Photo Journal

New York, Spring 2009

2009-05-11T14:10:00.000-07:00

Some pictures from my recent trip to NYC. The water tower is such a classic New York icon. I have written about them before here. The cobblestones and the dress both represent the West Village. The cobblestones are part of the vanishing landscape - the old meatpacking district, which is being covered up and re-paved, literally and figuratively, with upscale boutiques and galleries.

Happy New Year

2009-01-03T20:40:00.001-08:00

Hello to 2009...a new day

Goodbye to 2008....

December Views 12/28/08

2008-12-27T19:03:00.000-08:00

December Views 12/24/08

2008-12-24T17:13:00.001-08:00

December Views 12/20/08

2008-12-21T15:47:00.000-08:00

December Views 12/15/08

2008-12-15T20:18:00.000-08:00

Rainbow, Oakland

flocked trees

December Views 12/12/08

2008-12-12T21:05:00.000-08:00

Full moon tonight.

Red leaves this morning.

December Views 12/11/08

2008-12-11T22:13:00.001-08:00

December Views 12/10/08

2008-12-11T22:03:00.001-08:00

Crow in palm tree

December Views 12/9/08

2008-12-09T20:53:00.000-08:00

In my studio

December Views 12/8/08

2008-12-08T19:06:00.000-08:00

December Views

2008-12-07T17:34:00.001-08:00

Ethan at Ocean Beach, San Francisco

I am participating in a project called December Views which will include lots of images and very few words. You can read more about it here.

It feels like just the right thing to do right now.

Polaroid Love

2008-07-23T12:35:00.001-07:00

Since the Polaroid Corporation has announced that it will no longer be producing instant film materials after the end of 2008, my appreciation for the low-tech charm of the Polaroid print has resurfaced with a passion. Why is it that we sometimes love things more when we know they will soon be taken from us? Hmmmmm. That might be too big a question to ponder fully here….

I have an extensive collection of Polaroids from the many years (before digital) that I enjoyed the instant gratification of this lovely camera. I got my first Polaroid camera when I was about 13 ( a great age for appreciating instant gratification in any form) and I still have it , in addition to two other later models.

The above picture is just a few weeks old, taken with my 1980’s era Spectra (my newest model) As wonderful as Polaroid is for its charmingly unrealistic color shifts, this one is pretty true to life. These brown-red sunsets have been common in California this summer due to the numerous forest fires burning around the state.

For further links on Polaroid, and information on which other photo companies are still manufacturing instant film, check these sites. Also stay tuned for more Polaroid postings here, both vintage and contemporary.

Plastic Camera Fest

2008-02-04T17:14:00.000-08:00

Check out my new online gallery at Toycamera.com. This is a really fun website for plastic camera enthusiasts. There are some terrific galleries, articles and contests. Check it out!
It is a good antidote to mid-winter doldrums...

Happy New Year

2008-01-07T09:37:00.000-08:00

There is a break today in a series of winter storms. Beyond these Cypress trees in Pacifica yesterday, the ocean still looks blue-gray and wild. I like the change of seasons. Winter should feel like winter. I feel hopeful about the new year, keeping my fingers crossed (superstitious? me?) about several good things coming to pass this year, all having to do with progress, moving forward, being fearless.

Where I've Been

2007-11-22T14:38:00.000-08:00

I've been working on my 50,000 words for National Novel Writing Month. Its been quite an experience. I've returned to the New York of my childhood for about 2 hours a day. It's been a long strange, sometimes hilarious journey. Lots of bad, bad writing probably, but great practice. Nine days and another 18,000 words to go (roughly...)

Horn Tootin'

2007-08-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

Very busy with back-to-school stuff - my teaching that is. The kids still have two more weeks off, the lucky devils. I have been so busy that I neglected to post the link to my current piece of published writing in Common Ties. Axel's Chair is the true story of a psychic Postmaster in a small Michigan town during the Depression - a story that has been passed down in my family for years.

For the photo geeks among you, the picture above is a cyanotype printed on watercolor paper.
So...this is just a little of what my family would call "Tootin' my own horn" here (never to be confused with bragging...)

Enjoy...

Henry's Birthday

2007-08-02T16:20:00.000-07:00

I can’t believe it is your birthday Henry, and that you are fifteen. That still isn’t very old in the grand scheme of things, but like most annoying and embarrassing moms, I must say that it seems like you were a baby only about two weeks ago. I can still remember your tiny little warm self nestled on my chest like a loaf of fresh baked bread in the hospital blanket, and that ecstatic but also bewildered feeling that all new parents have. They were actually going to let us take you home? This tiny baby? As If I knew what I was doing? No instruction manual – just the little pack of diapers, some ointment and a ridiculous miniature rubber toy that we dubbed the $15,000.00 teddy bear, courtesy of Alta Bates Hospital. I still have it, of course.

Like all smitten new parents, we videotaped hours of you propped in your baby seat drooling and smiling. Deadly dull to most except the grandparents, we thought it was the Greatest Show on Earth. Your brother, simply by virtue of being the second child, didn’t get quite as much coverage. This might not be such a bad deal for him – less opportunity for embarrassment later on…

It was so hard to imagine back then what you would be like. I couldn’t picture an adult’s or even an older child’s face morphing from those fat cheeks and those big puppy dog eyes. I couldn’t imagine your grown-up personality. Would you be quiet or loud? Extroverted or shy? Artistic? Athletic? But in hindsight, I see that it was all already there; the way you would focus on a toy when you were an infant, examining it for long minutes, turning it slowly in your chubby little hands. Your quick smile, your quicker mind, your speed careening around the house as a toddler, later on the soccer field. All of this leads me to believe that personalities are indeed hard-wired. But here you are, skinny and growing taller fast, looking eye to eye with me now, those same eyes in a much leaner face, that same smile (with teeth now), that same focus and discipline and wit. I have grown to love every stage. I’m amused by it all; the i-pod, the skateboards and computer game obsessions, the music, the laughing at the same stuff your dad and I Iaugh at (because we are perpetual adolescents too, it seems. Lucky you!), the new independence you have, and how well you handle it all. Happy Birthday Henry,

I love you,

Love, Mom.

From the Land of Rebar and Dirt...

2007-07-14T13:29:00.000-07:00

...our house renovation continues. It is pretty hard to believe that at the end of all of this, we will have a house that is twice its current size. (2-bedroom Bungalow – cozy as is) I feel like such a materialistic, ugly American even writing this. I was a renter all my life until I was in my thirties, but still…having more space for the kids, and having my own office/studio, and a workshop (aka “Man Cave”) for the husband will be, in the parlance of my kids, “hecka nice!”

It has taken almost three months to dig out our basement, and for the past four weeks, there has been a deep pit around the perimeter of our house, which I refer to lovingly as “the moat” even though there are only about two inches of groundwater at the bottom (eek! They say that’s normal around here…) A temporary stairway on the front of the house allows us to come and go, but the back door is a bit dicey. My husband built a ramp (known as the “plank”) which is about a foot wide and nicely bouncy, and traverses this moat (just don’t look down, they tell me). My kids bounce down it many times a day, as they enter what used to be the backyard to access our detached garage (the temporary family room/ home entertainment zone, which will one day be my studio/office/art shed. Yay!) I walk the plank when I have to, but I am not a huge fan of heights – especially when the crevasse houses a neat fence of shiny rebar – for our soon-to-be-poured foundation - just ready to impale anyone unlucky enough to lose their footing. Above is the view of my future studio from the bottom of the moat (nice view of the plank, too)

We have two cats. They have always lived both outside and in, and they are both good climbers. Quinn, the orange tabby, our adorable bad boy (he’s addicted to Q-tips – more on that later) happily comes and goes on the plank, which leads conveniently straight to the swinging “kitty door,” all day and night.

The other, our lovely black and white Prima Donna, Oddy, will not be caught dead walking on the thing and must be fed a special meal in the back yard every evening. Why she won’t walk on something ten inches wide is a complete mystery to me, since she regularly perches like a fat hen on the back fence, which is only one inch wide and twelve feet from the ground. I have also witnessed her jumping from roof-top-to-roof-top many times in her seven years. Go figure. Cats have minds of their own all right.

