Mallory's Camera

Dreamed I was in a foreign land, some place very exotic & enticing, and I was collecting addresses from everyone I knew so that I could write them long, fascinating letters.

The first thing I did when I got to this foreign land was shop for something to wear! I found these two dresses—enchanting, flimsy things of rose silk and lace. One of them had long sleeves; the other had straps. I put the long-sleeved one on and then tried to look for price tags. (I knew I was gonna buy the dress however much it cost, but I also knew I had to agonize over the price.) Since I couldn’t find the price tag, I looked around for a salesperson—

And the salesperson came toward me wearing a really hideous clown mask with a long pointed nose!

Everyone who shops in this store must wear a mask! the salesperson told me sternly. Put on a mask, or I won’t sell you anything.

I looked around. True, there were a lot of shoppers in masks. But there were also a lot of shoppers who were not wearing masks—and they were all men. From this I deduced that only women were being made to wear masks, and I was about to say something angrily about this when I woke up—

###

I think this dream arose from a phone conversation I had yesterday with my medical provider’s office. I’d contacted them via their proprietary online system because I needed a refill on my thyroid medication; they called me back: My own doctor was on vacation; the physician covering for her wanted me to come in so that they could decide whether to do blood draws—

“But that’s ridiculous,” I said. “You just did bloodwork in March. I mean, if you need to do bloodwork, I’ll come in for bloodwork. Though I don’t see why you would need to. Just read my chart! But why should I have to make an extra trip so that you can decide to do bloodwork? Are you changing my physician?”

“No-o-ooooo—”

“Because that’s fine, too,” I said. “Only you need to be transparent about it. Otherwise, all this is is an extra visit so you can bill Medicare—”

Stunned silence on the other end of the phone.

Better watch it, Patrizia, I cautioned myself. Or you’ll get a reputation as a difficult patient, and that’s not good.

###

Otherwise…

I did not finish everything I had to do yesterday, and it was incredibly murky when I went out to tromp:



Last night, I watched Le Retour de Martin Guerre for the first time in a billion years.

I didn’t marry my first husband because he looked like Gerard Depardieu in Martin Guerre, but I went out with him for the first time because he looked like Gerard Depardieu in Martin Guerre. Bill had—how can I describe it?—that same level of physical presence:



(I’ve also been watching Moonlighting, since Hulu is one of the few streaming services I haven’t canceled, and realized that Bruce Willis’s David Addison is kind of a prototype for Ben—)



In Oakland, I saw Barbara Angell, Public Policy Eleanor, and Booter in quick succession, all of whom were overjoyed to see me and enveloped me in ❤️LUV❤️.

How nice it felt to be enveloped in ❤️LUV❤️!!!!





And then I hopped the train back up to Sacto and spent a totally fabulous day at the Railroad Museum and exploring Old Town and the river with Deb & Ky:



And now I’m back in the quaint & scenic HV where there are Decisions To Make.

Best 50¢ I spent all year?

This costume. (Thrift store.)

And we did get one trick-or-treater last night.

Which is really kinda remarkable given that we live smack in the middle of Old People Acres, a kind of animal preserve set up in the middle of Hyde Park where ancient humans are put out to pasture after a lifetime of performing at IBM and other corporate circuses.

No complaints! I actually like kids, prefer the company of an imaginative child to that of an unimaginative adult 99% of the time. But life is pretty sweet here in Old People Acres where the only life forms you have to look out for on the open roads as you careen down them at a whopping 20 miles per hour are the suicidal squirrels and the remarkably stupid deer (who are clearly the Trump voters among ungulates.)

Think of the sighting of this sole trick-or-treater as equivalent to the sighting of a roseate spoonbill! It doesn’t exactly symbolize a reversal of the plunging birthrate trend.

But it is hopeful.

###

What else?

The news feeds are abuzz with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the changes he is wreaking.

This is because mainstream media uses Twitter as a current events marketing focus group.

If it’s trending on Twitter, then it must be important news, even if the overwhelming majority of humans—who do not use Twitter and do not give a shit about Twitter—aren’t affected by it.

Yet another reason to disbelieve anything that comes out of the mainstream media.

The real news is that not only are gasoline companies making record profits right now but so are food producers and distributors—this despite the bullshit you’ve been fed about how the 10% increase in the cost of food over the past six months is due to avian flu, drought, and the higher costs of feed and transportation.

No, my friends.

It is simple price-gauging.

But you’re not reading about it anywhere, are you? You must piece it together from PepsiCo and Tyson Foods, Inc earning reports.

###

Also, my former mother-in-law died.

My first husband’s mother.

Jan was a pleasant woman and smart. Committed to following through (in a non-confrontational way) on the choices she made—or maybe that’s the only excuse I can come up with for why she didn’t divorce Al, my erstwhile father-in-law.

Al was irascible.

If he were alive today, Al would be running the nation’s first Trump museum out of downtown Port Angeles. On display would be redacted federal tax forms, scrolling Tweets on giant monitors, and a little portico displaying The Donald’s favorite spray tan and hair products.

I liked Al. He had a great sense of humor.

