WEEKS BEFORE RUDYโS, 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 Capistranoย ย ย ย ย her unfading brown eyes acutely aimed at me.ย ย
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย โYouโre too emotionalย ย ย ย ; itโs going to be your ruin.โย
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย โItโs passion Harriett, and part of my character.โ
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย โIt will do you no good. You have to listen to me.ย Iโm 97!โ
Harriett learned early on how to wear pearls and refuse pointless suffering.ย
I write this after a wakened sense of transformation.ย I didnโt have to go far, or pay any moneyย for this mud bath.ย It was after reading an email from my former almost engaged ย to man.( me never!) and the concentrate ย of my last standing hope for truth between us was treated as a formality.
ย So my emotions have been replaced with a cooler temper for both love and sensitivity.ย ย Thatโs okay, theย real danger is in developing into a cynic;ย tossing out jazzy lines about, how a man can destroy your life, and all of that.ย Thereโs a Middle Aged group of womenย โmen suffragesโโ, 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?ย Iโve never been emotionally damaged by a man.ย There have been ย 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. ย You see, everyone knows your voice, and even if your thousands of miles away, friends can hear despair.
ย Itโs all very similar to โA Book of Common Prayerย ย .โ Witty Joan Didionย ย , the ways she says, something I am paraphrasing,ย โIโm not calling ย at a bad time am I Charlotte? Youโre not in the middle of a nervous breakdown or anything? โ
I wonder if you lie to yourself it gives you an edge on how to lieย without ย conscience. ย Seems to be in vogue or something.ย That is the fault-line innocence and adulthood. Once you cross that line you know it.ย Iโve always been told I was a late bloomer in everything!
ย Iโm on my way out the door; I rented the house for twelve days.ย ย The big white Suburban just drove up. A wide shouldered, grinning forty something just got out of the car.ย ย I see a woman, then the two teenagers, and a dog! They didnโt tell me about the dog, but itโs a little limply Cocker Spaniel, so I wave, ย
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย โHi, come in Iโll show you around.โย
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย 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.ย My mother had just passed away, and I arrived with innocence and untrained cooking skills.ย Mom was an Irish Catholic meatloaf and corn-beef cook. ย Dad was a Russian Orthodox raisedย moderate vegetarian, and decided to hire a chef to teach me how to cook.
I came home from school one day, and found Caesar ย in the kitchen. He was a stand-in for Paulie in the Godfather, only he had curly black hair, and apple red cheeks.ย Caesar was dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and an apron that fell short of fitting him.ย 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 ย 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 Caesarโs face, and a jittery nervousness, surfaced just before my father arrived home, โWhat do you think?ย Will Dad approve?โย He asked. I assured him Dad would love the salad.ย ย ย Cesar and I became pals, and waited anxiously for Dadโs arrival.ย He wasnโt all that agreeable. Fastidiousness and perfection are common traits amongst gangsters.ย Usually, Dad remarked there wasnโt enough garlic, or there were too many croutons, and Caesar would swiftly correct the complaint.
After Cesar went home, ย 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.ย Three or four times a week Dad dined out, and he didn’t order salads.ย He frequented Italian restaurants, and his favorite was Bouillabaisse, with a side of pasta.ย I never saw him enjoy any food as much as Borsch with sour cream, and smoked white fish. That was his favorite childhood meal. Hisย father was a Orthodoxย Butcher, a very scared skill that requires a thoroughย understanding of Kosher preparation.
About six months had passed, and I came home one day and Cesar wasnโt there.ย 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.ย 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 beย harsh and demanding, ย 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:ย like white beans,ย garbanzos, walnuts, tuna, or shrimp,ย artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes etc.ย ย My friends call me a free-style cookย because I only use recipes when Iโm 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.ย 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 sixย 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,ย then I ask what his wife does, he turns his back and talks to the woman on the other side of him.ย 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?”ย “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. Asย 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.
THE FILM, stars Myrna Loy, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. At the risk of outrage from women who hate men, this film illustrates what a woman will and should do for the man she truly loves. The catch five is finding the right man to do it for!
The interior dialogue that is MALICIOUS and masked from the outside world, rots and takes the man or woman with it. BE HONEST AND IF YOUR ENCOUNTERS ARENโT, TEACH THEM.
Remember, who you were, at eighteen, bring her or him back, if they’ve gotten lost in the
Mount Disappointment from the west, May 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
woods of disappointment.
One foot off the ground, eyes pinned to the crest of creativity, at eighteen all I wanted was freedom and adventures.ย I wasn’t ever going to get married, and be tied down.ย Hah, this is the path I took, sometimes Mount Disappointment.
