David's Thursday Thirteen

A month ago, on the eve of the 19^th anniversary of Paul’s death, I wrote a Thursday 13, listing 13 things I think of about Paul. Now we are on the eve of the 22^nd anniversary of David’s death and I will do the same for him.

1.  David was the kid who was nearly born at home.  My labor went so quickly, that we had to leave 6 year old Jeri to babysit for the others because Char, who only lived 5 minutes away, hadn't arrived yet.  To this day she says she will always remember the look on my face as the car hit a bump backing out of the driveway as she was arriving and a contraction hit.  At the hospital I told them I was in transition and they poo poo'd me, then as soon as they examined me, rushed me to the delivery room.  I later told them "when a mother giving birth to her fifth child tells you she's in transition--believe her!!"  His was the first birth Walt was able to be in the delivery room for but the baby arrived so quickly, Walt was still getting gowned as he was born, but he was at least able to scratch my nose when it itched, since my hands were tied down.

2.  He weighed 10 lbs and was the biggest baby in the nursery, since all the others were 6 lbs or less.  When they wheeled babies out to the viewing area for parents and relatives to ooh and ahh over, he looked like a 2 month old compared to those tiny newborns.

3.  He was a very solemn baby.  He had these big brown eyes and he always seemed to be taking everything in before making a commitment to anything.  You felt rewarded if you got a smile.  In truth, I had not been happy to be pregnant this time.  I had such a special relationship with Tom and was sad that was going to change.  I loved him, of course, but it was "different."  One day I was on the phone and David, about 6 months old, was bouncing up and down in his "bouncy chair."  I looked at him and have gave me this dazzling smile and I realized with a start that I had fallen in love with this baby.

4.  My favorite David baby memory was when he was about 15 months old and toddling about.  I was sitting on the grass in front of our house in Oakland watching him play with the others a bit farther down the street.  Suddenly he saw me, stretched his arms out and ran up the street, throwing himself in my lap.  I get all warm every time I remember that. 

5.  He was such a smart kid, and so terribly un-motivated.  He is one of those "what ifs' I talked about yesterday.  In grammar school they wanted to put him in the new Gifted and Talented class, but it would mean he would attend a different school and he was reluctant to leave his best friend.  We left the decision up to him and ultimately he chose not to make the move.  And then the kids were put in separate classes anyway and the friendship cooled.  I often wondered if he had that extra stimulus in grammar school would he have worked harder in school?  He always got mediocre grades and the only reason he got into college was that he did so well on his SAT.  He goofed off so much in school that on graduation day, as we were getting into the car to go to the ceremony, he turned to me, with kind of a dazed look on his face, and asked "what now?" It just hit him that he'd blown his school years and did not have the grades for college, or any skills for a job. 

6.  But everyone loved him and he would help anybody.  When Victor, a 20-something man from Zaire, was living with us, he spoke almost no English and struggled with the language.  Dave and his friend Jeff decided to teach him English.  Every day after school, the three of them got together and using toys and lots of laughter, they slowly taught him to speak English.  They had such a close relationship that Victor showed up at his funeral--I don't even know where he was living or how he found out David had died.

7.  He got a paper route a year or two before he was officially old enough to have one, but Paul had been hired and found out he hated it, so David started delivering papers until we finally admitted to the paper that it was David, not Paul who was doing the delivery.  Often I sat with him on the floor in the morning, helping him fold the newspapers and then drove him on his rounds (I did that on Sundays when the papers were so big and he was now delivering for two different papers).  There was one house that had a small tree, newly planted, that he would jump over every day.  I wondered how long he could do that before the tree got too tall.  I was sad, after he died, to discover that the tree had been cut down (this was a few years after David gave up delivering papers).

8.  We accompanied the high school Jazz Choir to New Orleans when they performed at a jazz festival (and won).  Dave's friend Jeff was a huge jazz fan and so, by default, was David.  The group met a street performer in the French Quarter and the three of them performed together.  This is my favorite photo of that trip.

 

9.  He and Tom were  Lawsuit's biggest fans and as much as I enjoyed watching the band perform, I almost enjoyed more watching how much Tom and Dave loved the music.  The first concert after Dave's death was a very difficult one for everyone and in between sets we were all behind the scenes crying.

10.  He got into Chico State but I think partied more than he studied his first semester.  He was at a drinking party one night when a friend of his, also drinking, staggered out onto the railway tracks and was hit by a train. He was not killed, but in the hospital and Dave and a friend were making plans to rehabilitate him when he was ready to leave the hospital.  Then one night around 1 a.m. he called me in frantic tears.  The friend had died.  He had never realized that was a possibility.  He had a nervous breakdown and left school.  We had a very long talk when he came home, sitting in a darkened room.  He told me at that time that he felt his brain didn't work right and he also told me he thought he was not going to live long.

11. We got him into therapy and, after he did lots of research at the med center on anti depressants, he agreed to start on medication.  Within a very short time, he told me he felt his brain worked "right" for the very first time in his life.  He got his life back on track, started working at the local supermarket, where everyone loved him (everyone always loved him) and he was making plans to start UC Santa Cruz to study music.

 

12.  David gave good hugs and had a terrific smile. I've said before that I still hold the mental picture of the last time I saw him, on Mothers Day of 1996, standing in the hallway in his leather jacket, holding his arms out just like he did as a toddler, with a big smile on his face as he closed me in a bear hug and told me he'd see us when we returned from our trip to New York.  He died while we were in New York

13.  After his death. a friend of his told me some story I can't remember now but it concerned a white owl and how he always associated David with a white owl.  The night of his death, the friend had been driving and a white owl flew right past his car window.

Sunday Stealing

If you could, where would you max out a credit card?
My automatic response would be "a book store," but I have so many books now, I really can't "fit" any more.  Amazon is a good answer, since you can get just about anything there, from paper clips to major appliances, but for a "real" store, I guess it would be Michael's, because I always spend too much, always wish I could spend more and have this fantasy that with enough stuff from Michael's, I could make this office neat again.

Why do you like the music you listen to?
I don't listen to a lot of music any more, but when I do it's either show music or some classical music that will calm the cacophony created in my brain by the ever worsening situation in this country.  

What are your favorite colors?
Red and yellow.  Primary colors.

Do you collect anything?
Not any more.  I have, at certain periods of my life collected stamps, Judy Garland memorabilia, souvenir spoons and magnets.  I suppose I kind of collect postcards, but only by accident of joining Swap Bot swaps.

What's your dream job?
You can't really beat being retired and working 0-3 days a week reviewing stage shows.  It doesn't pay much, but the perks are great.

Favorite cosmetics brands:
You lose me here.  I haven't used cosmetics in a very long time.

Favorite scents:
I don't wear perfume, but I love the smell of the ocean, of a real (not hot house) rose, freshly brewing coffee, baking bread, puppy breath, and the hair of a newborn baby.

Favorite flavors:
Chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, and then the flavors of foods like crab and clam dip.

Favorite magazines:
I'm not really a magazine person, but I do take Food Network, Pioneer Woman, and This Week (a news magazine)

Favorite piece of jewelry:
I don't wear jewelry.  I have had favorite pieces of jewelry, some given to me by the grandkids, until they broke or were lost, and an opal necklace that I don't wear any more.

Favorite Holiday:
Thanksgiving, because it's the one holiday where there are no expectations of what to give or get and the reason is just to get together with family.  I am fortunate that our family has always gotten along well, so it has almost always been a pleasant holiday (and you can't beat a holiday that ends with pumpkin pie.

Favorite season:
Autumn because the leaves are beautiful and it is followed by winter, which I enjoy.  Winter rains, sadly, are followed by the beautiful blossoms of spring but that is only a harbinger for the heat of summer, my least favorite season.


