Four Stars

Many people think of Jeanette MacDonald standing in the ruins of 1906 San Francisco , singing hear heart out when they hear the song "San Francisco" (open your golden gates...). For decades I have heard that song and thought of Judy Garland belting it out during her Carnegie hall concert. After today, I will think of Fran Mitchell, and how appropriate it was that we should all sing that song at the end of her memorial service.

It was a grand send-off for Fran Mitchell, Char's mother. Fran died a month ago, after a brief stay in an assisted living facility near Char and her kids. Prior to that she had lived in San Francisco for 96 years.

The memorial had been postponed until Char's daughter finished taking her class to Costa Rica and it could be scheduled for a time convenient for her son and his family to fly out from the east coast. Grandma wasn't going anywhere; they could wait until the time was right.

The rest of us just made time to attend because...well...we never miss a Blackford funeral.

On Char's request, Walt wore his W.C. Fields tie, which he had worn for her father's funeral years before. Fran would have loved it.

It was a simple service, with comments and music provided by family members. I was so impressed with Char and her sister Flo, both of whom started the proceedings by getting up and speaking. Ain't no way I could have done that without falling apart.

Son Tim was the MC and did a great job of mostly sticking to the list Char had provided for him...and improvising when things had to be switched up a bit.

Char's oldest daughter Tavie wrote on Facebook yesterday, "Finished writing something to say at Grandma's service tomorrow, now I just have to figure out how to get through it without crying." She did a beautiful job.

The thing I loved about the service, as others in the gathering got up to share memories, was hearing what a fun-loving family this was, and how Fran had been the heart of it. I had known that, of course, having known Fran for more than 40 years, but it was nice to hear wave after wave of warm, funny memories. There were tales of picnics and crab hunts and camping trips and Halloween parties and so many other social gatherings that included all branches of the family.

It was a wonderful tribute to a woman who was the last of her generation in the Mitchell/Cameron clan.

When it was over, we stood around outside the funeral home chatting...

Grandson Tim with Eric and his father Richard from the Pinata group.
80 year old Richard had driven down from the Sierra foothills to be there

...and then drove to granddaughter Dana's house for a reception. It was a wonderful spread which included enough clam dip that everyone could hover, if they wanted.

I got a chance to visit with several people, including talking with great granddaughter Haley about how she'd enjoyed her trip to Costa Rica and what was probably my very first conversation ever with one of Char's kids' spouses, who often is not able to make the Pinata gatherings.

The house was full of people and food and laughter and more stories about Fran and the family. It was exactly the kind of party she would have thrown if she could have planned it for herself, I suspect. And her family did her proud.

Good show, guys!

Yom

I lived with Mike and Char for several months after my roommate graduated and moved back home to plan her wedding. I had run up a big bill at the local photo shop and needed to borrow money from my mother to pay it off. Mike and Char let me live with them while I paid off the loan.

They were renting a house which straddled the Hayward earthquake fault.

We figured it was the perfect place for a seismologist to live. If an earthquake hit, Mike would be the first person to know it.

The house had a covered porch, which you can see to the right of that single window above the trees there. The porch had a jaunty slant, the result of house settling after earlier earthquakes. Anything round that was set down on the floor rolled to the front of the porch.

I shared a bedroom with their youngest (then only) daughter, Tavie, who was not quite a year old. I went looking for photos to include with this entry, but I guess I was taking slide photos in those days and apparently my photos from time in the house are on slides or movies. But I remember that I never needed an alarm clock because I would wake up when Tavie's blonde head popped up over the top of her crib and she started talking to me. Depending on the hour, I would either play with her or not, but I would get her diaper changed and deliver her to her parents' bed before I went to work.

If Tavie didn't wake me up, the cat, Yom would. "Yom" was short for Yom Kippur, who was the cat they got after Roshi -- Rosh Hashanah [how a Catholic family decided to name their pets after Jewish holy days, I was never quite sure] died. This was an old house and when Yom realized that there was movement in the bedroom, he would stick his paws under the door and reach up as high as he could--I swear the cat thought he could reach up high enough to grab the door knob. At the very least, he scratched furiously trying to get the door to open.

