Trifecta

Los Angeles, California

I spent most of my elementary school years in Burbank, California. I attended Henry M. Mingay elementary school, in the Burbank School District. I belonged to Brownies and Girl Scout troop 157. One day when I was wearing my uniform with that number sewn onto my badge sash, I was told by my teacher that my IQ score had coincidentally come in with that very number. They're probably not supposed to tell a kid that, but I hardly knew what it meant. Today we say that age is just a number. So are scores.

And then we moved to Northridge, and I was reeling in the drama of starting a new school and knowing no one. I felt like a stranger in a strange land that first day. And I was desperately missing my friends. Unlike Mingay, this school had an public address system where they piped messages into the classrooms. And it was there, on my first day of school, that it was announced to us that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. At lunchtime, knowing no one, I went to the library which was located near the front of the campus. I saw that the flag had been lowered and understood that the president had been lost.

I had spent close to six months earlier that year living in a community in Maryland which was not far from Washington D.C. We often went to dinner in Washington. My parents liked the Watergate Inn. And one evening we went to see DiVinci's Mona Lisa displayed, which was on loan from the Louvre. My parents were Eisenhower Republicans, who had not voted for Kennedy but even they fell under the allure of the young president with the stylish wife. Everywhere we went we saw people meeting the challenge of the President's fitness program. Holding signs as they ran, walked and hiked. We went to New York and saw a musical, Mr. President, Irving Berlin's last Broadway musical, the book loosely based on the country's admiration for this new, modern administration. It all ended. Just like that.

I share this sense with others that many things in life come in threes. As I have written before, I have seen three no-hitters at Dodgers Stadium. I have been in three adult relationships. I lost the three people closest to me in the span of one year. And, there have been three mega events in my life: The Kennedy assassination; 9/11, and the Pandemic.

I was talking to Joel recently about this and about the changes that each of those things brought into our lives. I think the Kennedy assassination brought to us children a new reality that things like that could happen. We had been innocent, although we had already been through the Cuban Crisis and the duck and cover drills that came along with it. But somehow, even though sensing the adults' tension about this, the danger didn't really register with us kids. But the Kennedy assassination was the first indication that felt real. It came into our living rooms and told us that there was danger, and evil, in the country in which we lived. Other assassinations came afterwards, but didn't feel as shocking as that first one. Those were happening after Pandora's box had been opened. And by then, the war in Viet Nam was also in our living rooms, albeit only for a half an hour each evening on the nightly network news. We should have been grateful that we were spared the 24/7 news cycle that was to come.

9/11 brought inconceivable horror into our lives. We knew about terrorism. But we hadn't really considered that it could happen on our soil on such a large scale. It changed everything. I had been in New York that summer and, enroute to Bermuda, had sailed out past lower Manhattan and the World Trade towers, one of which I had ridden to the top of just three years earlier. The July 2001 sailing was a magical trip. My favorite of all the mother-daughters cruises my mom had generously taken both my sister and me on, each summer for over a score of years.

In late October, 2001 Tom and I flew to Kona on United Airlines. We had upgraded to first class, but the flight attendants didn't serve us cocktails before taking off as they had in the past. I thought they looked uneasy. Maybe I was projecting, but then, why wouldn't they look uneasy? We were eyeing the other passengers on the half-filled plane. When we got to the Kona Village, meeting Sandra and John there, we found it even more empty than normal. Late October was never a busy time at the Village, but that may have been the trip when there were 60 guests at the Village which has a capacity of about 300.

Now, at airports, we were wending through long lines in security and would soon be taking off our shoes before boarding flights. Terrorism continued but became domestic terrorism. School and church shootings, government buildings bombed, and then the conspiracy groups, mostly uneducated men and bimbo women riding in on the coattails of the least-qualified, most amoral and unethical character to ever become president.

And then we got novel coronavirus Covid19. And in that almost-60 year span, I think this is the one that carries the most weight, as it impacts every single aspect of our lives. There is no place to be safe with others. None. It's like a sexually-transmitted disease where you are sleeping with everyone the person you are sleeping with has slept with. Only it is a breathing-transmitted disease. Where do we not breathe when we are with others? No options, other than to not be with others which is an even deadlier choice. Or meet the risk, as we need to, to live our lives. But how to heed while living our lives? Maps of yore used to indicate where you fell off the edge of the flat earth. This way there be dragons. In so many ways, we now live with these dragons (as well as with our own personal elephants in the room!).

The day of the Kennedy assassination, my mother came to school to pick me up and my grandfather was in the car with her. He told me that he remembered the McKinley assassination. My grandfather lived to see both the Wright brothers first flight as well as the moon landing. He survived injuries from a cyclone as well as the loss of my grandmother after almost sixty years of marriage.  Maybe, if I'm lucky, resiliency runs in my genes, and it will provide the ability to surf the waves of yet another historical upheaval. But after the past two and-a-half years of Covid, and the trifecta of disaster in my lifetime, it is a challenge for me not to ponder with trepidation: What's next?

The Shuckers

 Los Angeles, California

I think it just a bit odd that two of my friends once teased me about my penchant for talking to people I don't know. I don't walk up to strangers on the street. But when I am doing business with someone, or even speaking to someone providing customer service, I often engage in conversation. As I think back, both of my parents did this. My mom didn't so much engage, as talk at people. She liked to talk but wasn't so much interested in what the other person had to say so much as what she wanted to tell them. My dad was more like a raconteur. He was a great storyteller, and I often think my interest in stories and other people's personal stories, came from him. Dad was also the parent who read me bedtime stories. His taste ran more towards Kipling than Seuss, and forget about reading me stories about princesses or young commoners who lived happily ever after with any prince or princess charming. And... maybe that was a good thing?

But back to this story. I find it much odder, that one of my aforementioned friends thought it was weird? Inappropriate? Or at least strange enough to comment on, that I had talked to the bartender when we were having dinner together at the bar in a hotel. Huh. Huh? I guess she never watched Cheers. I often find bartenders interesting. In fact, it was a bartender who introduced us to Sandra and John! And besides serendipitous introductions, if you end up talking about liquor, bartenders have been known to provide teaser tastes from behind the bar. I'm truly not in it for this benefit. I'm in it for the conversation. Interested in the stories. But if that comes with a half-shot of something I've not sampled before, so much the better.

Maybe most people aren't interested, but I am always curious to know where the disembodied voice on the other end of a customer service call is located. I always ask. If they are in the states, and there is a major league baseball team nearby, I often ask them about their team. It is surprising that, while there is a lot of talk about loss of interest, I encounter a lot of MLB fans who support their local or nearby team and work in customer service. 

A few months back, I needed to call the social security office. At the end of the call I asked if, since this was a government agency, the representative was allowed to tell me where she was located. I'm in Louisiana, ma'am. I responded that, in that case, she didn't have a baseball team, right? Oh yes we do, ma'am. We have the Biloxi Shuckers.

Sandra, namesake of this blog (and the best person I have ever known), lived six hours away from me, but we saw each other four or five times during the course of each year. When we saw Sandra and John in the summer, usually at their home in Tahoe, I would always ask about their local baseball team, the Sacramento River Cats. Except, I called them the River Rats. Much to John's dismay, Sandra began calling them The Rats as well.

I feel some regret that I don't have friends who support the Shuckers. It's such a great name for a team. And can you imagine what opposing teams' fans can do with hollering' that name? Most major league teams don't have very clever names. While I sortakinda hate the team, the Padres name is clever. It is also the name the Carmel High School carries for its teams. A while back, somebody got their shorts in a twist over this and the name's association with Saint Serra. History tells us of unconscionableness and even cruelty in our past. But the past of California is indelibly entwined with the California Missions Trail. That's why we studied the Missions, as part of California history, in elementary school, and even made those sugar cube replicas. I would hate to see the historical importance of the Missions diminished. And would hate to hear that the name of that school's team, with its campus walking-distance from the beautiful Carmel Mission Basilica, be changed to the Carmel Guardians.

On the other hand, the Atlanta Braves should consider getting rid of that chant. Not because it's demeaning, though I understand it is, but because it is alarmingly annoying. I do understand the indigenous peoples' complaint about all of this. When you watch old westerns, there is the same cringe factor that you feel at aspects of Gone With the Wind. But, erasure isn't necessarily a good thing. In my ridiculously unimportant opinion, perspective is the better route.

Luckily, I don't think the Shuckers are going to offend anyone. Yeah, not so fast. Maybe they are. There seems to be stirrings in the animal rights population regarding sea creatures. Certainly the Shuckers are disregarding the feelings of those mollusks who are being shucked, right? Oh, good grief, Charlie Brown! I truly hope for a time and place when we are not all so thin-skinned. Otherwise, I might have to go back to calling the Sacto team Cats, after all. And, I think the River Rats is a much better name. At least until someone steps in to defend the rights of rodents to not have their name so frivolously utilized. That wave may very well be coming at us, so be prepared to duck! Oops, not meaning insensitivity to web-footed birds. I find them delicious.

The Power Outage

Los Angeles, California

When a noise woke me up recently, I realized something was not quite right. It took me a minute or so, heart beating wildly from the abrupt awakening, to realize that my house and neighborhood were pitch black. Power outage? My heart started to settle down as I reached for my phone and got onto the local water and power company website. It confirmed what the bleak darkness had already told me. Power outage. My brain whipped around as I landed on the various problems this presented, namely ingress and egress. Garage door and gate both power-operated. Ana would be arriving to do housekeeping at eight. I would be leaving for a medical appointment at 9:00. The website projected a 7:00 AM restoration. I put about 50% of my trust into that.

It was 5:30 in the morning and it was going to be a challenge to get back to sleep. So, as I often do, I turned to a podcast. In this case, Marc Maron's WTF podcast; an episode featuring Christina Ricci. I like Christina Ricci as an actress, particularly in the film The Opposite of Sex. She has a unique voice and as I listened to the interview I began to relax and even hope that I might drift off. And I did. But before my drift, I heard something that resonated and stayed with me the following day and even now, a few weeks later.

After talking about her struggles with anxiety, she mentioned that she tells her seven year-old, when he is grousing/whining about not wanting to go to school (and I am paraphrasing): Sometimes it is time to do, not to feel. You can feel later. I didn't sit bolt upright in bed when I heard this, but it did have an impact. Enough so that I thought about it a lot after I got up at 7:15. Power was still off but it came back on just before 8:00 and Ana arrived shortly after.

I feel a lot, and almost all of the time. I wouldn't say I am dragging all these feelings behind me in a net, but I cannot overstate how much of a feeling person I am. And, of course, this is for good and for not-so-good. That almost-dread which I feel before I venture out of my home has been a challenge since the pandemic eased. It doesn't stop me; I leave my house and it is ok once I do. But the anticipation anxiety has at times felt like a hurdle. A navigable hurdle, but still.

The concept of setting feelings aside to just do what is before you isn't really profound. It is simple. But sometimes it is that simplicity in dealing with feelings and especially in dealing with anxiety, that can get you through.

I talked to Cathy about this during my 'pilates' session (pilates in italics because Cathy's unique approach to her clients presents a hybrid of many things including but not limited to pilates). We agreed that sometimes giving your anxiety too much attention (what I call feeding it) is not good. Burying it? Not so good either. So maybe what Ricci was saying was essentially that you can feel what you feel, but sometimes now is not the time. It's like a good tax plan -- defer, defer, defer.

So I got power restored in a couple of different ways and I shared it with a few friends. I don't know if it had the meaning and impact for them that it had for me. I couched it by saying that an interview like that is a lot like purchasing a cookbook. If you get one good recipe, it was worth the investment. This recipe was: Approach and accomplish task. You can dive into the sensory -- the taste, the feeling, later. Right now, you just need to do it. Sense and sensibility (thank you, Jane Austin). And, thank you, Christina Ricci.