DEATH DISORDER

August 16, 2025August 16, 2025 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

The order of this week is disorder. Not the trivial disorder of a closet, or a work in progress; this week is the unraveling of the self, which comes with separating from someone or something you love dearly. It is the subject of: poetry, theater, film, literature, dance, visual arts, and music — all forms of music from opera to rap. For all of you who have mothers and fathers close to death, and you don’t want them to leave.

Adults protect you from the brutality of death when you’re very young. They keep it behind locked phrases like ‘she had to go away to a better place; you’ll understand when you grow up.’ The camouflage of death may go on indefinitely until one day, you are hit over the head with a block of ice, and it splits you right down the middle. You can see your guts spilling out, and everything is all out of order. Walking is an effort. Thinking clogs with the big question: Why? Why can’t we all stay here together and live forever?

Flashback to 1966 — I was very young, not so much in years, but when I was 13, my mental and emotional age was more like that of an 8-year-old. I don’t know if I was ADD or DDT because those acronyms were not in vogue yet.

My development was arrested because I was raised on a fantasia of false identities, fiction, and privilege. I thought we were prosperous, happy, and would live together forever. The fantasia of falseness was abruptly taken away on June 19, 1966. On that day, I saw for the first time my father weep uncontrollably. I was told my mother was in heaven. My father was seated on my mother’s avocado green sofa in our tidy mid-century apartment in Westwood. Nana — mother’s mother — was sitting on the sofa next to my father. Nana and Dad had reconciled for the period my mother was sick with cancer. They both were sobbing. I was not, I was in shock. There was nothing inside of me but resistance, a blockage of emotion that remained there for so many years.

I was left in my father’s care. He was busy avoiding government subpoenas and running the Fontainebleau Hotel in Florida. He kept a command post on my emotions. He would not tolerate my grief, because he could not tolerate his own. So, I had to chin-up, chest out, walk up and down Doheny Drive in Hollywood where he lived and pretend I was going to be fine.

When I turned eighteen and left my father’s apartment, I was free to unravel my feelings for the first time. The emptiness was filled with confusion, anger, and drugs. If college was supposed to be my best years, then I missed that chapter. Looking back, the real leap to personal growth came at that time when I was left unattended to wander through life with my own eyes as guardian, and my heart as my compass. That is when I missed my mother the most. It was my fortune to have my father back in Los Angeles, throwing his weight around from a distance. He kept me under radar by having a friend’s son working in the admittance office of Sonoma State College.

I remember days when my mental attitude needed electric shock therapy. Miraculously, I did find my way home, and to the matter of my mother, and growing up with gangsters. From a wafer of stability, very slowly, I’ve built a nice lifeboat to keep me afloat. My screaming, cantankerous, and intimidating father who loved me beyond measure is in this imaginary boat, and my mother who loved with a silent gentle hand she gave to me whenever I needed assurance.

All I have to do is look at her photograph placed in every corner of my house, and I regain momentum in my lifeboat. When I am particularly insolvent with life’s measures, I recall the years she spent fighting cancer so she could continue to hold my hand. How can I disappoint such a woman? I cannot, and I know that with more certainty than I know anything. We all have a basement strength that rises up and balances us when we need it. Each time we cross that unpleasant road and say goodbye to our friends, our pets, our parents, or our siblings, we have to find our basement strength.

You can read poetry and essays, listen to opera or rap and find five-thousand ways of expressing the same painful stab of separation. If the comfort comes in just knowing — we all have that in common — then all you have to do is tap the shoulder of the person in front of you, and ask, “How did you handle it?”

Or as Henry Miller said, “All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience.”

MOODY BLUES TUESDAY

May 21, 2025May 24, 2025 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

MATISSE

Writing somberly is parallel to writer’s block. It’s not a block, really, more like a resistance to engaging feelings. If I place all the options on a puzzle board, this leads to the center. A fractured life impacts emotional posture and is not unlike physical posture. We slump or stand tall. We love instead of neutralizing, we are inspired instead of stagnant, we romance our passions, and we live to love. My heart is at the starting gate to love again, but the racetrack is missing. I’m undercover! I watch Blacklist or some foreign film in the evening. Most weekdays, I’m circulating between finance, selling furnishings online, shoveling snow, and researching acronyms because the news uses them so often.

The vortex of discontent is a punctured life. The windows of my home reflect the splendor of nature that plays all day long in the winter. I’m spending more time watching sky stage plays: clouds still, clouds moving, colliding, changing colors, sculpted into aberrations of animals and faces, than cognitive thinking. My collection of records and CDs accompanies the scenery. When I’m sorrowful, I listen to Ennio Morricone; when I need a lift, Vivaldi, Sundays it is Turandot or some other Opera. When I’m a go-go girl, Swing, Salsa, or The Stones, when I feel alone, Sarah Vaughn, Nancy Wilson, and Etta James, for writing inspiration Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Annie Lenox.

I don’t see any remedy commercials for a fractured heart. By tomorrow, the despair could vanish, like the rain that puddled us for the last two weeks. Everything I’ve experienced is good in the beginning. So, to begin, I will listen to Begin the Beguine.

“Begin the Beguine” is a popular song written by Cole Porter. Porter composed the song between Kalabahi, Indonesia, and Fiji during a 1935 Pacific cruise aboard Cunard’s ocean liner Franconia. In October 1935, it was introduced by June Knight in the Broadway musical Jubilee, produced at the Imperial Theater.

Henry miller writes in his book, “ Henry Miller on Writing” “Whoever greatly suffers must be, I suppose a sublime combination of a sadist and masochist.’ I suppose that a few of my friends have aligned me as such, and now that I write this, as in all writing, answers blink at you, and then the soul receives them like a wafer of wonder. Perhaps I am, but where that evolved and manifested, I have no time to think about it because the sun is out. I must sit in my newly designed sunroom, a small book library alcove that receives the sun at noon. When I returned with my phone to snap a photograph, the sun disappeared like a footprint in the sky. Every moment needs attention. It’s twenty degrees outdoors. I am modestly adjusted and receive a thousand weekly warnings to get a flu shot. My doctor has tried persuading me to get a flu shot for three years. I responded that I’d never had the flu and that my last cold was in 2012. He chuckled and asked the next question.

May 11, 2025May 30, 2025 ~ LouLou ~ 2 Comments

MOTHER’S DAY REMEMBRANCE

MY BEST FRIEND, Lucille Casey was a woman who threw the dice all her life. She gambled on her instincts as if they were already tested and approved. She never told me much about herself. When I learned of her struggles as a young woman and her chosen life, she became more real than when I’d known her. During the years we were friends, she handed out selected stories, abbreviated and censored. Being the inquisitive character I am, the shallowness of her stories bated me. I had to pry the truth out from other people who had known her.

Casey’s first gamble was at sixteen years old. She sent in a photograph of herself for the Redbook Magazine modeling contest. If she’d won, the Powers Modeling Agency in New York City would grant her an audition as a model. Casey was living in East Orange, New Jersey with her mother and sister. Her father had died suddenly, leaving the family without a financier. Casey’s mother was lost without her husband and unsuited to join the workplace. Casey didn’t tell her mother about the contest until she received the letter of congratulations.

John Robert Powers met Casey in his office on East 56^th Street and signed her as a Powers Girl. She was stunning to look at, photographed like a movie star, and was modest. John Powers did not look for aggressive, pouty-lipped fearlessness. The Powers Girls were captioned “Long Stemmed American Beauties” because they were wholesome, beautiful, tasteful, courteous, and virtuous. They were so far from the runway models of today that it is almost a reversal of the industry.

The models of the thirties were ordained to set the highest example of classic good breeding and education. John not only schooled them in fashion, and individual taste, he instructed them in moral integrity, independence, and community service. Casey went to school at John Robert Powers and became one of the top ten models in New York.

She was a blue-black-haired Irish beauty, with emerald green eyes and perfect teeth. She stood only 5’ 7″ in those days that was fairly standard. When I knew her, she was still thin and beautiful but she did not fuss about herself or spend a lot of time at her vanity. As a Powers model, Casey had a long line of gentlemen callers. Powers Girls were invited to all the nightclub and dinner show openings, sporting events, community galas, and fund-raisers. Social engagements were part of her job. Casey was not a woman of idle chat, in fact, a lot of people thought of her as restrained and unfriendly, maybe even snobbish. I think it was more secrecy. People were always prying into her life because it looked glamorous. There was another side to that glamour she didn’t want to put in the mirror.

One evening Casey had a dancing engagement at the Copacabana nightclub in New York City. She was on stage with some other dancers when a certain gentleman noticed her. The next chapter of Casey’s life began that night. At twenty-two years old, she fell in love with a man thirteen years older, of the Jewish faith, who lived in Hollywood. The consequences of her love forced her to change and adapt to a new lifestyle and different people.

She did not bury or rescind her love after she learned he was Bugsy Siegel’s partner and best friend and that Allen was a part of the Jewish Mafia. She asked him to reform his criminal activities. He agreed, provided she would marry him. We all know at twenty-two a woman believes she can change a man, and a man lets her think she can. Without that dream, many lovers would not have found their mates.

Casey did marry her love and spent her life trying to keep her children from harm and Allen from going to prison. I met her husband just after he tried to reform, and was beaten down by the FBI. I called him Daddy.

SEDONA SENSUAL

March 27, 2025March 27, 2025 ~ LouLou ~ 1 Comment

A MELODY OF LOVE CRIES

MY LOVER AND I CHASE THE SUNRISE

GRASPED THE PASSION

FLAMES BURIED IN COMPROMISE

SCATTERED POOL BALLS IN A HONKY TONK

DRANK RED WINE

SPOONED FRESH LIFE INTO DRY MOUTHS

STARED MESMERIZED INTO EACH OTHER’S EYES

MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN THE SUNRISE

OF MOMENTS

ENGRAVED IN OUR MINDS

IN A POEM THAT DOESN’T NEED TO RHYME

I LOVED

March 6, 2025March 7, 2025 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

JOURNAL ON MEN

The insomnia of separation from a man’s shoulder bowed to my head, tweaks like stale bread. A mind that directs me when I am driving directionless and maps my journey, walks beside me, a guardian of my fragility, acutely conscious of our path. The voice that encourages and applauds my success rather than let it drip from jealousy or preoccupation. How the laughter erupts in a moment of spontaneous passion. The gestures of him shaving and the modest vanity after I re-wardrobe him. Feeling his eyes in a crowd, undressing or admiring me, for some folly or expression.

The humor he finds in my misguided attempts to open bottles, and packages with a dull spoon, and figure out electronics.

How he will pardon and pamper my unwarranted fears of stalkers, sickness, rejection nightmares, and falling down the slippery wooden stairs.

The man whose balance evens my wrinkles.

Let’s the light into my eyes.

Opens my shell with wonder and tenderness.

POP-UP POEM

February 21, 2025February 21, 2025 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

He pushed her on a swing, so high she touched the sky, viewed the world through his eyes, lived for a time without lies, then as mystically as he appeared, he let go of the swing, and she fell on her wing, broken but with the will to begin again. A broken heart hasn’t stopped her from loving him.

For ten days, just thinking of her spoken words, how they made their way to his ears and returned the sounds she so wanted to hear. When he stopped contacting her, she wiped her tears as some people find love at the core of their fears.

ENDING THE MEMORIES

February 16, 2025February 17, 2025 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

NOVEMBER 2021

MONTHS LATER ON THIS DAY, she closed the shutters to him and alchemized from a cocoon to a butterfly beneath a circle of friends in tune. She removed the photos, gifts, and letters and put them in a box to reminisce later. Talking out loud, “She takes just like a woman, but she will not break like a little girl.” No more hours fanning the past; on this day, my view is spanning.” She sat peacefully by the fire into the night and let her broken wing sing as she watched the wood turn to gold.

TRIBUTE TO LA POSADA DE SANTA FE, SANTA FE, NM

December 29, 2024December 29, 2024 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

MAY 2017

It is the Kentucky Derby and Cinco De Mayo weekend at La Posada. Kristen from the hotel said I should go; it would be fun. She’s a feisty young woman with clear, penetrating blue eyes and silky brown hair. Youth dances in her expressions; other times, it wilts from being locked down to an indoor job. She’s an adventurer who camps out in Belize and South America. Now, she’s talking about Antigua.

I walked out to the courtyard to see what was going on. The tables weren’t set up yet, but the Donkey stood idly and annoyed at the other end of the yard. I don’t know why they bring him, maybe for the kids. In the bar, a few guests were watching the Derby. The elan of race anticipation is shining like a light. I ordered a Mint Julep, and the guys were all watching as Dude whipped it up with finesse.

“ How is it?” Dude asked without needing any approval.

“ Magical. Who are you betting on? Greta asked.

“I want a Titty Tut, something nasty.”

“ Oh, stop that. You do it too much.” She replied.

“ Not nearly enough! Okay, here’s my horse—Promises Fulfilled. Oh yes, that’s mine.”

“ Everything you say is a metaphor for sex.”

“ You bet it is.” Who’s your pick?”

“ My prick is Justify.”

“Hah, see, now you get it.”

I sipped my drink and wandered around the lobby, stopping to greet Jackie, Monserrat, and Danielle. They don’t know what their smiles and caring comments do for me. I must tell them more often.