I worked in the Physics Department of the University then, a job that required me to "dress" appropriately. That meant good clothes, nylons and high heels.

After I got dressed in the morning, I would pick Tavie up and head for Mike & Char's bedroom. At some point along the dark hallway the cat lay in wait. He loved to reach out and grab the nylons. I cannot tell you the number of pairs of nylons he ruined and how many screams at the cat woke Mike and Char before Tavie being handed off to them did.

I was living in the house at Christmas time that year and Yom gave me a dozen pair of nylons for a Christmas gift. But he never did stop attacking my legs when I went to work each morning.

I don't remember how long I lived in the house on the earthquake fault, but not as long as six months. I think it was about 3 or 4 months, until I found an apartment in a building just around the corner, and off the fault.

I lived here for about a year, until Walt and I got married and moved to the other side of town.

But I enjoyed my brief time living with Mike, Char and Tavie...and yeah, even Yom...and was grateful they were there when I needed someplace to go.

Table Ballet and Tom Kha Gai

What a great day we had today. It started out kind of iffy. My digestive tract wasn't behaving properly and I had the horrible feeling that I was going to have to send Walt off alone, but fortunately I just had a bland breakfast and by mid-morning, when we had to leave, I was feeling OK.

We drove down to the Bay Area to pick up Char and Mike so we could carpool over to the City. We had tickets to see the San Francisco Symphony play live music for a showing of Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush at Davies symphony Hall.

We have attended some of these live music showings before. A couple of years ago we saw the symphony play the score to The Wizard of Oz and there was some great silent Russian epic film that we saw many years ago. It's amazing how much richer the films are with a live orchestra.

We went early so we could catch the prologue . While waiting for the speaker, we looked out over the audience, and all we could see was a sea of white hair (unless there was no hair). There was also a walker-brigade of ushers who would accompany an older person in a walker to his or her seat and then take the walkers to the back of the hall. As Char put it, "It was the biggest collection of walkers and canes seen anywhere. We felt young and fit in this crowd." Walt later commented that probably a lot of the people in the audience had seen the movie when it was new!

Before the prologue started, there was a guy dressed as Chaplin who went all over the theatre, interacting with the audience. He was very cute and everybody seemed to be enjoying him.

The pre-movie talk was delivered by Stephen Salmons, co-founder of The San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Originally made in 1925, Chaplin reworked the film in 1942, so that it was shorter. He also took out the printed material and added his own narration. They were able to put back the deleted scenes and all the printed material so that audiences could see the film as movie-goers did at its premiere in 1925. They don't consider this a full restoration, but more a "work in progress."

I had, of course, seen The Gold Rush before, or at least the most famous scenes--the house teetering on the edge of the snowy mountain top, the shoe-eating scene, the "table ballet" Chaplin does with the dinner rolls (Photoshopped onto the screen above). It turns out that the dance he does with the rolls was really a fairly authentic reproduction of a clog dance he had done in England as a boy.

The full movie is 2 hours long (and I know I've never seen a 2-hour long silent film) and what a delight it was. For one thing, it was played on the type of projector that it was made for, so you didn't get all that jerkiness that you usually see when watching silent films and after you got over the fact that there was no spoken dialog, it didn't matter. I could understand why people were suspicious of "talkies" when they came along and feared that it would ruin the art of movie making. Of course that was long before people started fearing that Avatar was going to ruin acting. It's all just one long progression, I guess.

When we left Davies hall there was a big line of buses, tour buses and buses from assisted living facilities and any kind of bus you can imagine, coming to load all those white haired people with all of their walkers and take them home.

(and this was after a lot of them had left!