But I kicked him out of my house one night shortly after Ichabod was born because when he and Jan came down to see the new baby, he sat around the dinner table insulting Bill in the most derisive of terms.

Bill didn’t see anything wrong with what his father was doing. His father had been doing it all Bill's life. It was set up to be joking.

But I saw something wrong with it. This was the reason why Bill was so emotionally clamped down in my never-humble opinion. Why Bill was so fiercely competitive.

We had quite the raging fight after I forced his parents to leave.

Oddly enough, thereafter I became Al’s favorite daughter-in-law—he had two others. He also liked me better than his two sons-in-law.

Or at least that’s what he told me.

Al died 18 years ago. Everyone expected Jan to go into a deep decline because Al had dominated her so completely.

But she didn’t. In fact, she thrived.

Here she is at Ichabod’s Stanford graduation:



She would have been 83 or 84 then. She was well into her 90s when she died.

Memory eternal, Jan.

Another Bill Hare dream!

This time, he and MaryAnn were living with offspring I knew quite well in the dream but who don’t exist in real life—a young man (his son) and a child (his grandson).

I was curious about what room in his house they were staying in, and Bill was giving me answers that didn’t make sense until finally, I realized, Bill’s moved.

When did you move? I asked.

Twenty-four weeks ago, he answered. In July.

He’d moved to an apartment in San Francisco, into the top floor of a white building on a treeless street. In the dream, there was a sense that he’d moved into an area where I’d been many, many times before.

When I woke up, though, I didn’t recognize the area.

And, of course, if he’d moved 24 weeks ago, that would mean he moved in April.

###

Spent yesterday feeling off.

I have this thing: I never like to use the word “sick” to describe how I feel unless I’m so incapacitated, I can’t get out of bed.

And since that rarely happens, I am never “sick”.

But there was definitely a health-related something going on yesterday.

It was an intestinal thing, but also, weirdly, a sinus thing.

I managed to mount some masks on my wall. And I went to the grocery store.

But that was it so far as useful work was concerned.

Of course, being me and living in a magical universe, I persuaded myself that I’d caught the plague from Lois Lane merely by texting with her. The CDC really needs to look into binary code over radio waves as a vector for coronavirus infection!

##

I’m still not 100% today. But better than I was yesterday.

Although, of course, it's still early.

My first marriage lasted five years.

And the reason it lasted even that long was Jim Bishop. (Not His Real Name.😊)

Jim Bishop was Bill’s best friend, and a more intelligent, humorous, altogether sympathetic human being you could never hope to meet.

Many years afterwards, it occurred to me that Jim had been sitting on his own secret.

But we were long out of touch by that point, and although I have a general idea of Jim’s whereabouts and could probably get in touch with him again if I wanted to—

Dear Jim,

Remember me? I believe we met in a Moscow train station back in 1919—

—I decided against it. I mean, it’s possible he might be overjoyed to hear from me again after 30-some odd years!

But probably not.



Bill and Jim grew up in Delaware, Ohio—not together exactly, but on each others' peripheries. I loved listening to Bill’s stories about his boyhood: Give Huck Finn a bunch of explosives and teach him how to drive, and that would have been Bill. He was always blowing stuff up and having interesting interactions with the local wildlife.

Al Hare, Bill’s father, an engineer who worked in some capacity with molecular bonding, had discovered that for certain metal alloys, useful in industrial production, molecular bonding was best accomplished through massive explosions; so Bill had ample access to explosives.

Eventually, Al decided to strike out on his own, so the Hare family set out for the Olympic Peninsula where Al bought a bunch of land in and around Port Angeles and Sequim, and founded his own company for molecular bonding through massive explosions. It was very popular with Japanese industrialists.

Each of the seven children was allowed to bring a single item of personal significance on the cross-country move.

Al brought the entire contents of two cluttered garages.

This tells you everything you need to know about the dynamics of the Hare family.

Bill was determined to be a scientist because it was something his father had failed at. Al had wanted to go into pure research, but putting food on a table for seven children presents significant challenges, and the private sector pays much better than the pursuit of pure science in the Realms of Academe.

When I met Bill at the Café Roma oh so long ago, he was in the process of finishing up a Ph.D. in the neurobiology of vision at the University of California at Berkeley.



I forget how Jim ended up in California.

He was—probably still is—a fairly competent bass guitar and played in a couple of bands, so it seems likely that his reason for migrating had something to do with his music—although the San Francisco Bay Area was hardly the heart of the rock ‘n’ roll scene by the mid-1980s.

He shared a dark little cottage on the Oakland/Berkeley border with one of his bandmates, a guitarist called Bill Duke, and Bill Duke’s girlfriend, a Brit called Debbie Hyatt whose accent and hairstyle exercised a kind of morbid fascination on me. Debbie didn’t speak in the pearly tones of the BBC but rather like one of the characters out of one of those English kitchen sink movies, Look Back in Anger, maybe, or A Taste of Honey, all glottal stops and diphthongs. And her hair was cut like a Mohawk except instead of bald scalp, there was hair.

Bill Duke came from a rich family in Tiburon. In addition to being a remarkable guitar player, he was rumored to be smart. I never saw any evidence of either of those attributes, but of course, in those days, I didn’t look around as much as I do now.

Bill Duke also had a heroin addiction, so much of Jim’s life—when he wasn’t playing music, or selling security alarms, or reminiscing with Bill about the time Bill blew up the Van Zants’ abandoned hen house, or saving my marriage—was spent listening to Debbie complain about Bill Duke’s heroin addiction or chaperoning Bill Duke through various stages of relapse and recovery.

One day, Jim returned home—after eight hours of convincing moderately well-off people that an expensive security system was really the only thing that stood between them and underclass hoards aching to get their hands on the moderately well-off people’s worldly possessions—to find that everything of value in the dark little cottage was gone.

Jim being Jim, I’m sure the irony of that discovery did not escape him.

Bill Duke had apparently had a massive relapse and no money to feed it with.

So, Bill Duke did what any self-respecting junkie would do. Nabbed every object of value in the house—including Jim’s three bass guitars and Jim’s expensive stereo system—and sold them for dope money.

Shortly after that, Jim moved back to Delaware, Ohio.



Bill and I did love each other. Both my sons were conceived in an excess of ❤️LUV❤️; in that sense, I guess you could say it was good genes calling to good genes across enormous chasms of misunderstanding.

Because Bill didn’t get me at all.

And for that matter, I didn’t get him.

He teased me a lot, the kind of rough-edged, sarcastic jostling you’d expect from someone who grew up with six siblings all struggling to prove to a massively self-absorbed father that they were not invisible. I couldn’t stand what I saw then as constant belittling. In those days, I was incredibly thin-skinned.

Also, he did not get that I saw myself essentially as a narrator (that hasn't changed, by the way 😊), that it was therefore important for me to have certain kinds of adventures. I mostly stopped having sexual adventures after I married, but occasionally, I’d go off on a psychedelic adventure.

Funny. Bill was into dropping acid, too, but we never tripped together. I think because I really did not want to be seen in my entirety by Bill; I was pretty sure he would be horrified.

Jim was not horrified.

Jim was one of the least judgmental human beings I’ve ever known.

I would summon Jim when I was coming down off one of my clandestine psychedelic adventures, and we would plot out exactly what I’d have to do to “maintain,” and laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

Jim was the only person I confided in about what happened when I went back east to hang out with Jon and Ann again after All Those Years.

At one of the innumerable parties Bill and I gave—or that others in our circle gave—Jim and I would invariably gravitate toward each other after two or three beers and launch into a marathon talk fest: philosophy, history, the meaning of life, shoes and ships, cabbbages and kings.

The friendship owed nothing to romantic attraction.

In fact, I’m not even sure the friendship owed much to affinity.

Jim by nature was what you might call an emotional fixer. That was what he was really, really good at.

And in those days, I had a lot of things that needed fixing.

###

Many, many, many years later, I had the Aha! moment.

Jim was gay.

Not closeted about it. I’m quite sure he knew his own inclinations and quite possibly acted upon them.

But he almost never talked about himself. And he had a kind of cool, temperate persona. Detached. The political baggage attached to “coming out” would have been something he simply had no interest in or use for.

Also, I’m quite sure he was in love with Bill Duke—as much as he could be in love with anyone. And that was a card impossible to play, so he'd want to keep it close to his vest.

When Bill Duke went full-on junkie, stole Jim’s bass guitars, his sound system and everything else, Bill Duke broke the closest thing Jim had to a heart.

Last time I was in Oakland, I went looking for the dark little cottage under the freeway.

It isn’t there anymore.

With just four days remaining in the great You, Too, Can Pass the USMLE and Become an American DOK-TAH! sweepstakes, I have shifted into confidence-building mode.

I am praising Nafisa lavishly: You got the comma right! Way to GO!

I am actually advising her to study less (knowing full well she won’t, of course.) At this point, it’s all about relaxation.

Last night, I actually found myself advising her to pray: “Ask God to make you the vessel for His will,” I said. “You will be such a wonderful doctor! Let God use you.”

Across the Zoom ether, I watched Nafisa’s eyes fill with tears.

I could scarcely believe the words were coming out of my mouth!

For one thing, I don’t believe in God. Or, at least, in an anthropomorphic God like Allah or his disgruntled cousin Yahweh.

But they’re words I sometimes murmur to myself—like I’m asking for a personal favor or something—and not just when times are tough: Let me be the vessel of Your will.



Here I am in the halcyon days of my first marriage. That’s my first husband to my right and our friend Marco to my left. We had just completed some bicycle race across the Golden Gate Bridge:





In those days, I was a demon bike racer. In fact, bicycles are how my first husband and I met. Bill was not my biking partner of choice, though: He was a much faster cyclist than I was and had this distressing habit of speeding up to the summit of whatever steep hill we were on and then coasting back down to circle me as I plugged up the grade, gasping for breath, like some kind of raptor flying circles around an animal it had marked for death.

Eventually, I would have divorced him for that alone.

Even if everything else had been perfect.

No, my biking partner of choice was Bibbit, and unfortunately, I have no photographs of the two of us cycling together.

You know the game you play where you try to remember that one time when you were perfectly happy?

