Biophilia

Over the years, I've been following the work of an artist friend, James Griffith, who has lately been making extraordinary paintings using the medium of tar–"primordial goo"– from La Brea Tar Pits. James has always demonstrated remarkable skill in creating exquisitely detailed images of flora and fauna, but with these works he lures viewers into a layered and sepia-colored world that reflects a vision of the origins of life and provokes fundamental questions about who we are and where we are going.  There is something both noble and poignant about them, wondrous and haunting. I don't know that they are intentionally designed to call out to us across millennia and awaken impulses of concern and responsibility, but I certainly felt a renewed awareness as I stared into them of how deeply I cherish our planet, and a profound connection to the epic saga of life, and a hope, in these precarious days, that we are not obliviously veering towards the end of it. It has been said that art is not so much a way to change the world, but to change perceptions of the world, and I believe the latter can lead to the first.

We met up with James and his wife Sue at the gallery in Santa Monica where his astonishing tar paintings were recently on view in an exhibit appropriately called Biophilia (love of life).  It was a privilege to walk around with the artist and have him point out elements I might have missed...the significance of a grid or shift in texture and color, a word on technique, perhaps a background anecdote.  And here's a link to an in-depth article about the paintings, written by art critic Lita Barrie.

If you're curious about Sue and James (and why I love them), a good place to start is this post from ten years ago about the Folly Bowl, an amphitheater they built in their backyard where friends can gather to hear music and poetry and express themselves in beautiful ways. An amphitheater? Why not? These two specialize in endeavors that are quirky, unlikely, and life-affirming. Sue is an artist too, but she has channeled her creativity, passion, and environmental conscience into a landscaping business that emphasizes native plants, water conservation, and the needs of the birds and the bees...in dazzlingly original designs. She is proud to say that the gardens she has created have enticed many clients to live more of their lives outdoors.

Afterwards, we walked around Santa Monica in the broad flat light at the cusp of dusk. James told me that his father had been a photographer, and one of his gigs was to take pictures of children with Santa Claus at the old Buffums' department store in Long Beach. James was his assistant, gathering letters addressed to Santa, which he said felt somewhat fraudulent even then.

Eventually his father gave James his own camera, and he proceeded to take lots of pictures, then re-wound the film and took lots of pictures over it again. He did this repeatedly.

"I had watched my father deftly winding the film and taking pictures," he said, "and that was the part that that interested me: not the end result, but the process."

I thought this was kind of zen-like...noticing without necessarily capturing; intuitively accepting that all is in flux; attention to process more than product.  But I'm glad nonetheless that James eventually learned to stop time with an image.

Later, we had dinner in an unassuming little seafood restaurant with Christmas lights and fishnet decor and photos from the forties, and in the dim forgiving light, everything felt slower and more gentle than it is.

Grace Harbor

Peering at the rain-smeared night through the windows of the airport bus makes me feel the way I used to feel in the 1970s when I was a girl in my twenties sitting on Greyhound buses, lost and confused, maybe a fledgling feminist but not familiar with the term, a passenger in my own life. Perhaps I should give myself credit for the courage that I had, but I certainly wasted a lot of time in sad pursuits and misguided getaways. This time, I’m on a mission, heading for the Women’s March in Washington, with a rather indirect itinerary: Los Angeles to Charlotte to Albany. From Albany, I’ll drive with my old friend Barbara to Maryland, where friends of hers will host us.

When I first arrive, the weather in Albany is what I recall as vintage upstate New York: a muted palette of gray, brown, and white. Chilly. I go out for a walk after arriving at Barb’s house, careful about the icy driveway, the walkways patched with snow and frozen slush. My hands are cold; I hadn’t thought of wearing gloves. A woman pulls up in a car in front of a house nearby and steps outside to check her mailbox. She smiles. “Enjoying the nice, mild weather?” It’s all relative, I suppose.

Meanwhile, back home, the rain has finally stopped and there are rainbows arched above green hills. Monte texts me: Sacate Creek is flowing! The campground at El Capitan has washed away in mud. The ocean is the color of chocolate milk and waterfalls have surprised old sandstone contours. The world is many worlds, constantly changing, and reality itself seems fluid and unbound.

But there is a structure of truth and principle, and there are foundations we build upon and cherish, and that's why I’m marching on Saturday. I’m marching because I care about human rights, and fairness, and dignity, and possibility, and the fate of our poor beleaguered planet. I’m marching because the person about to assume office, and who in fact lost the popular vote by millions, is dangerously unfit to serve. I want him to see that he does not have our support, and I want to help promote and partake of the solidarity and determination that I know we're going to need to sustain us through the hard times ahead.

“A march? It’s as pointless as a temper tantrum,” I heard someone say mockingly. But I believe, as Rebecca Solnit has written, that symbolic and cultural acts have real power. I am hoping the march will energize us, render visible our national and global community, reinforce the sense of possibility, speak our truths, tell our stories, and mark a beginning rather than defeat and resignation. We march to push back against the affronts being perpetrated upon us and to help launch the resistance. I realize it’s just the start, and long hard work must follow, but a start is required.

_______

The next day, we set out for D.C. in Barbara’s car: Barb (at the wheel), her friend (and soon my friend too) Ronda, and me. There’s a percussion of raindrops and windshield wipers, the murmur of conversation, a soundtrack of songs from Hamilton, Joni Mitchell, and Jackson Browne, including one in particular by Jackson (and Carlos Varela) called "Walls and Doors":

Ever since the world's existed
There's one thing that is certain
There are those who build walls
And those who open doors

Barb and I became friends in the 1970s, not long after my desperado Greyhound bus days. I was belatedly wrapping up a degree at the state university, and she was a newly minted social worker, and we happened to both live in an old brownstone building at the edge of downtown Albany. We would visit each other at the end of the day, de-briefing, listening to records (often Jackson Browne), and coaching one another through what I still refer to as the days of whine and roaches. (You could actually hear those roaches in the night, a sort of tapping-crunching sound, and if you turned on a light, you could see them scurrying across the floor.) We found the humor too, and we became dear to one another, but life took us in different directions, and forty years happened with no contact between us. We reconnected only recently, and we instantly clicked. It was as though she had just walked back in from across the hallway with a new album for us to hear.

