Glitter

Los Angeles, California

My homekeeper, Ana, is helping me clean and organize my kitchen cabinets. No small thing, this. I moved into my home twenty-three years ago, and put my things away where I thought they should go. The kitchen in this house was designed when previous owners, who oversaw the renovation, combined the original kitchen and the den into a large, open space. I have a lot of cabinets and drawers, which I have divided up into twelve units for this project. During the week, I remove everything from the wide drawers, and in most cases, cabinets both above and below. Then, each Wednesday, Ana cleans them, while I sort the contents and replace. I haven't been replacing as things were, but rather moving things around in the kitchen I now know so well, so that frequently-used items are closer to my chosen workspace. A workspace which is one of four, one on each side of both the range and the sink, which are housed in two separate islands. A lot of room to move here.

The kitchen could use updating, and I toy with the idea of doing so. It was the next project up, after a remodel of my guesthouse. But with the loss of Kevin, friend and contractor extraordinaire, I have stalled. So, for now, cleaning and reorganizing will suffice for progress.

I am giving away a lot of things. At this point in my life, I need a lot less and feel encumbered by the too much. I am also breaking things... a lot of things. I don't know if this is because the new normal in my life seems to have brought clumsiness in its wake. Or, if it is a message from the universe to not value things that will not be around forever.

Recently I broke a favorite tiny, handled dish. It was distressed red ceramic, and a perfect vessel for a pat of butter or olive pits. Then, I managed to break the second, and the last, of my white ceramic spoons with the handle in the shape of a bunny. It was my soft-cooked egg spoon, sparing me the unpleasant, metallic tang of a regular teaspoon's reaction to yolk. I loved it for that, as well as the cheeriness of the bunny handle. But, gone...

This week I broke an aqua-colored, irregularly-round dish in which I often served pistachios or the cacahuates estilo Japonés which Joel buys for me at Vallarta, the local pan-Latino market. There are a lot of dishes that I would have gladly have given to ceramic dust before this one. How is it that I keep breaking my favorites?

I have come to think, in that crazy way that I often do, that this is a lesson from the universe. It is telling me: Don't get too attached to things... nor to people, in this life. Is it possible, I wonder, that the universe wants to advise me to have an attachment disorder? Isn't there too much of that around with so much fear of intimacy or rampant social phobias? Not going there, so maybe it is just a sign that I need to let my attachments, the connection that I feel to things and others, be fluid. Some things, and some people, serve a function at a certain time. They are not meant to be crazy-glued in your life.

My little cousin, Caryn, so called because she is six-months younger than me, is now struggling with brain cancer. When we were eighteen, we spent one of those crazy, magical vacation days together in San Francisco. I don't know what it is about The City, but so many of my glimmering memories of perfect days happened there. We saw Lloyd Bridges while we were waiting to catch the Hyde Street cable car on our way down to the wharf. He was wearing a black turtleneck, had a shock of white hair, and the bluest eyes west of Paul Newman. On the sidewalk, in front of Ghirardelli Square, someone handed us a jar of mustard, asking us to hold it up while he took our picture. In a store we always frequented, Takahashi Imports, we both bought the same greeting card. It said (and I paraphrase): If you love something, let it go. And if it comes back, it's beautiful. What was even then, years after the summer of love, so touching and evocative, now seems, well, pretty stupid. Because the truth is that the things and people we let go, rarely come back to us. But that doesn't mean that it's not right to let them go.

I have just received word that my waitlisted Tesla 3 is ready to configure for delivery. This car is going to be a blast! But I am reminded that when I sold my absolute favorite car ever, my 1978 white convertable VW bug, to the actress Maura Tierney, I cried when she drove it away down my street. The next day, I was still sad to have given it up, even though my new BMW was safer and better. When I arrived at an aerobics class and told a classmate about my sadness, she said: Well, if you feel that way, it was a mistake to sell it. (So... Why don't you just take my sadness and pile some of those Acme anvils right on top of it?!?) I staggered into therapy under the weight of this. But my therapist rightly pointed out to me that there was nothing wrong with making an informed decision to do away with something, but still mourn its loss. Selling the car was the right thing to do, in spite of the sad parting.

I have long-ago accepted that I am, and have always been, a human sponge of feelings. I am a Super-feeler which is a psychological, designated personality type. We super-feelers feel things more intensely than others, for better and for worse. Clearly, I do not have a teflon shell, and, thankfully, the people who know me and care about me are acutely aware of this. Still, I have almost been broken at times by the weight of my emotions, especially when letting myself be harmed by an uncaring friend or family member. But breakage happens, and I am learning to use the tools that I have to let these things and those people go. I don't always do so easily, but, as with the sale of my VW, I have learned to be cognizant that sometimes this is what I need to do.

