Everyday Mercies

Apologies, first of all, to readers of the Aggieland Star-Ledger who had difficulties finding this blog.  Your editor made the foolish mistake of typing an “@” where she should have typed a “.”  Congratulations on finding it, anyway!

A couple of days back, I was thinking more along the lines of an essay called “Everyday Tragedy,” but then mercy struck, and I don’t mean the bright and beautiful McGee daughter.  My mother always used to say, “be grateful for small favors,” though she generally changed it to “flavors” by way of irony.  The “small favor” or mercy, if you will that changed the course of the week – and maybe my life – happened on Wednesday, on the way back from the airport.  But more on that in a moment.

Living in this beautiful, gritty megalopolis, we are aware that tragedies are certainly happening daily.  We watch KRON-4, our favorite purveyor of weather and news and advertising every morning for an update.  There is the same wise-cracking, sports-loving anchorwoman, Daria, who was there when I watched regularly in 2001-2, and George the traffic-guy, and Marc the co-anchor and former weatherman.  (Actually they all seem to be former weather-folk:  James, the other local news-guy really lit up when he did the weather for Erica this morning, and Marc confessed to majoring in meteorology…) 

Anyway, we get our daily dose of burglary, murder and traffic mayhem from unexpected and expected spots, all over the Bay, and then our parents will frighten us with health setbacks, and I think – well, here we go again!  We will drive home to Texas in January only to find that one parent or another is deathly ill and one of us must fly back again…  My father, for example, has become vaguer than usual this week, and we wonder how much longer he will hang on.  Then there was the tremendous back-up on the highway outside our window, complete with helicopters and sirens, and the grim rumble of a thousand vehicles idling, going nowhere for a very long time, coupled to the knowledge that somewhere up ahead on the road, a tragedy must be unfolding.

But Wednesday changed all that sort of thinking.  Wednesday, we escaped being on the KRON-4 News by inches.  Wednesday, we looked up just in time and one of us yelled just in time and we did NOT collide with the back of that stopped truck, in the lane directly ahead of us.

It was a gorgeous, clear afternoon with unusually interesting clouds and a double rainbow, and we were pointing out the sights to two scientific visitors from France – had just waved towards the Campanile, as a matter of fact – when that particular Highway 24 exit lane from Highway 580 decided to put on its brakes.  Another lane was open and we veered uneventfully into it, but not before all the other possible outcomes had raced before our eyes:  ranging in seriousness from inconvenienced visitors to expensive car-repairs, hospitalization, and death.  But nothing, nothing happened; we didn’t even have to skid to a scary halt; the folks in the backseat seemed unaware of the danger, probably thought we were over-reacting. 

But all day it echoed around our minds, along with deep gratitude.  How sweet is life without inconvenienced visitors, expensive car-repairs, (another) hospitalization and (more) death!  Fathers rally yet again – yes, we know it will not be forever, but for now they do – and considering the size of this Megalopolis, there is a remarkable degree of mercy happening daily.  Most houses don’t burn down, most people don’t murder one another or embezzle the government, and most cars don’t crash.  It’s anything but a small favor; it’s a mercy!

“An Insufferable Prig”

A month of my hospital-, friend visiting-, spouse birthday-, nephew wedding- and Thanksgiving-doings, the manufacture of home-made gifts of the literary variety as well as the writings and mailings of Christmas newsletters and a brief excursion to Cambridge, MA have eaten November.  Chapter Two remains unfinished, but I have submitted my three novellas to Kindle for their consideration, in an offhand sort of way.  The incredible rains of last week are gone, the limbs are cleared out and the sun is very much out in Berkeley, CA.  There has been an earthquake today in Japan, but with “only” a one-meter tsunami.  Is that appropriate for a “date that will live in infamy?”  Yesterday was Saint Nicholas’ Day, and children in the Netherlands looked in their shoes to see what Sinte Claas brought them.  I have been out on Santa’s behalf, scouring odd corners of the town for stocking stuffers appealing to 20-somethings.