(It makes for good literature. That scene in Brideshead Revisited with Charles, Sebastien and the strawberries, where Sebastien says, “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember”? I am very sure that is Evelyn Waugh remembering the One Perfect Day.)

For me, it will always be that glorious day when Bibbit and I rode our bicycles up Spruce Street and onto Grizzley Peak Boulevard, and the sun was out and a light breeze blew, and the smell of the sage and the brickelbush rose in the air. I got a flat tire! Neither of us had remembered to bring our puncture kits! And we just laughed. Sat by the side of the road, yodeling Some Day, My Prince Will Come and laughing. And eventually another cyclist did come—we didn’t ask to check his pedigree for royal blood—and changed my tire for me. (If we’d been committed feminists, of course, we would have insisted upon changing it ourselves! But it would have taken a lot longer.)

Ah, Bibbit!

I’d give a lot to find out what happened to you.

And now back to our regularly programmed, boring but remunerative work.

Another favorite old photo of mine. I still mourn the tee-shirt!

Bob Benjamin and Bibbit lived next door to us on Benvenue Street in Berkeley. Housemates, not couple: For reasons I could never understand, Bibbit was officially in LUV with a very bland guy named Ron. Ron was nice-looking enough but seemed to me to have no personality whatsoever, so I was a less than enthusiastic coconspirator in Bibbit’s various schemes to get Ron to fall madly in LUV with her.

Bob had had the misfortune to be born to ambitious, relentlessly upwardly mobile parents who sent him to Philips Exeter Academy, a very exclusive, very expensive prep school in rural New Hampshire. They also gave him a BMW when he graduated from UCB. Bob spent at least 20 hours a week washing and polishing the thing, and he would never, ever drive it let alone chauffer us around in it on our various mad jaunts.

Bob was very neurotic.

I was living in the Benvenue Street flat before my marriage, and I was so intrigued by Bibbit in those days that I started spying on her every chance I could get.

How to describe Bibbit? She was otherworldly! A being from another time/space continuum. Maybe a little like Robin Williams’ Mork but without the body hair and the testosterone. She pulsed pure delight, but she was very fussy about her little rituals and intensely competitive about the (few) things she cared about. Bicycling was one of those things.

Several of my trips through Europe had been made on bicycles. Bikes were my favorite mode of transportation. I wasn’t all that into racing bikes at the time I first met Bibbit, though.

But after spying on her and determining, yes, that it was absolutely necessary for me to annex her (somehow) into the inner circle, I got into bike racing. Bibbit was a racer.

###

Bikes also brought me together with Bill, my first husband.

After one of the marathon training sessions described above, my habit was to coast to the Café Roma, park my bike along a wall, and drink caffe lattes, nibble scones, and write in my diary on the outside terrace until it was time to report into the ER in time for my 3pm nursing shift.

One summer day in 1982, I was writing in my diary about how I wanted to fall in LUV.

And while I was writing, I felt that prickle that one often feels when eyes are focused intensely upon one.

So, I looked up.

Sitting about 10 feet away from me was this very intense young man. He, too, had a bike parked against the café wall. He looked just like Gerard Depardieu in Le Retour de Martin Guerre, which at that time was one of my very favorite movies.

The young man and I continued trading surreptitious glances at each other for the next ten minutes or so.

And then I got up to replenish my caffe latte.

When I got back to my table, the young man was gone.

And I felt a pang of disappointment.

But then I looked down at the cover of my diary (which I’d closed when I wandered off for coffee)—and there was a note: I think you’re very attractive. And I like your bike! Blah, blah, blah. Here is my phone number.

Barbara Angell lived two blocks away on Aetna Street, so I immediately loped off to consult her.

“Yeah. I think you should call him,” Barbara said. “He didn’t interrupt you while you were writing, did he? I think that indicates thoughtfulness. Do it.”

So, I did.

###

The Café Roma is still there although it has a different name these days.

It’s right across the street from UCB’s law school, which it's now politically incorrect to refer to as Boalt Hall.

So, Max spent three years in close proximity to the very spot that without which, there would have been no Max! I think he even bought caffe lattes there from time to time.

I got married for the first time the day before Halloween. Our reception was a huge costume bash. For the actual wedding itself, I’d worn an antique ivory silk gown and a huge black hat—a rather extraordinary peach basket hat, trimmed with streamers and silk flowers.

For the reception, though, I went to a thrift store and found the tackiest bride dress I could, and hideous pink slippers; and I set my hair in spongy pink curlers, and strapped a big pillow to my belly. Shotgun bride!

Big fun.

The photos from that wedding and that reception are now languishing somewhere in my first husband’s garage.

Unless MaryAnne threw them away.

###

These days I live in the forest where trick-or-treaters do not venture.

And yesterday, I did not go into town. Not that that would have made a big difference: Hyde Park is not exactly a place where people fly the freak flag.

So didn’t catch much Halloween spirit yesterday.

Didn’t miss it at all.

I wonder why not?

Maybe I'm not the person I used to be anymore.

###

I’m working on an Art Installation for Robin. One of the pieces in it is going to be a sun with the six-year-old Robin’s face beaming from it.