Thank God for friendship, especially among women. I don’t know how I would navigate life without such friends. And oh, how women talk! Our car becomes a sanctuary of stories and warmth and camaraderie, a harbor of grace, it seems. Ronda sets out a bag of nuts, a container of celery sticks and carrots, green grapes, Cliff bars. We tend to one another. Even in this transition zone, a demonstration has begun, and it sets the tone for what we are about to witness: mutual support, kindness, and resilience.

The “inauguration” is taking place as we drive, and we don’t know if we can bear to listen. Ronda, an insightful psychologist who is exceptionally devoted to her clients and her own three sons, counsels against denial. “If we don’t listen at all, that’s just intentional ignorance,” she says, and we decide to tune in now and then. What we hear sounds militant, ominous, chilling…a dark vision of carnage and fear, a false and eerie patriotism, a rally to total allegiance.

Ronda’s mother, now in her nineties, is a Holocaust survivor who spent two years hidden in a small underground space…”the grave” is what she calls it. The family lived in what is now Ukraine, and as the horrors mounted, her grandmother sat by the window, planning. One midnight, she bundled up her three children—Ronda’s mother, at ten, was the eldest–-and walked to the house of a man she vaguely knew who did “illegal things” and asked for his help. They were led to a hole in the dirt beneath a pigsty, with a covering too low to stand up beneath it. It was swarming with vermin and lice. Pig urine rained on their heads.

Ronda’s mother has barely spoken of it, except in fragments of poems in old journals, not in English. Decades later, Ronda went back to the Ukraine with her, and they stopped at the house the family had to abandon. A Ukrainian woman came to the door, and with trepidation let them in. Ronda’s mother recognized the furniture, the parquet floor, the very window beside which her grandmother had sat and stared and schemed. The Ukrainian woman cried. She was only a child then. Her parents had taken her to a ditch where they lined up the Jews, shot them, then hastily covered them with dirt. “The ground was heaving,” she said. The townspeople watched.

“How did everyone allow this?” asks Ronda. “What happens matters. And this is why I’m marching tomorrow.”

________

In Maryland, where the Susquehanna River meets the Chesapeake Bay, we pass a city called Havre de Grace, and the name assumes a serendipitous significance, as do so many aspects of this journey. I admit that I had some anxiety and skepticism when I first contemplated the trip, but my conviction is growing with every mile.

At some point, Barb checks in with her mother, another nonagenarian. “Why are you going to Washington?” her mother says. “I’m looking at the TV, and there’s a big commotion there.“

“Mom, it’s a protest,” Barb explains, to no avail. Commotion is worrisome. Distance is daunting. Daughters are precious. A mother worries.

“A march is when bodies speak by walking,“ writes Rebecca Solnit in Hope in the Dark, “[It’s] when private citizens become that mystery the public, when traversing boulevards of cities becomes a way to travel toward political goals.”

Of what use is the moon if you don't have the night?
Of what use is a windmill with no Quixote left who'll fight?

We will not have stood by in silence.

______

We arrive in Silver Springs as darkness falls, and find our way to the house of our hosts, Jeff and Bonnie, who are easygoing and welcoming and seem immediately familiar to me, even though I have never met them. Maybe it’s our Brooklyn roots, shared sensibilities, a similar perspective on what’s happening. We reminisce about pizza and knishes, the sawdust on the floors of butcher shops and produce markets, lining up at school to have sugar cubes and a drop of Salk vaccine placed upon our tongues. We discuss the old neighborhoods, the public schools we went to, the work and dreams of our fathers, the things we learned to value.

There can be freedom only when nobody owns it…

Ronda’s 21-year-old son Jared, a college student in the area, comes by to visit and bring us his firsthand observations of D.C. on this Inauguration Day. It was crazy, he tells us, but not in a celebratory way. Sitting at the table with a group of slightly fraying sixty-somethings, Jared asks if our participation in tomorrow’s march feels as significant to us as protests of the past. Absolutely. Unequivocally. Even more so. Yes. We all agree on this. The threat is real and profound. The need to resist is crucial, compelling. It's an historical moment.

I think Jared is proud of his mom. In a nod to Joni Mitchell, he calls the three of us women “Ladies of the Canyon,” and it seems like an appellation of honor. I picture the California canyon of my home, then feel the comforting old embrace of East Coast-ness, and for a moment, everything comes full circle.

________

As soon as we board the Metro the next morning, we can feel that something is happening, and we are part of it. There are groups of friends carrying posters, parents with little girls in pink hats, men and women, Boomers and Millennials, and certainly those in between. Everyone is pouring into the city, filling up the trains, and the mood is friendly but not festive. We recognize each other. We’re in this together. We have a shared sense of mission and resolve.

We disembark at Union Station, and our numbers keep multiplying…pink hats ascending escalators, patiently lining up for a pre-march restroom stop, streaming out onto the streets. A policeman at the station tells us that the men’s room is open to women today. He’s good-natured and friendly and admits that this is the happy day. Yesterday? Not so much. More like the twilight zone.

Outside, the air is fresh and the sky a broad white slate of cloud and fog. The pre-march rally has begun, but we are far from it, and we will only see it later in replay at Jeff and Bonnie’s house. Right now we just walk in the general direction of the starting point until we abruptly cannot walk, because the street is completely clogged with people. Absolute gridlock. It’s the sort of thing that would usually make me claustrophobic, but this is where the miracle begins, because despite the frustration and discomfort, everyone is patient, polite, respectful, and considerate.

At one point, a young woman begins to hyperventilate and needs to get through, and the crowd immediately makes a path for her, like Moses parting the Red Sea, many looking on with maternal concern as she passes, offering water, asking if she needs anything. Four Vanderbilt coeds have driven through the night from Nashville to be there, one of them wheelchair-bound due to a broken foot; strangers form a barrier around them to give them a little extra space. In the course of the entire day, there will not be a single episode of violence.

