of being relieved, my father took over my life. I wanted to take a year off from school and work, he said that he had listened to me once and refused to listen to me again. I WOULD go to UC Berkeley. He reasoned that if I took a year off, I would never go to college at all. Other than my decision to enter the convent (which my mother championed), I had no history of ever going against my father's wishes and so I applied for entrance to UC Berkeley. (It was easier to get in there, and cost much less than now.) Because of my six month delay, I entered mid-semester, so was on my own, without a group of entering freshmen with me.

My father insisted that I was going to be a teacher. You teachers will appreciate his reasoning--you only have to work 9 months a year, you get a great salary, you only work until 3 p.m. each day. He figured it was an easy way to make lots of money for very little work.

The problem was that I hated teaching. I was terrible at it. When I taught Sunday School at Newman Hall, I took the same class two years in a row so that I could have a chance to make up for all the stuff that I didn't teach them the first year so nobody would realize how little I actually taught them.

When classes got tough, there was no incentive for me to work at it because all I could see at the end of the road was a lifetime of working in a job that I knew I hated before I'd taken a single class. I was such an incredible wimp.

Because I never went through orientation I knew nothing about how to work the system at the university. I remember someone once asking me if I were taking a class "pass or fail" and I didn't have a clue what that meant. When a teacher made a pass at me and started cornering me outside the room before every class, I didn't have a clue that there were options available to me and so I stopped going to his class to avoid him. I had never failed a class in my life (or gotten so much as a D) and I thought that by failing his class, I would be kicked out of the university. So I stopped going to all classes. The only time I ever met with my counselor (I never even realized I had one until this happened), I had to go to her drunk in order to have enough nerve to tell her I was quitting school.

If I had known then what I know now about how a university works, about the kinds of majors other than teaching that were available, about the kinds of support I could find in the administration, things might have ended up quite different.

Instead I took the easy road and just quit, extracting my revenge by going to work for the university and having them pay me for a change.

But for most of my life, especially since we moved to a University town, I have felt, as my father did, embarrassed that I had no college degree, when everyone I knew did and assumed that I did. It was especially embarrassing when I started typing psychological reports on people who seemed to have significantly less potential than I feel I did, who had advanced degrees. People tell me it's never too late...but now I don't care that much any more!

I just know that there is no way, even now, that I would even think about a career in teaching--and Up the Down Staircase just makes that point even more clearly for me. You guys, especially those teaching in inner city schools (like my friend Merrell) have my utmost admiration!

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Walt got my bluetooth working. He says all I needed to do was RTFM. I actually did, but must have missed something. Anyway, it now works so let's hope my interview on Thursday is worth the money I paid to buy it.

Blue Skies

When I was a little kid, we lived on a steep hill in San Francisco. Every so often a man would kind of lope up the street. Everyone said he was shell shocked (now he'd probably have post traumatic stress syndrome). He was tall and lanky and seemed monochromatic. Everything from the oversized shoes to the floppy cap he wore seemed to be a kind of grey-brown. He walked bent over, with his arms swinging back and forth.

And he talked to himself. Or to some unseen being. I never saw him when he wasn't talking to "someone." All us kids were afraid of him. When we went past the luggage storage area in my friend Stephen's apartment building and he told me that the "boogie man" lived there, I always imagined that it was the shell shocked guy.

Years later, when I was working for a typing service here in Davis, we had a customer with severe mental problems. He had been a high school teacher, I believe, but he lost his job after he became convinced that we were being controlled by rays from another planet. He used as his proof illusionist Doug Henning, who could "make things disappear." He was certain Henning was being controlled from another planet.

The man wrote and wrote and wrote and would bring his gibberish to us to type. While he proofread his stuff, he sat at a table in lively conversation with an invisible person. Sometimes he would stand outside the door having an argument with something or someone invisible

(Ironically, he did one day get his book published--I suspect self-published!--and I actually bought a copy to send to my friend who sufferend through endless drafts of his stuff with me!)

My oldest aunt had a friend from outer space. Bertie, she called him. Since he was of some royal lineage, I suspect he may have been cheating on Victoria with my aunt. She wrote tomes about her relationship with Bertie and where they went.

When I was young, we would have said these guys were nuttier than a loon.