“ I don’t know what I’d do without all of you.” To be continued.

MOTHER’S

September 17, 2024 ~ LouLou ~ 1 Comment

It is my mother’s birthday, so I am thinking of her. If she had been here today, we would have had this conversation.

Mom, I can’t hold up, I’m so beat down.”

” You have to. I know your situation is degrading and frightening, but you don’t have a choice. You have to use all your strength.”

” I wish I was more like you.”

” You are like me, and I know you will overcome.

After our home burned down in the Bel Air fire, my parent’s divorce was in motion. Dad moved to Hollywood, and Mom moved me to Westwood to a studio until she found work. Mom returned to modeling to support us.

PETER GABRIEL’S YOU’VE GOT FRIENDS

July 20, 2024 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo…

MAURICE ROBERTS IS THE KIND OF FRIEND

THAT TEACHES YOU WHAT YOU DIDN’T THINK

YOU NEEDED UNTIL THEY PASSED AWAY. DEL

MAR, CA. 2013

May be an image of 2 people and people smiling

June 5, 2024June 6, 2024 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

WW11 SURVIVOR’S VOW TO GOD

Part Two. Solana Beach Morrocan Bungalow 2003. Maurice was 84

Maurice married the love of his life on December 25, 1941. They married in December because Maurice had saved one thousand dollars and made one hundred dollars a month. Agnes, his girlfriend in Grant, Iowa, is the woman who led Maurice out to Rancho Santa Fe, California, from his home in Grant. She and her father worked for Ronald McDonald, a prestigious resident in the ranch. She was responsible for housekeeping and cooking, and her father was the chauffeur.

Agnes and Maurice went to the US Grant Hotel for dinner and stayed at the Paris Inn on Kettner Avenue in San Diego. The following day Agnes went off to work. Maurice stayed in the little guest house she occupied on the McDonald property. Two days later Maurice received his draft notice. On December 31, he left his new bride and reported for duty in Escondido. He had one short visit before he left for overseas. Then, the next time he would see her, he would be changed.

Buna

One summer evening, I was sitting on Maurice’s front porch. Sometimes, we would sit out till after eight o’clock at night talking about different parts of Maurice’s life. Maurice is really busy in the summer; he tends to his garden of fruits and vegetables, he delivers furniture for all the Cedros merchants, and he helps his friends. He never seems tired, he likes to sit on the porch, have a beer, and tell stories. I used to like it when my father told me stories, but they were unlike Maurice’s. There didn’t seem to be anything he

couldn’t talk about. Once he said, ” You can ask me anything you want.”

“Maurice, how old were you when you were drafted?”

“Well, I was thirty-one years old in 1941 when the war broke out. I had to leave my wife, which bothered me, but I wanted to go overseas and fight for my country. There were so many nice soldiers, the best people in the world. I recall two boys from Chicago that were only eighteen years old, they lied to get in the service, and they were the best soldiers you ever saw- they weren’t afraid of anything.”

“Where did they send you after you left San Diego?”

“Well, first, I went to Camp Roberts for thirteen weeks of training, but I got out in nine weeks. Then they sent me to Fort Ord to get my gear, rifles, and clothes. We left San Francisco on April 21, 1942. We got into Adelaide, Australia, after twenty-one days at sea.” Maurice paused like he had to catch his breath. I watched his face, thinking he may want to stop.

“You remember so much… Do you mind talking about it?” I asked.

“No, I don’t mind; it changed my life, everything about it.”

“Where did they send you after that?”

“We trained for a while in Adelaide; the people in Australia were so happy to see us. I remember they met us at the beach with tea and cookies. The enemy soldiers were getting close. We went up the coast to New Guinea and into Port Moresby; we got there on Thanksgiving Day 1942. As soon as we got off the ship, the bombs hit us; it was the hundredth raid that night. The next morning we were supposed to get to the Stanley

Mountain range, we were in such a hurry. The Japanese soldiers built cement pillboxes and the army wanted us there. So we got in this plane, and they flew us there. Twenty-one at a time. When I got to the island of Buna, there were dead soldiers scattered all over the beach. We lost men so fast. Then, on Christmas Day of 1942, General McArthur ordered us to advance, regardless of the cost of lives. My division was one of the first to stop the Japanese army, the 32^nd Division. After we were immobilized and a lot of our men killed, they sent in the 41^st Division to take over.”

Maurice’s memory was like listening to a documentary, and this was the first time a Veteran confided in me. They didn’t get supplies at first; they had to wait till everything was shipped to Europe. They got what was left over, which wasn’t much. He ate cocoanut bark for two weeks and had no water.

“I can remember so well the first Japanese soldier I saw. He was sneaking through the jungle, only thirty feet off. I don’t know if I shot him, but he dropped. I don’t like to think I killed anyone, and it bothers me to this day that I had to kill. The Japanese were good soldiers; they had better ammunition than us. We fought all day, and we always ran out of ammunition before they did. I’ll never forget Christmas Day of 1942. We went into a trench to get ahead; the fellow ahead of me was cut wide open, and the guy behind was shot. I just lay there on the ground. If you moved you’d be shot. It was so bad; I lay there all day and night. ”

“Did you think you were going to die?”

“I didn’t let myself think that. I promised God that if I ever got out alive I’d never complain about anything in my life again. Nothing… nothing could be worse than that day.”

“You kept the promise, didn’t you?” I asked.

“Yes, I have.”

“And that’s why the war changed your life?” I said.

“That’s right. Every day is a beautiful day after you’ve lived through war, at least for me,” he said.

CASEY, A WOMAN OF SECRETS

May 12, 2024May 12, 2024 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

CASEY, A WOMAN OF SECRETS

Sometimes, a blank piece of paper is the only way to begin, as it is today. I look out the window at blooming trees and a cupful of flowers rising from the ground. The sky is pale grey, and it is just fifty degrees. May, my birthday month, reminds me of Casey, who threw the dice all her life. She gambled on her dreams.

Casey never told me much about herself. She lived in the present moment and considered her past a private matter. Once I learned of her struggles as a young woman and her chosen life, she became more real than when I’d known her. During the years we were friends, she handed out selected stories, abruptly, with final endings. Being the inquisitive character, the shallowness of her stories bated me. I had to pry the truth out from other people who had known her, and from government documents.

Casey’s first gamble was at sixteen years old. She sent in a photograph of herself for the Redbook Magazine modeling contest. If she’d won, the Powers Modeling Agency in New York City would grant her an audition as a model. Casey lived with her mother and sister in East Orange, New Jersey. Her father had died suddenly, leaving the family without a financier. Her mother was lost without her husband and unsuited to join the workplace. Casey didn’t tell her mother about the contest until she received the letter of congratulations.

John Robert Powers met Casey in his office on East 56^th Street and signed her as a Powers Girl. She was stunning to look at, she was photographed like a movie star, and she was modest. John Powers did not look for aggressive, pouty-lipped fearlessness. The Powers Girls were captioned Long Stemmed American Beauties because they were wholesome, beautiful, tasteful, courteous, and virtuous. They were so far from today’s runway models that it is almost a reversal of style. The models of the thirties were ordained to set the highest example of classic good breeding and education. John not only schooled them in fashion, and individual taste, he instructed them in moral integrity, independence, and patriotism for their country. So Casey went to school at John Robert Powers and became one of the top ten models in the country.

She was a blue-black-haired Irish beauty with emerald green eyes and perfect teeth. She stood only 5’ 7”, but that was fairly standard in those days. When I knew her, she was still thin and beautiful, but she did not fuss about herself or spend much time at her vanity. As a Powers model, Casey had a long line of gentlemen callers. Powers Girls were invited to all the nightclub and dinner show openings, sporting events, community galas, and fund-raisers. Social engagements were part of her job. Casey was not a woman of idle chat, in fact a lot of people thought of her as restrained and unfriendly, maybe even snobbish. I think it was more secrecy. People were always prying into her life because it looked glamorous. But there was another side to that glamour she didn’t want to put a mirror to.

One evening, Casey had a dancing engagement at the Copacabana nightclub in New York City. She was on stage with other dancers when a gentleman noticed her. The next chapter of Casey’s life began that night. At twenty-two years old, she fell in love with a man thirteen years older, of the Jewish faith, and who lived in Hollywood. Casey never told me that she fell in love with a gangster. I do know once she felt love for this man, it could not be reversed. The consequences of her love forced her to change and adapt to a new kind of life and different people.

She did not bury or give back her love after she learned what he did for a living. She asked him to reform his criminal activities, and he agreed if only she would marry him. We all know at twenty-two, a woman believes she can change a man, and a man lets her think she can. Without that dream, many lovers would not have found their mates.

Casey married her love and spent her life trying to keep her husband on track with honesty. I met her husband just after he tried to reform and was beaten down by his past mistakes. I called him Daddy.