Coffee or tea?
Coffee.  Peet's French Roast, which we have been drinking since Peet first opened his first store in Berkeley.  (did you know that the Starbucks guy learned coffee roasting from Alfred Peet?)

Where would you go on vacation if you could go anywhere?
Somewhere in Africa where I could see wild animals.  Maybe Botswana, which is supposed to have the largest number of elephants left in Africa.  But I fear that my traveling days are over, because of both my mother's condition and my body, which ain't what it used to be (and it never was that hot to begin with!)

What kind of geek are you?
What defines a geek?  I love Star Trek, enjoy some sci fi books, though have not read that many.  I have a desktop, a laptop, an iPad, an iPod, a Kindle and a cell phone and use them all, but couldn't program any of them if I had to.  I am fairly good at PhotoShop, at least all I need for my needs.  I can zip through a lot of functions on our TV remote, but again only the ones that I need, so I haven't bothered to learn the rest.  I don't really think of myself as a geek.

Something New Every Day

They say that one thing you can do to keep your brain active and...young...is to learn something new every day.

If that's the case, Walt and I have brains that have been through a car wash this evening and come out all shiny and new looking!

We had what amounts to a master class in something I was vaguely aware of, but had absolutely NO idea what it was all about;  air guitar.

Oh I had seen people playing imaginary guitars before and knew that was called an air guitar, which seemed rather silly, but my word...this is a whole new world!

I was reviewing a show called Airness, which does have a plot which is kind of irrelevant, but it's an air guitar competition in which three guys - "Shreddy Eddy," "Golden Thunder," and "Facebender" and one electric girl "Cannibal Queen" are competing in a local contest and a girl (Nina) joins them, thinking this will be a piece o'cake for her to win because she actually plays the guitar, so playing without a guitar won't be any problem at all.

The playwright explains that she is not an air guitarist and when she first saw an air guitar competition she thought "this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of."

Over the next 90 minutes you learn what an almost spiritual endeavor it is for the participants, how their whole performance comes from the depth of their soul and how to impart that energy to the audience.

From the program"  "Indeed the world of air guitar is interesting, full of people who genuinely feel that air guitar does good in the world.  The Finnish ideology of Air Guitar is as follows: 'Wars would end, climate change stop and all bad things disappear, if all the people in the world played the air guitar.'"

There are official rules, printed in the program, which include things like learning that the official contests contain two rounds, freestyle, where the competitor performs to a song of their choosing, and compulsory, which they perform a surprise song, chosen by the judges.

Performances are scored on a scale of 4-6 in things like technical merit ("you don't have to know what notes you're playing, but the more your invisible fretwork corresponds to the music that's playing the better the performance") and stage presence ("anyone can do it in the privacy of their bedroom.  Few have what it takes to rock a crowd of hundreds or even thousands, all without an instrument."

There are competitions all around the country all year long and then the World Championship is held each year in Finland.

a recent 2-time winner

 

This is perhaps not the show, or the activity for opera fans, symphonic fans, chamber music fans, or musical theater fans, and especially not the show for anyone whose idea of popular music died when Elvis came on the scene (which pretty much describes the 3 of us who went to the show together!).  But I guess the biggest compliment I can give it is that I didn't hate it as much as I expected to.  In fact, Walt and I grudgingly admitted that we kind of enjoyed it.

And I certainly know more about air guitar tonight than I ever knew -- or thought I wanted to know.

The Big Wedding

There is lots of talk about The Big Wedding these days.

Discussion about the dress, the location, the hair, the wedding party, will she wear a crown?

Many are flying long distances to be there.  We've all seen other weddings in the family, but this is really the big one.

Oh.

Did you think I meant these guys?

 

Nah.  Not these guys.  It's THESE guys!

 

After 8 seasons (Mayim Bialik joined the cast in season 3), Sheldon Cooper was finally marrying Amy Farrah Fowler.

In this area, Jeopardy is on at the same time as Big Bang Theory and I let Walt know that we would be recording Jeopardy today and instead watching Big Bang Theory in its regular time.  How could I be late for the wedding of "Shamy."