So, I had to find a photograph of the six-year-old Robin to sketch from.

Which meant I had to spend several hours yesterday poring over a bunch of photographs from 1999.

The photo above is one of my favorites of me and Max. He was 12; we were still buddies.

We stopped being buddies when he hit puberty.

And started being buddies again when he hit 25 or so.

###



Here’s a picture of Max and his stepbrother Beau.

I used to take care of Beau a lot when he was a little kid (a) because I liked him but (b) because the logic of having a brother in one house and not a brother in the other house struck me as something the five/six/seven-year old Max would have a lot of trouble with.

Then the H____ moved to Orange County, and I didn’t see Beau again for years and years and years.

When I finally saw him again, he was broken.

###

Two things I remember about Beau in Berkeley:

I have absolutely no mechanical aptitude whatsoever. I mean, none!

And one day, I was trying to pull the back seat of my car up.

I had taken it down to carry something-or-other that wouldn’t fit into the trunk.

But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get the seat back up. After struggling with it for 20 minutes, I resigned myself: Henceforth, your car will be a two-seater!

Then Beau came out into the backyard. He took one look at what I was doing, frowned, and touched two latches.

Instantly the back seat sprang back into the right position.

Beau was seven at the time.

The other things I remember was how mean Bill was to Beau.

I can’t remember whether there was physical abuse. But there was certainly verbal abuse.

It was so relentless that one day I called Bill on it.

(You can imagine how bad things must have been for the X-Wife to rally on the stepson’s behalf.)

“Lay off that kid!” I yelled at Bill. “He’s a good kid! Can’t you see how he cringes every time you get near him?”

“You don’t understand,” Bill said. “It’s biology. He’s not my son. He’s MaryAnne’s son with another man, and that means my instinctive response is a hostile one. It’s only natural.”

“You’re out of your fucking mind!” I said. “He’s a seven-year-old kid. He needs love!”

###

These days Beau is not in touch with the H____ at all.

He had quite the series of sad things happen to him after the family relocated to Orange County.

Things that wound people on a pretty deep level.

After those things were all over, there was a period of time when things were ostensibly good. He and Bill both love the outdoors. Used to go on camping trips together.

He was around for Thanksgiving last year. We watched Get Out together.

Since then, though, radio silence.

There are dire insinuations from the H____: drug abuse.

(Given the H____' marijuana intake, that one's pretty funny!)

Honestly?

I have no idea.

In big families, there’s often one kid who gets dumped on. Who gets scapegoated. Who can do nothing right.

When that kid disappears, that family always blames the kid. There must be something wrong with the kid.

Beau was that kid for the H____.

###

Here’s a page from a book I made for Robin to help him get over his pre-kindergarten anxiety called… (wait for it!)… Mr. Kitty Goes to Kindergarten:



###

And here’s the Christmas card I made that year:



###

Here’s the only extant photo of me as a nurse! 1992 was actually the last year I was a nurse, so I’m not entirely sure how this photo found its way into the 1999 photo batch:



###

Here’s a Walking-and-Talking photo of my two X-husbands together. I was enough of a hippie back then to believe that we could all be one big happy extended family:



###

Here is my Robin with Bill and MaryAnne's Madeleine and Isabella:



Isabella grew up to be a great beauty:



Gifted artist, and a generally nice young woman as well.

Madeline smokes pot from the moment she wakes up in the morning till the time she hits the sack at 3am. With full parental approval from what I understand—Bill hasn’t drawn a sober breath since he retired. Madeleine is perfectly functional. The only reason I roll my eyes at Madeleine’s behavior is because MaryAnne had Beau institutionalized when he was a teen for smoking pot. At a notoriously horrifying rehab center.

###

Scrolling through these photos didn’t make me particularly melancholy. It just made me think, Huh! While it was happening, you thought it would last forever.

But it didn’t last forever.

I hate coming back to a messy place. But the cats hadn’t been pleased by two weeks of abandonment, so my little sanctuary space was quite the mess. Spent all yesterday cleaning, working out on my new-to-me elliptical bike, and watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Amy Sherman-Palladino, how I love thee!

The Meezer unaccountably has taken up residence under my bed.

Rutger has decided he’s a dog.

Many of the storage boxes I’d packed up in California on Monday had actually arrived, so I dealt with those, too. After nearly a decade in storage, Jackie’s having a perpetual bad hair day and is missing a shoe!

The Trip in Review:

Friday



In Orange County, it was over 90 degrees.

Ninety degrees in fuckin’ November!

I had to tromp around a bit to grok the full ramifications of that – Boomers! Big on experiential learning! Once upon a time, Tustin had been a real live human town. This was back in the day when there were real live citrus groves in Orange County.

The architectural remnants of that real live town are a Destination of sorts thereabouts, genuine anything being exceedingly rare in Southern California. So I set out in search of it. But by the time I’d tromped two miles, I found myself dizzy and nauseated, hovering on the verge of genuine heat stroke.

Nothing to be done about that except to keep on tromping.

In a way, that’s the story of my life.