LIVING day to day without any certainty is like being on the Titanic that won’t sink but is filled with water, and sinking.ย It may be time to explain what adventures in livingness are; not just to you but to myself. The suspense: it drives us, we don’t have a cupboard of familiarity, it keeps changing, like the weather, most of us are single in this department. Sometimes acts of God and nature intervene, so we have no control over the next hour or the next year. The essentials, a home, food on the table, and some circle of family or friends that will hug you and say, I understand instead of ‘everything works out in the end.’ย Imagination plays the hand in this kind of living, we dream a lot, we plan and then we change the plan, we are adaptable and that is what we strive for, to be adaptable, to lifestyles, cultures, location, and unfamiliar walks on roads our sneakers don’t know.ย
Iโm sitting in a squeaky clean room, sanitized by professionals,ย feeling self- consciously un-scrubbed. Rooms like this are serious; medical sitting rooms, where surgeons come in after youโve 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. โItโs better up here; I donโt want to sit a foot away from a couple kissing.โย He was right; we had mezzanine seats, and were at least twenty feet from the sleep over party down below. ย It reminded me of a fold out beach photo; ย guys and dolls on their stomachs, leaving their bronzed backs to glow in the sunshine.ย The girls legs dangled in the air, rising up and down with each giggle.
โYou donโt look happy.โ ย I said after watching the corners of Rudyโs ย mouth tighten and drop. ย He stared out to the ocean for a long two minutes.
โ I get nothing from a beach swarming with people. ย I go for the closeness to nature, the silence beyond the roar of the ocean. When we were at Kellyโs there wasnโt anyone else but us. โ (Kellyโs Cove, San Francisco)
I thought about it, and how the crowd was entertaining me, and how Iโd dismissed the bold and demanding essence of the oceans power.
โYouโre right, itโs different. I donโt ever remember Del Mar so crowded on the 4th of July.ย ย ย I was here in 1986, with Hannah Head, and a crowd. It was overcast, andย we ended up at one of the crowdโs house in Encinitas, in a hot tub. I still have the photo.โ
โ Where was I?โ
โ Remember? You didnโt like her. Or weโd broken up, I canโt remember.โ
โ Why donโt you go in the ocean?โย He asked.
โ I donโt want to go in if you canโtโ
โ No way! ย I want you to enjoy yourself.ย Iโve not been in the water in three years, but Iโd go today, except I have to wait another week. The stitches look all healed.ย See the scars. โย ย Heย raised his shirt, and pointed, ย โI look like Carlito;ย โ no big deal, in and out, boom boom.โย ย The scars were still purplish red from a hernia operation then an appendectomy, and then cancer in one month. ย Thatโs why he was on the boulder; wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots.
โI must look like a Hillbilly from West Virginia.โ
โYou look like Clint Eastwood! All right, Iโm going in.โ
My skin was warm and damp and I walked through the aisles of legs, blankets,ย chairs, toys, and cabanas to the waterโs edge.ย Prissily sensitive to anything cold,
I layered my body down slowly under water, and got lost riding waves.ย Everyone had a boogey board or surfboard; and one kid swiped me as he passed.ย Rudy was right, not the same, but under water the thrill was not gone.ย 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.ย We didnโt 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.ย Rudy wanted to talk about old times; in Del Mar, and old times in Taos, and New York, and all the other places weโve experienced together.ย 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. ย Thatโs one of collisions we have adapted to.ย I go fast, and he goes slow, I turn right and he turns left.ย I say, โdid you get the for rent sign?โ And he says we have one, and we discover weโre talking about different properties.
We didnโt 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.
โWonder what happened to Blondie?โ
โWhich one?โย I answered.
Afterwards, while we were waiting for the talking pedestrian traffic light to shout out; WAIT, WAIT, WAIT,ย Rudy started imitating it really loud. The family behind us joined in and the kids got wild in the middle of the street.
โRemember when Whitey threw the keys to his new Jag to you and said take a ride?โ
โYea, that was the first day we met him.โ Rudy said.
โNo it wasnโt.โ
โYes it was, or maybe the second day, but it was right in the beginning.โ
โDavid empowered our breakfast cafรฉ salon.ย He looked like God’s disciple; a crown of pearl white hair and teeth to match, bronzed skin and he wore white gaberdine pants.ย We were all intrigued because he was so at peace.
โ 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 wasnโt before.โ
โBefore what?โ
โI became writer.โ
Rudy leaped into his encouragement serum, knowing Iโm at the end of the tight rope, and also knowing I wonโt look for a safety net.ย One time I threw out a few boxes of manuscripts and he rescued them from the dumpster. In another home, he picked up pages Iโd let drift out the window and taped them back together.ย Weโve 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 nightโs 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, thereโs the circumstance of meeting someone you havenโt 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. ย 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.ย She told me the cross can work for anyone, and that they pray four times a day, once in each direction. ย I thought it wouldnโt hurt to start the same practice, because who can remember to pray but the tribes.
Then she told me a secret. ย โAll the pueblos are preparing for the big dances, and they are secretly praying for rain.โ
โ Really? You mean all this rain we have hadโฆ
She tilted her head to one side and smiled.ย โ You can come in anytime and Iโll tell you stories.โ
I walked out, with that singular enraptured sense of climbing off my boulder, and into the waiting discovery.ย Late at night I sat outdoors listening to the song of the crickets and thought how a hundred years ago this house was here. ย This was Ed Barkerโs 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. ย 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 acresย in the Capitan Mountains of New Mexico, become the mascot for fire safety.ย One moment youโre safe, the next youโre not; but you canโt live on a boulder, anymore than a cub should live in a Zoo.ย To be continued.
ย 
ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS 