WEEKS BEFORE RUDY’S, insultingly witty and honest mother passed away, she looked at me over the rim of a Lemon Drop at the Ripe Tomato in San Juan Capistrano her unfading brown eyes acutely aimed at me.
“You’re too emotional ; it’s going to be your ruin.”
“It’s passion Harriett, and part of my character.”
“It will do you no good. You have to listen to me. I’m 97!”
Harriett learned early on how to wear pearls and refuse pointless suffering.
I write this after a wakened sense of transformation. I didn’t have to go far, or pay any money for this mud bath. It was after reading an email from my former almost engaged to man.( me never!) and the concentrate of my last standing hope for truth between us was treated as a formality.
So my emotions have been replaced with a cooler temper for both love and sensitivity. That’s okay, the real danger is in developing into a cynic; tossing out jazzy lines about, how a man can destroy your life, and all of that. There’s a Middle Aged group of women “men suffrages’’, that live in Santa Fe. Sometimes I see myself in that group, chanting, doing yoga, going to lectures, out to lunch.
What percolated this epiphany? I’ve never been emotionally damaged by a man. There have been sorrowful break-ups, but when we split up, all eight of the men became close friends over the years.
My gal posse offer advise; light a match to his love letters, treat yourself to all therelaxation rituals, and spa treatments, take a trip to visit them and indulge in friendship, and joining Match.com. You see, everyone knows your voice, and even if your thousands of miles away, friends can hear despair.
It’s all very similar to “A Book of Common Prayer .” Witty Joan Didion , the ways she says, something I am paraphrasing, “I’m not calling at a bad time am I Charlotte? You’re not in the middle of a nervous breakdown or anything? “
I wonder if you lie to yourself it gives you an edge on how to lie without conscience. Seems to be in vogue or something. That is the fault-line innocence and adulthood. Once you cross that line you know it. I’ve always been told I was a late bloomer in everything!
I’m on my way out the door; I rented the house for twelve days. The big white Suburban just drove up. A wide shouldered, grinning forty something just got out of the car. I see a woman, then the two teenagers, and a dog! They didn’t tell me about the dog, but it’s a little limply Cocker Spaniel, so I wave,
“Hi, come in I’ll show you around.”
To be continued. Hariett and I pictured in 2004 at a San Diego Opera Gala.
I moved in with my Dad when I was thirteen years old. My mother had just passed away, and I arrived with innocence and untrained cooking skills. Mom was an Irish Catholic meatloaf and corn-beef cook. Dad was a Russian Orthodox raised moderate vegetarian, and decided to hire a chef to teach me how to cook.
I came home from school one day, and found Caesar in the kitchen. He was a stand-in for Paulie in the Godfather, only he had curly black hair, and apple red cheeks. Caesar was dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and an apron that fell short of fitting him. Dad instructed Cesar to teach me how to make salads, baked fish, and spaghetti with oil and garlic. Everyday after school, Caesar was in the kitchen preparing dinner for us, and I stood beside him, observing his chubby knuckled fingers, slice and chop vegetables. We started with what Dad ordered; a meal in a salad, and later coined it Farmer’s Chop Suey. The salad was not just prepared, it was a decorated masterpiece when he finished. During the preparation, I noticed beads of sweat on Caesar’s face, and a jittery nervousness, surfaced just before my father arrived home, “What do you think? Will Dad approve?” He asked. I assured him Dad would love the salad. Cesar and I became pals, and waited anxiously for Dad’s arrival. He wasn’t all that agreeable. Fastidiousness and perfection are common traits amongst gangsters. Usually, Dad remarked there wasn’t enough garlic, or there were too many croutons, and Caesar would swiftly correct the complaint.
After Cesar went home, Dad would talk to me about food, and how everything starts in the stomach, and how the vegetables have to be scrubbed, and the seeds removed. Three or four times a week Dad dined out, and he didn’t order salads. He frequented Italian restaurants, and his favorite was Bouillabaisse, with a side of pasta. I never saw him enjoy any food as much as Borsch with sour cream, and smoked white fish. That was his favorite childhood meal. His father was a Orthodox Butcher, a very scared skill that requires a thorough understanding of Kosher preparation.
About six months had passed, and I came home one day and Cesar wasn’t there. Instead I found my father in a rage. I asked about Cesar and he told me it was none of my business, and to start preparing dinner. After my first salad preparation, Dad applauded my presentation, and assured me everything he was teaching me would serve me later on in life. He explained he had to be harsh and demanding, because he wanted me to be able to take care of myself properly.