Nowadays, you have to be careful of labels like this. When you see someone walking down the street alone and talking animatedly or having an argument with an unseen companion, it's more likely that s/he is talking to someone on the cell phone. It makes it hard to tell the real crazy people from the people who are just crazy enough to talk loudly in public to their unseen friends!

I have thusfar resisted the temptation of anything beyond a very simple tricorder type flip phone, decorated with puppy teeth prints (we were due for new phones in August, but I didn't want to give up my puppy-marked phone!)

But I have to interview a guy in San Diego this week and it's silly to pay daytime long distance rates for an interview when I could do it for free on my cell phone. But I can't hold my cell phone up to my ear to conduct an interview like I do with my land line.

Enter...

I was hoping to get some ear phones, but the only ones they had had ear buds, not "in the ear" thingies, which I prefer. Then he showed me the Bluetooth. I admit I was curious. After I saw it and he explained how it would work to me, I decided to join the 21st century and get a Bluetooth.

I wasn't completely sure he knew what he was doing when he set it up.

But he seemed confident and told me that as soon as I charged the thing for 2 hrs and turned it on and then started up my phone, I would get a message asking if I wanted to use the Bluetooth. I came home and plugged it in, excited to try it for the first time.

Naturally I can't get it to work, now that it should be fully charged, so I guess another trip to Verizon is in my immediate future...or at least before Thursday, when I have to conduct this interview!

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HOWEVER, I am no slouch in the kitchen. I made "real" ice cream today (now that my "coconut ice" is finished) and it is fabulous. A quart of vanilla malt chocolate chip ice cream is waiting to be dessert after dinner tonight!

Somebody's Bright Idea

When I was in Australia, I wrote an entry called "Why Didn't We Think of That?" It was about Australian things that I thought were very clever.

One was a two-button flush mechanism which only used a little water for most things, but for heavy duty stuff, flushed a lot more water.

Then there was the 3-pronged plug, which I think about often around here. When Peggy first arrived here she was amazed at how unsafe she felt our plugs were. Every time I do something here where the plug slips out of the socket, I think about how tightly they fit into the socket in Australia and how it can't fall out. The socket itself can also be turned off and on, which is an additional safety feature.

Then there was money...most paper money in other countries which is either colored or different sized or in some other way made to easily tell which currency you have. People who come here are confused that all our paper currency looks the same, unless you recognize the people printed on them. (In some countries, each denomination is a different SIZE, which helps blind people figure out what they have in their wallets).

Australia continues to provide me with material. One of the things that arrived in my Christmas parcel from Australia was a cutting board. But not just ANY cutting board. Check this out.

It opens flat for chopping, but when you've finished chopping your onions or whatever, the sides fold up and it becomes a handy funnel that easily transfers your chopped food to a pot. As someone who constantly drops bits and pieces of food on the floor when trying to carry them to a pot, I am amazed that nobody thought of this before. Good on ya, Aussies!

But then I found a nice American invention. I went to buy a new broom the other day. We also needed a dustpan, since the one I've been using for the past year has a crack in it. They only had one kind. This one:

It's fantastic. You can easily sweep up all the dust singlehandedly. The pan doesn't move because you step on the bottom of it, and there are no leftover bits when you're finished. I wonder if the inventor was Australian.

Now if someone could put a little strip of velcro on the collar of a snuggy, my life might be complete.

(Oh God...I'm one year closer to death and I'm getting excited about things like dustpans. Groan. Just shoot me!)

XXX

I didn't remember that we were Facebook friends until a photo of him popped up in my live news feed today. And was it from his news feed, or from someone else's?

I clicked on his photo and his page popped right up, so at some point either I friended him or he friended me.

But it brought back such a wave of emotion.

He was in grammar school with our kids and he was the school bully. I can't remember the number of times that one or the other of our kids came home crying because they had been threatened by him. I don't remember there being serious beating, but everybody, it seemed, was afraid of him and he often brought them to tears.

I felt so helpless. I don't remember if I reported the incidents to the school or not, but probably not because I felt it might make things worse. He lived in the neighborhood. I may have talked with his mother, but I don't remember. But I always cringed when his name came up or when I saw him. How does a little kid turn into such a bully...and how could I protect my kids?

It was Christmas night many, many years ago when the doorbell rang and he stood there, looking frantic. His father was beating up his mother and he wanted us to help by calling the police.

"Tell him it's XXX," he said. "They know me."

Sadder words have never been spoken. It explained a lot.

I don't remember much else about that night except how gentle my father was with him. I don't remember him ever being that gentle, that kind, that loving with anyone. Certainly not with me, not with my sister. But he took XXX in his arms and he just spoke gently to him and calmed him down. Made him feel safe in a way I never experienced from him myself. I don't think I ever realized before that night how much he missed having a son.

The police must have come and the boy returned home. I don't think we ever spoke again. He never again appeared at our door in the middle of the night. But he never bullied our kids again either.

I don't really think about him much, except when I see his brother around town. I wouldn't recognize the brother except he's been in a wheelchair all his life and he has always wheeled himself everywhere. He must have the strongest upper body of anybody.

But I didn't know whatever happened to XXX until I saw his pictures today.

When I showed them to Walt he said that the thing he remembered most was being outside, working in the yard when the now-grown boy was driving by and stopped. He got out of his car and apologized to Walt for not attending David's funeral.

"I was in jail," he said.

I'm thinking about him today and I'm feeling sad. Sad for the scared little boy who needed us to call the police for him, for the bully who must have learned how to be a bully by watching the things that went on in his own home. For the young man who has had run-ins with the law, and for the polite man who felt sad at missing the funeral of the little boy he used to bully.

Life is strange. And in thinking about him I realize the good that is behind the mean face that some people present to the world, the good that must be hidden deep inside everyone, the potential that gets buried when a little kid sees only ugliness in his world.

In some respects it makes me feel guilty for never having taken on the job of helping to turn the life of some of these kids around. Maybe that's why I foster dogs. I look at Polly today, this scared little thing of skin and bones. What cruelty has she known in her life? And as she nestles into my lap and gives a sigh, I hope that as she settles in here she will begin to see life as a more positive place and leave here a stronger dog who is ready to join a forever family and live a happily ever after.

Does XXX have a happily ever after? His facebook photos show a smiling man with his arms around a smiling wife. I hope he has finally found happiness.

Sweet Polly

The day didn't go quite as planned. The plan was to take Dexter to meet his new family around 1 p.m., but I had a note from Ashley that they had postponed the big transfer for a week, so he's here, now, until the 9th.

But she asked if I could still pick up another dog.

So at 1, I drove over to Petco. I told her reminded me of a drug drop or something. It was a grey, drizzly day and there was a group of people huddled around a car in a quiet part of the parking lot. Only instead of passing around contriband, Ashley was passing out puppies. The SPCA received 4 chihuahuas, a Lhasa Apso, and 3 pit bull puppies today, so they are desperate for homes.

I'm not sure if Polly is named after Polly Pirette, who plays the quirky Abby in NCIS or Underdog's girlfriend, Sweet Polly Purebred, but Polly she shall be. Dexter, it turns out, does not really play well with others. I sat in the recliner with the two of them in my lap for the afternoon, hoping to give Polly a good start on feeling comfortable here. Dexter spent a lot of time barking at her, each time getting a tap on the nose with a "NO!" Eventually both fell asleep--and I did too--and we all slept very comfortably for an hour or so.

They both needed medicine when they woke up, and I found that peanut butter is a great incentive, not only to take your medicine, but to be around a new dog.

It's still an uneasy truce, at best, but at least Dexter isn't barking at her all the time. He may enjoy having her here because she's very skinny and Ashley says "whatever she wants to eat, give it to her." Dexter get some of the benefit of that!

We had a lovely New Years Eve at the home of someone from the now-defunct Davis Comic Opera Company. We go to this party every year and it's just perfect for us, low key and lots of fun. There is a little champagne, a lot of hors hors d'oeuvres (stuffed mushrooms to make a meal off of!), and then two kinds of home made soup (vegetarian and non-vegetarian), bread, salad, and four different kinds of desserts.

We sit around and play "the name game" until midnight. Before dinner, everyone takes slips of paper and writes down the name of anybody you can think of, from the obscure to the obvious (Paul Potts--the Susan Boyle of his year on Britain's Got Talent--to Mickey Mouse). All the slips get put in a bowl and then we divide into teams and the idea is to get your team to guess as many correct names as possible in about 20 seconds. There's lots of laughter and I just love it. (My clue for Lou Gherig, "they named a disease after him," seemed to be the big laugh of the night.)

At midnight we watch as they prop Dick Clark up for another year and then after a toast to the new year, we are all out the door and in our cars by 12:20 at the latest.

I love all these people and see far too little of them throughout the year, so this is a much anticipated and much enjoyed gathering each year. You can tell how much I enjoy it, because I never bring a camera with me. I didn't even have my cell phone with me last night. I just enjoyed the moment and didn't worry about taking pictures to post later.

Free Association

Why do I keep forgetting about Skype? Tom bought me a webcam before Bri was born and we've done Skype calls a couple of times, but I never think of logging on unless he has called to set up a call.

Today I thought I would just log into Skype and see if anybody I knew was around. Imagine my delight to find my friend Lynn, in Houston, connected!

We talked for about half an hour and I got to meet her new dog, Minnie, make arrangements to see her in a couple of weeks for her birthday party in Ventura, and wish her a Happy New Year.

Now I'm all jazzed about Skype again, so if you want to add basykes, I might just be around for a chat sometime.

Though I listed the events of the "ten days of Christmas" the other day, There was actually an eleventh day of Christmas. Ashley dropped by to do a skin scraping on Dexter (no more sign of demodex, thank goodness). But she also brought some nicely wrapped packages, one of which was an ice cream maker and the other two ice cream recipe boooks! I've been wanting an ice cream maker for several years (just what I need, right? It's a good thing Walt bought me a camp chair for fat people!). I'm very excited about the opportunity to experiment.

Today I started looking through the books and discovered that they recommend chilling ingredients for up to 6 hours. Also, I didn't have "ice cream" ingredients and Walt had the car. I'm an "instant gratification" kinda person and so I started looking at "ices." I found a recipe for Coconut Ice, for which I had all the ingredients (coconut milk, sugar, lemon and rum) and so I whipped up a batch. I only had enough for half a recipe, and it was getting hard by 15 minutes (of the 25 I had set), so I removed it and tried it. Delicious. Now I'm all jazzed about ice cream, ices, frozen yogurt, gelato and anything else I can think of to make in this machine. I suspect that the bowl will rest in the freezer permanently, unless it's being used!

Thanks again, Ashley!

I may also have received another nice gift, accidentally. I support Broadway Cares, a group of theatre folks who raise money for AIDS. I saw that they were selling a Christmas CD, music made by the cast of various Broadway musicals. I loved it and so I decided to order the 2008 CD as well. Only when the CD arrived, it wasn't 2008, it was another copy of 2009. I contacted the organization and the guy I was corresponding with said he would send out a copy of 2008 and a return label so I could send back 2009. In the meantime, I decided to give 2009 to Jeri, so I told him I would just keep 2009 and asked him to charge my credit card for the 2008 CD, which he had, according to him, already sent.

When I returned from Santa Barbara, there was a HUGE, heavy package for me from Equity Fights AIDS. When I opened it up, this is what was inside

It's a lovely music box/water globe which commemorates all of the shows playing on Broadway in 2008. It's six inches tall and 3-1/2 lbs. According to their web site, it's $45. I immediately wrote to the guy I'd written to before. I explained what happened and asked how much he had charged my credit card and what he wanted me to do with the snow globe. When there was no reply, I checked and found out he had only charged me $20, and his e-mail says he was having a CD sent, so the screw-up was somewhere in their shipping department. Since the thing was packed so tightly I had to destroy the box to open it, so if I don't hear back from my friend, I'll just keep it as a gift from Broadway Cares, and maybe later in the year I'll send them a $20 donation.

Out with the old...in with the new.

There is good news for Dexter. He has a new home. I'm to take him to Petco tomorrow, having packed up his meds and his shampoo, and turn him over to his new family.

But the SPCA is getting in four new chihuahuas, a Lhasa apso and some pit bull puppies. We will probably be taking at least one of the chihuahuas. God forbid I should go into the next decade without a little rat dog at my heels.