Our contractor and his crew entertain us regularly with sordid stories of the neighborhood. Of course they are all like members of our family now, and I must be discreet because we live in a pretty small town, (in fact at least two other couples we know are currently doing projects with the same contractor). When you get them going though, they are happy to dish about how that project on the West End never got finished, and why: not only an imminent divorce, but the soon-to-be-ex wife’s unplanned pregnancy with the lover who lived right next door. Add to this that most of the workers grew up here and have known each other since Middle School. So we try to give them a wide berth, and not get nervous when we arrive home during the day and witness the affable old hippy driver of the Bobcat (mini bulldozer) horsing around with the crew boss, chasing him into the dug-out area, as the crew boss laughs uproariously and flings shovels of dirt at him. Just a typical day. And you ask, “Is this why the project us taking so long?” Ah, well…

More New York Photos

2007-06-23T22:08:00.000-07:00

Happy Father's Day

2007-06-17T16:05:00.000-07:00

Father's Day is an important day for me. My own dad has been gone since 1998. Here I am with him in Nantucket when I was about five years old. I always was a Daddy's Girl, and thinking about him now usually makes me laugh, although of course I miss him. A self proclaimed "blue-eyed country boy" from the midwest, he ended up going to college on the GI Bill and then making it big as a film critic in New York City. People who knew him later in his life saw him as witty and sophisticated, always articulate. He never lost that basic innocence though. He could make a trip to the grocery store an adventure, finding the humor and absurdity in everything. He also passed along to me a sense of possibility and fearlessness. I remember him saying, well into his '60's, that he still had a lot to do in life, and that looking in the mirror was a surprise since, as he put it, "I still feel like a likely lad!"

Wherever he is (perhaps sharing a martini with Frank Sinatra in some parallel universe) I wish him a Happy Father's Day. He was indeed the happiest of fathers, and a shamelessly proud grandfather, too...

Also a Happy Father's Day to Joe, here with our kids about ten years ago. Yes, they are all still cute, and the boys can still get on their dad's lap on occasion (well...sort of...)

These three are the reason I'm the luckiest gal on the planet.

Brooklyn Bridge

2007-05-15T16:34:00.000-07:00

Some of you might know that New York is my original hometown. I have written a great deal about it over the years, and am presently trying to turn some of this writing into a series of short stories (fictionalized) because that is just easier for the very private me.

I have written plenty of non-fiction about my home city, too. One of these pieces, Brooklyn Bridge, is currently online at Literary Mama.

I took this photograph with my Holga camera in the summer of 2004.

Plastic Camera Spring

2007-05-06T16:49:00.000-07:00

Just some pictures taken with my trusty Holga camera around the former Alameda Naval Air Station, where you can always find lots of rusty metal, abandoned hangars, and flocks of shore birds. It's one of my favorite places to take long walks. I never get tired of checking it out and recording the crumbling beauty before the developers pretty it up. It has already been discovered by filmmakers and television folks (not to mention skateboarding and bicycling kids).

It Begins

2007-04-26T18:39:00.000-07:00

This week, we started a formidable house renovation project. We have been talking about this project for at least ten years, and it seems that it will finally become a reality. Well, it sure feels mighty real today, as the front stairs are gone and there is a big gaping hole under the front half of the house, and mounds of excavated dirt in the driveway. The swanky plywood slab now nailed over the front door makes the house look suspiciously like an abandoned building. As we sneak up the driveway to the back door, our family is beginning to feel like we’re illegally squatting in our own house. We should all carry signs saying “Yes, We Actually Live Here!” when entering or leaving the debris field that is now our property.

The much dreamed about end result of all this will be a family room and separate bedrooms for our two teenage boys and a home office for yours truly (Yes, the longed for Room of My Own). I will be posting occasionally (!) about this process, which is likely to take the better part of year (please tell me that’s not too optimistic….) And yes, we are indeed living here during the entire renovation. For the foreseeable future, we are inhabitants of the land of smashed pink stucco and mountains of brown sand. Stay tuned.

Disco Bunny

2007-04-08T08:53:00.000-07:00

Happy Spring...

Writing Every Day

2007-03-29T21:34:00.000-07:00

I’m doing it now, the writing every day (though obviously not on my blog….) I’m trying to create stories from the true stories I’ve witnessed or lived, from dreams, overheard conversations, or from things I just manage to conjure up. Many don’t manage to make themselves into actual stories. They are just snippets of things, sometimes scrawled on index cards which can be very hard to decipher later. I have a rubber-banded clump of dog-eared cards in my purse for this purpose. Forget waiting for the muse. She is downright unreliable, and as those close to me know, I can’t abide unreliability. It is far better to sit down in those tiny windows of opportunity, if that’s all I have, and just plain write, with or without ideas. And let me tell you, I haven’t even had many of those windows lately. We’re talking scribbling madly in my notebook while I cook dinner, or in my parked car in between my class and a meeting, or in the waiting room at the dentist’s office. The most frustrating is when some great idea does occasionally come to me…the muse choosing to capriciously visit at the most inopportune moments, like while I’m driving. Not stuck in traffic inching along, but doing 70 on the freeway, or maybe when carpooling the kids to soccer. So I sit down doggedly at the “free” moments, however impossibly brief they might seem at the time, and just write what comes, most of it bad, bad writing. But occasionally the germ of an idea can be found in there somewhere, especially if I just let it rip. Lately I have been paying more attention to my visual ideas as well. I started two pieces in the past month based on very vivid images that popped into my head. This is where it can get fun, to follow those images and build stories from them. So many writing teachers and books, encourage just this regular practice, even if it does feel like squeezing blood from a turnip. And not to beat yourself up with perfectionism, or you will never truly start, let alone finish – anything.

Spring Forward

2007-03-10T16:00:00.000-08:00

Indeed. I am so ready. I have never felt more ready to move forward, to get on with it, although it does feel like it has come a little early - this false Spring. There are blossoms on the trees, the air is deceptively sweet and soft these late afternoons, and I want to start all my creative projects at once, jump off that precipice into the great, exciting unknown. But I need just a little more quiet time first, a little wool-gathering as they say. Just a few days, or a week at the most, because I am not very good at simply sitting still and listening. Perhaps what is needed is a bit of truth-telling and cleaning of the house, but not necessarily the kind of cleaning where you toss everything away - just rearranging things, so that they might take on a surprising new clarity. It is possible to see the clutter, the lovely mess of your life in a different light - to pick out the little sparkling gems from the gravel, to see them for what they truly are.

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essentially invisible to the eye.

- Antoine de Saint Exupery

Love

2007-02-14T16:00:00.000-08:00

Not just today, with all the commercial hype, but how about the other 364 days a year to make it delicious...!

Sunday Scribblings - Goodbyes

2007-02-04T10:49:00.000-08:00

We are undertaking a rather huge house renovation project –having our entire basement dug out to create a haven for our teenage and soon-to-be teenage boys. Yes, our very own “Wayne’s World.” Also out of all of this will come a home office for me. It’s all very exciting, but we are now deep in the drudgery of having to go through every single box of junk in our current crawl space. It has been fun in a way, and a little bit emotional. It’s fun to see the tiny baby clothes, the old school projects (our kids still want to keep their carefully constructed California missions from fourth grade), and boxes and boxes of yellowing paperbacks that the husband and I each have leftover from college (why?) The paperbacks were easy to toss. Harder were the four boxes of LP records. Remember those? You have to have been born in the 60’s or early 70’s at the very latest to have bought and cherished a substantial vinyl collection. We recalled that many of these were not even playable anymore due to obsessive overuse, though we do have a serviceable though rarely used turntable. Most of our favorites we have replaced with the CD’s. Still, stacking these into a box designated for garage sale – Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello, The Talking Heads, the Specials, the B-52’s – felt sacrilegious to me. Painful even. I recalled the days that we saved our money to go to the record store to pick up the latest release, long before i-tunes downloads and instant gratification. Playable or not, I found myself digging back into the discards box and fishing out a battered copy of Neil Young’s “Live Rust.”

“But we can get the digital version…” my husband remarked. He’s more of a Neil Young fan than I am.

“I went to that concert!” I replied, not remembering in the moment that this was an album that I had not yet bothered to replace on CD. He had gone to that concert, too, although we had not yet met. I reminded him of this, and he didn’t protest when I put the album in the “keepers” pile. In fact, I don’t think either of us remembered whose album it was, originally.

I constantly fight the packrat in myself, not wanting to end up being one of those crazy old ladies who lives in a warren of boxes. But I must admit I’m sentimental. As I pulled out each musty-smelling album, I admired or chuckled with familiarity at the cover art – recalling a time when cover art was actually big enough to see and appreciate and sometimes study for hours on end (yeah, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right) But it was all part of the experience, not to mention the personal associations with the music of my youth. We all have that, but it doesn’t mean we want to go back there too often. Once in awhile is ok. I’m not a big fan of oldies stations for the same reason. Also – a song here and a song there is fine, but - the whole album? And aren’t we too spoiled by current technology now to have to manually lift the needle arm to the songs we want? So…much of it did go into the discards box. A final “Goodbye.”

