The Perfect Day

Los Angeles, California

A cautionary tale: spending a month out of each year in Carmel (or Santa Fe, or anywhere else you might find idyllic) is dangerous. And I can, more or less, encapsulate the danger in one word: reentry. This is the term which Billy and I use for the return to our life in Los Angeles. While we try in every imaginable way to fool ourselves, the truth is that we spend eleven months in Los Angeles each year, and only one in Carmel. No matter how hard we try to turn that fact around, it stubbornly persists.

It's not that I don't, to borrow from Randy Newman, love L.A. I have to say that I have a fondness for LA, even with all of its negatives (like traffic, that 'industry' and the far-flung logistics of the city), as well as tender memories of the Los Angeles from my earlier years (as written about in the post entitled The One Year Anniversary of Neighborhood Chaos. Read it here, for free!). But, as in all places where one lives, our lives here are intricately complicated by the stuff of day-to-day reality -- aging parents, banking, business, health, home repair, etc. You have at least some of the same responsibilities and concerns, I am sure, so I'll spare us all the details.

We consider our time in Carmel to be a retreat. And, retreats have loomed very large in our legend. There was a decade or so when we actually scheduled retreat weekends at our home. We would block out an entire weekend, and not make any plans except to stay at home. There were rules to go along with these weekends which included the prohibition of all work except basic zen chores like meal preparation and clean up. We also prohibited television watching (no big deal today as we watch less and less of it), though watching movies was allowed. I would stock the house with good stuff to eat, drink, read (magazines), and watch (movies). I also bought bath gels, lotions, and scented candles. We lit the house at night with candles, and, if it were summertime, we went barefooted, after hanging out by the pool all day. We used to schedule these retreats about four times a year, and we looked forward to them. But eventually, life took over that time and space. In Carmel, however, the retreat lives, albeit in slightly different form.

We suspend a lot of our LA activity when we're in Carmel. Billy doesn't work there, and I don't dance. We walk most days. We cook a lot. I still have to do some basic accounting for home and business, but it's nothing compared to what I do at home. I get to write each day. And I am free from the clutter of home life which constantly taunts me, reminding me of how disorganized I am, or of how much more work I should be doing. It's hard not to feel overwhelmed when everywhere you look there is a job to be done, or a repair to be scheduled, or a renovation to be undertaken. So after I return home, I try to combat this by focusing on the smaller projects which can be more easily undertaken. Baby steps.

However, currently, I find myself facing what feels more like a big, old giant step, as now, home again, I am tackling a pinnacle of that aforementioned clutter by attempting to organize my office. It simply has to be done, and done now. I have this theory that there is a moment in chaos when you either get a handle on it all, or you lose it forever. I once witnessed my mother-in-law passing this point in time, and subsequently losing control of her garage. And, my office is now teetering on that brink. So, upon returning from the bliss of Carmel, I knew that I would need to face the hell of my office space. And that is what I am currently doing. I call this the Healy Office Organization Project, or HOOP. And I'm just starting to get rolling (forgive me, I couldn't resist).

As in all large undertakings, there must be some impetus, some motivating factor, something that keeps your mojo going while you are digging in. And for me, that is the perfect day. You know how you don't get very many of those in life? I'm talking about the day that is perfect from beginning to end. Everything works, everything falls into place, everything goes all glimmering (again, as F. Scott once wrote). And, you actually realize it while it's happening. Lucky for me, I had one of those days while I was in Carmel.

It was a Sunday that started off by being a good hair day. No small thing. Billy had come back to Carmel the night before at the end of a rainy day, and we had enjoyed martinis, an artichoke, and a duck tamale in the bar at the Rio Grill. We went to Mass at the Mission Basilica that next morning, and the sun was streaming in through the windows while we were there. After church, we met our friend John at La Bicyclette in town. We enjoyed a lovely lunch in this space filled with sunlight, and laughed a lot with John who is easily the funniest man we know.

After lunch, we raced back to our little house to meet our friends, Diana and Brendan. Diana is a BFF and one of my favorite fristers. We met on a Caribbean cruise in 1995 -- both traveling with our mothers. And, as I wrote in a previous post entitled Fristers (read it here, for free!), we went on to travel three more times together with our moms. Diana's husband, Brendan, is warm, wonderful, and always fun to be around. Billy and Brendan quickly became good friends, so we always look forward to being in their company. That evening, we went to Mission Ranch for drinks at sunset, then to a local tapas restaurant which we had saved to try for the first time with them. We drank a lot of sangria, shared a variety of interesting dishes, then hurried home for an evening of . . . and I'm so sorry, but in truth, it is a card game which is simply called . . . Shithead.

Now, we didn't invent nor name this game, and we have tried to come up with something different to call it. For awhile we went french, calling it something like Merde. But Shithead is its name, and Shithead it has stayed (I'm starting to get used to writing this over and over, did you notice?). Diana and Brendan's daughter taught it to them several years ago, and they taught it to us. And it has stuck. We play it every time we are together, sometimes into the early morning hours. One summer when they visited us, we decided that whoever won each hand had to display a talent. This ran the gamut from Billy manipulating his hands so that it looked like his thumb was cut off (Billy never forgets any trick or joke he learned in elementary school), to Brendan singing in the voice of Daffy Duck (or so he said, when in reality he was imitating Porky Pig, which we all immediately pointed out to him . . . like, that's not Daffy Duck, that's Porky Pig! we all cried in unison), to Diana singing the Canadian National Anthem in first English, then in French. What did I do? I whistled piercingly with my fingers in my mouth, and joined Diana in singing, from memory, Frank Mills from the musical, Hair. But, truth be told, the game is almost as much fun without the talent show. So on this night in Carmel, we just played it (Shithead . . . see I just wrote it again).

That was that. It was a perfect day. A ten. And the afterglow of it stays with me as our rough reentry begins to smooth, and I begin to proceed with the HOOP. Thank goodness for the memory of that day! A memory that can keep me going until the next perfect day occurs. I hope you have one soon, and I thank you for reading my blog.