Angels and Alpha-bits

While my mother was in the hospital for a month or more, my father, sister and I were invited by well-meaning friends and neighbors to dinner.  An ambulance on Angus Street was unheard of, and everyone seemed to know that my mother was ill and that my father had the two small girls to handle on his own.

Directly next door were a childless couple named Mac and Doris.  He owned some sort of business and she was his secretary. They had a poodle named Tammy and cocker spaniel named Shane. Movies were obviously a big source of dog names for them. I loved the cocker spaniel and my sister went for the poodle

Mac may have had a stroke, because he could not use one of his arms and walked with a limp. Or maybe he’d been injured in the war.  No one talked about it. They smoked and drank and owned a yacht that was kept at the Balboa Yacht Basin. To me they were rather glamorous.

Our dinner with them was at once odd and comfortable.  We usually only saw Mac and Doris for a party of some sort and their annual New Year’s Eve party.  Doris’ elderly parents always came and stayed in the chilly apartment they had on their lower floor.  There would be kids, Doris’s sister trying to dance the Twist and platters of walnuts with nutcrackers. People smoked cigarettes and cigars and drank cocktails.  Not like at my house where cranberry juice was the holiday libation.

The night they had us for dinner, a school night, Doris served us home made chicken noodle soup, which in itself was a novelty. But it was the big, black peppercorns floating amid the wide noodles that grabbed my attention.  I had never before seen a whole peppercorn and, oblivious to the fact that I was breathing in plenty of second hand smoke, I really enjoyed that soup.

The invitations for dinners started pouring in.  Dad knew we had to bring a gift to each and came up with a typical Al Smithson solution.  He bought pre-made angel food cakes, which we “frosted” with whipped cream.  Then we opened boxes of Alpha-bits cereal—a new item on the market—from which we picked out the sticky letters to spell THANK YOU and the names of that particular evening’s host and hostess set gently on to the top of the cakes.  The three of us got pretty good at the routine of decorating our cakes and thought we were pretty slick.

The Choice

 I don’t have many regrets in life, I am happy to say.  But a big one happened when I was in the fourth grade. I still feel guilty about it.

My mother was seriously ill and in the hospital.  She had pinprick-sized holes throughout her stomach and she was bleeding.  She had had major surgery at Ross Loos Medical Center.  Dr. Loos, himself, and the brother of writer and wit Anita Loos who penned GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES, preformed the intricate stomach procedure.  Friends, family and even our Mobile gas station attendant donated blood.

My mother lay in Good Samaritan Hospital, the same in which I was born. The same one in which Robert Kennedy died.  She had tubes in her nose and IV’s in her arms.  Above her bed the Catholic hospital had placed a very graphic statue of Christ slumped on the cross-, oozing blood from hands and feet.  It was not a pleasant place to visit.  The nuns, the smells, the hushed tones, the visiting priest—and we were definitely NOT Catholic—were not things I felt comfortable with.

One day during my mother’s time in the hospital, I received an exciting invitation.  Kayla A. was a member of my Brownie troop who had moved to The Valley.  She was inviting the entire troop to her home—with a swimming pool—for an after school birthday party.

I had a choice:  visit my mother or go to the party. This was the first time in my life I had a serious dilemma.  And every time I see, read or hear the word “dilemma” I think of the choice I made.

 I went to the party at Kayla A’s. and don’t remember a thing about it.  I do remember that I let my mother down. 

Death, Illness and the Good Hostess

The year that my mother went back to work was a difficult one.  I was just starting fourth grade; my sister was in second. We still had our hair braided or pony-tailed in front of the pink bathroom’s large mirror every morning; our lunches were still made the night before and stored in the fridge in colorful paper sacks that sometimes had love notes tucked between the waxed-papered tuna sandwiches, cherry tomatoes and much welcomed the new invention of “Cheese n Crackers.” We still had a sit-down breakfast at the dining table that, too, was set the night before.  I had no idea at the time how stressful this must have been for my mother. She wanted to be the perfect music teacher for the Burbank School District, perfect cook, perfect homemaker, perfect wife and perfect mother.  People didn’t talk about stress in the 1950’s.

These were not the days of driving with your kids to a McDonald’s drive-thru and ordering a McMuffin with processed cheese or grabbing a Jamba Juice.  These were the days of wheat germ, oatmeal with raisins and that cereal that made me feel like puking: Cream of Wheat.  On weekends it got more elaborate.

In mid September, my mother’s beloved father passed away in his sleep. On the morning of Dr. Cleveland Kleihauer’s death, the phone rang as we were eating breakfast in the dining room. My father was reading the sports section of the LA TIMES.  With naive excitement, I ran into the hall to answer the phone.  My step-grandmother said in a flat and unfriendly tone: “Get your mother.”

For the first time in my life I went to school without my hair being done by my mother. And since then, I never answer an early phone call.

My mother blamed her father’s death on “having to carry too much luggage” on a recent tour of Europe, did not allow us to attend the funeral and very soon became very ill.

PART TWO

I don’t remember how much after my grandfather’s death that the doctor came to our home…maybe several months.  Because I do remember taking our somber grandmother on a tour of the “Apple Country” which was an annual day outing in the fall for the Smithson’s.  Day tripping with Ione was well out of the ordinary, and it seemed “forced.” She had always been the Grand Dame—head of the Kleihauer household, putter-on of dinners with silver candleholders, director of the housekeeper, wearer of fur stoles and mistress of the domain.  She had social status and let it show.  She was not used to sitting in the back seat of a station wagon with an eight year old.

I sat next to her, feeling uncomfortable at the proximity to a woman who was not, in today’s parlance “warm and fuzzy.”  It did not feel right.  Perhaps it was the proximity to death, as well, that made me feel odd.  I had never known anyone who had died before my grandfather.  Maybe I thought it was catching.  We ate fresh Red Delicious apples, visited my father’s friend named Blackie, who owned an orchard and got Smokey the Bear comics from a ranger.  I was glad to get home.  I’ll bet Ione was too.

PART THREE

When the doctor arrived at our door on Angus Street, I was oblivious as to how very ill my mother was.  She had been passing blood, all the while passing as the great mother that she was.  My father made the call and later the doctor told him that if he hadn’t my mother would have died.  When she arrived at the house, she immediately went into my parents’ bedroom.  My sister and I stayed out of the way.

But my sister inherited a super gene for hostess-ness.  She went into the freezer and dug out a frost-covered can of concentrated lemonade.  She would serve the doctor a cool drink.  Being little, she may not have been able to manipulate a can opener.  This was before the lids just could be lifted off.  So, with goodness in her heart, she got an ice pick out of the drawer and started stabbing.  She stabbed right into her finger.  The ice pick was stuck and dangling, blood was flowing and the doctor did not end up drinking lemonade.

When the ambulance took away my mother and my father followed in the car, a neighbor at the top of Angus Street swept us up and included us in her dinner.  Mrs. Clifton had raised three sons and was good in a crisis.  She told us that she was making macaroni and cheese.  I told her it was my favorite.  When we sat down at the table, I saw that she included stewed tomatoes in her version of the dish. While my sister ate gingerly with her bandaged hand, I tried to hide that this was nothing like my mother’s macaroni and cheese.

FISHING:PART ONE

I caught my first fish when I was about 7.  It was as small as I was.  We were on a vacation—probably driving up to Seattle from Los Angeles, and we stopped at a lake.  I think it may have been Crater Lake.  For some reason unbeknownst to me now, we kept the little fellow and took it to our motel room in a milk carton.  I do believe it was flushed while I slept.

I remember fishing on a Girl Scout trip to Big Bear.  We were out on the lake in a dinghy and one of the advisors told me to spit on the hook.  It didn’t work. But a few hours later I developed a 104-degree fever and slept out the rest of the trip in the adults’ room on a canvas cot.

One summer at Manhattan Beach when I was an early teen, unable to surf and consigned to a blowup mattress, which wasn’t cool, I went out to the end of the pier and bought a drop line for 99 cents—but with the tax it was just over a dollar.  I only had a dollar and the man fronted me the extra two pennies.  I gathered barnacles from the bottom of the pier for bait and, predictably, caught nothing.

On another occasion, when I was a graduate student in Scotland, my friend and I went on a trip with the “Hill Walking Club” from Strathclyde University.  We took the ferry over to the Isle of Arran and it poured.  We walked several miles to the campsite in the dark…and it poured.  We set up our tent, which was lit by the phosphorous of the smoked kippered herring we had brought for breakfast.  And, to paraphrase, ‘the rain it raineth.’

The plan of this overly ardent club was to climb Goat Fell in the morning.  In the rain.  I thought, no.  This is just not fun. And not for a girl from LA.  When it rains we light a fire and drink hot chocolate. With marshmallows.

So on the wet morning of the proposed hike, I bailed, took my backpack and walked alone into Brodick to await the ferry to Ardrossan and the train back to Glasgow. The wait would be several hours and I bought a drop line, plucked mussels from the rocks for bait and went to the end of the ferry landing.  And caught nothing.

What I would have done with a fish I have no idea.  I hate trying to get the hook out of a wriggling fish. Add that to the fact that—to this day-- I’ve never gutted a fish and I would going to on public transport with a fish and nothing to carry it in.  Not a wise idea. But I did meet a handsome young man on the train who asked me out.  We were to meet the following Saturday in George Square.  He stood me up.

When we lived in Seattle I bought a rod, reel and salmon eggs and tried to fish in raging rivers, off Edmonds pier and out of my sea kayak.  None of these attempts were successful ventures.  But I enjoyed it, nevertheless.

Fate brought us to a summer of teaching in American Samoa; living next to the beach in Pago Pago.  To keep my almost four year old entertained, we went fishing off the rocks near our hotel room.  He caught a tiny fish. We threw it back into the polluted waters of the bay where it could live amongst the plastic carrier bags that floated like multicolored jellyfish.

When I lived for a cold and wintry year in Stockholm, a friend introduced me to Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream.  The notion of drinking rum and coconut and fighting with marlin off the back of a boat named PILAR seemed unbelievably attractive. So on our first trip to Kona, on the Big Island of Hawai’i, my husband watched our son while I ventured out on a deep-sea fishing charter. Hemingway was posthumously fueling my passion.  No one on the boat caught a thing except sunburn.

When my son was around 8 years old, and we were living in Kailua, I needed something to keep him busy during school breaks.  I bought two cheapo fishing poles at the oddly named Holiday Mart and drove him to a Heeia pier.  I taught him how to bait the hook, cast, and deal with the disappointment of not catching anything.

A few years later, now living in Honolulu, I took my son to the harbor off Ala Moana and joined a charter for an early morning deep sea fishing trip.  Again we caught nothing, but the captain brought my son up to the helm and let him steer the boat back into Honolulu. And we did see a basking shark.

On another occasion my son and I went out on a charter from the same harbor.  The seas were very rough.  We could see the whitecaps from our house. It was the only time the captain chose to go around Diamond Head and not in the other direction towards Barbers Point. All the passengers were puking their guts out.  But not us; we had Australian candied ginger as our secret weapon. This intestinal upset was a good thing because it significantly raised the odds of us catching something as the poles are divvied up.  With three of the six onboard curled in the fetal position, our chances were elevated. I honestly don’t remember if we caught something or not.  Most likely not, if I don’t remember it. The surreal thing was that one of the pukers was a former student from the Lab School with very bad eczema.

Lest this sound like a tale of fishing woe, things started to change.  One year my birthday aligned with a school holiday and I convinced my husband to go deep-sea fishing with me.  We got up at 5 and each ate a bowl of saimin because my dad always said never go out to sea on an empty stomach—something he’d been told by Italian—or perhaps Portuguese—fishermen.  Rather ironic from someone from Arizona.

As the boat was clearing the harbor and the lines put in, we all drew cards as to which pole would be “ours.”   Within seconds, my pole got a major hit.  The sunrise was lightening the sky and I couldn’t have been happier.  I had a mahi on the line and despite all the movies I seen of people struggling for hours with a fish, I pretty much knew I didn’t have the strength.  The fish was brought aboard just as the sky lit up to its fullest extent.  A mahi mahi is a beautifully colored fish in the water, but once it dies, the color fades.  I felt a bit sad.  But I guess we all fade when we die.  We had enough fish to share with the neighbors.

ABBY and SNORING

I was saddened last week—well, for many reasons, but that’s another story—when I referenced “Dear Abby” in one of my classes and drew blank stares.

I cannot tell how much life experience, how many sticky situations and what possible foibles I have avoided, because of what I’ve learned from reading those daily columns.

It started at the breakfast table at Angus Street. (That in itself is a cultural rarity) and, with the exception of my five years in Europe, continued to September of this year when we chose to cancel the local paper and get the NY Times instead.

Ann Landers and “Dear Abby” were twins.  In Los Angeles, in the 50’s, there were two newspapers.  One had Anne and one had Abby.  We had Abby.

What I loved about “Dear Abby “ was the total commitment to common sense.  If I could spread a salve over this present generation and my own, it would be a balm made of COMMOM SENSE. 

My all time favorite column was one from a woman who was writing “back” about a previous one. The subject was a woman complaining about her snoring husband.   The writer wrote:  “I just wish I still had my snoring husband. He died this year.”

Every time I wake in the night to a snore, I think of that.

The Indian in the Bathroom

When I was a child it was obvious that my mother idealized and idolized her only and older brother.   He had chosen to have a childless marriage that would allow him to design and build homes in comparatively glamorous places—ocean cliffs or hillsides overlooking Los Angeles; one poised under the HOLLYWOOD sign and just a block or two up from Aldous Huxley’s home.  He and his wife were free to travel to parts foreign, rub shoulders with Jawaharlal Nehru and know what the words “obi, “sake” and  “arigato” meant far earlier than most Americans.  This was the fifties.

My mom was stuck in Silverlake with two young girls and a loving husband, but her summers were spent driving up and down the west coast.  Though those summers were wonderful for my sister and me, I’m sure they paled in comparison to the trips my uncle and aunt were taking.

My uncle and aunt took tramp freighters and posed for stiff photos with Japanese hosts.  When they returned from their trips my sister and I would be given things we had never seen before:  purses with little metal mirrors reflecting all the Silverlake light being an example.

Although Silverlake was a diverse neighborhood and my sister and I had been exposed to many different cultures; tempura lunches with our mother in Nisei town, Janice Hing’s wedding reception in Chinatown, my father flaunting his three words of Spanish at Mexican restaurants, we were not too familiar with Indians.  I mean people from India. Of course my mother had introduced us to chicken curry, but I was later to learn that it was nothing like the real thing except for the color of turmeric.

My mother worked hard at everything she did.  She could have been the prototype for Martha Stewart—had Martha been a music teacher in Burbank with two small daughters, a salesman husband and a house in Silverlake.  She enjoyed entertaining and chafing dishes with purple flamed cans of sterno and sherry infused recipes.

I remember, on the eve of a dinner party that I would eventually be sent to bed before it ended, being given what, at that point in my life, was ALMOST the worst thing I had ever tasted.   I sat on the two steps that separated our dining room from our living room and tried to eat cream cheese.  It was only slightly less disgusting than my mother’s zucchini squash with tomatoes and Italian spices.  Of course, today I like cream cheese, but even in adulthood zucchini is not something I choose to eat.

One evening my mother and father had a small party and my uncle and aunt were invited.  They brought with them two tall Indian men who stood around the fireplace shyly.  After awhile one of the men needed to use the restroom.  I do not know whether he was directed to the room or just went off on his own to search for it.  It wouldn’t have been a long, or a difficult hunt as we only had one bathroom.  The door was closed and he walked in and went directly up to the sink.  Maybe he just wanted to look into the mirror, or perhaps wash his hands after eating a messy appetizer. Thank goodness he didn’t need the toilet.  In any case he did not notice that my little sister was sitting on the pink toilet-- that matched the pink shower-- with her wide 1950’s skirt covering the porcelain.  She was absolutely mortified and quite traumatized.  I think he finally saw her and made a soundless exit back to the fireplace.  It was a memorable evening at Angus Street.

Bobbie Pins With a Message

Most of my life my mother wore her hair up.  Then, in the 1970’s, perhaps inspired by Nancy Reagan, but who’s to say, my mother went “short.”    This hairdo lasted briefly and began to grow into a length that could once again be “put up.”  During this period there were “falls” and fake hair to add to the zest of the style.

My mother became an aficionado of what my sister and I called THE HELMET.  Hair spray and regular appointments with a Hispanic hairdresser ensured that her hair would not move, look a bit like Margaret Thatcher and remain fairly carefree if one slept in a special net.  Bobby pins were always somewhere in the nest that was my mom’s hair.

When my mother passed away, she left me an article that she had once read.  It was about death and memory.  It said that I should think of my mother whenever I saw a particular bird.  I have done that with the white fairy terns that fly around Hawaii.  When there are two I think of both my parents.

There is something else that resonates deeper.  I have found bobbie pins around the world.  In Japan, China, Britain, and the U.S.  I always seem to find a bobbie pin when I travel.  It’s a pretty random thing to look down at a sidewalk and see one.   But I find them with regularity…Kyoto, Beijing, Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne and recently, in the place where I will eventually live, I found four.  One was on top of Lava Butte and another on Pilot Butte.  Two more were found on the streets of Bend, Oregon. 

It may be that “Oregonads” (as my husband calls them) use more bobbie pins than the average world population.  But I choose to believe that they are a message saying that I’ve made a good choice for the future.