One surprising outcome of the day was our kids’ reaction, particularly the 12 year old, who, happening upon a pile of rejected Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin albums exclaimed, “Wow! Cool! Can I have these?” Our kids, whose i-pods are filled with contemporary music, have also been raised on classic Rock ‘n Roll. They are young enough to have referred to LP’s as “ those funny big black CD’s.” They didn’t want the albums for the music – much of which they already have, but for the album cover art. Apparently, appropriating your parents’ old LP covers and putting them up on your wall is the thing to do. Who ever would have guessed? Still…on the day of the garage sale, I have a sneaky suspicion that I might still scoop up one or two of those battered old favorites. I’ll say it’s for the kids.

For more Sunday Scribblings, go here.

Road Trip, Part 2

2007-01-29T15:51:00.000-08:00

So…after the sushi dinner in Santa Barbara, we set out once again in the intrepid Queenie, determined to make it to Los Angeles before the hotel bar closed. As it turned out, we made amazing time, and arrived at the Hotel Angeleno at about 10:45 PM. I had noticed this strange cylindrical structure from the 405 Freeway on previous visits to L.A., its top floor glowing at night like a green and violet-hued flying saucer. We wasted no time dumping our bags in the room and whizzing on up in the elevator to the bar on the top floor where we enjoyed a well earned celebratory drink.

The next morning we woke to a bright blue sky and a crisp breeze. We headed down to the beach at Santa Monica to complete an 8.5-mile walk. Susan is in training for a marathon in the spring, and walking is my absolute favorite form of exercise, so we were a good pair. The main challenge for me was not stopping every ten feet on the Santa Monica pier and in Venice to photograph with my beloved plastic Holga camera. I had to frequently jog to catch up with Susan.

As we stretched on the beach afterwards, we sheepishly decided to skip our planned excursion to the Getty (bad girls) in favor of lunch and shopping on Montana Ave. After all, it was an unseasonably cold, brisk day and we needed some appropriate duds. I rarely engage in such girly activities in my real life. In fact, I usually hate shopping, but I had no problem giving myself over to the experience when I found a scrumptiously cozy magenta fleece for a very reasonable price, and a few other goodies. When we arrived back at the hotel, still in our workout clothes and laden with shopping bags, the valet parking dudes descended on Queenie like a swarm of flies. We were slowly getting accustomed to this, but had not as yet figured out what the protocol for tipping was.

We also couldn’t help but be a little self-conscious about the slovenly state of our steadfast chariot; her floor littered with half full water bottles, Kleenex and Luna bar wrappers. Not to mention the load of shopping and snack bags we now toted. We felt like the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath. The only thing missing was poor expired Grandma Joad strapped to the car roof.

We spent the evening with another old high school friend who lives in West Hollywood. We met La Wags, as we affectionately call her, in a rather frightening bar in Beverly Hills. The murky room was packed with married middle-aged film execs looking to pick up young wanna-be actresses. The light fixtures over the bar – huge dripping amber things – looked as if they had been scavenged from the La Brea Tar Pits. After waiting several years for my $15 pomegranate martini (yes, it was good, but still…), we managed to wangle a table by the door, until one of the teenage waitresses told us it was reserved. The anthropological appeal had already worn off, and we were happy to depart.

La Wags took us to an Italian place that wouldn’t be too crowded, since, as she frequently mentioned, it was the weekend of the Golden Globes. She looked great and regaled us in her inimitable way with tales of the movie biz, her latest acting projects, her director brother’s upcoming film at Sundance, her new boyfriend, etc. Eventually, we regressed to adolescence. We had some laughs about people from our past back in New York, shared updates on our aging parents - the kind of conversation you have when you’ve grown up together, even if you’ve landed in very different worlds.

The next morning we drove around Bel Air, looking at the ridiculously enormous houses. We talked about my late dad - a film critic based in New York who only visited L.A. when absolutely necessary, usually to interview an actor or director. Like most New Yorkers, he was an avid walker, and didn’t quite get the California car culture. He had a matter-of-fact take on celebrities. A Midwesterner by origin, dad’s friendly forthright manner drew him to those who remained unaffected and down-to-earth despite their fame. Even so, he usually stayed at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, a swank place from which dad would occasionally pilfer the towels and ashtrays because they bore his initials: BW.

We soon parked ourselves at a sunny outdoor table for coffee at Peet’s on Sunset Blvd (a good thing since I had begun to experience serious withdrawal from my favorite Bay Area brew). While Susan chatted on her cell with her beau back in NYC, I took a little stroll up Sunset, poked my head into Book Soup and photographed a mysterious lime green flying saucer of a building I had passed many times before.

After coffee, we embarked on a day trip to Palm Springs, where neither of us had been before. Driving inland through a landscape that became rockier and dryer by the minute, I was reminded a bit of New Mexico. But in this desert, the landscape was painted in hues of sepia and raw sienna, with barely any vegetation. The snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains loomed in the haze to the East like a painted scrim.

At the Palm Springs Visitors Center, we bought corny hand-colored vintage postcards and shot glasses. I mean come on, when you’re visiting a place with streets named Gene Autry Way and Frank Sinatra Blvd., you might as well get in the spirit of the thing. With the help of some maps we took a self-guided tour of the 1940’s modern architecture of Palm Springs. Susan jumped out frequently to take pictures (she loves this stuff). At one point, as she leaned over a stone wall to photograph a lovely rock garden in an arroyo, a BMW screeched to a halt and pulled over in front of us. A well-dressed guy got out, gesturing wildly. I was convinced we were about to be arrested for trespassing, but it turned out he thought we might have spotted a coyote, and he was looking to get a glimpse, too. We then enjoyed a sunset drive down the main drag where Susan admired the leftover Christmas decorations still festooning the palm trees – an exotic sight to a New Yorker.

It was the coldest night of the year in the desert – 36 degrees. Ravenous and bleary-eyed from driving, and woefully underdressed in the biting wind, we stopped for an early dinner at an In-N-Out Burger – Susan’s first ever. It tasted unusually good. Then we were off to a free event at UC Riverside’s Palm Desert campus – our one nod to some semblance of culture - an actor and a very interesting writer, discussing their work. It felt good to come in out of the night, away from that sandblasted cold wind that howled around the auditorium, and into the warmly lighted inside, to an un-Hollywood, relaxed atmosphere, though the audience was filled with aspiring screenwriters. Warm hands at last, smiles, talk and laughter afterwards. We met a writer/director who had driven out from Venice to give the actor a script to consider. She wore cowboy boots and a short skirt, and was even colder than I was in my thin suede coat and skimpy cotton sweater. At least I was wearing jeans. The freezing temperatures were the talk of the evening. When we finally ventured out into the cold, we all played with her adorable, bandanna-clad dog in the parking lot for a few minutes, wished her luck and climbed into our cars for the trip back to Los Angeles. I had to blast the car heater the whole way. Susan laughed at me, deciding that all Californians adopted or otherwise, were Weather Candy Asses. I’m afraid it’s true.

Since it was our last night, we decided to live it up at our flying-saucer hotel bar. We dressed for the occasion, engaged in lively conversation with some of our fellow bar patrons and the bartender, who was a great guy (free martinis after midnight), and managed to get to sleep by 2 AM.

The trip home, after a gigantic and much-needed late breakfast at the hotel, wasn’t quite as picturesque as the Coast Highway, but had its moments. After loading up the car with our Joad bags (we had also come to use the word as a verb; “to Joad”), and tipping the valet parking guys for the final time, we headed out on Highway 5, wound through the gold colored hills of the Grapevine, across the flat plains of Bakersfield, and finally, through the soft, greener rolling hills around Gilroy by Sunset.

I was whipped, but proud of us, and of Queenie, and of our initiative in taking this road trip after just talking about doing it for years. And, for all of you who ridicule us Weather Wimps out here – it did happen to be the coldest week of the year in California. The day after we left, the Grapevine was closed due to icy conditions, and it snowed in Malibu. I love a road trip, but I was glad to get home. Yes I was.

Road Trip

2007-01-20T16:59:00.000-08:00

There's something about the road, about traveling over the land, that has a distinct appeal and romance. Maybe it's the awareness of covering ground, the way people did in the days of covered wagons, and even train travel. The days when going from New York to Chicago was an overnight trip, during which one could look out the windows at the passing scene, hear the voices and clanking metal doors at arrival and departure, the brisk cold wind of the outside world blasting into the train car at each station. This is far more real to me than airplane travel, when you spend several hours sealed into a metal can with plastic scented re-circulated air and an unreal sense of time (not to mention insufficient legroom). A car is even better. It's your wheels, your ride, your timetable, with the wind in your hair, sunglasses on, and home at your back. Yes, the lure of the road trip, the fantasy of it, had preoccupied me for months. It was something that I needed to do, and with an old high school friend this time, rather than husband and kids, because part of the allure was the lack of obligation, the sense of being in motion, unconnected, free.