But where is the march? We want to march, and we've come a long way to do so, and here we are just inching along or standing still, unable to reach the route! Suddenly we realize: we ARE the march. The original river has formed a hundred tributaries, the floodgates are open, and we are flowing. All of Washington, D.C. becomes a great, epic march.

At one point we march alongside a small band called Brick-by-Brick, a public art performance group that builds human “walls” against misogyny. They are wearing brick-patterned jumpsuits, carrying signs in protest of actions that threaten civil and human rights, and making wonderful music. We march along singing “This Land is Your Land”, “Down By the Riverside”, “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”... traditional songs of protest, hope and yearning. There’s something about the music that really does it to me, along with the sights of the Washington Monument, The Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial in the distance, and the messages on the signs that people are carrying, some of them blunt, some witty, collectively a kind of poetry of the people, and there is a feeling of extraordinary unity and unshakeable determination. My eyes fill with tears. My heart fills with hope. Half a million people? A million? Who knows. We are everywhere. We are a harbor. We are the sea.

We Have to Share

         A Visit with Lynne and Chantalle Castellanos of Youth Empowered

                                                                              Chantalle, Lynne, and Max

You might not notice it if you didn’t know it was there, but tucked away on the ground floor of a modest building in Solvang is a place where magic happens. It’s called Youth Empowered, although co-founders Lynne Castellanos and her daughter Chantalle have not yet gotten around to putting up a sign.  It’s a nonprofit educational organization – a gym, classroom, and community center where kids can come, not just for athletic training, but also tutoring, friendship, and a sense of connection. It is, in essence, a place to be. In addition to Lynne and Chantalle, Omar Sandoval completes the team as a coach and instructor. Lynne is a well-loved teacher in the Valley, and Chantalle and Omar are both professional athletes in mixed martial arts.

“Athletics is the lure,” says Lynne. “We want them to be good people, and we want them to do their academic work, but if we have to trick them into coming here for boxing or wrestling, that’s great!”

The program evolved so gradually and intuitively, it’s difficult for Chantalle to pinpoint a starting date. The idea may have first taken root in college, when an assignment in a Criminal Justice class got her thinking about restorative justice and the sociology of gangs. She decided that she wanted to work with troubled kids or kids who were moving in the direction of trouble. It seemed to her that the primary impetus behind gang involvement was a need to connect and belong.

She later took a state job in Sacramento, whose rough south side neighborhoods were characterized by violence and gang activity.  “It’s a way to be a part of something,” Chantalle observes. “Especially in inner cities, parents are working, kids come home, and they’re on their own. They almost need the gangs as a safety net. If they go out and walk around, they’re in danger at times. So they join a gang and they have a protection, a family, not in a positive way, but they feel that connection.”

“But instead of the street, there could be places like this,” she says. “You can do it through sports, but there are other ways.  Our theory is that whatever you’re passionate about, you can find a child to share it with. Find a child and mentor them. Give them a boost. That’s what our world needs, and we don’t have enough of it.”

Obviously, the Santa Ynez Valley is not the inner city, and gangs are thankfully not a significant threat. But Chantalle observes other phenomena even here that are indicative of underlying deficiencies locally and in our culture as a whole. “I don’t see the kindness in kids that I saw around me when I was growing up,” she notes. “Kids seem hardened a little bit. They’re sarcastic. There’s no respect for one another or for adults. But how can we expect to see respect and kindness in kids if we don’t model it as adults? Even walking down the street, I surprise people by saying hello, not just tourists, but people I see every day. And it makes me sad that hello makes them jump a little bit. We’re supposed to say hello to one another! We’re supposed to connect. It’s crazy when you walk down the street and you have to dodge people because they’re all staring at their phones.”

Lynne, Chantalle, and Omar are out to create a different kind of culture at Youth Empowered. For starters, there’s the implicit code of respect that the framework of sports demands, where fair play, focus, and discipline are essential.  “Some of them step onto the mat thinking they are already so strong and so cool,” Lynne says, “and then they begin to realize that they don’t really know how to box, and there’s a grandma here who can do more push-ups than they can, or a seven-year-old girl, and there are grown men out there sweating…maybe even crying. It’s like everything can come out. Nobody laughs at you. It’s safe.  We’re all in it together here.”

Chantalle and Omar do boxing, kick-boxing, wrestling, and a variety of circuit and strength-training classes. Lynne leads fitness-boxing classes for kids, cardio-boxing classes for adults, women’s powerlifting, and a “Little Super-Heroes” workout for toddlers, complete with tiny capes. There’s also a once-a-week yoga class.

But the respect and caring of Youth Empowered goes beyond the mat.  Lynne’s specialty is tutoring and reading with students and helping them to develop better work habits.  She has high standards, and she holds kids accountable. “My friends were always terrified of my mom,” recalls Chantalle, “but they also loved her, because they knew her strictness was an expression of love.”

Sometimes it’s a matter of emptying a backpack and organizing its contents or pointing out more effective ways of keeping notes. “With some teen-agers, you have to stir them up a bit, or sort of push them off the track they’re on and help them find a different kind of balance,” Lynne says. “They need to be re-directed.”

Sometimes, though, they just need a quiet conversation, and at Youth Empowered no one is turned away.  “Now and then a kid will wander in and you just know they kinda need you,” says Chantalle, “and you become their therapist that day.”  

Whether there’s a specific issue to be resolved or just a longing for safe haven, this kind of personal responsiveness demands an ability to improvise. “We deal with things day-by-day,” says Chantalle. “It’s hard to think about long-term goals. The nature of our program is that we’re always evolving, and we’ll always be in progress.”

Money is tight. Funding for Youth Empowered has been a patchwork quilt of membership dues, donations, and small grants. “We cover our expenses,” says Chantalle, “and not a whole lot more, but we don’t want to grow too fast anyway.” There are about twenty-five or thirty family memberships at this point, and a number of individual adult and child memberships. No one is turned away for being unable to pay. Lynne and Chantalle acknowledge they will need to find additional resources in order to sustain the program for the long run, but right now they’re too busy running it to focus on fundraising and pursue grants. 