Of course, I could have gone back over to Bill and MaryAnn’s and spent the day there, but I was trying to be sensitive to the proprieties of the situation: Present Wife entertaining X-Wife. Bill, Max and the rest of the kids wouldn’t have cared. But I think MaryAnn would have.

Underground economy transactions were proceeding at a brisk pace by the time I got back to the Key Inn. A large cockroach was stalking the bathroom sink, a scout, no doubt, sent out by the Cockroach King – So when are they gonna become extinct exactly? – plus (exciting first!) the steam from my shower actually activated the smoke alarm in my room. So I can’t recommend the Key Inn for any of y’all Dear Readers who may be planning to visit Tustin in the near future. Though if you’re looking for cheap meth…

Did go back to Bill and MaryAnn’s for dinner. Then a gang of us settled round the quadrillion-inch TV set to watch Get Out, which is even more of a masterpiece on second viewing. Get Out is easily the best film made in 2017.

Saturday



Max and I hit the northbound highway fairly early.

Max works and works and works and works. The night before, for example, he hadn’t joined our movie party – he was working.

My public policy training is such that I see Max isn’t working particularly efficiently. When you’re writing a paper about some arcane aspect of the law, for example, really you should do only enough initial research to help you come up with some sort of cogent outline for the paper.

Thereafter, you should confine your research only to fleshing out the specifics of the paper. Else you can really disappear down a rabbit hole.

Unfortunately, Max doesn’t seem to understand this, and any wise maternal admonitions exasperate him, so I keep my mouth shut. It is immensely frustrating to watch him spin his wheels, though. I want to scream, You’re overthinking this!

He’s a sensitive young man, and I think he thought I thought I was being ignored. Not true because (a) I like spending time by myself, and (b) it made me happy to facilitate his Thanksgiving reunion with his Dad since I knew he couldn’t afford to make the trip by himself.

Any time I’m in a position to make one of my kid’s dreams come true, I will do so! ‘Cause you know: I am the world’s best mother!

But I suspect Max decided I needed quality Max-and-Mommy time. So we stopped in Solvang.

Which turned out to have a mission.

Who knew?

I like missions!





This one is called Santa Inés, and what it is doing in the middle of a faux Danish tourist trap town is beyond me. It was founded in 1804, which is relatively late for a mission.

It was a little bit dinky and very pretty.

In the courtyard, we eavesdropped on an entitled Millennial going off on her bewildered parents: And you never ever take my feelings into consideration –

And I thought, Dayem, bitch! They’ve been taking your feelings into consideration for 25 plus years! And also – from the looks of you – feeding you, housing you, clothing you, and subsidizing your taste in expensive electronics.

The parent/child bond. Always a source of bemusement.

Max and i got in the car and drove some more. We drove along the outskirts of Salinas! We detoured to Santa Cruz over 156, a small highway that once upon a time, three or four times a week, I drove regularly when I was working for BrakePoint and had to commute regularly to an office in San Francisco’s trendy upscale South Park.

156 scared the shit out of me because it was a two-lane highway, and the headlights of the cars accelerating toward me as I drove home at 9, 10 o’clock at night – I was an upwardly mobile executive; I worked long hours – literally blinded me so that I couldn’t see the markings on the road. I was always terrified that I was going to drive off into a ditch.

I surprised myself on this trip by feeling no emotional resonances whatsoever.

And then it was time for Ordeal By Blood Relations!



Annie and I have abandoned any pretext of liking each other.

That was kind of a relief.

See, Annie, I am not the fourth Vogel sister. You do not get to triangulate against me with your demented sister Jane and torment me psychologically the way you tortured my poor doomed mother.

Not that Jane is up for much triangulation these days.

“She’s dying,” Annie said abruptly when I did the pro forma And how is… thing. She said it accusingly as though it were somehow my fault. “She’s in hospice. She could go any moment.”

Did I care? I probed my psyche. Really, honestly, truthfully – I did not! Whew! So much psychological growth!

“Gee,” I said. “That’s too bad.”

“Yes, it is, for me,” Annie said. “It will break my heart.”

“What’s she dying of? I mean – I know she’s in her late 80s. But is there an – um – proximal cause?”

“Alzheimer’s!” Annie snapped.

“I’m sorry,” I said. And I was sorry. Because Janie and I may share up to 25% of our DNA in common. Which means I’m a candidate for Alzheimer’s, too! “Do let me know if there’s some kind of memorial. I live very close to David as it turns out.”

“Oh, there won’t be any memorial,” Annie said. “We’ll cremate her. And then – I don’t know. Dump her ashes in a recycling bin.”

Yes, I thought. I bet you will.

###

When I was in my 20s, I cut off all communication with my mother’s family. They were very brilliant but also deeply creepy, and they were never very nice to me. I was the stepchild who was locked in the basement. My mother abused me in all sorts of ways that as an adult, I have tried to forgive her for – after all, she was only 16 when she had me; if I’d had a baby at 16, I would probably have strangled it and left its corpse in a dumpster. I find it somewhat harder to forgive them: They saw what was happening to me. And they did nothing. Except for Rik. Who wasn't even a blood relation.

