Salutations

Dad was in the service during WWII like most of his generation. Instead of going overseas, he was sent to Ohio to work on airplanes with a group of engineer-soldiers. They fought for their country with slide rules instead of rifles. I don’t know the exact dates of his military stint, other than that he and Mom married in October of 1943 and my brother was born in September of 1945. Mom and the baby went out and lived with him on the base, for she told me various stories about this time period. Army life for my young Mother, with knife fights and drunken brawls outside her doorstep, was quite a change from growing up in Beverly Hills. During this time, she learned to knot a sewing thread with a few deft twists and a quick roll between the thumb and forefinger. I remember so distinctly her showing this trick to me and telling me of the older no-nonsense female army sergeant who had taught it to her. In this photo, Dad is holding my eight month old brother Mike near their Army housing. I wish I knew what he was saying – the expression is an unusual one for him. Rather than a proud, beaming new father, it’s as if he were delivering a gangster impersonation or sarcastically barking an Army command.

He told me he liked carrying Mike in his arms around base all the time because it got him out of saluting.

Doors

With a brother 4 years older and sisters 5, 7 and 12 years younger, I had some breathing space growing up. Fascinated with the cool activities of my older brother, I too, drew pictures and made models (even though I didn’t particularity like cars and planes). Watching over my little sisters, I helped them build forts and arrange plastic animals in the sandbox, staying long after they lost interest to finish ‘our’ constructions. Escaping the hubbub of preschoolers, I often worked and read and drew and made things alone in my room - a lovingly built sanctuary, with a ready audience just beyond the door. Through that portal, there was always someone available - even if just to argue with, or to play cards with, or tell to shut up, or to turn down the TV, or to show what I was making. I remember working late out back in the rumpus room and coming into the house at 1 or 2 am to get a snack and say hello. It was dark and everyone had gone to bed. So immersed in my own creations - I had no sense of time. Hours flew by, and when I went to visit the ‘other’ world, it was already closed for the night. Dorothy opening her door to enter OZ and those space ships and time machines in Dad’s science fiction books were not such far-fetched ideas – they were just another way of describing that transition between imagination and reality. My Dad saw the world that way in his last years as his dementia increased. Science fiction WAS reality for him. The way his mind worked, he DID go thru doors and get transported to different times and places, for he was seeing with his mind, not his eyes. Sometimes he was on a cruise ship or at the beach house or at the airport or with his mom. His memory so often seemed so much more vivid than his failing eyesight that it overwrote his real-time mental processes. He evaluated his observations with a logic that worked for him and his reality was the reality of a dream state - like those spiritual American Indians in the movies having visions. The dream IS the reality - ignore what you see, go with what you believe, believing is seeing. As we would walk Dad down the hallway at the nursing home, he would suddenly step to the side exclaiming “Look out there’s the opening in the floor! See it! Step in it, WOOSH! You’ll go right through!” And he was right, for he fell many times at the home. Even now I watch my step in unfamiliar hallways, wary of those unseen doorways.

Akerholm Hair

Today is my Mom’s birthday, she would have been 84.

Here she is being held by her 71 year old Grandmother, Anna Catherine Akerholm.
I have always been haunted by this photograph of the two Annes. The stark look of another era, the breeze blowing my Great Grandmother’s wispy thin white hair - “Akerholm Hair” – Mom called it with a sigh as she tried to make it curl and look fuller on our heads. But that Akerholm hair would always cut loose and refuse to be managed, much like our unbending personalities. Mom would tell us about trips as a child to Mississippi to visit her tiny peppy Grandma Annie and how they would all jump on the beds together and have pillow fights. Gramma Annie in her seventies and still spry and FUN, that’s how Mom wanted to be.
Me too.

Rash Medicine

The Iron Baby piece reminded me of another story about my early childhood my Mom used to tell me. It seems I had a terrible skin rash on my neck and to prevent me from scratching at it, my parents put my arms in splints. Whether this revealed a dark side to my parents or was merely an overly harsh medical practice of the early 50’s, I will never know now. Anyway it seemed that despite my constraints, I managed to be able to eat a graham cracker through various sweaty contortions. I dearly wish I could still twist like that now - maybe I should use graham crackers in my yoga practice.

Iron Baby

At a family reunion, Uncle John told me a story about my childhood that I hadn’t heard before. It was the first time he had ever met me and I was about a year and a half old. It was in California and we were all outside most of the time. My brother was playing with his buddies, a group of neighborhood youngsters who ran free on the block. Confined to my playpen, I was desperate to join them as they moved further and further away. The playpen was one of the old kinds with a hardboard floor divided in half so that it could be folded up and stored. Realizing this, I managed to move the padding aside, lift up the flooring, and by holding onto the sides, walked my way down the street, cage and all, to join the group. To this day I still have that determination - as well as the biceps.

Joyride

I have been spending a lot of time in the past this year, an activity triggered in part by thumbing through old notebooks and in part by my own daughters having moved out of the house. Their new beginnings remind me of my own leaving home, and how I snuggled the past while the future beckoned me on.

- from notes in a 1981 journal -
The weather at the beach that year was beautiful with unusually clear and cool mornings and not a hint of fog. I almost missed those socked in mornings where you wait and wait for the sun to break through, wondering if it will be a nice day for tanning. This day there was a weird cloud wall hugging the coastal hills, as if creating a barrier between the sea people and the desert people – almost like Steven King’s MIST, cutting us off from the rest of the world. On each visit out here from the Midwest, I wanted to pack in as many emotions and experiences as possible, taking them back as prized souvenirs. I have always had trouble with being ‘here’ and ‘there’. I am tethered to my past, cherishing those loving bonds while throwing out new lines in other directions - not to replace the old ties - but to add to them. Is the present merely the instant in which you speculate backwards and forwards - like that moment between inhaling and exhaling, a turning point, a moment of decision, or a limbo between then and when?
As we came in downstairs from our walk, we heard the thud of footsteps above or was it low thunder from those cloud covered hills? Mom was pacing. She was always a busy and engaging person, a mover and shaker. “Come on you deadheads! Let’s get up and go!” And we gladly got up and went, for the trip was usually a joyride. On this day she was distracted, edgy, and irritated - wishing we were all doing something else. She sat down to read, then got up and moved a lamp, sat down, reached for the ash tray, sat back, sat up, put her book down, strode over across the room to the end counter and dug through a tray of junk, picked up a pen, took it to the kitchen, returned the pen to the tray, went to her chair and sat down and nosily opened her book to read, thus creating an excitement with her actions that she felt was lacking in the room. Maybe she longed to have each minute of our visit as intensely special as I did. Maybe she was also uncomfortable with the in-between state of ‘now’. It hadn’t occurred to her that we were also engaged in ‘activities’, they just fell outside the boundaries of her definition of the word. It must have annoyed her to see my Dad just sitting there in his chair, to her, ‘doing nothing’, when in his mind, he was probably running laps. What we were doing was watching the surfers out on the ocean. There they floated, their eyes on the shapes of incoming swells. Maybe just sitting there astride their boards on the undulating surface, so in tune with the rhythms of the sea was the real joyride.

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.