Somehow it’s staying afloat, and there have been huge individual successes. Struggling math students have been steadily improving test scores under Lynne’s guidance, and Omar has stepped in to fill a need for impromptu Spanish lessons. High school students walk into the gym not just to work out, but to sit on the couch and do homework together. Children engage in simple service projects, such as making cards and Christmas bags, and gain a deeper sense of connection to community. Teenaged girls are acquiring new confidence in their real strength and capabilities, along with a better sense of how to dress appropriately. (Hint: teeny tiny shorts do not make wrestling easier.) A former student named Kyleigh, now attending Hancock, assists in the gym and with tutoring, and is helping to set up a reading corner and book club for junior high and high school girls. Another participant, a man in his sixties, has established friendships with younger workers that he had previously seen on the job but never known as people.  “We never had any generational connection,” he says, “And now they’re my boxing buddies.”

A family atmosphere prevails. The team’s personal dedication and passion drive the program, and it becomes more than the sum of its parts. “It’s a good model,” Chantalle says, “but there’s an element of magic to it that comes from sharing what we love. And we can all try to figure out what we can do in our lives to create and share that kind of magic, whatever form it takes. We have to reach out to every child. We have to share.”

The Exact Purpose of Kelsey Sullivan

Improving the World, Little by Little, Through Soccer and Love

At 28, Kelsey Sullivan is fearless and determined, but she always has a twinkle in her eye.  After graduating from Dunn School in Los Olivos, she went to Ghana as a volunteer for the Right To Dream Academy, a residential international school that offers scholarships to talented young soccer players drawn from all over West Africa. There she met eleven boys from Sierra Leone who had been sponsored by the then fledgling Craig Bellamy Foundation (CBF), started by Welsh soccer player Craig Bellamy who, after seeing the devastating conditions in which these kids grow up, resolved to educate them through their love of the sport. "Something about those Sierra Leoneans resonated with me," Kelsey recalls. "They're honest, direct, and a little bit cheeky. I'm like that too. I was just drawn to the kind of energy they have." Today, she is the primary sponsor, advocate, and den mother to fourteen young men from Sierra Leone who are living, playing soccer, and attending high school in the Santa Barbara area. It's been quite an adventure.

A versatile athlete who has played soccer, run track, boxed, danced, and, as a child in Wyoming, was a dog sledding champion, Kelsey's talent and temperament were a good fit for the program. She came home briefly after her volunteer stint, worked in a bakery in Solvang, and thought about things. She knows there are kids in need everywhere, but you might as well start somewhere, and she knew she had an affinity for the people of Sierra Leone...and soccer. When she learned that CBF needed an English teacher and wanted to start a girls' league, she went to Sierra Leone. Jumping in and figuring it out as she goes is her characteristic strategy, and it seems to work for her. She has a sunny, optimistic nature, but she is also hard-working, persistent, and resourceful. 

“We look at maybe 4,000 kids, and ultimately whittle it down to sixteen,” says Kelsey. “For the kids who are chosen, it’s huge. They get to live in a dorm with three meals a day, running water, electricity, and the only grass field in the country except for the national stadium. But it’s not just athletics. Education is a big part. We give them five-year scholarships and we see how they progress. After a couple of years we start to see who our stand-out leaders are and who has really strong character, and they might be chosen to come here to California.”

“When we went to recruit, we learned that there was no formal league in Sierra Leone where we could find these boys, so we started a Youth Soccer League with help from UNICEF, and now we have a girls’ league as well. And there’s more involved than the games. We have a point system that takes into account wins and losses; fair play; community projects, and school attendance. If you win games, you still have to go to school.”

Dunn School, Kelsey’s alma mater, has been especially receptive to the CBF boys who make it to California. Seven will be starting this year, and Dunn's first CBF graduate, Sahid, will be attending college at Loyola Marymount. There are also two boys at Cate this year, and two at Laguna Blanca.  The students have full scholarships, funded through a mix of endowment funds and private donations. They play club soccer, which sometimes leads to interest from colleges. “Hopefully some will play pro, and some will get degrees, and we’ll see where it goes,” says Kelsey. In 2020, when this current group graduates, she plans to move back to Sierra Leone and open up a girls’ version of the program.

The Cate boys are boarders and the rest of them live with Kelsey in a house that she bought–it’s simply what she chose to do with money she inherited. “I’m the only adult, just me and the boys, and I had to create this part. Some people think it must be strange, or challenging, but actually it feels good. I am working with kids who know how lucky they are to be here, and they are appreciative.  The first year, we only had one boy, Sahid, the one who is going to LMU this fall, and it was just the two of us in the house. I was twenty-four, and he was fourteen. How would this all work? Neither one of us really knew, but it was interesting for us to navigate. To this day, I still have these hours-long conversations with Sahid. He’s been good about explaining a lot of the cultural things. He’s taken on that role. We teach each other.”

“There are always little things…like one boy went to take a shower, and after he’d been gone for forty-five minutes, it turned out he didn’t know how to turn it on. Or how do you use a microwave? Another boy had just arrived, and on his second night, all the smoke alarms went off…we had cooked chicken, but it was Ramadan, and he had been fasting, so he was trying to re-fry the chicken at four in the morning, but he didn’t know how to do it. The house was filled with smoke.”

“Honesty is what works for us. We’re all gonna make mistakes, but we just talk about it. It’s the same for me learning things culturally. Being a woman taking charge—I know that’s been an interesting change for a lot of the boys. But they make fun of me too. They call me Chelsea when I get mad. ‘Oh, Chelsea’s out.’ And as a group, it turns out we’re the most competitive people in the world. A card game, whatever, everyone wants to make a bet, everyone wants to win. It’s always a competition. And that’s fun too. I like that. I thrive on it. I’m in.”

“I never get tired of watching them play. Someone is always training, every night, and I sit and watch. They’re so great to watch! Their personalities come through. You can see this is totally their space. They’re having fun. And that’s my Zen time, just sitting there and watching them practice.” 