I developed into a moderate vegetarian and have used that salad as a blueprint for most of my meals. Now I create a variety of salads, and a lot more ingredients: like white beans, garbanzos, walnuts, tuna, or shrimp, artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes etc. My friends call me a free-style cook because I only use recipes when I’m making soups or stews.
I was very fortunate to grow up with a father who spent hours teaching me what I would need to know in life. This is something you won’t read or see in a film about growing up with gangsters.
Geronimo and fellow Apache Indian prisoners on their way to Florida by train (Photo credit: State Library and Archives of Florida)
I go to the market, and buy six items.” Do you want a bag?” he asks? “No I’ll juggle them on my head.” At the bar at Geronimo, ‘ Do you live here,” from the man sitting next to me. Gibberish weather, and wine conversation, then I ask what his wife does, he turns his back and talks to the woman on the other side of him. Another night at Geronimo, a man ( high dollar Texan) buys me dinner because he thinks I’m so different.. We decide to go dancing at El Farol. I meet up with two humorous gay fellas on the porch, and while having a cigarette, the man exits and leaves without a word. At La Po, the waitress asks me, why I am staying here. I tell her because my house is rented. ” Oh, do you still own it?” she says. The front page of Pasatiempo event guide is a story, ” Are you paying too much for pot?”
A man walks up to my porch, ” Are you open?” “No, but come in” I say and he walks around and tells me he dreamth about my red room, as the office of his character in his screenplay.
Wells Fargo is my favorite. As soon as you walk in, a bank hostess, sings, “Welcome to Wells Fargo” and then I wait 20 minutes for a teller. After that, I spend another twenty minutes watching what the clerk is doing because they always put my business income in my personal account. La de da, if you want to live like it’s all a joke, move to Santa Fe. It will transform your rigidness into a loosely tied knot of learning how to adapt, as if you were in another country.
The plumber who is amiable fun-loving man, whose name is Tim gives me a ride to Wells Fargo so I can pay him cash. Tim lived here all his life, but he’s having trouble finding a pen, and a calendar to mark the next payment date, and then we pass Wells Fargo, and he says, is this it? I say Tim, it’s been here a long time, and he says, I got so many jobs I don’t know what’s newer than 1960.
The streets are narrow and filled with pot holes, so when a delivery truck can’t find a parking space, they pull up on the sidewalk, and over the years, the sidewalks have bubbles, cracks, and are worn down. It requires tightrope talent, and if you wear stacked heels, you’ll never make it to the corner. My heel got stuck between two bricks and I had a hellava time breaking free.
My dream slipped out. Has that ever happened to you?
You wake up one day, and you’re watching the Olympics, with a robust cup of Italian Roast, and the bed is empty and unmade, and then there’s London, and the glorious athletes, their smiles crossing the world, and here in my room, I am mesmerized by the champions. I’m
Thomas Hicks running the marathon at the 1904 Summer Olympics (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’m sitting in a squeaky clean room, sanitized by professionals, feeling self- consciously un-scrubbed. Rooms like this are serious; medical sitting rooms, where surgeons come in after you’ve met all the cheerful and optimistic staff members.
Just a few days before, on a pillow size slice of beach, Rudy and I
crouched up on two boulders. “It’s better up here; I don’t want to sit a foot away from a couple kissing.” He was right; we had mezzanine seats, and were at least twenty feet from the sleep over party down below. It reminded me of a fold out beach photo; guys and dolls on their stomachs, leaving their bronzed backs to glow in the sunshine. The girls legs dangled in the air, rising up and down with each giggle.
“You don’t look happy.” I said after watching the corners of Rudy’s mouth tighten and drop. He stared out to the ocean for a long two minutes.
“ I get nothing from a beach swarming with people. I go for the closeness to nature, the silence beyond the roar of the ocean. When we were at Kelly’s there wasn’t anyone else but us. ” (Kelly’s Cove, San Francisco)
I thought about it, and how the crowd was entertaining me, and how I’d dismissed the bold and demanding essence of the oceans power.
“You’re right, it’s different. I don’t ever remember Del Mar so crowded on the 4th of July. I was here in 1986, with Hannah Head, and a crowd. It was overcast, and we ended up at one of the crowd’s house in Encinitas, in a hot tub. I still have the photo.”
“ Where was I?”