In Girl Scouts, we sang the round: Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other is gold. I rarely use the word Frister anymore, the term I coined so long ago. Back then, I defined Fristers as: Closer than friends; better than sisters. I saw them all as gold, but there were some who glommed on to the word, while decidedly being neither fristers nor gold by any measure. Now, as with the reorganization of the cabinets in my kitchen, I have learned to value what is true quality, and not be taken in by the faux. We were taught by our grandmothers that all that glitters is not gold. And I am ever mindful of this. With what I have given away, I now have more room for my household treasures, and for new, touch-my-heart friendships. My old friends continue to be gold. Diamonds, even. A reminder that you can never have too many of these. Because, after all, diamonds are a girl's best frister.

Thank you for reading my blog, unless you are Marie Kondo (figure it out...).

CARMAGEDDON !

Los Angeles, California

It's here, and will the world stop? For those of you living out of the Los Angeles basin (or east of Fairfax, as the current joke goes), Carmageddon is the word, reputedly first used by Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky (though there is a computer game by the same name) to describe the anticipated chaos of this weekend's closure of the 405 freeway.

Now, the 405 freeway was called the San Diego Freeway when I was growing up and freeways all had names and off ramps had no numbers (actually, I find the off ramp numbers quite helpful, especially when navigating to somewhere new, worrying that I might have gone too far, and not trusting my navigation system as she led me astray once in an appalling fashion). Anyway, the ol' 405 was cut through Sepulveda pass way back when, and it used to be a lot less congested than other freeways in the area, but no more. All of our freeways are clogged with cars, most of which have one person in them, and that would be the driver. And, more and more people keep pouring into Los Angeles. They are young. They are hip. And they ALL want to work in the industry. Don't get me started as I've covered this sufficiently in a previous post entitled The One-Year Anniversary of Neighborhood Chaos (and available here for a very small cost).

Here are the two big preguntas about this weekend's closure: Will it be a chaotic nightmare beyond all imagining? Will they get it reopened Monday morning on schedule? Will it solve the problem? Ok, I know, that's three questions. I threw in the middle one for the fun of it. But the big question as discussed on my local NPR station which broadcasts from Pasadena (an area that shouldn't be affected by Carmageddon anyway, so why are they getting involved, I ask you?), is the latter one: Will it solve the problem? They are adding additional lanes, including a car-pool lane (once called a diamond lane, I suppose for it's preciousness?). Will more people double up in their cars in order to take advantage of this? Doubt it.

I did come up with a solution to this some time back. I thought that we could solve the problem of traffic in Los Angeles, if everyone who was born in a different state had to return to that state. That's it. Simple. When I mentioned this to a friend of mine, she protested that she and her husband (New York) would have to leave California, in that case. "Well," I said. "I have to make sacrifices as well. My mother (Ohio) has to leave. And Billy (Minnesota) has to leave." She wanted to know what I wanted to do with people who were born in other countries. I didn't have to ponder that. I kinda sorta like the multi-culturalism of Los Angeles, especially as reflected in the Latin-American origins of California. And I don't want to appear ethnocentric. So, basically, they all get to stay. "But," she said. "This would be something a totalitarian government might do!" I had a ready reply. "Sweetie, this isn't about politics. It's about traffic . . !"

We used to really love our cars here in Los Angeles. At least before they became movable containers of anger, angst, and anxiety (the real Triple A club of motoring). I have carried on a pretty good relationship with most of the cars I have driven, since learning to drive in my dad's Alfa Romeo. In fact, I got on quite well with that first car, much to my dad's dismay. You see, my much-older sister wasn't much of a driver, and didn't learn to drive a manual shift. So, my dad decided he was going to teach me to drive in his manual-shift, red, convertible, Italian import. Guess whose car I wanted to take to the beach on Saturdays when I got my license the day after my sixteenth birthday? An Aristotelian tragedy, that! I piled girlfriends into it (it had a shelf backseat), and motored through Malibu canyon as often as I could wheedle the loan of it. This was an experience so memorable, that the first car I bought with my own cash was a brand-new, white, convertible VW bug. My third in a long succession of all German automobiles, and probably my favorite to date. But I digress . . .

So, Carmageddon. This weekend. How will it all end? Gridlocked misery or trumped-up doom-prophesying, much like the anticipated hell of the '84 Los Angeles Olympics (which turned out to flow perfectly in all manner of ways including southland traffic)? But, just in case, we are sticking around our neighborhood, as advised, for the duration. A little gardening, a little cooking, a little hanging out by the pool. As I always say, when the cosmic trafficmeister hands you a lemon, it's always smart to spike some lemonade. Thank you for reading my blog. Vaya con huevos!