“This year we have three Christian boys and the others are Muslim. We figure God is God, whether it’s a mosque or a church or a house.  We pray before dinner together. We share.  One boy, Musa, was in class last year and a classmate was repeating what he’d heard on the news or whatever about Muslims being really violent and things like that, and Musa said, ‘I’m Muslim. I’m not like that.’ And for that kid, it was eye opening. They have this safe space to interact, articulate thoughts and share with honesty. Everyone comes away with a better understanding.”

Kelsey goes back to Sierra Leone each year to get the boys, and when she talks about the place and its people, her love is palpable. “It’s actually hard to come back here afterwards,” she says. “Whenever I go there, I feel refreshed, simplified, clear-headed. All the things we worry about, you can’t worry about there. It’s just basic needs. To get something done, for example, takes twice as long, maybe three times as long, as you would expect. They call it African time. So what you can accomplish here in maybe two hours can take three days there. But what’s the hurry anyway? So it takes a long time to do things, but then you’re more relaxed and clear. Then I come back here, and everyone is rushing around. And I take the boys to Costco. You want cereal? There are like 700 choices. It’s overload.”

“Traveling can be hard. They question me when we travel, so I take the guardian papers everywhere we go. The visa process is a monster task every time. You never know what makes a difference or when someone is going to be denied and why. It doesn’t get any easier.”

“Eventually you’re there, and as soon as you leave the airport, there’s all this poverty, right in your face. But the place is honest, it’s raw, it’s colorful, and it’s friendly. I like talking to people. Everything is a story. I love that part of it. And there’s always an adventure with every single thing you do. Something always happens.”

“You wouldn’t think that in the face of so much poverty and sadness, you would find the kind of hope that the people there have. One of the fathers sells newspapers in Freetown. He’s the happiest, nicest man I’ve ever met. He works so hard, he has so little, but he’s so happy and grateful for life. You see a guy like that and think, ‘What have I got to be unhappy about?’ Maybe I’m missing the point. So I feel refreshed. It gives me hope.” 

Kelsey seems uniquely qualified for the mission she’s undertaken. All her strength and spirit and distinctive Kelsey-ness has been channeled into it. She is also quick to acknowledge teachers, family members, friends, and others who have helped her along the way and are there for her still. She is refreshingly modest, never claims to be an expert, and laughingly admits when she's puzzled. She doesn't much like to be in the spotlight, but she agreed to do this interview because she is proud of the boys and wants their stories shared. You can learn more about the Craig Bellamy Foundation on their website: craigbellamyfoundation.org

“If you find what breaks your heart, then you find your passion," Kelsey says. "I read that someplace, and it’s true for me. We have so much, so many opportunities. How can we share? What would bring communities and cultures together? That would help the world so much. The dialog, the learning experience, even just to have a real conversation, so much learning can happen! For me, it breaks my heart when you can’t do that. So how can I bring these things together? I found my exact purpose. This is what I was supposed to do, and I just keep plugging away. It will fall into place. The good things will come.”

Anything For A Celebration

Meet the dynamic and charming Readon (Donnie) Marilyn Grossi Silva.  She was born in Lompoc on December 7, 1933. Her childhood home was on Santa Lucia Canyon Road, and she has lived in Lompoc all her life.

Donnie and I had an impromptu conversation at the Lompoc Valley Historical Society last week, where she is one of the volunteers who diligently tend to the memorabilia of the area's history. She is constantly in motion, but I followed her around and did my best to ask her questions.

I’d heard she was the first Lompoc Flower Festival Queen, so I asked her about this:

It isn’t hard to picture Donnie as a festival queen, looking pretty in a lavender dress, waving from a float. She earned the title by selling the most tickets to the festival, and her still vivacious personality must have served her well.

But she also admits to having had connections: her dad was bartender for Martin’s Bar, and his bookkeeper gave her good advice about where to sell the tickets. "I was in every bar for miles around selling those tickets," she laughs. Her mother ran the soda stand at Stan Johnson’s drug store on the corner of I and Ocean, and that helped too.  Yes, those tickets sold like hot cakes. 

Donnie has fond memories of the way Lompoc used to be, when it felt more like a community and everyone came out to celebrate: 

The changes in the flower festival reflect the way the town has changed in general. People aren’t involved as they used to be, says Donnie:

Donnie’s father played accordion, sometimes accompanying a terrific local piano player named Bea Harris at the USO. “Back then they had dancers,” she said. “The dancing has changed. But the swing...they’ll never get rid of the swing.”

Donnie’s history is right here. All the old names represent real people to her, and every street holds stories. She observes that many newcomers lack a sense of the past and aren’t even interested in it. They do not feel the deep connection and sense of community that add such pleasure and meaning to her life. It's a loss.

But maybe there's a lesson here too on the importance of engaging in community, participating, celebrating, and learning what happened yesterday to help guide us through today. 

Fire

We experience a distinctive kind of vulnerability living here in drought conditions at the edge of the brush and chaparral. I snapped the above ominous-looking photo on Thursday afternoon while we were driving north on Highway 101 near El Capitan. The fire had not yet reached the road, which was shut down in both directions just a few hours later. Pushed by howling winds and fueled by miles of dry vegetation that has not burned in decades, the Sherpa Fire is now at 7800 acres, with 45% of the perimeter contained. It is still burning fiercely, and apparently 1900 fire fighting personnel have been dispatched to the scene, all of them heroes to us. (I have found this InciWeb link to be an excellent source of regularly updated information.)

It's frightening and humbling. Fire reminds us of the ephemeral nature of things, of what matters and what does not, of how little is within our control. We have been very fortunate here at this ranch. The fire is quite a bit to the east, and the wind has been pushing it away, not towards us. We certainly see the smoke, feel the anxiety, and know that we are always at risk, for that is the nature of living here. But we appear to be out of the path of this particular fire.

I have been thinking, though, about the phenomenon of fire in California and how many people have had formative fire experiences. Even among those of us spared the loss of life or property, we share a common residue of images and emotions: hills in flame, blizzards of ash, fear, evacuation, and at some point a necessary letting go.

My own daughter will never forget the children in tears on the school playground as the 1993 Laguna Beach Fire seemed to be encircling them. Many classmates and neighbors lost their homes. Eleven years later, smoke plumes from the Gaviota Fire rose visibly into the sky while she was in the midst of high school graduation ceremonies at Dunn School in Los Olivos. In both cases we were exiled from our houses with whatever possessions we happened be carrying or wearing that day.

My friend Julie remembers being evacuated for a week during the 1990 Painted Cave Fire, watching the flames and feeling curiously detached. "At one point," she told me, "we were allowed to go home and had a half hour to gather our belongings. We ended up taking only a very few special things, important papers, and animals. In the end, it was a Zen experience. We gave up everything. And then we got it back."

Another friend, Genevieve, was evacuated from her home at Midland as fire rolled down the mountains during the Mare Fire of 1993. She took refuge in Saint Mark's church in Los Olivos and watched the sunrise for the first time in her life. "The proximity of fire strikes a primal nerve in us," she concluded.  Maybe it is some ancient recognition that we are part of a cycle much greater than ourselves.

Because the current fire is blazing in the vicinity of the infamous Refugio Fire of 1955, I am particularly interested in the memories of folks who were here at that time. One of them was Lincoln Hollister, who was seventeen at the time. He recalled:

Yes, I was with a crew keeping the fire away from the Arroyo Hondo house and the barn. I was with another guy between the barn and the highway. Glowing embers were flying around and starting fires wherever they landed. Some actually blew out to sea! We were battling these little fires with wet gunny sacks. The main fire was starting to cross the east Arroyo Hondo ridge, up high, when suddenly the whole canyon from about the barbecue pit to the crest, just exploded in a ball of fire, from west ridge to east ridge. This changed the wind direction, as the air was sucked into the huge ball of flame. Where we were, out in the field south of the barn all the little fires we were trying to put out suddenly started running towards the barn. Smoke filled the air and visibility dropped to zero. We put bandanas over our noses and ran in the direction we were headed, toward the barn, locking arms. Then a bit of clearing happened, and there was a ranch flatbed truck with people on the back. We were pulled up onto the truck and driven out, passing a fire department engine that was headed to where we had just been, to save the house and barn. My father had arrived at the intersection of the Arroyo Hondo Road and 101. He was relieved to find I had gotten out on the truck!

If you're interested, here's a link to a 1950s film about the Refugio Fire. It's called "Watershed Fire" and it's a classic.  I shared it with Lincoln, and he mentioned that he saw his Uncle Jack Hollister, then state senator, about twelve minutes into it, in the discussions about re-seeding. He also recalls helping to stop traffic at Gaviota and turn people back when the 101 was closed.

"I was used for the back fire operation at Gaviota pass," he added.  "I was given a stick with a flare attached at the end and told to just run through the grass, with fire billowing up behind me.  I was almost seventeen at the time...too young to be officially drafted as a fire fighter, but I was around to help as needed."

Anyway, as I sit here in my comfortable house looking out onto the brown hills and tired-looking orchard, I know a battle is being waged nearby, and I hope it ends well and soon. I have the luxury of being philosophical because we are not in immediate danger right now. But I realize that everything changes, and possession is an illusion. New growth will come, but fire is a premonition of all that we must lose.

Shoes

Shortly after the end of World War II, one of my grandfather's brothers sent a letter to him describing impoverished conditions in Southern Italy and asking if my grandfather would send a decent pair of shoes for his daughter Rosaria. My grandfather had left the port of Naples on a New York-bound steamer decades earlier, in 1905, and as far as his relatives knew, he had been living the American dream ever since. In truth, he too was struggling to get by, but his pride would not allow him to admit this to the family he had left behind. Instead, he asked his eldest son (my father) to respond.

My father good-naturedly took on the task. He wrote a letter in Italian, explaining that shoe sizes in the United States were different, and that someone should draw an outline of Rosaria's foot on paper and send it back to him. When he knew what American size to buy for her, he would happily do so. Simple. He did not treat it like a big favor. Soon he would be shipping her a brand new pair of shoes.

I know this because Rosaria (who is now in her 80s) kept the letter and showed it to me many years later when I first came to visit, a trip that neither my grandfather or my father was ever able to make. Speaking in Italian with someone translating, Rosaria told the story and placed the long-cherished letter in my hands. There in blue ink was my own dear father's familiar penmanship, and it felt as if he were in the room with us, a full-circle kind of moment, with tears and hugs.

Fast forward another thirty years, and I was again in Italy. This time my young cousin Luca appeared to have been assigned the job of showing me around, a duty which he dispatched with humor and patience. One morning he took me along as he made his rounds of various properties he manages in Scafati, and then we stopped at a little sandal and shoemaker shop called Mastrogio, where his friend is a master craftsman. The concept was to choose a style, customize with whatever ornaments appealed to you, and have it specifically fit and made for your foot. The shelves were stocked with soft colorful moccasins and samples of sandals suitable for goddesses. Behind the counter were supplies and equipment, and on the wall a clock and crucifix. It was the setting in which a true artisan worked, and it smelled of good leather.

Luca and I manage to communicate pretty well with the help of a translator app, our own sincere efforts to talk in one another's language, and at times a congruity of interest and ideas that makes me wonder if there might be something genetic going on here. (Our grandfathers were brothers.)  Luca is always in motion, always seems to have something going on, someplace to be, an idea up his sleeve.  But now he had a surprise for me. "We want to give you a pair of sandals," he said. "Choose the ones you like. See if there's a pair that fits."

This of course was too generous. Even so, I might have considered it and graciously accepted but for the fact that I have the world's ugliest feet, with bunions and bumps and broken-nailed toes splayed out like a fan. I do not wear sandals at all, let alone sandals for goddesses who possess lovely feet that can step out nearly naked.

"Perhaps a pair of moccasins then," said Luca's gentle friend.  I picked up a bright blue one, felt its softness, tried to imagine myself wearing it, even dared to remove my own shoe and attempted to slip my wicked stepsister foot into it.  This one was too far too small, and another far too big, and the gift in general seemed too extravagant anyway.

There was a bit of discussion in Italian. "He can do this for you," Luca said. "We draw an outline of your foot on a piece of paper, leave with him, and he make a shoe fit just for you. Your perfect size."

But there wasn't time, which didn't matter, because wasn't this moment gift enough? It was a full-circle kind of thing.

There's This

Above we see Nick (visiting from Wales), Rebecca, and Guy on a morning stroll through a canyon in the Santa Barbara north county backcountry. If a passion can be described as patient and gentle despite its intensity, that's what these birdwatchers possess.  The soundtrack is the crunching of feet on gravel, the song and chatter of birds, and comments such as these, interspersed with quiet wows:

"A falcon. Coming back around...."

"I didn't see any warm tones at all..."

"I could in the face, and then I just saw the tail…"

"The flight would say kestrel to me..." 

Or:

It is amazing to me how much these folks observe in such a short distance, how much life and layering and richness they perceive, and how oblivious I am. They stop in their tracks every few steps and marvel at the wonders that abound. "There are all sorts of problems in the world," muses Guy at one point, "And then...there's this." 

The list of birds they see becomes a kind of poem: Nuttall's woodpecker, Western bluebird, California thrasher, dark-eyed junco, purple finch, cedar waxwing, American kestrel, red-tailed hawk, Anna's hummingbird, canyon wren...just to name a few.  

Pretty soon I have a kink in my neck from staring up into oak and sycamore trees trying to distinguish bird forms and movements by following descriptions of bumps on bark, angles of branches, and clusters of leaves, and still, to be honest, I don't always see:

In addition to visuals, the birders are impressively tuned in to sound. "I think I'm hearing hermit thrush," Rebecca might say suddenly.

Or, in this rare instance, she responds to a lovely descent of notes that even I recognized:

In fact, the auditory aspect of birding is Rebecca's special strength, and it has opened up a universe for her. "The sound part of it reveals what I know to be there; it layers it for me. I can perceive so much richness and diversity just by listening. To be honest, sometimes it’s difficult to be so tuned into sound because I can’t tune it out. It can be very distracting." 

I ask her if the practice of birdwatching has rendered her more observant and patient with humans in her everyday life. "More than the act of birding," she replies, "what has caused me to be more focused and patient is working with students. Teaching. Because it's a really focused practice, describing and re-describing and re-describing things to maybe connect with somebody until they finally get it. And it's so very satisfying when they do. I get so much out of opening that door for them." 

Rebecca was introduced to birdwatching by Fred Emerson, a respected local expert, but it was Guy, who is with us today, who became her mentor. Even now, the two will often notice a bird in the same moment and say its name together.  It's fun to be out walking with people who are so comfortable with each other, so appreciative of the environment, and so exuberant about their activity.

"If you had asked me twenty years ago if this is what I would be doing, I wouldn't have believed it," Rebecca tells me, "but I have come to love it. This is my subject. And I've found my tribe."

In a few more paces, something else catches her attention. "Oh my God, how beautiful!" Obviously I am not seeing or hearing with the birders' degree of nuance, knowledge, and relish, but I am struck anew by the beauty of this canyon and its myriad miracles, quietly happening without us. 

"Do you realize you've been in a place that doesn't exist?" Rebecca asks Nick as we walk back home. "You've landed in something that was." 

 Was but still is. Thank God. I feel humble and grateful, as ever.

Stopping Along The Way

We were headed up to the Bay area for a couple of social events, but as is often true when we travel by car, the stops along the way are a big part of the fun. I love checking out the main streets and peripheral neighborhoods of towns and cities that I have no reason to be in, exploring curious non-destinations where people I will never know live and work. I enjoy peering into shop windows, pondering variations on the theme of front porch, and discovering aging buildings that speak of past grandeur. The best thing is when the town has its own little historical museum, replete with wonderful photographs and artifacts, often staffed by elderly ladies whose grandparents lived there too. Atascadero, where we stopped for a late lunch yesterday at the Carlton Hotel restaurant, has one of those museums, but it was closed.

We did, however, take a pleasant walk, pausing for awhile in front of the beautiful Colony Administration Building, which is currently under restoration but still impressive. Designed in 1913 by San Francisco architects Bliss and Faville (who, coincidentally, were also the architects for the Hollister House here at the Ranch) it was clearly meant to instill a kind of civic pride, embodying the ideals and hopes of California. Its warm honey hue is the color of the native clay used by a local brick factory, and it is crowned by a domed rotunda, now covered by plastic and scaffolding, which initially housed a public library and was serving as the City Council Chambers when the San Simeon earthquake damaged the building in 2003 and forced its closure. Across the front facade are inscribed these words: The most valuable of all arts will be that of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil.

I was struck by this spirit of industry and optimism and its agricultural emphasis. Later I did some reading about the building and the place and learned that Atascadero was founded by the publisher of The Women's National Weekly as an urban experiment, an "ideal city" based upon families living simple moral lives in harmony with nature, each with an acre or so of land, and compatible cottage industries nearby, in particular, flower seed production. Homes were built, many of which still stand, fruit trees were planted, and a 17-mile road to Morro Bay was constructed, now known as Highway 41.

But when we passed through, it was President's Day, and while construction workers were busy at the Administration Building, most of the businesses were closed and the nearby park and streets were virtually deserted. I noticed a sign for an old-fashioned hardware-and-everything-else kind of store that appeared to be open and I went inside to look around. I like the smell of such stores, and the eclectic assemblage of goods they offer. This was a family-run business, no chain name in sight, and it was a little like stepping back into time.

In the top picture is Rick Grisanti, the proprietor, whose parents, Joe and Olga, founded the store in 1947. It has been at its current location since 1962, selling sporting goods, athletic equipment, plumbing supplies, gardening supplies, paint, gifts, housewares, and toys, with friendly banter thrown in free. The old guy at the counter, to the right, whose name I did not get, told me that his father and Rick's father had been friends, and that he still has the FM radio he bought here fifty years ago. He also told me that I should come back in 2013 when the Administration Building opens up again so I can go inside. "Oh, it's really worth seeing," he said. "Long time ago, I got married up there."