“ Remember? You didn’t like her. Or we’d broken up, I can’t remember.”
“ Why don’t you go in the ocean?” He asked.
“ I don’t want to go in if you can’t”
“ No way! I want you to enjoy yourself. I’ve not been in the water in three years, but I’d go today, except I have to wait another week. The stitches look all healed. See the scars. ” He raised his shirt, and pointed, “I look like Carlito; ‘ no big deal, in and out, boom boom.’ The scars were still purplish red from a hernia operation then an appendectomy, and then cancer in one month. That’s why he was on the boulder; wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots.
“I must look like a Hillbilly from West Virginia.”
“You look like Clint Eastwood! All right, I’m going in.”
My skin was warm and damp and I walked through the aisles of legs, blankets, chairs, toys, and cabanas to the water’s edge. Prissily sensitive to anything cold,
I layered my body down slowly under water, and got lost riding waves. Everyone had a boogey board or surfboard; and one kid swiped me as he passed. Rudy was right, not the same, but under water the thrill was not gone. Beneath the surface, I surrounded to the sea as if he was a lover.
Maybe it was that night we ate outdoors on the terrace and watched the sunset slip like an eye lid. We didn’t talk too much about the medical meeting, or what was said, in such long-winded sentences with words out of medical journals. They were preparing us for the next surgery. Rudy wanted to talk about old times; in Del Mar, and old times in Taos, and New York, and all the other places we’ve experienced together. One day we went up to San Juan Cap to browse the antiques stores. Rudy spends hours picking through shop collections. He walks slow as molasses while I am aisles ahead, and miss all the good stuff. That’s one of collisions we have adapted to. I go fast, and he goes slow, I turn right and he turns left. I say, ‘did you get the for rent sign?’ And he says we have one, and we discover we’re talking about different properties.
We didn’t see anyone we knew when we were in Del Mar, except those same Starbuck sippers, now with less formality and an air of comfort in retirement.
“Wonder what happened to Blondie?”
“Which one?” I answered.
Afterwards, while we were waiting for the talking pedestrian traffic light to shout out; WAIT, WAIT, WAIT, Rudy started imitating it really loud. The family behind us joined in and the kids got wild in the middle of the street.
“Remember when Whitey threw the keys to his new Jag to you and said take a ride?”
“Yea, that was the first day we met him.” Rudy said.
“No it wasn’t.”
“Yes it was, or maybe the second day, but it was right in the beginning.”
“David empowered our breakfast café salon. He looked like God’s disciple; a crown of pearl white hair and teeth to match, bronzed skin and he wore white gaberdine pants. We were all intrigued because he was so at peace.
“ Let’s ask David out to dinner.” Rudy said.
” Yes, lets. But I wonder if he is tied to the Mafia like an informant. I’m writing all these posts about my Dad and he’s so mysterious, like James Bond.”
” You’re crazy, you know that.”
I wasn’t before.”
“Before what?”
“I became writer.”
Rudy leaped into his encouragement serum, knowing I’m at the end of the tight rope, and also knowing I won’t look for a safety net. One time I threw out a few boxes of manuscripts and he rescued them from the dumpster. In another home, he picked up pages I’d let drift out the window and taped them back together. We’ve lived in at least a dozen homes, casitas, or apartments since we met.
This morning back in Santa Fe, NM I walked through the Plaza, still waking up from last night’s festivities, and summer preparation is everywhere. Big storewide sales, street vendors, hobos, dogs on leashes, old men searching for a memory, and crews setting up the sound stage in the Plaza. All of us are thrown out of our homes to either collect or spend money. Beyond the money, there’s the circumstance of meeting someone you haven’t seen lately, or a movie in production, or a blazingly poetic sunset.
The air is perfumed with grilled chilies and sizzling greasy meat from push carts, bringing flies and children, like they do in Spain or Mexico. I walked into a Jewerlry shop and asked about a Navajo cross on a string of pearls. The saleswoman was a girl, with a laughing smile, and birch-brown eyes. She told me the cross can work for anyone, and that they pray four times a day, once in each direction. I thought it wouldn’t hurt to start the same practice, because who can remember to pray but the tribes.
Then she told me a secret. “All the pueblos are preparing for the big dances, and they are secretly praying for rain.”
“ Really? You mean all this rain we have had…
She tilted her head to one side and smiled. “ You can come in anytime and I’ll tell you stories.”
I walked out, with that singular enraptured sense of climbing off my boulder, and into the waiting discovery. Late at night I sat outdoors listening to the song of the crickets and thought how a hundred years ago this house was here. This was Ed Barker’s home and his relatives come by often to tell me stories. He was a very prominent wildlife and game protector, and the first Commissioner of the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. It was Ed who suggested the little black bear cub who was caught in the 1950 Capitan Gap Fire, a wildfire that burned 17, 0000 acres in the Capitan Mountains of New Mexico, become the mascot for fire safety. One moment you’re safe, the next you’re not; but you can’t live on a boulder, anymore than a cub should live in a Zoo. To be continued.
It is time to turn my life upside down, instead of moving furniture, my neurosis of constant change, it is interior change that I must make. Henry Miller says, ” Words by the way, can carry you into action, carry you into thought, instead of the other way around.”
Adventure, dreams, and escapism have guided me and maybe you, and now ( as a sudden rain storm begins) it is sketching what is necessary, unavoidable, and maybe even tedious.
Henry Miller, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1940 Jan. 22 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
posición en el baile flamenco. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The throw of the dice this week lands on the un-said and underscored vignettes that pass through us. Those moments which make us turn away from screens, cameras, and cell phones, to observe life around us. Writers do this habitually, like addicts. It is our drug to examine what we feel no one else is seeing, feeling or thinking. These were last week’s vignettes.
I am outdoors on the patio of La Posada Resort. The cotton wood leaves on the trees, are dancing in setting sun light. At the far end of the dining patio, the lawn is staged, and the grass is covered with folding chairs. On stage, under a white billowing tent, teenage Flamenco dancers’ switchblade their black and coral skirts, as the pillow soft breeze brushes my face. I’m smiling without envy, a massive leap, because for most of my life, when I see professional dancers, I’m scolding myself, for not following through with my passion for dancing. Tonight, it is gone. My joy erupts to the surface. The dancers are the same age I was when I began training.
Their painted cheeks and darkened eyes are highlighted by the sunlight; they look like paintings that have come to life. The music is burning through centuries of Spanish history, through blood and battles, and the eruption of their passion for dance.
We have a convention of insurance salesman, dressed in Eddie Bauer, and the ladies in Jones of New York, seated like birds with their wings clipped. The men are standing in huddles, roaring laughter at inside jokes. Three dancers break from tradition and are now dancing to Billy Jean, striking their poses and facing our table. the leader, whom the others bashfully imitate, plays to us, and I want to tell her, don’t stop dancing, don’t give it up.
Seated in front of me is a couple in their late sixties. Transparent by dress and manner, they look farm-bred Midwestern. He wears a hard-working no fluff or formality expression, and his wife, probably is his high-school sweetheart. She appears painfully restrained-but she covers this up with a contented smile. The husband is staring at me, his lips are scornful, his eyes like that of a disbelieving police officer, or judge. I’m behind sunglasses, absorbing them through my mental lens, as if we were having a conversation. I imagine him on a tractor, and his wife behind a white worn picket fence picking fruits and vegetables. We’re separated by the cultural divide, but I want to ask the farmer how his life has changed, how the economy impacted his crops, his dreams. What did he dream about when he was a boy? Maybe dreams were a luxury he could not afford.
Beneath a black lake of stars, the breeze whips my hair, Rudy smiles at me, without a word I know what he’s thinking. The evening volumnized when the band kicked into sixties soul, and the insurance salesman are now dancing with the insurance saleswoman, and their wings are unclipped.
We left, crossing through the festivities to our porch, where the music resonated. Rudy turned on the blue lights.
“Don’t turn them on; they attract the moths.”
“I tell you what I’ll do and what I won’t do.”
“They’ll eat your eyeballs when you’re sleeping.”
“What! Where did you come up with that?”
“Don’t know. Look whose coming out to complain about the music?” Then we see our neighbor, stomping across the lawn in his red T-Shirt and Beret. Professor J, demands to voice his rights at every opportunity. I’ve seen him argue with a Police Officer in the middle of the street, at one in the morning. “You have an obligation to police Santa Fe that is your job!” He shouted at the officer for thirty minutes.
The night closes, like a play from the summer of 2012. Doesn’t sound like the summer of 1971, when we met on the streets, and just hung out, listening to radios, and watching people. I think living next to a hotel, has kept me closer to street life. I could do without the delivery trucks at six in the morning and the crashing bottles in the dumpster. It’s not unbearable any longer because La Posada is nowLa Familia.
ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS 