Remembrance of Alohas Past

Los Angeles, California

Ten years ago, I was at The Kona Village Resort, waking up in Lava Samoan 8, a hale (Hawaiian for house, in this case more of a cottage) set on a promontory of lava with the ocean lapping on two sides. I wrote about this hale in a much earlier post entitled: Albert Finney Slept in my Bed. We had discovered LS8 by accident, after having stayed on the other side of the Village for a lot of years. But one year we had a bit of a 'Charlie' problem, which was the cute name the staff used for ratatouilles on the roof. And 'ratatouilles' is the cute name I'm going to use for things that you just don't want to see around your home or resort home. Look, it's Hawaii. And there are wildlife in Hawaii: Geckos, rodents, mongooses. The mongooses were brought it to deal with the rodents, but no one did the research and it turns out one is nocturnal and the other not. So that put a bit of a kibosh on the natural control. Now there is a mongoose problem, which anyone who travels from Pa'ia to Hana can clearly see from the roadkill.

We went to The Kona Village Resort in late October, beginning in 1998. And starting in 2000, we went every year through 2010. We had first stayed at the resort in the mid-'80s and early '90s, about a half-dozen times. But by 2000, there were no questions about where we would spend my birthday and Halloween. And that had a lot to do with Sandra. It is now ten years since Sandra and I shared our time, with John and Tom, at the Village. In May of 2011, the Village was taken out by the tsunami after the earthquake in Japan. It has been closed ever since though reconstruction is in process. It won't be the same for a lot of reasons. But the largest, for me, is that it can't ever be the same without Sandra. And without Tom.

I have so many memories of the time spent together, and with all the other couples we met during that decade. I think I had a sense while enjoying it, that it was as special of a time as I might ever experience. I have loved Hawaii since my family traveled there on the Matson Lines' Lurline, with my grandparents, when I was just five years old. I spent two summers there, the first when I was fourteen, and second when I was seventeen and recently graduated from high school. Tom and I spent our honeymoon there, at The Royal Hawaiian on Waikiki, and the Sheraton Maui at Ka'anapali. We traveled at least one more time to Maui before we decided it was way too Newport Beach for us, and we hightailed it to Kona. Our friends, Karen and Greg, had gotten married at the Village, and another woman I knew insisted that we should stay there. So, we changed our May vacation plans to stay at The Mauna Kea, and headed instead to The Kona Village Resort. It was magic from the get-go. But we took some years off to travel to other places, returning to the Village in October instead of May, in 1998. And it was at there we met Sandra and John.

I have written so much about Sandra. You can read about her at the top of this page. But, here, I want to write about how much I miss her. How much I miss her voice, and her laugher. How much I appreciated her goodness and optimism. How much fun we always had together, some of it bordering on getting into harmless trouble. We loved to say "It's our Village" while we were there. And, we did sometimes act like it. But we got along well with staff, and October was an extremely slow time at the Village, so we didn't bother other guests. At least, mostly. Sometimes the guest count dropped to sixty while were were there. We usually knew about a third of the guests, at least to say hello at lunch. And with a number of them, we sometimes took over The Bora Bora Bar.

There was a feeling that went along with vacationing at The Village. Sometimes it felt like being at camp, only without the yucky mountain dust and pines. Here there was sand and ocean, trade breezes and swaying palm trees. There was a feeling that went along with every experience, from walking in the morning quiet down the decomposed granite path to breakfast; to meeting up with John and Sandra at lunchtime at the tiny palapa-roofed Talk Story Bar; our seats at the six-stool bar saved for us by Chad or another of the bartenders we knew. We would arrive at lunch individually, but wait until the four of us were together to eat.

Evenings began just before sunset at The Bora Bora. We were freshly showered and ready for martinis, and for more conversation and laughter. More than ready to enjoy friendship, that felt like family (but in a good way). Each day repeated and was the same and different. From The Bora Bora Bar we watched for the elusive green flash as the sun hit the ocean horizon at sunset. I never saw it.

Sandra told me that once when they were at the Kona Village without us (they returned to The Village in winter and early summer, as well as October each year), a man came to the bar carrying an urn. He set the urn on the chair alongside him, and ordered two martinis. He told Sandra that he was taking his wife's ashes out to sea the following morning. We both nodded at the end of that story. We got it. It would not have been a bad end to one's story. But The Village was an end to its own story after the 2011 tsunami.

I have never known anyone quite like Sandra. And becoming close friends with her, despite her living six hours away in Sacramento, was the greatest gift in my life. When I would be getting ready for the trip, stressed about providing care for my mom while we were away, or about other home and/or business issues, Tom would say to me: Don't worry. You'll be with Sandra soon. And then you'll be alright. Did he recognize that I couldn't provide solace from the stress for myself back then? That he couldn't provide it? Of course, vacations, and The Village itself provided a real respite. But Tom was right. Being with Sandra made everything right.

I celebrated my annual fiftieth birthday there for quite a few years. The last one was ten years ago, and maybe that is why The Village and Sandra are so much on my mind at this time. Friends may come and go. But friendship with Sandra is eternal. Even though she has been gone for almost seven years, I still feel her presence. And somehow, on this late October day, in spite of all of the chaos in our world, I am happy and grateful for that. Thank you for reading my blog.

A Writer's Thoughts

Los Angeles, California

Cathy and I facetimed for three hours on a recent Sunday. It had been over seven months since I had last done pilates in her studio, back in late February. A world ago. That is the longest I have gone without Cathy's presence since I first met her sometime around 2001. She was teaching a pilates mat class at a local studio which later morphed into a circuit training/pilates class which I took twice a week. I also started training with her individually on the pilates reformer. I followed Cathy to four studio locations as she built her own business over the next nineteen years, while doing pilates under her guidance. During that time she went on to become a licensed practitioner of Chinese medicine, so now, in addition to her unique brand of fitness/pilates, Cathy is my acupuncturist and aromatherapy wizard. She is also my friend.

Our conversations over the years have often been in bits and pieces, except on the occasions when we can arrange lunch. Often, we talk through our sessions, with the result that Cathy has to work harder to keep us focused. This is my fault, I know. We have been through a lot together. Both of us have cried; me on multiple occasions. We have shared thousands of hugs. She is one of the kindest people I know, and that is, I think, the best trait of strength that someone can carry. I think only people who are strong can be kind.

What I didn't know about Cathy is that she is a writer. So when she recently shared some of her work with me, I was stunned. Not everyone can write. Certainly every literate person can put words together. But even well-educated people often don't write well. After college, after dropping out of the graduate program I had barely begun, I took a staff position at the university I had attended. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I quickly learned it wasn't that. So, during that time, I started a business called Typing, Etc. offering typing and editing to students and professors. I typed term papers, masters theses, and textbooks on my IBM 'electronic' typewriter,, which was self-correcting and had a bit of memory storage. I should not have been surprised, having gotten my own secondary school education in the Los Angeles Unified School District, that many college students at this Los Angeles-located university, and in particular business students, could not write. LAUSD moved you forward whether you had learned or not. It had been a shock to transfer into that district after having experienced exemplary teaching and true attention to learning in the Burbank School District. Many of these students whose papers I typed had no concept of syntax; their vocabulary was stunted, and they evidently lacked the capability to look up words to correct spelling. Don't get me started on there and their, or choose and chose. I'm not being lofty, here. I am not a good speller. In fact, I once humiliated myself at an elementary school spelling bee by attempting to spell the word CERTAIN starting with the letter S. But at an early age, I learned to use a dictionary, as well as a thesaurus. Later, in my typing business, I relied upon books which list words showing only their spelling and breaking of syllables (all this, despite any evidence to the contrary here in my blogland).

I knew from all of our conversations, that Cathy is intelligent and talented.  But with all of the interests we spoke about, I don't recall literature or writing coming up. So I was completely thrown off my wheels when I read a portion of the work she was writing. It was stellarly good. I started it one night in bed instead of whatever novel I was currently reading. I stayed up until way after midnight, finishing all of it. I was moved to tears at times by her ability to put you right into the emotional bubble of whatever event she was recreating. And... I got excited. Almost eighteen months ago, I put my memoir aside after finishing a third of it. She got me thinking about it again.

So, on that Sunday, we talked about what she had created, going through the pages as we talked. And in between the pages, we talked about other things. Things that are happening right now in our country. And about our lives, both past and present. And, again, I came away with thoughts about my own work and what writing means to me.

I have always written in some form. In elementary school, my poems were chosen for the bulletin board. I wrote my first play in sixth grade, and it was performed at the end of the year assembly. I wrote short stories all through junior high and began to keep a journal the summer before high school. I wrote my first, unfinished novel in my first semester of college, and have finished two subsequent novels. But I have never thought of myself as a writer. I used to tell people in our salsa group that I was a writer. But that was mostly because it was shorter and easier than explaining myself as a business owner of a retail, outdoor furnishings business. Especially when loud music was playing. And, of course, the business did necessitate a lot of writing, though mostly in the form of doing business.

I am a writer. Because I write. And for the first time, I have two writers in my life, and we are all working on similar projects. I feel infused with their energy and am thinking about where I go with my writing from here. I have spent seven months through this pandemic, writing while bitching and complaining about this odd, stunted time; writing it in my journal, and here on this rebooted blog. I want to write more. And with the two writers in my life, and the conversations we have had, I feel a connection to writing that feels empowering. And, part of that is within the thoughts that maybe my writing can actually help someone. Maybe there can be a quality of greater good, instead of what I feel is the low-grade fever of past slights and irritating character issues that I have pinned here. Granted, these are difficult times and a lot of stuff at the bottom of the cauldron has swirled up to the surface. But my conversation with Cathy has caused me to think: What purpose does it serve to skewer an ex-friend for her stinginess on a long-ago trip, other than for a reader to maybe think Oh yeah. I have known those people too? I rationalize that I am imparting a potential thought bubble that says: This is our time to regroup. To not be cheap with our friends and with ourselves in future, non-Covid times. And I suppose that is partly my purpose. But, in another way, remembering what should have been a wonderful weekend getaway with friends, which turned into a bad experience because of one member of the group's dogmatic penuriousness, still makes me angry. And a blogpost is a convenient place for me to offload that anger.

I keep a journal. And, believe me, I offload a lot more into that than I do here in my blogland. But, maybe I can better differentiate in the future. I'm not saying that I shouldn't write from a place of anger, frustration, and despair, anymore than I would want to exclude happiness, contentment, and joy. I believe in trying to live within the full spectrum of emotion (all the rooms in the house). What I am saying is that my recent conversations with these two writers have created the thought that I should set my writing bar higher (at least by an inch or so...).

This post started out to be something completely different, and that is one of the things I love about writing. The writing itself took me down a different lane, to a different place altogether. And, as I was writing, awash in the curiosity of where I was going with all of this, I was able to escape from the reality of both pandemic and election stress, for a time. I hope that you, reader, have something in your life that provides this for you. And, that is the near-Halloween interwoven web of thought, creativity, and, if you will, humanity, making up the ponderings of this writer's mind on this late autumn morning. Thank  you  for  reading  my  blog.    GO DODGERS... on a wing and a Hail Mary! 

Enjoy the Chivas

Waikiki, California (I don't know why I wrote that. I just felt like it. 😎)

I'm not doing much shopping at this time. I go to the market twice a week, where I am now spending a lot more there than in the pre-Covid past. My market, part of a small chain, recently started a rewards program. Last week I was told that I had gotten $20 off my $100 order due to accumulated rewards. Huh! And I haven't even been buying much wine. Yet.

Like most of us, I have indulged in online-purchasing a few pieces to build a pandemic wardrobe. It was sweats and sweaters through the winter; cotton jersey and tanks through the summer. Don't get me wrong. I dress up to go to the market twice a week. I know the employees there, and don't want to go ugly, the way I go around my house. But, more than that, I don't want to get out of the habit, or completely lose my ability to spruce up. So, I match my mask to my outfit, I do my hair and put on eye makeup. Good to go.

But every now and then a dress catches my eye. I'm shopping on Johnny Was or Anthroplogie (both have great masks, by the way) and I see something that I could wear to salsa. And I get a momentary, internal glow that comes from imagining myself in that outfit at that event, moving across the floor with Joel turning me and my dress flowing about me like Ginger Rodgers. A similar thing happens to me when I read recipes. I can visualize making that dish for that smart dinner party that I am not having and haven't been having for a long time, even before the pandemic. I pass on the dress, but I do clip or save the recipe. It costs me nothing to daydream, and you never know...

I bought new dance shoes just before this mess broke. If you watch any of those ridiculous dance-contest, reality shows on TV, you would think that all salsa shoes (called Latin Ballroom) are sexy. They can be. The shoes I wear are kind to my feet, not terribly high-heeled, and come in tan and black. I have them in both colors. They are made by Bloch, a company that makes ballet, pointe, and other dance shoes. They are comfortable when broken in, suede-soled for smooth turns, and not terribly stylish. So I pay more attention to dresses, though I generally alternate between wearing pants and dresses. Sometimes I dance in jeans. The unwritten rule is that we dress up on live band nights. So, when do you think there will be a live band again in an LA salsa club? My salsero friends agree that salsa clubs will probably be the last thing to return. So, I can keep fantasy shopping, but will continue sending my shopping money to Joe Biden instead of to Johnny Was.

I also don't have the upkept hairstyle that I used to have. Most of my friends have returned to salons, but I doubt I will until the salsa clubs open. I've been able to cut my own hair, as it's long which makes it easier, and I have even learned to apply highlights. It's not perfect. It's pandemic.

After my dad passed away, my mom often said that I had given her some advice that she had taken to heart. I had told her not to worry about what she spent. She would sometimes comment that blueberries or artichokes were so expensive. I told her that if she wanted them, she should buy them. She and my dad dined out a lot. They traveled domestically and internationally as if the police were after them. Most of that was going to be curtailed, so why shouldn't she indulge in blueberries and artichokes or even lobster, if it was what she wanted? I feel the same way about this pandemic. Take whatever oxygen is provided, because anything, anything that can bring us any joy right now is worth it. This is the time for the best single-malt scotch -- that one bottle of The Macallan that you thought you should never buy at that insanely exorbitant price. Go for it.

Once, after I was grown up and married, I was visiting with my parents and helping my mom put away folded laundry. I noticed a bottle of Chivas Regal in my dad's underwear drawer. Now, I could have understood this, back in the day when my high school friends and I would steal alcohol from our parents and replace what was taken with water. We were so stupid. It didn't occur to us that this was probably a better plan with gin or vodka. My dad drank J&B scotch, and he actually rather nicely asked me to stop watering it down. But those days were long gone. I was beyond legal, and we were drinking from our own bar, and martinis, not scotch. Plus, the bottle was unopened. I asked my mom about it. Oh you know your dad. He's saving it. My dad was probably around 70 at the time. I said to my mom, Tell Dad that if he dies, the first thing we're going to do is drink that scotch. My mom laughed, but later told me that she did tell my dad. And shortly after, he began to enjoy the Chivas.

We've all known and have said that life is short. But have we lived like that? I had never flown alone, and it was this gynormous wall that I needed to figure out how to get over, because there was no going around it. So, on Christmas Day 2018, I boarded a flight on my own, without a traveling companion. When I came down the escalator in the airport in San Jose, California and saw Lynnette wearing a Santa Claus hat while standing with her husband, Jim, and waving at me, I had the  euphoric sense of having ascended Everest. Then, on my 6th 'solo' flight this past March, I almost died (yes, I will continue to refer to that experience in bold italics). We are dicing with death everytime we leave the house these days. Hence the masks. I don't drink Chivas, but I would hate to think of someone getting into my single-malts because I didn't time the drinking of them to run out before I run out. Or because I stupidly ignored Covid warnings, causing me to leave this world and my fully-stocked bar as a result.

So, maybe a pandemic can bring this life lesson. I keep trying to locate silver linings in all of this, and there are some. Surely not enough to make up for all the deprivation and all we will continue to go through but, still, there are some. And one of those is the realization that whatever we've been waiting to do, whether it's buying those sexy, sky-high Manolos, taking that QM2 crossing, or just enjoying the Chivas; it is time to get on it. Or, in the case of that transatlantic voyage, at least the planning of it. It's not just that life is short. It's that life is unpredictable. So, what better way to cope with it all than to indulge in whatever our hearts currently desire. We might as well, right? Can't dance (at least not for awhile...). Thank you for reading my blog. A scotch toast to you, Tommy 💛 (that's my dad)!

Living on a Prayer

 Los Angeles, California

When Eddie Van Halen passed away last week, I checked my iTunes to see if I had any Van Halen music in my library. I liked Van Halen, but as it turns out, not enough to have downloaded anything by the group. Had I, it probably would have been the song Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love which evokes a lot of memories from that era. I do however have some of Van Halen's licks in my iTunes library, as he did the guitar solo on Michael Jackson's Beat It, which is part of a collection of music that I use when working out.

Tom understood that when a famous actor died, our next trip to Blockbuster Video would be to rent one of their movies. It was my own sort of Turner Classic Moviesque tribute to watch a favorite film by one of the movie greats just after they had left us. That was back in the day of losing the likes of James Stewart and Katharine Hepburn, although we also did this after the demise of lesser constellations. So, did I want to listen to Van Halen yesterday or today? Not so much. I already have a constant ear worm going with Bon Jovi's Livin' on a Prayer.

It's my own fault. It's another song in one of my workout playlists, songs chosen for their meter which makes them particularly good for warm-up/cool-down, aerobics or weight/abs/ legwork. Amidst a lot of songs, this lyric got into my head:

We've gotta hold on ready or not

You live for the fight when it's all that you've got.

Whoa, we're halfway there

Whoa, livin' on a prayer

Take my hand, we'll make it I swear

Whoa, livin' on a prayer

So, I realize it's not great poetry. And if you're not a woman of a certain age, you might not even know that Jon Bon Jovi was about the most gorgeous guy to ever grace rock and roll. But, that's just an aside. My ear worm is we're halfway there. And of course, aren't we all living on prayers? And hopes and wishes, and so much more than most of us were a year ago?

I see all the pumpkins and Halloween paraphernalia at my local market and at the pumpkin patch I drive past, and one-half of my brain registers that this is normal for this time of year. The other half is where the rumination and anger and ear worms reside. There is a plexiglass partition between them.

I drove to my local market last week on a sparkly, autumn day. If you live anywhere in the US besides California and Hawaii, you would probably laugh at reading this about LA. We do have some trees that change color, but for me, autumn is marked by a changing of sunlight. And a certain crispness in how things look and feel. It's subtle. I'll give you that. But as we barrel through MLB playoffs towards the World Series, and the election shortly after, I am daily aware that it is October, and changes are coming. And I am living on a prayer that they will be good changes, and that maybe, pandemic-wise, we might even be better than halfway there.

Lately, I have been watching the series Felicity, which is a college drama from the late '90s and early '00s, which is set in New York. It is well-written, and is a great escape for me, both because of where it takes place as well as when I first watched it. I had traveled to New York in the summers of 1998, 2001, and 2004, and the changes both in the city and in travel between 2001 and 2004 were clear. Life simply altered after 9/11. There was no going back. I have read that what we are going through now will be the defining time of our lives, much as the depression was for my grandparents and the war was for my parents.

My parents eloped on their third date, and my father shipped out with the Navy a month later. They didn't see each other for twenty-eight months, and since they hadn't known each other for long, my mother said she would forget what my dad looked like, and would often have to frantically pull his photo out of her handbag to remind her. As she told it, this would happen while she was riding the streetcar on her way to work. Once reunited, did they take that experience of fear and separation with them throughout their marriage? What will we take with us from this time when we can finally move forward? How hard will it be to adjust to life after Covid? We hope it will be a snap back to what we knew, but will it? And what about life after Trump, whether that comes from this election or later? When he is gone, what will happen to that base with their hatred, vitriol, and the absurdity of comspiracies and "alternative" facts? Will there be a political new normal that is calmer, bipartisan, and, most importantly, honestly factual?

So for now, living on a prayer, living on a multitude of prayers, is not a bad way to live. And I could certainly have worse earworms, like those awful advertising jingles. No, I think I'll keep my worm: Halfway there... We will make it, I swear. Thank you for reading my blog.

The Fly on his Head

Los Angeles, California 

You knew this was coming, right? I was in a three-way text with my friends Todd and Curt, while watching the Vice-Presidential Debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence, when the fly landed on Pence's head. My head craned forward. What was that? It wasn't moving, but it clearly was an insect. I started to laugh. When I tried to text: There's a bug on his head, I started to laugh harder. And then it happened: That full-on laughing until you cannot stop, and you are now crying and gasping as you are laughing so hard. You finally stop, and then it starts again. The fly was still there, and I was in such a seizure of hysteria that I couldn't even key-in the words to send my text. It was a complete and total loss of control; a Mary Tyler Moore and Mr. Peanut moment.

Sometimes, when Lynnette is visiting and we are playing Ticket to Ride late into the early hours of the morning, this will happen. In Ticket to Ride, you have to plot out these routes on a map, and mistakes can be made. You find yourself charting a course to Sault St. Marie when you were supposed to be heading to Duluth. It happens as we get punchy from staying up so late. We are in that let's play one more, and then, in the middle of that game, one of us will say: Wait! Where am I going? and we will start to laugh.

We all know this kind of laughter, and how good it feels. I am not a giddy person who laughs at everything. I think my sense of humor tends to be dry, and my comedy taste runs to wit, rather than silliness. I skew Marx Brothers, definitely not the Three Stooges. A lot of comedy makes me smile, so laughing actually remains special. But the absurdity of that fly on Pence's head tipped my canoe into a depth of hilarity. I COULD NOT STOP.

When I had been married for only a few years, I traveled to Solvang with my parents to attend a Theaterfest production. It was something that we had been doing annually, each summer, but on this weekend, Tom had to work, so I went alone with my parents. At intermission, sipping a hot apple cider outside of the outdoor theater (it gets inexplicably cold there at night in the summer), my parents ran into a friend whom they knew from their church. When she approached us, my mother greeted her, and then turned to introduce me. This is my daughter, she said, Mrs. Healy. I'm sure I looked at my mom as if she had lost her mind, but I greeted and shook hands with their friend, who certainly was confused by the formality of this introduction. After she walked away, I turned to my mom and asked her what the hell was that about? My mom shook her head and said I don't know. I got confused. I just wanted her to know you were married, since you're here with us on the weekend. And all I can say about that is: Yep. That was my mom.

About ten years later, my mom, sister, and I were waiting in line to greet the ship's captain on a Caribbean cruise. My mom nervously asked us how she should tell the First Officer her name, as that was how she would be introduced to the captain. Should I just say I'm Betty? she asked us, or should she say her full name? She turned to me: What are you going to say? I quickly responded: I'm going to say I'm MRS. HEALY! And we both started to laugh. This occasionally happened with my mom and me. We once lost it at The Hollywood Bowl when the first violinist was playing Swanee River on a musical saw. I even think there is a previous post about that. But back to the cruise. We could not stop laughing, and we were nearing the captain and the photographer who would take a photo of each of us with the captain (I think we did this on the first two cruises, then finessed it on all subsequent cruises). We are now both wiping tears and trying to stop, which only made us laugh more. Again, The Death of Mr. Peanut on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. When we finally got to the captain, I was still hiccupping back the laughter, when the captain said to my mother: Are these your daughters? Mom nodded. Very nice, he smiled. I guess we made a change for him in this rote drill he did on every cruise. Besides, we weren't laughing at him. We were laughing near him.

At the fly point in the debate, I was home alone, watching with the fly on Pence's head, the phone in my hand, and heaving with laughter that I could not stop. It may just have been the best time I've had since the pandemic began, and most certainly the only truly humorous moment so far in the campaign. I so thank you Mr. Fly! With love, from Mrs. Healy. Remembering Betty💛.  And thank you for reading my blog.

My New Old Friend

Los Angeles, California

Sometimes good things happen at a time of bad things happening. Six years ago, something very bad happened in my life. And simultaneously, something very good happened to me. It was the gift of a new friendship. As anyone might gleen from many years of blogposts, my friends are important to me. In fact, I've been told that I talk more about the friends in my life than I talk about myself. Joel says by the time he began to know me a little, he knew a lot about my friends.

I had a very bad year when I lost everyone who was closest to me. And then, a friend I had counted on stepped back, and back and back, until she became invisible. I never learned why this happened, and continued to reach out to her. I reach out to her still, on her birthday and at the holidays, despite the lack of reponse. I wish good things for her. She had meant a lot to me, and I would not want to minimize that. The truth is that during a lifetime friends may come and go. Sometimes you are glad to see them go as the friendship has run its course. With others, you might find the only thing you still have in common is the friendship. That can be ok or it can be not enough to sustain. In this case, it was hard to lose the connection to her, but I simply had to accept it.

At the end of that sad year, another woman came into my life. We had known each other in a professional capacity for several decades, and had always liked each other. Without the true friendship and support she offered me when I was at my lowest... I honestly don't know how I would have gotten through it all. She left her house and her husband late one night when I was despairing, to sit with me and listen to me. And I will always, always be in grateful debt for that, and her other acts of profound kindness.

But, this post isn't about Lynnette. It's about Russell. Russell is the brother of one of my family-but-in-a-good-way friends, Karen. I have known Russell almost as long as I have known Karen, which is for many decades. But my friend, Karen, lives out of state so I don't see her as often as I would like. And Russell lives in London, so I never see him. We had emailed early this year as he was going to be in Los Angeles and we made a plan to see each other. That plan was canceled the day before his flight to Los Angeles on March 19th. We continued to email, and our correspondence has continued through all these months.

The way we have chosen or evolved to communicate with each other through this time is as individual as our fingerprints. Only twice have I seen friends during this long period of isolation. But Lynnette and I speak almost daily. I connect by phone with other friends about once a week, and these are long conversations. A few friends who I was in weeklyish contact with, now text with me more frequently. I could go on and on, but the point is that patterns have established themselves. And within one of  these patterns are found the long emails which Russell and I exchange.

Russell and I seem to agree about so many things that I recently wrote to him that only one of us really needs to be here. I am isolated from friends and Joel. Russell's husband has been out of the country for months. And so, our emails have become a touchstone for us both, and have brought me joy and some laugh-out-loud moments (which these days are as good as gold). I wrote to him Saturday and woke up yesterday morning to an email in my AOL inbox, which I enjoyed along with my morning tea in my October pumpkin mug. Not a bad way to start the day.

The pandemic, the politics, the lack of physical contact and disappearance of all of the activities in life that I have come to love -- I could go on and on about what is making me so plain damn ANGRY. You can read it in my recent posts. You can read it in my future posts. Even with my friends, who I truly value, I can find myself pissed off (I write to Russell that I am "American-pissed" to differentiate from Brit-pissed which means inebriated). I offload my anger into my blog and have some relief through that venting, but then I recognize what that is all about. I am just ANGRY and that anger attaches itself to things I have read, or heard, or remember. And I sometimes react to things that my friends have said to me. Which is crazy because they're stressed too and I should understand that. In better times, I am the person who believes that everyone has a right to feel what they feel. So why are these comments or opinions throwing me into this ragespin? One of the tools in my toolbox is for understanding and having compassion for what is different from me. All of the differences: Political, ethnic, religious. So, why is this so hard for me right now during this pandemic time?

Russell is also angry, but what makes me laugh out loud about this is his declaration that people can just fuck right off. Or, as we now both write: FRO. When he first wrote this in his email, I responded that I like that. Americans are so economical, I wrote. We just say it in two words. And I like the urgency. Don't just fuck off. But fuck right off. Like now! Hey, he's on the other side of the pond, yet I tell him that he is clearly American-pissed. So maybe there is an underlying epidemic, during this pandemic, which is plain and simple railing, shaking-your-fist at the sky RAGE. But at times I do wonder if it is just me feeling this unwelcome anger.

I don't have this anger issue with Russell. We debate a bit about American politics. I know so little of British politics that I can't weigh in on that. We dish about food, travel, misbehaving children and parents, friends who disappoint us, and giraffes. He just wrote to me about a giraffe, and I decided to throw that in just for the fun of it.

We sent each other a list of the things we hate. Mine was long. We agreed on our love of staying in luxury hotels and traveling business class on planes. I wrote him that: I get a benefit from applying the proceeds of my frugality to pay for a luxury. He wrote back that he was keeping my sentence. Russell skips daily coffee from Starbuck's because of the annual cost tabulated. I calculate monthly charges for apps, cable tiers, and upgrading my phone, by what it will cost me over ten years. If I'm willing to spend that decade amount, I'm in.

When I was young, we spent summers with my mom's cousins in Reno, and my dad's cousins who lived in the boonies in northern California in a place called Forestville. I loved my fun cousins and all there was to do in Reno. Forestville and those cousins offered up nothing. I was so miserable there where it was dusty and there was no real city with anything to do. I didn't have the language at the time, but I now realize that we had nothing in common with those cousins who were soundly provincial. When my parents would tell them that we were going into San Francisco for the day, they would reply: What for? Thankfully, they must have finally gotten too provincial for my parents, as we stopped staying with them, although we continued to travel to Reno and to San Francisco many summers where we would often shop for our back-to-school clothes at the stores on Union Square.

By the time I was a teenager, we were staying in some pretty nice hotels and resorts. My mom would say that we stayed for free in Reno, so she applied those savings to lush resorts where we vacationed in the Caribbean, or the fine hotels where we stayed in Athens, Amsterdam, and London. I took Mom's cost-averaging rationale with me into adulthood, along with my own philosophy that the only two things worth going into debt over were education and travel. My parents had paid for college, so I had no education expenses. What Tom and I spent at our weekly stay at the Kona Village Resort each October could have afforded us two months at Best Westerns. But, uh-uh. No.

A few years ago I traveled to another city with some friends to see the Dodgers play  a team at that city's home stadium. You learn a lot about friends and family when you travel with them, and usually that is good stuff. This time, not so much. I was surprised by one of the women who had many times previously traveled to and spent time with me in Carmel, where I rented a house for the month of January for about a decade. On this trip she balked at the cost of the mid-range boutique hotel we had booked, and on the second day, directed us to eat breakfast at an inexpensive cafeteria-style restaurant which was part of a pedestrian chain. I went along without complaint. There was a horrific heatwave that weekend, so after the game I suggested we grab a ride back to the hotel from the stadium. After a brief discussion, she threw up a definitive roadblock of an excuse for not wanting to do that. As we walked for over a mile, dripping with perspiration, I realized she was not willing to pay her third of the ride, nor let us pay for her share. That was the proverbial three-strikes straw. I cannot travel with people like that. How much more money did she spend by staying one night in a boutique hotel close to the stadium, instead of a Quality Inn on the outskirts of town? Maybe $100 or at tops $150? What would it have cost her to eat breakfast in the much-nicer hotel dining room, and to split the cost of a mile-long lyft ride? Maybe $25? I always wonder with people like that, where is that $125 now that was saved? Did it change her life? And I understand that paying the extra amount would make a huge difference in the lives of many people. But I knew enough about her to know that this was about financial anorexia, and at the expense of fellow travelers. I had never noticed this about her during her many visits to Carmel, where, like those family trips we took to Reno, she stayed for free. But I probably should have.