It was too early for dinner when the movie was over, so we drove back across the bay and by the time we got close to Mike & Char's house, it was 5 p.m., so we stopped at a place called Chada Thai, where we had a wonderful dinner starting with Tom Kha Gai, a fabulous sweet and sour chicken soup with a coconut milk stock. I could have made a whole meal on that alone, but we ordered several dishes to share.

Everything was wonderful, and I think this was the first time I've ever eaten in a Thai restaurant where I did NOT get Pad Thai.

We were home in time to find out who was booted off of Survivor. It was all just a lovely day.

Blackwell's Corners

I had a call from Char this morning. She and Mike are on their way to Palm Springs with Rich and Pat and another couple from the Pinata Group for an Elderhostel weekend. She wanted me to know that they were almost to Blackwell's Corners and to ask if we would be there.

We laughed a lot.

Many, many years ago, before Walt and I were married (so that makes it nearly 50 years ago), we used to go camping with Char and Mike, and occasionally others. Char and Mike were married and had little Tavie, the first of their five children, by that time. Because they were married and were starting to buy things together, Char and Mike had all the camping equipment, so whenever we went camping together, Walt and I would bring our sleeping bags and some of the food, while Char brought the stove, lamps, utensils, bowls, and more food.

I think this was supposed to be our first trip to Death Valley. The four of us had planned to go down over the winter vacation, but Tavie got sick. For some reason Walt and I had to go the weekend that we had originally planned, so we decided we could borrow all the camping equipment from Char and Mike and then meet them halfway on our way back and return it to them, so they could go on their own camping adventure.

Mike and Walt poured over maps to find a logical place where we could meet. (We have never done anything with the Blackfords when Mike and Walt have not found a reason to pour over maps.)

They chose a place called Blackwell's Corners as a nice midway point--and besides we liked the name of the place. The plan was that we would meet at Blackwell's Corners at high noon on the first of the year and give them back their camping equipment so they could go on to Death Valley themselves. We also realized that the chance of both cars reaching a midway point at an appointed hour was pretty slight, so OUR job was to find a telephone booth and get the phone number and call Mike to give it to him so that if one or the other of us was going to be delayed, we could call that phone number and let the other couple know, to keep us from worrying. (This is what we used to do, children, in the days before cell phones.)

When we got to Blackwell's Corners we found that the only thing there was a dilapidated gas station. But it had a phone booth, so we called Mike and gave him the phone number, then we went on to Death Valley.

This was, perhaps, one of our more memorable trips in a long string of memorable trips. All of our trips, especially when they concerned the Blackfords, ended up having an element of disaster to them.

I don't remember everything that happened, but there was a lot of wind, I remember, and we were sleeping on the sand dunes. Wind. Sand. Not a good combination. And hiding behind a sand dune isn't really all that effective!

In the morning I was going to make pancakes. I had brought along my trusty bag of Crusteez pancake mix but when I went to get the spatula to flip them, it wasn't there. We hadn't brought along the cooking utensils. I think I had a bowl to mix the pancake batter and Walt (who never throws anything away) dug an old Boy Scout camping set out of the back of his old Rambler. In the camping set was a Donald Duck spoon, the handle of which was about half an inch wide, so I used that to flip the now dollar size pancakes.

I'm not sure if we had more pancake or more sand in the breakfast, but somehow we managed to get through the meal.

On New Year's Day, we headed home and were rushing to get to Blackwell's Corners on time, but it was going to be a tight squeeze to make it at the appointed hour so we stopped to call the phone booth at Blackwell's Corners. It was just about noon when Mike came to a skreetching halt at the gas station. He leaped out and ran into the office and asked if there had been any phone calls for him. The guy looked at him as if he were crazy when right at that moment, the phone rang. Mike picked up the receiver in the phone booth and signaled the gas station attendant that "It's OK--it's for me."

I think that somewhere, if he's still alive, that guy must still be shaking his head over that.

But no, we aren't at Blackwell's Corners today. Fortunately Mike & Char are headed for a hotel anyway, so they don't need their camping gear!