But the “brief excursion to Cambridge, MA” has probably left the deepest impression of all… except that I am naturally hoping that the “off-hand mailing” will really amount to something.  Really being someplace makes all the difference, doesn’t it?  Really sleeping in the same building where Robert Frost spent the last twenty years of his life, really hearing gorgeous music on the spot where the original Congregational church stood (and the current one is not so young, either), really, really reading a collection of Longfellow poetry a few doors away from where he lived and wrote it, really moseying past where Joan Baez and Bob Dylan got their start in folk-singing or where Washington first mustered and trained the Continental army, really knowing that it was here that people decided both that education must be required of every citizen and that the Church must get out of that education, at least at Harvard… even just looking up and seeing the little window at Harvard square reading DEWEY, CHEATHAM & HOWE, marking the office where “Car Talk” was taped, all those times… all this confirms the notion that people who make a start at something really matter, that each person really matters, and that believing that really matters.  It also matters that we examine what we do, and why we do it.

Something in the severe self-examination in the literary air of our little top-floor room must have set my spiritual antennae waving, for the very night we arrived, I had the strongest sense of being SUCH a prig!  Yes, the phrase insufferable prig leapt to mind as Robin complained mildly that I had been nagging him ceaselessly for the last few days and if possible moreso during the weary, hungry hours after we arrived and began foraging for dinner at 9:30 p.m. or so.  All at once, I saw myself in the stark, Puritan light of Cambridge, and it wasn't pretty:  a know-it-all, pedantic, self-righteous schoolmarm, thinking she is somebody, pretending to write legible prose, intending to dust off and brush up her poetry:  a dallier, a dilettante, a sponge and yes, an insufferable prig, always telling people what to do and how to do it, judging, correcting… how could anyone stand to be near me? 

Increasingly on edge as to what the publisher will say about my novel waiting patiently on his desk to be re-read, increasingly self-critical for both my wild hopes and my despair, puffed-up at the least sign of praise for stories I love, spending whole days focussed on my own creative process, a deeply selfish enterprise, I had become a jangling ganglion of self-love and self-loathing, lashing out at my own best-beloved as if to blame him for an imperfect world.  What rot!

Yet, having realized all that, I also realized that I was becoming hyper-sensitive to things “not done right” for the first time in a very long time, and that, with considerable dialing-back of sensitivity levels – and stiff resolution not to say whatever comes into my head, whenever it comes there – I saw that after months of numbness, of stumping dully along like some saddle-sore mule, I might just be growing younger again, and might have recovered a long-missing bounce-in-the-step.  Nerve-endings seemed to be working again, certainly, if perhaps unfortunately for everyone around me!  All the same, the stinging correction was liberating as well as painful, like a snake peeling off an old skin and sliding forth quite new and clean.  Quite empty, I roamed the streets, took the subway to the art museum, wandered at will through the art and lost myself in familiar and unfamiliar poetry and delighted to learn all I could: all the above for starters.

A Convenient Emergency

Assuming that God is good and Obama (and not the forces of greed and idiocy) will win this election, I set those worries aside to log in a momentous week.  For it was not just the week that Robin flew back here from the east coast two days after Sandy had skimmed his conference center, not just the week of the big Giants victory parade in SF and not just the week of Halloween and my brother’s 60^th birthday, it was the week that the ol’ gallbladder decided to give up the ghost at last.

What an unispiring little organ is the gallbladder: hearts, livers and lungs have all the romance!  It is, however, the center of what P. G. Wodehouse calls “dyspepsia,” which he describes in the opening pages of “The Smile That Wins,” in Mulliner Nights as creating in the sufferer “all the emotions of one who has carelessly swallowed a family of scorpions.”  The scorpions have flared up from time to time in the past, but especially recently, perhaps been collecting venom from all the stress.

A surgeon back said last spring that the dratted thing should come out, and soon, “before it becomes inflamed and you have to have emergency surgery,” but really, is there ever a good time to spend $1000 on that lovely first deductible?  And who chooses to go in and try their hand at getting a nice, simple surgery with no regrettable side-effects?  So when?  The wonderful nurse at the old home clinic had told me “you’ll know when it’s time to take it out” and by 10:00 p.m. Thursday night, I knew h-hour (or more like w-weekend) had arrived.

Let us skip over the couple of hours of agony in the emergency waiting room at Alta Bates, shall we?  And not mention the crazies who like to congregate in such places at that time of night?  Let’s say nothing of the unfortunate presence of two young healthy boys (no doubt waiting patiently for Mom, inside Emergency) munching on their dinners just opposite, where they could best admire the writhing and moaning of not just me but also another lady who had just arrived, doubled over at the waist!  Let us not dwell on the hours in the little examining room, or the hour in Ultra-sound, in which the (mercifully sedated) scorpions were subjected to much pressure.  Instead, let us hurry on to the long-awaited moment when, at about 4:00 p.m. Friday, the nice anaesthesiologist arrived in Pre-Op, told me what was going to happen, then injected a little something into my I.V. and then…

All at once I was waking up in Recovery at about 5:30 p.m. Friday, the words of the surgeon echoing in my ears, “It was really, really bad!” – the gallbladder, not the surgery, which went “by the book” – and the recovery nurses were bustling around, saying how awake I was.  (“Ha!  If you only knew!” I was thinking.)  A snoozy night and day with cheery visits followed and, having already spent my deductible in the Emergency Room, the surgeon suggested I stay Saturday night, too, because once the morphine wore off I would feel as if I “had been hit by a truck” and if I were at home I might think of coming back to the hospital that night, anyway.  She was quite right, of course!

Has anyone else noticed how smart your average surgeon is?  Or how considerate, hard-working and generally terrific?  This fine lady, once she discovered I was from College Station, TX, hurried to assure me that she had trained with TAMU’s Dr. Red Duke, himself, as well as at Houston’s bouquet of great hospitals, just in case I had no faith in California physicians, I suppose.  And she took the time between surgeries on Sunday to intervene with an obstructive pharmacist, so that I would be pain-free overnight.  Let ’em have their huge fees, I say!

To sum up:  it was awful, but necessary, and things are now improving rapidly, but the curious thing is that there seems not to have been a better moment in recent history for such a temporary disaster than right now.  The spouse was in town and is not tied down by teaching duties.  I am no longer Head of School, with all eyes anxiously fixed upon me for strength and solace.  We have sweet neighbors here, good friends all over, and handy family members willing to visit and help.

It couldn’t have been better timed if we HAD chosen the moment.  Thank God for serendipity…and everything else!

bittersweet

When Robin and I went to the SF Symphony a few weeks back, the lights that glowed on the Beaux-Arts dome and columns of City Hall were a peculiar copper-orange color:  Giants Orange.  Orange is not a color we wear a lot in College Station, particularly not Burnt Orange, but this other orange used to be my mother’s favorite:  something my mother, Marie Iverson Mitchell, called bittersweet.

It has been a bittersweet week:  this used to be Mom’s favorite time of year, and her birthday was the 26^th.  She has missed it now for the third year running.  People have told me they have been visited, somehow, by their beloved dead, but until recently I had felt nothing beyond a lingering horror.  Subtly, recently, I seem to feel companionable presence beside me as I drive again around her favorite places. 

The semester I spent teaching in Italy, in the fall of 2005, I was already worried about Mom’s health, and at this very time of year I went for a long walk up the Val di Chio, on All Saints’ Day.  The leaves in the vineyards were going a bright yellow, and the persimmon trees were losing their dark red, heart-shaped leaves, exposing the orange fruit hanging heavy on the slender boughs, and I thought of my red-haired mother, always a little delicate yet forging on regardless to one adventure after another as we travelled the world.  Persimmons ripen on the bough from inedible sourness and hardness to unbelievable softness and sweetness, something she had often remarked.  The bitter memories of 2010 are softening and sweetening, too.

The winter before she had the stroke that left her speechless and immobile, I took Mom on a drive to Point Reyes Peninsula, just as a treat.  Dad had trouble walking, she no longer felt safe driving, and she didn’t often get out.  We went at an easy pace, looking and talking about everything we saw, going out and coming back. We sat in the sunshine outside a cafe at Point Reyes Station, and later ate lunch together at the diner, taking our time and getting the pie.  She was so grateful to get out and about, to just be buddies, and it was the last time we ever did.

I adored my mother, but we didn’t do many things together like that, just she and I. My daughter Tia, though, has outlived my most irritating years still willing to do things with her Ma, still talk on the phone, still “hang out.”  When I was out here on my own, teaching at Sacred Heart, and again during my father’s long illness, we spent a lot of time together.  But last Thursday night – you might call it Mom Birthday Eve – has to be one of the most memorable of Tia Times. 

I had just straggled home late from the SF airport through a massive traffic jam what with the World Series game, right there by the Bay Bridge, and had one ear entirely deaf with a cold-plus-cabin-air-pressure, but had every intention of collecting the dog from Tia’s apartment and dashing off to church choir practice at FCCB, with dinner at some later time.  Tia disabused me of this foolish notion, however, insisting we go out to dinner.  How could I say “no” to the person who had dog-sat Oscar and who had been busy teaching all day?

So, though I ached a bit to be deserting my fellow Altos for this sweet chance for some family time, we adjourned to an unlikely enough place for it:  the Hotsy-Totsy Club (“tipsy since 1939”), a black box of a bar with good neighborhood ambiance and a taco wagon, and not usually a sports bar, but a notable exception was made that night.  We got our three tacos each (Pastor, Pollo, and Asada for me) and our drink of choice (dirty Martinis made with two gorgeous olives and local gin flavored with the herbs of Mt. Tamalpais) and made these last through the seventh inning of the second game of the series, watching the Bunt of the Century roll fair.  Giants Orange, and sweet, very sweet because spent with my Tia-pot.

Today I wore the salmon coral necklace my mother’s Aunt Til -- one of my favorite people, a business woman and a world-traveler – gave me a million years ago, a child-sized necklace brought back from Naples and originally strung on wire, which I restrung on silk and expanded with matching beads from Pompei, so that it is long enough now to throw on anytime one is ready for action.  And now whenever I wear it I will think not only of adventurous Iversons past but of this present grand-daughter of Iversons, my daughter Tia, who made me part of an evening I will never forget.  Thanks, Miss Peeps, and we raise our Martini glasses to you, Mom!

Into the Thesaurus

After a weekend back in Texas for Thomas Cowden’s wonderful Michaelmas wedding, a delicious frontal system of rain that has finally put a green blush on the sad lawns here and made a clear, cool autumn day as only Texas can do them, tomorrow it is time to return to that strange new world of 2012 Berkeley, CA.  At the wedding, I was heartened to learn that I have at least one loyal blog-follower, so for you, dear reader(s?), I will share another really fine weekend, from the Bay Area.

As all you students of Greek out there know, a qhsauroV is either a treasure-house or the treasure itself, so it is not just words that are the subject here.  And as (all of) you reader(s) of the last blog will recall, the San Francisco Bay Area is very much like Ali Baba’s treasure house.  Our weekend adventures of September 22-23 (the equinox and beginning of fall) were proof of this notion.

It certainly is fall there, by the way, all those from “four seasons” states who sneer at Mediterranean climates notwithstanding:  huge sycamore leaves are careening to the pavement and gathering along the sidewalks in rustling, untidy heaps, and the liquidamber trees along Piedmont St. are flaming red at the top or a mingled red and green.  The Tule fog is slipping into the Bay from the Valley some mornings, and nights are getting colder (even than summer).

But the 22^nd was gorgeous:  a perfect day to go to the City and see some art at the Palace of the Legion of Honor.  We dawdled around the apartment Saturday morning, apparently so as to be in the throng on the Bay Bridge at 11:00, the rush-hour of the weekend, as everyone goes to San Francisco for some fun.  After weeks of walking freely all over Berkeley, the traffic was an unpleasant shock, but the treasure was worth the wait.

We headed for Irving Street, which parallels Golden Gate Park, and a certain stretch of which – near where Tia takes her voice lessons – we know pretty well.  We were looking for lunch, and figured we would go with a familiar neighborhood.  But since Golden Gate Park extends across half the city, the part of Irving-near-the-Park in which we happened to land was blocks away from there and a whole new world to us.  Rather than grab the smartphone and look up “Pluto” or another familiar Irving Street restaurant, however, we took our chances where we were and struck gold, like many another Californian before us. 

There, among many exotic names, was Brothers Seafood Restaurant:  clean, trim and full of happy (and appropriately Chinese) customers eating what seemed to be the largest portions of dim-sum we had ever seen.  We sat and duly waited for a table, watching the doomed fish, crabs and lobsters move moodily about their bubbling aquaria, spying on what everyone else was eating and puzzling over the menu.  Once we were duly seated, we did our best (with the help of a photographic chart) to select 5-6 balanced dishes, and did not go too far wrong:  after all, how bad is it to order two desserts, especially when one is taro buns, covered with streusel and the other is fried mochi filled with sweet bean paste and covered with sesame seeds?  And truly, the buns and meat-dumplings and heaps of beautiful cooked greens were tremendously generous – I mean, was I wearing my reading glasses or were they really that big? – for $2 or $3 or $4.50 for a group of three (or a heap of veggies)…  Anyhow, you get my point: buried treasure!

The show at the Legion of Honor which followed this feast was a more expected treat: Man Ray and Lee Miller, purported to be a surrealist show but really an hommage to the long friendship of these two American artists.  It began in a red-hot love relationship in 1930’s Paris, but when she left him to work in New York (and went on to be a renowned war photographer), he continued to obsess over her, and not surprisingly:  she was not just an artist and intellectual but also a fashion model and about as beautiful as they come.  He saw her lips everywhere and made whole series of longitudinal collages and paintings to mimic them.  As for her eyes, he kept a photo of one of them in his wallet at all times, and attached them to the business ends of numerous metronomes, always meaning to destroy them but never bringing himself to do it.  The catalogue is not the sort of thing to leave lying around the Teacher’s Workroom at Saint Michael’s, but it was a fascinating show.  Perhaps best were the whimsical creations he made for her after the war, when the horrors she had seen threw her into deep depressions and he tried (usually successfully) to cheer her up with offerings of art.  The show, and the views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the City from the lofty perch of the Legion of Honor on an unusually sunny day were both worth the long, slow commute back to Berkeley.

That night we watched the dear old 1950’s film, “The Mudlark,” which is only available in a very odd reprint from “public domain” somewhere (unless you know a really good local rental place), but still worth buying if you are as big a fan of children and sentiment as I am, AND would love to see Alec Guiness completely own the part of Disraeli and a pudgied-up Irene Dunne conquer the role of Queen Victoria, AND see the fabulously Victorian (big surprise) home décor of Windsor Castle.  This made for interesting conversations for the next few days, and much sentimental satisfaction!

At the risk of creating a bloggone (imaginary Italian for “a really big blog,” –one being the suffix added to objects of great size), I must say something about Sunday the 23^rd.  After finally “nailing” the anthem “Precious Lord” (Thomas Dorsey version) for the 10:30 service at First Congregational Church Berkeley (so much so that the dratted Alto part was stuck in my head all week), we had a nice lunch with my father at the pleasant and tasty Villa Chinese restaurant in San Pablo, across the street from his assisted living apartment, then – after a suitable period of sheer laziness back at home – began our exploration of the Hill Paths of Berkeley.

Armed with the indispensible “Trails of Berkeley” map like any good tourists, we began at Codornices Park (the 5^th station, as it were, to use Mt. Fuji terms, being halfway up the 1000-ft. Berkeley Hills) and struck off on the first precipitous path, with stairs so long and steep we couldn’t see their top, climbing out of a redwood-shaded hollow where someone was holding a meditative jazz jam-session. 

The streets of East Berkeley wind and twist prodigiously across the face of this steep hill-face, and are thus difficult for pedestrians to navigate without much backtracking.  The solution presented by the long-dead fathers of Berkeley development was to provide paved paths with many ranks of steps, scaling the sheer drops between the streets.  They are generally named for the streets they continue or connect, but occasionally after heroes (e.g, “Billy Jean Steps”) or local patrons.  The quaky nature of the Hayward Fault which runs under these hills has made many of the original steps writhe, crumble and extrude in strange ways, and some paths are no longer passable.  Many more have been recently re-built by fans of the paths, in stout squared timbers of some iron-like wood, and spiral and wander acr0ss the face of the hill.

The aerobic exercise, going up, was terrific, and the stress on tender knee-joints, coming down, was sometimes painful, but the overall effect was exhilarating, especially as we rose higher and higher and the views on that gorgeous afternoon (the fog just stealing in at last through the Gate, and heading straight for Berkeley, as usual) that gradually opened up as we rose, tremendous. Sometimes the signs for the paths were nearly obscured by trees, and twice they required us to go up a private driveway for a few yards, but Robin was a perfect navigator, and we persevered.  We passed a house with a “Nobel Prize Winner Parking Only” parking spot, and many, many more houses that were interesting and unique, with variegated and lush gardens, as anything seems to be able to grow there with a little drip irrigation.

At the very top we could see over into the valley beyond, as well, and off as far as Mt. Diablo, while in the opposite direction Mt. Tamalpais rose clearly above her quilt of fog.  The houses up there were vertiginous in the extreme, often just pasted on the side of a cliff, with “Lots for Sale” that were nearly entirely vertical.  Up there we came across a fountain at the head of a small subdivision were we could water the pooch (Oski was a trouper from bottom to top and back again) and reflect that at a dance in a house on that street, we had first met, thirty-eight years ago.

Many more paths await, more memories, and more treasures.  Ciao for now!