Wednesday, February 18, 2009

NANA

My maternal grandmother, Nana was always ancient. Her face was wrinkly and the skin on her arms hung like draperies, her hands were knurled and veiny, their age accentuated by bright red nail polish. I watched her hands a lot as a child. They were my focal point when she told me stories, when they held a cup and read the tealeaves, when she mixed fruitcake ingredients in a big bowl, and especially when she held playing cards. For it was at those times my world was a glorious land of gaming. Puzzles and games were her life blood and since she lived with us much of the year, we played a lot. She was my roommate during my early childhood in Ohio, spending countless hours with me while my Mother was busy with the triple whammy of three baby sisters. I used to rummage through Nana’s “special” drawer in her dresser when she was away, looking at the little woven grass slippers made by Indians, her Eastern Star ring and pins, and especially the little test-tube vials of powdered pigments from her china painting days. These were so intriguing to me, so like the chemicals in my brother’s chemistry set, but strangely out of place nestled here in a drawer with embroidered handkerchiefs. I felt sure that they had magical powers. By her bed was a little porcelain figurine and a tree. I don’t think the tree was alive, it was more like a sculpture tree, but it did have moss around it’s trunk and some kind of dried vegetable matter on it’s branches for the “leaves” –‘cause I touched it! We also had a neat nightlight in our room that automatically lit when you lifted it up. It was metal, in the shape of a candlestick, with a bulb where the flame would be. We both used it on nightly bathroom calls. The light wasn’t strong enough to illuminate the side hallway down to my brother’s room. This was bad since I imagined the giant Tarantula spider lurking there. (As a 2nd grader, I had gone to way too many horror films with my older brother.) I would hurry along tightly clutching the light and keeping my eyes averted from the terror of the shadows.
Nana would spend half the year with one daughter and the other half with the other. Much of the time in Ohio she was with us or visiting her siblings here and there. She divorced my grandfather Papa when my Mom was 14 years old, and was unwise with her settlement. Spitefully refusing to follow Papa’s advice on investing, she lost most of it and was forced to live with relatives for her remaining years, eagerly awaiting her social security check like a kid waiting for her allowance. When we moved to California and lived on Seahurst, she was a permanent morning fixture, perched on a barstool at the kitchen counter with coffee, cigarette and crossword. Up for hours and all coffeed up, she was way too cheerful and chatty for our groggy, not-ready-for-school selves. We tried to hide in our Cheerios and the morning comics to avoid conversations and her “so you’re off to schooly-ooly!” chatter.

(I have a mental picture of my daughters reading this and thinking “boy does this sound like MOM!” - Well it’s in my blood and probably in theirs too.)
I remember a period in the 60’s when Nana was all keen on winning herself a Pontiac Grand “Per-ee” as she put it. The newspaper was running a game with a word jumble that unscrambled to reveal the name of some obscure Island. Each week a new island’s name was decoded and dutifully mailed off to the PO Box. She did make the finals but alas, never won. She had a nice car, a Pink Plymouth sedan with clear plastic covering the seats. She used it to drive back and forth to my Aunt’s home in the valley for extended stays and often we kids would accompany her. In the summers Mom and my Aunt would trade children for awhile and everyone got a new take on family. It was especially nice for the twins and Chris and cousin Anne as they were close in age and often in tune with the same pastimes. It was also great for Tom and Sue, the two late arrivals of our families. There was an exotic quality to living at my aunts home, the dynamics were different, the pace, the smells of the house. This novelty was mixed with a burning desire to return to my own home, room, dog, etc. In the early days our house had a pool and theirs didn’t. With their location in the San Fernando Valley and its 100°+ temps, we suffered and did our best to distract ourselves with games and stories. They had different old stuff in their closets that they would bring out and tell us about, plus my uncle kept pigeons! This was good and bad. They cooed and pooped outside the window of the room I stayed in, but I could look out the window and watch my Uncle take them out and feed them. We had no birds at our home, dogs, horses, ducks, guppies, rabbits, mice, fish, lizards, and for a short time a goat, but no birds – Mom hated them and the poop was probably a contributing factor. Nana loved birds (her room at my aunt’s was happily beside the coop) and once bought one from the Newberry’s pet department at our local shopping center. It was supposed to be ‘for’ me and her story to Mom was that it was free in some sort of promotional giveaway. It was a little yellow and grey bird of unfamiliar species – nothing recognizable like the canaries and parakeets some of my friends had, just a little molting bird that sat in its cage and pooped and never made a peep. It met with an untimely death when Dad was paneling the pool house where Nana lived. The sudden sound of his electric drill gave it a heart attack and we found it keeled over later that afternoon. Few tears were shed at its funeral. The pool house was built to accommodate my Grandma as well as provide bathroom and dressing space for swimmers and a recreation room. It had a large room with a fireplace and room for a pool table (Dad’s joy) with a small bedroom and bath off to the side. When Nana still lived out there, we’d go out and visit her - watching her TV, drinking cokes, eating forbidden cookies and candy, it was cool. After she died (1966), one by one we moved out there, as a sort of rite of passage for whoever was the eldest child still living at home. Separate from the house and out of earshot of our parents, Nana’s old room retained its aura of decadence as if still under her mystical influence.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Churchgoers