I started communicating with them after I became pregnant with Max because I thought, Well, hell. They’re his family, too. He should get to make the decision whether or not he wants contact with them.

And I have to say, my mother was an exemplary grandmother. She was the only one of the Vogel sisters to pursue therapy, and as she got older, she was able to keep many of the negative behaviors associated with her borderline personality disorder in check – at least when her life was going smoothly. (Of course, that all fell apart when she became ill.) I like to imagine that she regretted what she had done to me. And she really, really loved Max.

Annie has always been very fond of Max as well.

“That’s because he’s a male,” Alicia – Annie’s daughter – noted. “Haven’t you ever noticed that the Vogel sisters hated all women? They only liked males!”

I can't say I had noticed the Vogel sisters hated all women! I thought they only hated me!

As Vogel sisters survivors, Alicia and I share a peculiar connection. I wouldn’t call it affection exactly: I’ve always found Alicia extremely difficult to bond with.

“My mother doesn’t really like anyone,” Alicia continued. “She’s a complete narcissist. She does it in this bizarre self-deprecating way, so it’s hard to pick up on.”

An astute analysis. And one that rang true.

Alicia is stressed to the max dealing with the ongoing saga of Annie’s property.

“We’re on our second lawyer now,” Alicia said. “We’re $30,000 out of pocket. And he’s gonna take 30% of any settlement we get.”

“They let lawyers do that?” I asked. “I thought it was an either/or payment upfront or contingency thing.”

Alicia rolled her eyes. “He’s a complete jerk. I told him: You need to file that suit as soon as possible. And then I called him 10 days later, and he still hadn’t filed it! I mean, hey! We’re dealing with a very narrow statute of limitations window here. You have to ride these people constantly. It’s very annoying.”

The world lost a talented tort attorney when Alicia decided to try and win Rik's (her father) approval – in vain, I might add – by studying microbiology. She is a veritable pitbull.

“So, the week after the landslide,” Alicia confides, “my mother comes up with this wacky idea: She’s gonna move an RV on to the property. And I tell her, No, no, that’s impossible. There’s no causeway. The ground’s unstable. There’s no place to hook up utilities. But you know, she thinks she’s this hippie earth-mother goddess or something, so she knows best. And then she starts talking to the lawyer about it. Next thing I know, there’s a bill for $3,000 on my desk from the lawyer – for research on RVs and red-tagged properties!”

I laughed.

“You think that's funny? You wouldn’t if you were the one paying that lawyer. I read him the riot act. You know what he said to me? You’re not my client; your mother is! I said, Maybe, but I’m the one who’s paying your bill. Then I called my mother and let it fly.”

“And how did that go over?”

“Oh, she sulked like a five-year-old who’d just been told, No, you can’t wear your Princess Elsa dress to school.

You just cost me three grand, I said. That shut her up.”

There was a time when I might have felt sorry for Annie in this predicament.

“Well, you look great,” I told Alicia, and indeed, she does:



In her 20s, Alicia had been a professional triathalete, and she still exercises fanatically. She looks 20 years younger than her age – which is 50.

“I do Botox,” she confided. “Plus I get eyelash extensions every two weeks.”

The Botox I could take or leave – unless it could do something for crepe neck. Vanity, vanity – all is vanity - I grok! But I must say, I find this slackening around my jawline very discouraging.

The eyelashes, though. I’d definitely do the eyelashes! Eyelashes make a huge difference.

I’d never gotten the feeling that Alicia had very much use for me, but as we talked, I could feel my ratings going up, up, up on her internal Alicia-ometer.

What cinched it was my suitcase.

She kept circling my suitcase.

She even peered inside it as I fished out my pajamas.

“One bag for a two-week trip?”

“Well,” I said. “You have to pack carefully. Be very organized. I repack everything at least once a day.”

“Very efficient! I like it. I like it. You look good, Patty. I mean for 65! I wouldn’t guess you were a day over 55, honestly.”

This is probably the highest praise of which Alicia is capable.



The next morning, I restored my sanity by having a lovely brunch with Susie and Jon.

And then Max and I took off for Berkeley where I spent the next two days packing and shipping storage unit stuff.

I think I’m glad to be back. I’m not 100% sure yet.

Evolution hasn't caught up with the car. Meaning: if you drive 1400 miles in four days, even in a series of air-conditioned automobiles, on the other side your body will have aged just as much as if you'd spent the last 6 months crossing the Dakotas through Apache ambushes in a covered wagon.

The Hare ladies and I were driving Max – the Hare heir, born in the Year of Rabbit – to Deep Springs. This was not exactly my idea. Originally I'd wanted to make the trip with Bill, my ex-husband, Max's father, and had put the feelers out to MaryAnne, the current Mrs. Hare. Bill, it turned out, had to be in Vienna on business but once the invitation was out there, it could hardly be rescinded. And anyway there was something symbolically satisfying in having the four family females escort the fledgling Hero to the all male bastion where he will spend the next two years boning up on Heidegger and ranch hand skills.

Time out of time…

I was very teary. It had finally hit – Max was leaving home forever, and though of course I would see him again, our relationship had changed forever – I was still a parent, I would always be a parent, but I was no longer a guardian and that has been my primary definition of self for the past 18 and a half years.