It was also a test of my beloved ’98 Volvo, now christened the Queen of the Road, or Queenie for short. She had no trouble at all making the transition from Commuter Dowager/Carpooler of Kids to Road Warrior- all the way down California Highway #1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles and back, with several detours in between. I’m not really a car person, but she rocks.

So Susan and I (who have known each other since ages twelve and thirteen respectively - and I don’t even need to explain what that kind of history means) set out on a crisp San Francisco morning after listening to our loved ones make numerous “Thelma and Louise” jokes. My 14-year-old son even told me to drive carefully and not to drink and drive. Damn, these kids today are well trained. So the family generously wished me well, and off we drove to the coast, and five days of girls-only revelry.

There is a special pleasure in showing a friend from back home the beauties of my adopted state. After twenty-five years here, I must say I do think of California as home, although I will always be New Yorker at heart. I’ll tell much of the story, as I often do, in photographs. But the photographs can’t capture all of it – the fresh smell of he Pacific at Big Sur, the smoky scent of the fire pits at our beachside motel when we arrived at San Simeon for a stunning winter sunset, the impressively grand scale of everything in the West that really must be seen in 3D.

The audacity of Hearst Castle – that physical manifestation of one man’s obsessions, an impossible wedding cake high on a remote hill, filled with unlikely treasures; European tapestries and marble statues that stay fresh snow white simply from the ocean blasted clean air up there. Afterwards, down by the chilly sea, we watched the miracle of an elephant seal giving birth on a beach littered with the corpulent sausage shapes of dozens of others doing the exact same thing, en masse. Group birthing.

Then of course, there was the continuous excited stream of conversation in the car, which often resulted in dangerous laughing jags for yours truly, the primary driver. This occasionally felt a bit risky, especially when rounding the precipitous cliffs of the coast highway. But we expected this. And Henry had no need to worry. There was never any drinking involved. We saved that for evenings at base camp, wherever that turned out to be.

On the second night, we drove into Santa Barbara in the dark, lost, until we happened by the Santa Barbara Mission – still lit up with Christmas lights – glowing golden in the cold, and eventually landed at the best Sushi place in town, pretty much by accident, where we met a lively costume designer from L.A. As it turned out, she had lived at various times in the New York neighborhood where Susan and I grew up, as well as in the Northern California town where I am now living. This was further proof that there are only 40 people in this big wide world. Coincidences and fortuity always happen when you’re on the road. Maybe it’s something about the motion.

To be continued…

Merry Merry Merry

2006-12-28T20:01:00.000-08:00

How to Avoid Christmas Shopping

2006-12-17T12:50:00.000-08:00

Ingredients:

A surly attitude

A devil-may-care attitude

Not enough money

Reminiscing

Not enough time

Bad weather

Several holiday parties

Several time-wasting drinks/coffee dates

A realization that your car needs a tune-up

Sick kids

Mix all of these in random order during the last two weeks before Christmas.

Drive by the mall on the way home from work. Admire the lights. Curse under your breath when you think how close you are to the last mailing day that you don’t have to pay rush charges. You briefly entertain the wild notion of turning in to the mall parking lot, but instantly realize how cranky you will get when you can’t find a parking space. Don’t stop. Keep driving.

Realize that one of your credit cards is maxed out. Knowing that you will do as much shopping online as is humanly possible, go to the bank and do some quick fund transfers, lickety-split. Go to the drive-through ATM. Be thankful for the drive-through ATM. Realize that it is one thing you like about living in the semi-suburbs. Plan to go to the local bookstore. Tonight. You can take care of at least three gifts there.

Remind yourself that you work well under pressure. You are very good at getting things done at the last minute. In this spirit, instead of heading to the bookstore, make an impromptu date for drinks with a girlfriend. Your husband is out of town, and you hate to squander the opportunity. Warm up Chef-boy-R-Dee for the kids first. Feel no guilt. Feel giddy and relieved. Have a few really good laughs with your friend. Don’t talk about the holidays at all. Not even for one minute. Ignore the Christmas decorations at the bar.

In a similar vein, attend several Holiday parties. Dress up so that you feel pretty; wear jewelry you don’t normally wear, sparkly stuff, and high heels. Drink enough, but not too much. Do not discuss Christmas shopping; at least not after the first requisite 30 seconds of admitting you haven’t started yet. If anyone says that they have already started, or worse, that they are done, walk away immediately. Some discussion of dysfunctional family members is okay. Dancing and singing are good, too. And of course, eating. You are not - I repeat, NOT - to think about calories at this time of year.

Watch the news. Regret having done so because it makes you so angry and sad. Decide to do something positive. Have the kids help you get together some donations for the homeless. Be proud of their enthusiasm. Drop off the donations and feel privately that you can never do enough. Watch the kids gleefully listen to their i-pods in the car on the way home, each sealed in his private universe.

Have both of your kids come down with Strep throat. Do not stress out. Use the trips to the Pediatrician and the Pharmacy as very good excuses not to Christmas shop. Try not to yell at your kids when they start feeling better and bickering. Try not to yell at them when they feel so much better that they are asking you to get off the computer do that they can show you their Wish Lists on Amazon. Send them back to school.

The day you are finally ready to start Christmas shopping (one day before the last non-rush US Mail deadline) make sure that it is raining buckets. I mean a serious downpour. Do not cancel the walk you have already scheduled with a friend first thing that morning. Inhale the cool misty air; appreciate the brilliance of the gold and red leaves still falling from the trees in the blue light. Admire and/or deride the Christmas decorations in front of the houses you walk past. What’s cool: 1950’s vintage kitsch Santas, even the ones that light up. What isn’t cool: contemporary inflatable decorations that look like they’re from Wal-Mart.

Finally drive out in the afternoon rain to buy the gifts that need mailing. Turn up the rock and roll music in the car. Sing along. Be glad that it as least a little chilly where you live in Northern California, even though there are tinsel-wrapped palm trees on every other block. Find this a strangely appealing, incongruous sight even after living here for over twenty years. Think about the weather Back East. Think that you are glad you don’t have to deal with it. Realize that you car needs a tune-up. You think your brakes feel a little soft. Realize that you will get it all done today, as you always do, because you are good under pressure. You are good when you are in charge, with an imposed deadline. Your father was the same way. Remember him writing out his Christmas cards on the train as you traveled from New York to the Midwest. He scribbled away and could even carry on a conversation at the same time as the train rumbled along the frozen Hudson River. Remember the blocks of blue-gray ice in the water, and the shabby little houses in upstate towns near the train tracks, strings of multicolored lights in their steamy windows; spots of cheer in the bitter cold. Think about the Christmases of your childhood; shoveling driveways, sledding at the golf course, believing in Santa, your uncle with his movie camera, filming you and your cousins in identical red-flannel nightgowns reaching for your stockings, clutching your brand new baby dolls. The light on the camera was so bright, blinding, like the snow outside. Remember how magical it felt Christmas morning, how the snow actually did seem to make a silvery sound when it fell, how your uncle would wink and say how do you know that’s not the bell on the hat of an elf, a stray elf left behind to watch you enjoying your loot. Then all the grown-ups would laugh, with their brandy-spiked coffee and cigarettes, and all was right with the world. Remember this.

New York Windows

2006-12-07T15:02:00.000-08:00

Just some windows somewhere on Bleecker Street - my old neighborhood. I think I took this picture in April, 2004. No plans to go back there for Christmas. I probably won't visit again until spring or summer. Well...I just liked the colors....

Thanksgiving in New Mexico

2006-11-29T13:38:00.000-08:00

Over a week late, so more than one photo of our annual Thanksgiving in Santa Fe....

Gals' Night In

2006-11-19T18:16:00.000-08:00

I spent a fantastic evening last weekend with two of my favorite people. I will call them Nanny Goat and Wild Girl. These are not really pseudonyms because, well, this really is what I call them, no joke. Since it was Wild's Birthday it was necessary to make a Wild Rumpus at Nanny Goat's house until 2:30 AM. The Wild Rumpus consisted of lying around drinking champagne, talking and laughing our asses off until it was too late to go out to a restaurant so we were obliged to order takeout at 11:00 PM. Italian, of course. Here are just a few reasons why I love the gals:

They both have loud laughs.

They are both very creative and have a great sense of style.

They are both opinionated as hell and not afraid to speak their minds.

We call eachother "Duuude!"

One of them quacks like a duck.

The other one squeaks.

They are both beautiful.

They are both brilliant and well-read.

They can both dance up a storm.

We decided that each of us has at least one excellent physical attribute that would make a combination of all three of us the "perfect woman" (No I am NOT telling...)

We have taken some great road trips together.

We have had some good cries together.

They make me laugh until I....

I have known them for 24 years. That's along time, people.

There is much much more of course, but there is no way I'm sharing it on the Internet. That's another thing - these women know how to Keep A Secret.

Thanks WG and NG!!

Love, Sequoia (aka Trunkasaur)

Look Up

2006-11-09T14:40:00.000-08:00

Tired and overworked but here I am. This is the time of year to remind yourself to look up and out of yourself and away from your spinning wheels. There is always something to see...

Watch with glittering eyes
the whole world around you
because the greatest secrets
are always hidden
in the most unlikely places.

-Roald Dahl

Walk

2006-11-01T16:18:00.000-08:00

I love to walk, usually at a good clip. When I am alone I bring my i-pod, because the music can take me away, get my mind and emotions moving to other places, and my legs pump faster. I like the bright air and the immediacy of a morning walk on the road by the beach, the smell of the ocean, gasoline and coffee.

I walk the sidewalks of my neighborhood past familiar houses and gardens; seeing details I never notice from a car – a plastic playhouse in a driveway with Godzilla peering out of the window, a forgotten newspaper on the front steps nestled in a recent drop of deep red fall leaves. I like to feel my muscles working, doing what they are supposed to do in tandem with my heart. An evening walk offers glimpses into secret worlds behind lit windows at twilight; a head bent over at a desk doing homework, the muffled clatter of dinner dishes, the blue glow of a television in an upstairs window.

I love to walk with a friend. This can be better than sharing a cup of coffee or a cocktail or a meal. Maybe it’s the simultaneous flow of conversation and blood in the veins. There is something about the constant movement, filling your lungs with fresh air, and not even looking at each other that often – that brings out the best and deepest thoughts and laughter. When you are not fidgeting with napkins or wine glasses or food preparation and consumption – everything is stripped away. A pure state of communication emerges, where the absurdly funny anecdote, the fight with your kid, the e-mail from an old love or heartache over an ailing parent can surface and be released, without judgment and with a fresh energy that lightens the burden. It is the physicality of it. You walk it out. And when you are finished and home, you are maybe a little sore and sweaty and windblown, but calmed inside. Ready for whatever comes next.

A Photo a Week

2006-10-24T11:23:00.000-07:00

Yellow

In the spirit of actually posting on this blog more regularly (i.e., getting over my lazy self) I am beginning a new photo-a-week challenge for myself. For the foreseeable future (or until the end of the year 2006 at least) I am going to post one of my photographs each week. I will also choose a word or several words to accompany the photograph and write a bit about what these images/words bring to mind. If I really get on a roll, I might even occasionally interrupt the project to post something a bit different. We shall see.

Yellow is warm and sunny or sickly, sallow. Yellow was the color I wanted to paint my room when I was ten. I couldn’t because we lived in an apartment building where only off-white walls were allowed. It was the color of the cotton pants suit I wore the first time I went on an airplane by myself – to visit cousins in Michigan, also at age ten. It was the color of the oversized wristwatch with Roman numerals that matched the pants suit, and which I hoped was very mod. Yellow is often one of the colors in a surprisingly bad bruise – next to and mixing with the purple and pinkish and blue. Yellow is cowardly – what gangsters called each other in old black and white movies, if one of them ratted another one out, “He’s yella!” It’s the color of pears, lemons, and Ginkgo leaves in the fall, littering the sidewalk with a golden rain of rippling miniature fans. It’s the color of the grass on California hillsides, sour lemon tart, yellow curry - spicy and sweet with coconut milk seeping into rice. It’s the color of hay, the sweetish musty smell of it in summer barns, bees buzzing around the door. It’s the color of honey, sliding from the spoon onto toast, or directly into my mouth, rich and sticky. It is the color of illness on once-healthy skin, teeth on the old man who sweeps up at the barbershop; nicotine stains on someone’s mother’s pink nail-polished fingers. If you put a buttercup blossom under your chin and it casts a yellow glow, it means you are supposed to love butter. Yellow is the color of the walls in my kids’ room.

My Favorite Place in the World

2006-08-06T21:33:00.000-07:00

For the world, I’ve got to say that this has been a pretty bad summer. Global warming is undeniable, the war in the Middle East is more terrifying and horrific than ever, and it seems unlikely that things are going to change for the better anytime soon. So…I have admittedly been attempting to insulate myself and my family from present-day reality. We were very fortunate to be able to travel clear across the continent (thunderstorm delays at O’Hare notwithstanding) to visit our favorite place on earth (or mine, at least), Nantucket, Massachusetts. Yes, I know it has a reputation for being one of the playgrounds for the rich and famous (needless to say I can boast of being neither) but it is much more than that. For one thing, it’s got history that makes the West Coast look pretty newly-hatched in the grand scheme of the world. (Yeah, I know, Europeans laugh their heads off at the notion of anything in the U.S. of A. being “old”) But, Nantucket is a place of many fascinating ghosts: the Whaling industry, the Quakers (who have a sizeable cemetery in Nantucket WITHOUT headstones because they did not believe in such adornments), the monument at the top of Main Street listing the Nantucket men who died in the Civil War. The early Nantucketers lived hard lives – on this island 30 miles out at sea. I wonder how many of the tourists driving SUV’s think about that?

I love the ancient cobble-stoned streets with old New England style upright gray-shingled houses crowding the sidewalks, miles of unspoiled moors and sandy beaches, and fog – yes fog. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and you might wonder why I have to travel 2000 plus-miles to see fog? For one thing, Nantucket gets “real” seasons, so although the fog does come in early in the morning and at night, it does dissipate during the day and the ocean is warm enough to swim in for hours.

The air there feels scrubbed clean - maybe because the island of Nantucket is so far off the coast. My dad was lucky enough to have a friend (with whom he wrote songs for off-off Broadway revues in the early ‘60’s) who had a cottage there that his wife inherited from her Aunt. And I do mean COTTAGE, built in the early 20th century – no TV, no dishwasher, horsehair plaster walls (if you look closely enough you can still see the hairs,) a teeny tiny loft/ attic with cheerful yellow walls and the floor painted blue with glow-in-the-dark stars and sleeping cots for the kids, a fold-up card-table for meals, a couple of beat-up bicycles in the garage for transportation, and of course, a piano - wedged under a breezy window at the end of the downstairs hall, across from the bathroom (bathtub. no shower). This house remains virtually unchanged in the thirty-plus years I have been visiting. It still has that wonderful mothball-and-sea-air beach cottage smell. It is the kind of place that always has a little sand on the floor, no matter how much you sweep. My Dad’s songwriting pal happened to have a daughter my age, Jean. We went to school together in New York, and have remained friends all these years, having shared many coming-of-age experiences both in New York and Nantucket (but that is enough material for a novella or two, so I will spare you). It was through Jean that I became reacquainted with the beloved island about ten years ago – when our children were toddlers and we were sealed inside that charming cottage for two days during a hurricane. The beach NEVER looked as good as it did on that third day when the sun came out…

There is really no substitute for watching your kids run in the surf at the same beach where you learned to swim (although you don’t tell them about how you were afraid to go in the water for a week the summer that “Jaws” came out) and ride bikes on the same sandy back roads that you did, and listen to the same ghost stories about the old windmill, and live in flip-flops and bathing suits for days on end.

I think that is the main reason I love it so much, to be honest. It’s the bathing suit and flip-flops and bike thing. We are very lucky to be able to indulge in such simple pleasures…

The Dance

2006-06-27T18:05:00.000-07:00

When asked by the PTA to chaperone and take some pictures at my son’s Middle School graduation dance, I hesitate at first. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted either of my parents at my 8th grade dance. I ask my son, but he just shrugs. “It’s okay,” he says. I like to think it’s because he knows me well enough to know that I won’t talk to him unless he talks to me first, or spy on him and his friends perhaps engaging in their first ever slow dances with girls. Instead, I stroll as unobtrusively as possible around the edge of the darkened gymnasium, illuminated with colored strobe lights and improbably decorated in a Mardi Gras theme. I snap pictures occasionally, but mostly enjoy the anonymity of being an adult, and therefore invisible. The Hip Hop music is loud and thumping and the kids start out in clusters segregated by gender. The groups of girls are the first to start dancing together. I observe lots of wild hair tossing and gyrating hips, and the entire range of costuming. Some girls are wearing low-slung tight jeans and tank tops. Others are adorned with gowns and hairstyles more appropriate to ascending to the stage to collect an Academy Award. All are in high heels. The boys are slower to get going. There is much standing around, laughing a little too loudly, their hands in the pockets of their baggy pants. Some wear suit jackets, some ties, hair gel, and new sneakers. The feeling of imminent excitement is palpable.

At my own 8th grade dance I don’t have a date. I have come with Jillian and Katie. I am wearing strawberry lip-gloss and a peasant dress, and I have daringly pulled the elasticized neckline down into an off-the-shoulder look. The lights are turned low in the gym, and there is a disco ball throwing dots of colored light around the room. We all dance together to the Doobie Brothers - “China Grove.” I love to dance, but I don’t want to get sweaty, so I sit the next dance out on one of the metal folding chairs by the wall. It is a hot, humid New York June night. When they put on "Stairway to Heaven" a boy named Will ambles over and asks me to dance. I feel panicked at first because I don't particularly like Will and it’s a slow dance, but I say yes. He is wearing a beige suit and his hair is almost as long as mine. I stare down at his high top sneakers and hope I don't trip on them. I nod without looking at his face and allow him to put his arms around me. I am amazed at how good this feels. It feels even better when he nuzzles my bare neck as we dance. I don't tell anyone this.

I try not to look at the couple making out against a back wall. After the first hour, pretty much everyone is dancing and sweaty, including my son - whom I am trying to ignore. I am glad that he’s having fun though. It matters. Occasionally, kids who know me as “Henry’s mom” come over and mug for the camera, arms around each other. One nerdy boy in a full suit and tie borrows a cell phone from a teacher to call his mom to pick him up. He is not having fun. I feel genuinely sad for him as he waits by the door, shifting from foot to the other. Even for the more social kids adolescence is a rollercoaster ride - emotions running high that you can barely put a name to yet, a heady giddiness at playing at being grown-up. Even looking at the precocious kids – the ones for whom sex and drugs are probably already a reality – I see how innocent they still are. They just haven’t put on the life miles yet. This is all a test drive, a plunge into newness and confusion.

Drama. Ed has kissed Jillian out in the hallway but she doesn’t really like him and is trying to escape. She corners me in the pink-tiled girls' bathroom and says let's go outside. I know that Miles has a six-pack of tallboys out in the schoolyard behind some bushes. There is also a lot of smoking going on out there. The teachers don’t seem to notice, or they are pretending not to. I take a sip from one of Miles’ beers but I don’t really have a taste for it yet. It is tinny and sour. The cigarette is good though. It makes me feel zippy and talkative, like my dad’s coffee does. On the walk home with my friends, I take off my new white platform sandals and go barefoot on the sidewalk. My mom would kill me if she knew, but the new shoes are killing my feet and it feels so good to walk flat-footed on pavement still strangely warm from the heat of the day, although the sun has been gone for hours. One of my friends is crying because she never got a dance with one particular boy, and he will be going to a different school next year. It was her last chance.

Drama. At the end of the dance, groups of girls are weepy, hugging each other.
I am not privy to the details of their world, to the secrets whispered in shadows, the clustered goodbyes. I am still invisible, keeping to the periphery. One boy is talking quietly to a longhaired girl who is standing silent, arms folded. He suddenly throws up his hands and walks away down toward the nearby beach. Another boy starts after him, calling out, "Hey, man...." The rest I cannot hear or see, as they disappear into the dark. Voices rise and fall on the breeze outside the gym. The music has stopped and the DJ is packing up. My son and his friends have a prearranged ride home with another parent. He comes up to me then, asking me if I had a good time. I say "Yes, of course I did. Did you?" to which he replies "Heck, yeah." Then he is gone. I climb into my own car with images in my camera which cannot possibly capture this evening of the dance – only the tiniest glimpse.

What You See

2006-05-31T13:47:00.000-07:00

Here is my son Henry when he was barely two. He is staring through the fence at the house my great grandfather built in Cadillac Michigan. This house loomed large in my childhood. Although it was sold out of the family for a number of years, my grandfather owned the property next door so we always knew it as the family farmhouse. My cousins and I always had a feeling it was haunted. I think my father thought so, too, but never admitted it officially. He laughed off things like that, though late at night after a few drinks, he would tell a story about the room upstairs where his grandmother had died - a story about himself as a ten-year-old boy running across the field after bringing the cows in - and seeing the white gauzy curtains in that upstairs window, floating out on the balmy summer wind, seemingly beckoning to him. He was so spooked that he accidentally whacked a hornets’ nest with the stick he had been using against the trees to herd the cows. He ran home with his shirt yanked up over his head, and still got stung. Like most of my father’s stories, this one had a humorous punch line, an ending that veered away from the supernatural beginning, the unknown becoming known.

What you don’t see in this picture are the remains of the old barn and silo out back, the cabin where we spent many summer evenings, the battered picnic table, and the rope swing in the tree. What you don’t see is what is coming: the new house we built next door and then sold, the red maple in back we planted when my father died, his ashes that we scattered in the woods behind the field behind this house. You don’t see Henry grown now into a lanky thirteen-year-old California boy who still remembers Michigan even though we haven’t been back in several years. You don’t see Henry’s brother Ethan, who was likely squirming and kicking wildly inside me – seven months pregnant – when I took this picture. But in a sense all of these things were maybe already there waiting to happen, like a sudden gust of warm breeze.

The Letter M

2006-05-17T16:45:00.000-07:00

Multicolored: Rainbow yarn hair ties I had as a little girl. I loved them because they were so brilliant and daring, the way I wanted to be. My mother preferred plain pale pink, navy blue or white, but I wanted everything multicolored. Last year at my mother’s I found a multicolored bikini from my teenage years in a drawer in my old room.

Mark: The first boy I kissed playing spin-the-bottle in sixth grade. He had dark hair and blue eyes and I was already smitten. When he realized we had to kiss he took a look at me and said “Oh, snap! Braces!” but he still smiled and did it, a good sport.

Mad: The way I feel when my precious - though futile - sense of control feels like it is slipping away. Days when traffic is bad and the homework is not done and I can’t get to my own work and one more person asks me for one more thing and I fear I will snap. On these days I have fantasies of grabbing every dish out of every kitchen cupboard and smashing them all on the floor. I don’t do it, but the mere thought is exhilarating.

Michigan: Place of childhood summers, lakes smelling green, the iridescence of blue damselflies lighting so quickly on my arm as my uncle paddles the canoe. Water fights with my cousins with a garden hose on the brown lawn. Tornado warnings, when the light all around would turn a flat golden yellow, the air preternaturally still. Helping my aunt dry dishes at the sink while she hummed along with the radio. The sad fact that I don’t visit as much as I should since my father died.

Mud: I like the way it feels on my bare feet when I have given myself over to it - cool and smooth and messy. The beauty of childhood mud pies, when I completely believed they could be chocolate or cinnamon, when anything was possible.

Middle aged: What I don’t feel. At all. I feel like I have plenty of time to figure out what I want to be when I grow up because this is still just a warm-up. There is more. Feeling this in spite of having a good job, a great husband, and two children pushing adolescence.

Movies: Escapism. Magic. Going into another world for a time. The reasons I still like going to the theater to see them; the smell of popcorn, sitting in a cool, dark, cavernous room with strangers, sharing the experience, the emotions. Growing up with movies, steeped in them because my father was a film critic. How flipping TV channels on a rainy Saturday afternoon and seeing a familiar classic flick by – in silvery rich black and white - gives me a sense of the familiar, of comfort. I can’t resist sitting down to watch…

More: How wanting more is necessary, and makes me feel alive, awake, moving forward.

Sunday Scribblings: Why I Live Where I Live

2006-04-29T21:01:00.000-07:00

I live in California in a pink stucco bungalow. I have lived here for thirteen years, since our first child was seven months old. It is the longest I have lived anywhere as an adult. It is home. As I write this I can smell the fragrant jasmine blooming in my back yard. It is a small yard, but it contains three fruit trees – a plum, an apple and a lemon. This might seem unremarkable to some - particularly other Californians - but to me it is miraculous. To me, a New York City girl who grew up in a fourth floor walk-up, these are gifts I notice daily. The view out of my childhood bedroom window was of a small tar papered balcony with no plants, the fire escape on the building next door, the gray stone and brown brick buildings across the street, and beyond them, bigger buildings, many topped by the old cylindrical wooden water towers that are ubiquitous in downtown Manhattan. It wasn’t bad. It had its own brand of charm. I didn’t look out on a dark brick airshaft. I could see the sky. But now I look out on my morning glories and passionflower vines, a flaming coral rosebush, and even the neighbor’s palm tree. After twenty years on the West coast, non-native palm trees still seem highly exotic to me. That, and the fact that I don’t have to scrape ice off my windshield in the winter.

Inside our bungalow, it feels snug and safe - unpainted wood wainscoting, a working fireplace, a couple of squishy comfy chairs (often occupied by our two cats) and other various and sundry thrift shop furniture. There are piles of books and magazines, a castoff sweatshirt or two. It is rarely tidy or pristine. Photographs and paintings fill the walls, many created by friends and family members. Our two boys share a suitably messy catastrophe of a room, complete with bunk beds plastered with stickers, desks and bookshelves piled high with their “stuff,” and a very active tortoise slamming around in his tank. It is a small cozy house, old enough (by California standards) that my husband is always fixing something in it, on it or around it. As I write this, he is painting the door he just replaced on our vintage original 1916 garage (suitably sized for a Model A). The beach is within walking distance, and to get to it we pass under canopies of large trees through a neighborhood of even older, bigger homes - Victorians. The kids can ride their bikes to school. I guess you could call it picturesque. That is the reason it is not unusual to occasionally see a film crew up from L.A. doing a location shoot here. It has a deceptively All-American small town feel, though it is right outside of San Francisco. So now you are thinking, ”Ah! There’s the catch…she lives in earthquake country!” Indeed we do, and it is worth every glorious, high-risk moment.

Most importantly, it is where my children are growing up - much too fast.

And besides, there is something about living in a little pink house that appeals to this Big City Girl...

Happy Birthday Nancy!

2006-04-05T10:36:00.000-07:00

I have known Nancy longer than any other friend. Here we are 1. In New York last summer and 2. in Nursery School. I will not be so rude as to reveal to the Big Wide World what year that picture was taken. Lets just say it was back when school pictures were still shot in black and white! Without getting overly sentimental, I must thank this fabulous chick for years of friendship, for “getting” me even at my most insane, and for being such an ingrained part of my history that nothing ever needs explaining between us. Add to this that she is an amazingly talented painter and all-around artist and a damn good cook.

This barely scratches the surface of my shared history with the gal, but here goes:

Walking to elementary school together when we both lived on Perry St. in NYC
Dancing to the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” ‘til we dropped
Playing baroque games in my dollhouse that featured many melodramatic and/or dying characters (complete with funerals)
Drawing for hours while listening to Top 40 songs on WABC (“Cousin Brucie!”)
Wondering aloud why all the songs were about love
Watching “Dark Shadows” after school and being fascinated/scared by Barnabas Collins
Watching “Lost in Space”(favorite character: The Robot) and “Star Trek” (favorite character: Spock)
Deciding who was our favorite Beatle/Rolling Stone/Monkee (too fickle to list)
Our parents’ respective divorces
Nancy’s move to Mexico City in fourth grade
Lots of letter writing on cute mod stationery
Hanging out in hot, humid New York when Nancy would come back for the summers
Blue cream soda from the deli
Walking for blocks and blocks in the city
The funny Irish doormen in Nancy’s dad’s building (“The doorman sees it all”)
Shopping for clothes and records in air-conditioned stores
Long talks about books, art, movies, music, and boys
More long talks (and lots of angst) about boys
Going to clubs when underage (no problem in 1970’s NYC)
Bad Sangria
Good White Russians
Lots of dancing
New Years Eve parties - some good, some bad…
Summers in Vermont and Massachusetts during college
A haunted mill we lived in one summer
Oddball roommates: “Vaseline dog”
Ball lightning coming through our window
Landlords who made stained-glass windows
A landlord who just got out of the State Penitentiary
My move to California (and living with Nancy’s sister, Claire!)
Nancy’s move back to New York
Our weddings, three years apart (we both lucked out on this one, after years of angst)
Both of us losing our Dads
Yearly visits
Hours of phone calls
Good Cosmos
Better lasagna (thanks to Nancy)
More long talks about politics, kids, art, books, movies, music and boys
E-mail, e-mail, e-mail…..

Happy Birthday and Lots of Love! xoxo

Kept

2006-03-25T21:52:00.000-08:00

When cleaning my bedroom the other day, I realized I have a ridiculous number of keepsake boxes. I do not live in an environment of tasteful minimalism, that's for sure! I spilled the contents of one - the heart-shaped box on my dresser, just to see the things that for one reason or another, escaped being tossed…

Dental floss in pleasing little round dispenser – almost empty. Kept because I like the shape and smooth feel of the dispenser.

A wind-up frog without its wind-up key. Because it’s cute and I like frogs.

A tiny picture of my younger son Ethan (now 11) when he was three, looking uncharacteristically angelic and sweet.

A paisley heart key ID cover my sons rejected from the multi-pack they bought. They kept the checkered and striped ones for themselves.

A piece of “2004” confetti from New Year’s Eve 2003. Kept because 2004 was a great year for me…

A long skinny box of matches from “Craft” restaurant in New York, where I went with my friend Nancy on her birthday in 2004. Kept because I love “Craft”, I love Nancy, and I am always homesick for New York and anything to do with New York.

A flat (empty) matchbox from “Windows on the World,” a restaurant that was on the top floor of the World Trade Center. This is probably early‘90’s vintage, from a night I had dinner there with my Dad, who is also gone now.

A button from my purple cashmere cardigan I keep meaning to sew back on.

A mini superball (orange) I found in my son Henry’s pocket when doing laundry.

A safety pin.

3 plastic beads - two purple, one orange.

A $2 stamp with a tiger on it. I probably kept it for the kids.

A glittery silver paper star. Origin forgotten, but I like the glitz of it.

A blue plastic monkey from a frozen margarita - I can't remember where, when, or with whom.

An antique rhinestone necklace - a Christmas gift from my Dad, 1997.

A lovely little rock – pink and gray marbled - from a hike with Joe and the kids in the Marin Headlands this winter.

Obscured View

2006-03-01T11:59:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted in a long time. Mostly because I lost sight of what I thought this blog should be, or what I wanted it to be. I am not one for confessional outpourings. A few people I know have intense, wonderful blogs onto which they bare their souls regularly. Some of these are beautifully written, their deepest emotions wrought in clever turns of phrase and imagery. I envy them their bravery, but that isn't me. I am one who publicly masks much in my life with a humorous spin. Call it a survival tactic. The deeper stuff I must handle subtly and with care. I think I want the blog to be more about the pictures, my photographs, small snippets of my days, and occasionally, a tiny epiphany or two.

In the middle of winter I am amazed as always by the stunning skies, the frothy blossoms on the plum and cherry trees - and my birthday, with wild dancing with friends last weekend that made me feel about twelve-years-old; shamelessly self-indulgent. This is really the beginning of my New Year.

Speaks for Itself

2006-03-01T11:48:00.000-08:00

Ethan's board that he broke with a spin-kick in his Black Belt test for Kuk Sool Won, the Korean Martial Art both of my kids have been practicing for about five years. He doesn't have the black belt yet. He needs nine "stripes" to get there. It will require more tests over a number of months, which are very rigorous and exhausting. Board breaking always comes at the end of the two-hour test, and is just sort of a bonus. You don't have to break the board to pass, but of course all the kids love to do it. It is the fun part, the glamour part. When I saw this broken board propped up on his bookshelf last weekend after the test I smiled to myself. I am reminded that it's good to have a little pride after making it through the pain…

Shameless Moi

2006-01-01T20:05:00.000-08:00

Here I am in my new (to me) 1998 Volvo station wagon. Those who know me well know that I don't really give a damn about cars except that since this transplanted NYC girl has lived in California (20 plus years now thank you very much) I have been indoctrinated into the car culture. Being a commuting working mom adds to this pure necessity - hence the very un-sexy Volvo - my second one. I am one of those peculiar souls who will only own one make of car - over and over again. I can now happily retire my light yellow 1986 "beater" which sits now un-driveable, in our driveway. But hey, she did great in her lifetime of service and only has 283,000 miles on her (a mere pittance for a Volvo) If anyone can get Goldie to start again, they are welcome to her. Otherwise, she gets donated to charity by the end of the week. So long, old girl…

So…moving on into 2006, in addition to so-called resolutions, I try to carry over some of the wisdom gleaned from living through 2005, and take it from there:

Keep my sense of humor
Learn Photoshop well enough to be teaching it by years end
Be kind to Joe and the kids even when I feel like hell
Say "No" when it is to my benefit, rather than "Yes" just to please others
Continue to be brave in my writing and photography (and life)
Get more work published
Pay attention to my intuition
Be kind but honest with those I care about
Laugh often
Trust myself
No regrets

Happy New Year

Merry Merry

2005-12-24T16:53:00.000-08:00

Whichever Holiday or Holidays you celebrate, here are some origins of traditions of the season to remember:

In ancient Rome and earlier, the bringing of forest greenery indoors (holly, ivy etc) during the winter solstice - the darkest time of the year - symbolized the power of the sun and eternal life - "evergreen."

The burning of the Yule log in ancient Celtic and Germanic tradition has a similar meaning - a celebration of the power and life-giving warmth of the sun.

Mistletoe originally symbolzed a truce or peace, and later came to signify a blessing or good luck for couples who kissed underneath it. Here's to lots of xoxox's this season!

And some more contemporary contemplations....

"A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together." - Garrison Keillor

"What do you call people who are afraid of Santa Claus? Claustrophobic." - Anonymous

"Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree. In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall." - Larry Wilde

"As soon as you stop wanting something you get it." - Andy Warhol

"And he puzzled and puzzled till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store? What if Christmas, he thought, means a little bit more." - Dr. Suess

Merry merry everyone...

Spirit

2005-12-10T17:23:00.000-08:00

Moonrise in New Mexico

I 'm working hard to summon the holiday spirit this year. This week I have been to several parties here in San Francisco with a bad cold I masked with mega-doses of Advil - the result being that I now have literally no voice. Anyone who knows me knows that this is torture (at least for me!) In the uncharacteristic quiet imposed on me this weekend by this condition, I'm trying to summon some of the spirit I began to feel at Thanksgiving in New Mexico. It seems like months ago already. Whenever we arrive in winter, I immediately recognize the smell of Pinon pine on the sharp air, the narrow avenues of adobe walls decorated with holiday Luminarias, and the gentle rising shapes of Sun and Moon mountains on the horizon. Days of amazing hikes are followed by evenings by the fire.

I realized that as of this year, we have been visiting Santa Fe regularly for twenty years, when Joe's mom and stepfather first moved there from Connecticut. It is a stunning place, when one learns to look beyond the tourists and the disturbing inequality between the haves and the have-nots. I focus on the landscape, the skies, the weather, and the sense of spirituality that somehow resides in the nature there, no matter what your religion - if any. I always come away feeling cleansed, fresh and renewed, even though my sea-level skin is unused to the dryness. It is harder to get to this peaceful inner place when one has been in four traffic jams on the Bay Bridge in the past four days, but I am trying. This year more than ever, it seems we all need a little peace.

Comfort Zone

2005-11-20T22:03:00.000-08:00

I went way out of my comfort zone last weekend. I went down to LA, saw an old high school friend, and dropped copies of my book at several far-flung bookstores. I drove miles and miles. That place is a spread-out urban sprawl that makes San Francisco look like a quaint little hamlet. It's not just the Big City thing. I grew up in Manhattan, but I always feel completely at ease there. I feel like a fish out of water in Los Angeles. For one thing, I am an avid walker, and there is nobody on the streets. I met my friend at a place on Sunset Boulevard for brunch. Except for the long line outside the restaurant, the neighborhood was a ghost town. As I strolled along with my camera, I felt solitary, exposed. The easy anonymity I feel on the streets of New York or San Francisco was absent. I felt scrutinized by every car that passed by. At a crosswalk, a family in a rented convertible called to me, asking for directions. I smiled and shrugged; surely feeling even more disoriented than they did. I must have been hiding it well.

Years ago, I would meet my dad in LA once a year when he came out from New York on business trips. These were fun visits, since I felt protected and provided for, entertained. This time I was alone, which was sort of fun - no family agenda to consider, only my own. But it was hard selling my book, which is essentially selling myself - not my strong suit. It was good seeing my old friend, who works in the movie business, but whose descriptions of her life seemed about as imaginable to me as life on Mars. In my long drives, I saw dusty Christmas tree lots springing up amidst scrubby palms wrapped with tinsel. I saw the beautiful Pacific Ocean at Venice Beach, and put my toes in - the water so much warmer than it is up here. I saw some very bad, vapid art and some very good, intelligent art.

But at the end of it all, my return home was a welcome relief. I could see my familiar world from a different angle, like looking at my surroundings in a mirror where all is recognizable, but wonderfully reversed, and therefore new. Maybe it is important to move out of our comfort zones from time to time, to do things that are unfamiliar or difficult. Maybe it's necessary to be awakened to the unfathomable lives and lifestyles of others, to push past our preconceived notions and allow some compassion, and to see our selves more clearly in the process.

Orange

2005-09-30T18:24:00.000-07:00

They call it Indian Summer when it gets hot and dry like this. The usual cool breeze from the Bay isn't blowing. Instead, it's a warm wind coming from the inland hills. I love it like this, although it always throws me a little off-balance. I'm an East Coast native. Fall to me always meant crisp air, iron gray skies, a cold wind, the smell of leaves burning and the comfortable hiss of steam radiators kicking on in old brick buildings. It was time to get out the sweaters and the schoolbooks, the new pencils, the clean white paper. Here in California people call it Fire Weather, with good reason. There are several blazes raging in Los Angeles County as I write this. I will never forget the Oakland Hills fire fourteen years ago, when we watched an entire neighborhood go up in extravagant flames right at the end of our street. I remember the scraps of handwritten letters, of book pages, floating down on the fire wind into our yard that day. I bent to pick up what looked like a fragment of a window screen, and it turned to ash in my fingers.

Still, I love this season. Fall has never felt to me like death or like the end of things. Its colors are too rich and vibrant. It's more like a last hurrah. Here, in the seductively balmy afternoon, there is a tree down the street that has already turned. Its leaves glow a brilliant orange in their last furious blush before dropping.

What We Have

2005-09-02T16:50:00.000-07:00

Here are Ethan and Henry blissfully frolicking in Hanalei Bay in Kauai last month. It seems like a year ago. It's hard to believe that summer is really over. I was back at work last week teaching, a little glum about the end of summer, feeling sorry for myself in a most unseemly way. Then hurricane Katrina came and all of the terrible aftermath this week - so wretched in so many ways that we cry when we read the paper. And I can’t help thinking about Daniel, this great fourteen-year-old kid - just a year older than Henry - who was in my summer photography class. He was from New Orleans and spending the summer here in California with his aunt. Just a week before the hurricane, we had a great Night Photography field trip for our last class meeting. Daniel said he would e-mail me some of his shots after he got back to New Orleans. He left the next day. Of course I am wondering about him daily, hoping that he and his family are safe. All I have is his e-mail address and no word yet. Just hope. Of course my self-pity has evaporated, my children are safely back at school, and I am once again jolted by the fragility of life, how much everything can change in a split second, how lucky we are to have every lovely mundane day. I'm loving the late summer sunflowers, the leaves just starting to change, the screech of bike tires outside my window, piles of new school papers which need to be signed, soccer and carpools and daily trips to the grocery store and no time to myself. Just living.

Please click here
or here to find out more about how you can help the hurricane victims.

Inspiration

2005-07-22T20:11:00.000-07:00

Trying to write this summer has been hard. For one thing, I have been happily busy - ferrying the kids back and forth to theater camp which they both love, remembering my own foray into elementary school drama, when I snared the prize role of Gollum in "The Hobbit" in fourth grade. It was a blast. I got to draw out my S's and wear blue face makeup and a four foot train of ripped-up black fishnet stockings. Don't ask. I mean, it was New York City in 1970.

Now I'm looking out the window at my California garden trying to write. I'm thinking about all the things I do not say in my writing - all the harder thoughts between and behind the lines. The stories not told. It's beautiful here. My jasmine is blooming, and the smell is so sweet I don't think hard clean thoughts, just dreamy unconnected ones. I think about the view from my old window in New York - mostly the tops of buildings, and water towers of varying sizes. They seemed like silent, faceless beings in their little peaked hats, watching over the city. Sometimes as I sat doing homework in the evening I would look out at their silhouettes against the twilight sky. They seemed a little sinister, authoritarian, like they were thinking, "Well…? Get on with it." If I imagine that they're still out there, hidden behind the jasmine, maybe I'll just jump back into the notebook and begin, see where it takes me. As Flannery O'Connor once said, "If I waited for inspiration, I'd still be waiting."

Little Lanterns

2005-07-05T21:04:00.000-07:00

I was at a party in New Jersey last weekend. It was so balmy outside even at 9:30 at night. This is what I miss most about the East Coast. This and the summer thunderstorms. Then the lightning bugs came out, tiny sparkling lanterns of their own. I love the earthy way the air smells on summer nights back there. On July 4th in the Bay Area it is too cold to sit shivering on a quilt to watch distant fireworks through the fog. I stayed home and let my kids play in the driveway and light some ancient firecackers we found in the back of a drawer instead. I think I'm going to buy some little lanterns of my own...

angelresize

2004-12-09T22:56:00.000-08:00

angelresize, originally uploaded by swphoto.

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Happy Holidays

typewriter

2004-10-28T12:40:00.000-07:00

typewriter, originally uploaded by swphoto.

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