Several years ago I was at a point where I just wanted to STOP WORKING, so I decided to take a walk – ‘Walk it off’ as Mike’s coach used to tell him to do. I was feeling like I had been letting ‘free’ time slip away from me. Work and its responsibilities are always in a corner of my mind - like a vastly overweight house guest who is constantly underfoot when you want to get something out of the refrigerator or vacuum the living room. I had so many duties, there really was no choice. I had so many things that HAD to be done and done NOW and by ME and so I just had to get busy and DO THEM and I did and now I AM taking a break. So I walked downtown and visited my usual spots, then headed home thinking of some sort of extravagant way to play hooky. I opted for a Tomato/Provolone Foccata from John’s Grocery after poking around in the Northside Book Market looking for a copy of Gift from the Sea for a friend. There wasn’t one available - everyone must keep their copies. I did come across three copies of Dimitri Merzekovski’s Romance of Leonardo da Vinci - guess that one’s not a keeper. My Dad loved used book stores along with hardware stores and lumberyards. He was a poker-arounder and I am too. He’d mosey around the stacks of books, telling me which ones he’d read and loved, and then would think of something to look for and go off on tangents, wandering down another dusty aisle. I remember a time in Pasadena, when we looked for a copy of a Tarzan book (I thought used books - cheaper! but actually they were about the same price –often even more -being antiques and all). At that time I was heavily into the ape-man series and the libraries didn’t stock them for some erroneous puritanical reasons. Tarzan & Jane WERE married and NOT living in sin! (If anyone on those morality committees had actually read the books they felt were so detrimental to society, they would have known that.) Dad had read them all and tried to steer me towards Edgar Rice Burroughs’s other hit series, the John Carter of Mars books. I never did read them. I liked the jungle and the animals better than Space. Dad loved the future. So as if accompanied by Dad’s ghost, I found myself gravitating to the same haunts. There is a wonderful sense of reverie and peace after an afternoon of bumming around in a used bookstore. It triggers all sorts of other peripheral thoughts and your mind flits from memory to memory, recollecting past readings and the time and place where you read them. The smell of deteriorating pages, yellow and crumbly, is heady incense. It was a most perfect spiritual experience and carried me away from my burdensome present, it’s my church.

My younger daughter, the animal lover, also became a fan of Tarzan and was ecstatic to find that I still had the complete series; she read them all and insisted that they be willed to her. She is studying to be a librarian and so goes to church everyday.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Mama-San

On one visit to my parent’s beach house, Mike and I had gone down ahead, eager to see the ocean after living 2000 miles away in land locked Iowa. We unpacked and walked the beach, said hello to the ocean, and were hanging around awaiting my folk’s arrival. Dad walked in accompanied by a silent smiling geisha. She nodded fanning herself and refused to speak for a half an hour. It was weird to see my Mom staying in character for so long. Having been captivated by the book and TV series Shogun, she thought arriving in Japanese attire would be a riot. They managed the 2 hr drive down without causing any accidents, despite a few second takes at the ‘Japanese’ lady in the passenger seat with the cigarette dangling out of her mouth. She either borrowed the outfit or it may have been a leftover from when the Japanese tourists stayed at out home a few years before. Mom had befriended a guy who sponsored foreign visitors to the USA - I forget the name of his organization “American ports of call” or something. His idea was to pair up tourists with host families for overnight visits so they could get a real feel for American family life. Mom was all for it and we had visitors for dinner and occasional overnighters like the Japanese contingent. The latter was a group of 7 or 8 young Japanese students who Mom arranged to have stay at several friends’ homes, we had 3 or 4. I was working as a waitress at the time and didn’t usually get home till after 2AM and not being clued in about the guests, came into a silent house oddly littered with dozens of origami cranes, foreign teabags and a Mexican sombrero. Tiptoeing over blanket covered bodies on my way out to the pool house where I slept was a surreal experience.
This was not Mom’s first time in disguise. Once when her dad was visiting from Tennessee and we all went to Disneyland, Mom bought some fake eyelashes and sat on a bench with them on smoking a cigarette in a long holder, he totally passed her by without a turn and she loved it.