So, Russell and I are both checked out on travel and could probably travel well together. We share a desire to do the QM2 crossing some day. And we are discovering a twinship in some areas that I'm not sure we were aware of back in the days when we first met. We both have a memory/date thing though it manifests differently in each of us. And it has been comforting to have this email dialog going through this difficult time. It is one of the good things that have come out of this very bad time.

It's hard to be in month seven of this. Hell, it was hard to be in month one through six. And I am not going through this swimmingly. Read above regarding ANGER/RAGE. But when I try very hard, I can focus on what joy has come my way through new friends; the important reconnections with old friends, and the constancy of Lynnette and Joel, and my friend, Larry who texts me every evening without fail. I have a fervent hope that we all survive the remaining time until we have freedom to be together again. Then I can let my anger abate, stop the circles of rumination, and start catching up on all the hugs, and in-person conversations with friends, which I have missed so much. Lynnette will come visit. Joel and I will dance again. All that and more. I cannot wait. Thank you for reading my blog.

Morning News

 Los Angeles, California

The president has Covid. I just wrote that sentence and then sat and stared at it for the longest time, not sure how to proceed. Maybe I'll start with the clichés: Karma's a bitch. You reap what you sow. You made your bed, now you have to lie in it. And my favorite from my father: Hoisted on his own petard.

I'll follow that up with the tweet that a friend forwarded to me the following night (I am not on twitter, facebook, any of that.... stuff) by Jess Dweck (an Emmy-award nominated Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon writer):

I wish we could have our memories wiped so they can announce it again tonight

Now, that's funny, but I am writing this squeamishly. Because of the karma thing. But also because I was brought up to respect the president. This was hard during Nixon's second term. But as people complained so nastily about Obama, and before that about Clinton and Bush, I still clung to my girl scout mentality that, after all, it is our president. And we are taught to respect him. He's the president. He's not symbolic like the flag or an anthem. He's the man. That ended with Trump. Do I wish him ill through this illness? Absolutely not. Do I wish that he will resign before he loses the election? Sure. But, I am fully cognizant of the trouble ahead.

I support candidates in some out-of-state senate races. But over the weekend, I was thinking: Can we worry less about getting republicans senators out of office, now that Trump seems hellbent on purging that party via deadly virus? I mean, it really was stupendously shocking to see the degree of their cavalier attitude toward ANY of even the most basic precautions against this virus. Stupendously. As if they thought they owned a free pass.

A friend writes that we must brace ourselves for the coming inevitable and ridiculous conspiracy theories. Can we blame antifa? That's funny. Can we blame Islam extremists? Of course we won't blame the domestic, far-right extremist groups that have perpetrated more terrorism in the United States than any group from outside the United States, 9/11 included. Fact check, people.

Or, maybe we can blame Obama and Hillary. There's an idea. But that's hardly possible. They were too busy drinking children's blood while trying not to fall off the flat edge of the earth. I haven't said or written this in at least two decades, but...Give me a break. So, here's my theory: The Rose Garden reception for Coney Barrett's nomination appears to be the superspreader event. So, maybe God doesn't want Roe v. Wade repealed, regardless of what old male Republican politicians think.

As Crash Davis famously said in Bull Durham: We're dealing with a lot of shit here. But what I really believe is that we are dealing with a lot of ignorance here. I am not in favor of free college education, but, as in health care, I think education should be very affordable. And it should not be job training, or worse, a conduit to moneymaking. If you want to be an influencer, you don't need to go to university. Higher education should provide a solid grounding in liberal arts that can provide young people with a route to thought and logic. And, if along the way it models compassion and humanity which students might not have garnered from their families, schools, and religious education, so much the better. Because we are looking at a country where too many do not have empathy for each other. An epidemic of callousness. And that now clearly starts right at the top, and with the people who support him.

For myself, I look forward to a time when politics are removed from: A) my blog; B) conversations with friends; C) mask-wearing during a contagious viral pandemic, and D) all of the above. Enough is enough. But the situation in our country, with a president who flaunted all precautions and is now hospitalized with an apolitical, deadly virus, and a populace who is spasming in all different directions in response to a variety of issues besides the virus, is dire.

Back in the summer of my youth, Jessie Colin Young sang: Come on people now, Smile on your brother, Everybody get together, Try to love one another right now. It all seemed so possible back in my idealistic youth. Le sigh. Now, with everything that is going on, it just makes me feel sad. Oh, and very, very frustrated. Thanks for reading my blog. Avoid large crowds. Especially at the White House.