It was a lovely wedding, and weird enough to befit two brilliant socially challenged scientists.

We got to meet Amy's parents at long last

 

Played by Kathy Bates and Teller, the silent half of Penn and Teller.  They were the perfect couple, Amy's perfect parents and (spoiler alert) Teller speaks.  Perhaps the biggest shock of the episode.

 

And yes, Amy wore the crown Sheldon gave awhile ago, as an apology for being a jerk (again)

 

Mark Hamill showed up unexpectedly to officiate at the wedding (displacing a grumpy Will Wheaton).

And, bless the writers, they didn't hoke it up too much.  There was enough science to make it truly Sheldon's wedding, but when they gave their vows, both were so sweet and wonderful that there wasn't a dry in the house and then it was over.  Sheldon and Amy are married.

I might watch that other wedding, but it won't be nearly as special as this one was.

The Basement

Sunday is Mothers Day

Whenever Mothers Day rolls around, I think about my father and the basement of that flat where we lived in San Francisco for the first 18 years of my life.

Every year around Mothers Day, my father would take me down to the basement so I could wrap his gift for my mother for him.

He always bought her some fancy lingerie but he couldn't wrap gifts at all and was very happy that I could.

 

In the days after they invented the ribbon that stuck to itself when moistened, I mastered the art of making ribbon roses and loved to wrap packages.  

I wish now that I had photos of some of the packages I  wrapped.  I remember one package, a gift for my typing teacher, Sister Anne, that I was sending to her in Phoenix.  The top was covered with ribbon roses and a big bow and I had to build  barricade around them to keep them from squishing when mailing.  She was amazed when it arrived.

I continued to fancy wrap packages until we had kids and wrapping gifts with the comics from the paper took the place of all that time to make roses.  I never went back to those days, though I have occasionally tried different forms of fancy wrap.  Now that bags for gifts are all the rage, I am more likely to take the easy way out and use a bag and tissue paper.

Our basement was an adventure.  The entrance to it was from our tiny cement back yard and we went down a flight of steps, like into the bowels of the earth.  Once my father unlocked the door, we went into a one-person-wide little entry way with dirt walls and into a tiny room, with dirt walls and dirt floor, that was lined with boxes of "stuff."  It had a table, a small work bench, and one bare light bulb hanging over the table.  Off to the side, behind a lot of pipes or other things that did work for the house were a couple of big boxes of Life Magazines.  My father had saved them all through the war and was heartbroken when I discovered that some of them had pictures of Judy Garland and cut those pictures out!

(Later the basement flooded and one of the boxes was ruined, so I was glad I had taken the Garland pictures!)

At the end of the little basement was a door and when you opened it it opened onto this huge cavernous second basement.  It really belonged to the couple  that owned the building, but since my father did handyman work for them and since the guy was too old to work on stuff like that any more, it really became my father's work room.

(When I look at pictures of the flat today on Google images, I see that the basement is now a garage and lord knows they needed it!  When we lived  there it was not out of the question to drive around for half an hour trying to find a place to park!)

My father was an OK handyman, but not a great one.  Things never quite turned out the way he planned.  He built his magnum opus, a record cabinet, in that basement.  I don't know how long it took him, but when it was finished there was space for the record player and then shelves that housed most of, but probably not all of his records.  

He built it to fit in a little cubby hole type of thing near our dining room.  He was most proud that he varnished it to a fair thee well.  Several layers, each dutifully rubbed with soft steel wool before applying the next coat.  Each night he would come up to dinner, bragging about what he had done that day and how smooth the surface of it was going to be.

When it was all finished, he brought the cabinet upstairs and glowed at this magnificent thing he had built. It was lovely and was very smooth.

Then he carried it down the hall to the cubby hole and when he tried to stand it up discovered he had measured wrong and it was 1/2" too tall and would not fit. 

That was NOT a good day in our house.

Adventures in "The Home"

I had quite an extensive "home" experience over the weekend.  And only one day was at Atria.

On Thursday night, we reviewed a show called "Jack of Diamonds"

This was a very funny show which takes place in an upscale retirement community.  It was like walking into Atria.  There are five residents and a Nurse Ratchet-type caregiver, who runs the place like a prison and obviously hates where she has to work (that part isn't like Atria). 

The five have invested their life savings with a friend and hear, over the TV, that he has been arrested in a Ponzi scheme and that they have lost all of their money.  The plot involves trying to figure out how to stay where they are and, when the crook turns up, pretending to be catatonic, at the home, trying to decide how to kill him.  It was a so-so show, but we laughed a lot.

But what made it special for me was the residents who were so familiar from my years around Atria.  And I also got a brainstorm.  One of the characters suffers from narcolepsy and passes out periodically, for short or longer times.  It was exactly like what my mother has done.  She has not had a spell like that in a long time, but if she has one again, I will definitely suggest that possibility to the doctor.

 

The second play was Marjorie Prime, which takes place in 2050 when science has perfected the ability to make holograms which can hold someone's memory.

Marjorie is 85 and has dementia.  Janis Stevens, perhaps the best actress Sacramento has, has perfected the persona of an older woman who still has a thin grasp on her memories, but realizes they are slipping away. Her body language, the way she holds her hands, the way she speaks is spot on.  It was like talking with my mother.

The only "off" thing about it was that while Marjorie's demented moments were perfect, she also had moments of greater lucidity, when she could discuss some of her memories.  Presumably, as her dementia increases she will lose this ability.  If I try to remind my mother of events from her past, she is more likely to say "I know you're talking, but I can't understand a thing you're saying."

However, in the play, the holograms are programmed to hold all of the memories of the one who is slipping away and has the patience to tell her the same stories over and over again, hopefully bringing back some of the life that she no longer remembers.

And then I went to Atria and found all the people in the cast of Jack of Diamonds.  My mother and I sat in the common room with Tony (I still don't know if he speaks or not) and watched people bowling.  My mother got a headache the instant someone invited her to join the game. 

She left me and went out into the patio.  I followed and sat with her in the shade at the other end.  Then she got up and walked back to where we had started.  I was about a minute behind her and when I opened the door to go into the common room, she was so surprised to see me...and where had I been?  She was so glad to see me again.

If I could get a Mildred Prime, I might actually consider it.

My Hero(ine)

I came of age in the 50s-60s when the picture at the left would have been the epitome of the perfect woman.

How I fantasized about Scarlett O'Hara and her 18" waist and even went through a period of starving myself in the 60s to try to achieve it.  Only one time in my life do I remember my mother being concerned because I was too thin.  That in itself was a sort of a backward reward (from the woman who once told me, as a 7 year old, that I was too fat to dance ballet).

If only I had realized that in the same period that I was despairing of ever having an 18" waist, there was a very popular model who is all but forgotten now. It was Hilda, whose picture I innocently posted yesterday.  Hilda, the voluptuous model who found joy in life and didn't care what size she was.

Hilda was the brainchild of illustrator Duane Bryers and, as it says in the article I read, "pin up art's best kept secret."  She was apparently the only plus-sized model printed on calendars from the 1950s to the 1980s, but she never achieved great popularity.  One reason given is that Bryers sometimes used models, sometimes used his imagination and so there was an inconsistency in Hilda's appearance, though I find it hard to believe the look on her face would have been the limiting factor.

Hilda was not afraid to answer the door in the all together.  Perhaps holding a tray of .... uh ...hot buns?

or to do her housework in the all together

She was a voracious reader

but she sometimes got tired.

And then she'd take herself to bed with more books and snacks.

Maybe if more of us "normal" girls had Hilda for a role model we would not have wasted so much time trying to look like Scarlet O'Hara.  Heck, even Marilyn Monroe couldn't keep up with those standards!