I kept my tears behind my sunglasses. MaryAnne and I, while not exactly enemies, are not exactly friends – no warm fuzzies forthcoming from that direction. Over the years I have grown to appreciate her – her housekeeping skills are extraordinary – but I could never say I like her. I like her two daughters though, Max's half sisters, Madeleine and Isabella. I remember my deep despair when Madeleine was born – Bill had remarried first. In fact, Bill had taken up with MaryAnne exactly three days after the dinner date in which I told him in no uncertain terms that I would never go back to him. A practical man, Bill. He did not waste his time lining his pillow with regrets.

Anyway not only had Bill moved on, he'd begotten more offspring. I was still unattached. I remember sniveling on the phone with Annie: "They're a real family. And I'm just this wacko single mother."

"Oh, honey," said Annie. "You've got to look at it from an unselfish perspective. It's never a bad thing for a child to have more people to love and be loved by."

First I drove by myself from Monterey to Tustin. I'd gotten up at 4am to finish all the circus prep work – posters to go out to Bellis Fair, a powerpoint slide for Bellis Fair's rotating media display, press packets going out for Bellingham and Port Townsend, several phone back-and-forths with the indefatigable Byron – are we getting the miniature circus for Bellingham? are we not getting the miniature circus for Bellingham? Then I played wack-a-mole with the little store's bills. I need to update the store's website. I need to design a brochure –

I am doing waaay too much. I can't possibly be doing a good job with any of it –

Which sentiment was confirmed when my cell rang just as I was opening the door.

JDK. He has a deep twangy voice. Possibly there's something Pavlovian in my reaction to it: my shithead father sounded just like him. I loathed my father but there's no denying that of all the voices in the world, his – or ones that sound like his – is my favorite one to be sweet-talked in.

"You didn't like the poster!" I cried.

"I liked the poster just fine. But it has the wrong dates on it –"

Fuck.

Another 15 minutes spent rectifying the poster.

Out the door finally at noon. I cut over to I5, a horrendously ugly freeway, and listened to rightwing talk radio all the way into Orange County.

That was the first four hundred miles.

The next day we set off on the next three hundred.

We drove east through Riverside and San Bernardino, literally invisible through a thick mantle of brown smog. Cut north on Highway 395 winding through Victorville, possibly the ugliest small town in California, and the white salt scar that used to be Lake Owen. (Mental note to self: must reread CADILLAC DESERT…) It was a hundred and five degrees outside. MaryAnne and I made small talk about the vast Hare clan who used to be my relatives; the children watched a Drew Barrymore Cinderella remake on the DVD player.

No opportunity to deliver that last Polonius-like sermon to Max: "This above all: to thine own self, be true; always wear clean underwear and don't forget to floss –"

Deep Springs itself is an oasis in the high desert. Really a beautiful place. And I knew Max would have extraordinary adventures there, be molded in good ways and that this was a gift that I had given him: it was a good thing that he couldn't wait for us to leave.

But my heart was breaking.

The infant at my breast. The little solemn, fair-haired boy. The coltish kid in the school uniform he always hated. Where had he gone?

Heartbreak lasted all the way back to Monterey. Email from Max!

Hey Mom,
although I'm not quite over my lonliness phase, I'm
having a lot of fun. I'm alrady tremendously
underslept. I had to get up at 4:30 this morning to
weed for four hours. Tonight we have a hike into thed
mountains, and I've briefly been playing a little
chess and basketball. Every time I try to pick up a
book for more than ten minutes, my eye droop and my
consciousness begins to waver. I will continue writing
to you, and once I get in the groove of things, will
start taking pictures and sending them to you. I miss
you very very much, and I hope you will have/are
having/had a safe drive back to Monterey. Please write
me back

While I was reading, the phone rang. JDK. "Hello, beautiful. Listen, we have some problems here –"

"Something I did?"

"Oh God, no. Would you knock that off? You're perfect. I want to submit you to some Chinese biotech laboratory so they can clone you. But here's what I need you to do…"

Life goes on.

Bill H here this weekend. X-husband, father of Max. If anything he is even more depressed about the election than Ben is, thus dinner conversation chez moi for the past three nights ran something like this:

Bill: Maybe we could buy up twenty million bibles cheap, impregnate them with some potent biotoxin, rent a crop duster and then air-drop over Okalahoma

Ben: Oklahoma only has seven electoral votes. So what’s your theory again on why the Jews didn’t leave Germany?

I spent all Saturday cooking and writing which was some kind of luxury. Jerk chicken, pattern recognition. The chicken came out good, I’m not at all sure about the story. I know the structure now but the scene in the Indian casino, in particular, seems overly melodramatic: girl stumbles upon drunken half-sister giving biker a handjob; elliptical confrontation harkening back to sexual abuse they both suffered at the hands of drunken father. I could fix the scene if I had a couple of hours to tunnel into it. The problem is that every minute I write is a minute I’m not doing all the endless administrative work essential to float a business, or working on Max’s college applications, or cleaning the house. Right brain is right brain and left brain is left brain, and never the twain shall meet.