"Can I help you find anything?" asked Rick.

"Oh, no. I'm just looking around," I said.

"Well, just take anything you want," said the old guy. "Everything is free today."

"Yeah," said Rick to me. "Free to you. He's pickin' up the tab."

I told them in my effusive way that I thought the store was charming and the town was interesting, and it was fun talking to locals. "It's like a real community," I added, stupidly.

"What do you mean 'like'? " said my old-friend-whose-name-I-didn't-get. "It is a community. Spent my life here. Been goin' by the cemetery a lot lately, though. I keep telling myself, 'Well, not yet. Maybe soon, but not yet'."

Rick gave me his card and invited me to stop back next time I was passing through. I told him I would, and I'll buy something too.

Then I stepped out into the vacant streets lined with blossoming trees. Fruitless pear trees, Rick had said when I asked what they were, "...and sometimes they don't smell so good, but they're real pretty, aren't they?" A breeze came up and for a moment seeds and white blossoms filled the air like snow.

Sometimes It Rained (2004)

The access road to the 101 was a muddy rushing river and our phone line was dangling limply over a branch. It wasn’t hard to read symbolic meaning in this, but the immediate implication was that we were stranded, suddenly simply here. We lived in a wet green world where creeks were roaring and mud was sliding from the hills and no one was going anyplace soon. Everywhere there was the din of water: running, dripping, roaring through the canyon. Newborn rivulets trickled through the grass, waterfalls surprised old sandstone contours, and once you accepted what was beyond your control, reality itself seemed fluid and unbound. 

            But first we gathered by the flooded crossing in our Wellies and rain gear, assessing the situation, speculating as to time frame, sharing news and stories, and tending to one another in a way we often don’t. Do you have enough fuel for your generator? Can we pull aside the tree that came down last night? Who has a car parked on the other side of the trestle? Who needs eggs? We were all exasperated about the well-known inadequacy of the crossing at the Gaviota Creek, but mixed in with our frustration, I have to admit, there was a hint of a holiday feeling, at least at the beginning. How much can you protest when fate hands you a bonus Saturday that just goes on and on? All of our important meetings would somehow happen without us.

            “It’s another world,” said my husband, as we walked through the fog in a lull between storms.

            In truth it was the only world.

            At night we lay awake listening to the fury outdoors, and in the morning we marveled at the rain gauge and surveyed the aftermath. Wild pigs had gotten into the orchard to feast on oranges and macadamia nuts. The swollen creek was etching new tributaries. About a half-mile up the canyon a section of the road near our neighbor’s house was near collapse, and we mucked around in the mud attempting a makeshift repair here and there. Shutters were banging and windows were leaking and we grew chilly and tired and wet. But there was a kind of enchantment, too: the air smelled fresh with sage and eucalyptus, the toyon berries were varnished, and transparent beads of water adorned every leaf and blade of grass.

            Yet images via satellite Internet reached us even here, and superseding all was the backdrop of watery devastation wrought by the Asian tsunami, fathomless and horrific. It put our small inconveniences into perspective and seeped into our souls, somehow washing away notions of being separate and safe in the world. Maybe this was the beginning of wisdom and an impetus for compassion, but there was also something free falling and scary about the randomness and vulnerability it implied.

            “What if we miscalculated?” a boy in my class asked me once. “What if we lived our whole lives believing one thing and it turned out we were wrong?”

            We had been talking about religions of the ancient world, but in a broader sense, about the search for meaning in our own lives and the answers by which we choose to live. I attempted of course to be wise and reassuring, which is difficult when you’re clueless and confused.

            “Just try to be a good person,” I offered lamely.  “It doesn’t matter what you call it.”

            And I thought about that as I watched the sea drawn back into its lowest tide, stained in the strange light of a hidden sunset. In fact, I thought about it constantly in the days that followed, having suddenly so much time for contemplation. The element of water was the indisputable theme and architect of my psyche, washing, eroding, reshaping, and unearthing. The ranch had become a kind of island, and yet I was more aware than ever of my connection to others, of my community here and my membership in one greater.

            One afternoon a physician neighbor, newly returned after having offered his services in Sri Lanka for a week or two, left his car on the other side of the creek, then walked across the railroad bridge and back onto the ranch. Sri Lanka. It seemed very far away and suddenly very near, connected by a trestle.

            “Hold onto other hands in the water,” wrote Annie Dillard in a piece she read on NPR.

            And the heartaches of the world pressed heavily upon us.

            More rain was predicted. We did what we could, then sighed. We were down to the essence: simplified, renewed, washed clean perhaps, but damp and tattered and all in need of mending.

            “Put more water in the soup,” wrote a friend in an e-mail, “there’s a better day a’comin’.”

            Beneath the dome of wet sky, Indian paintbrush and small spears of orange poppies were sprouting on the hillsides, and I remembered cycles and hope and all the old promises of spring.

Being The Bot

My irrepressible friend Greg Winterbottom grew up in a working class neighborhood where drinking and domestic violence were the norm and aspirations were low. He decided early on that he would have a different kind of life. In this interview Greg candidly discusses his childhood, talks about the 1966 accident that abruptly changed his world, and shares his reflections about the path he has taken.

Known affectionately as The Bot, Greg has spent more than three decades in public service and is currently on the board of the Orange County Transportation Authority. People may notice his wheelchair but very few are aware of the continual pain that he endures, and even so, it's hard to keep up with The Bot. He is generous and outrageous, inspiring and opinionated, an indomitable soul who will never be defined by disability. He calls himself a cynic but none of us believes that.

It's been nearly a decade since this interview, but here's the essential Bot, in his own words:

My name is Gregory Thomas Winterbottom, and I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on May 7, 1947.

My parents were born and raised in Philadelphia - Lansdowne, actually. My mother's family actually had money before the stock market crash, and they lived in a big house, a mansion. My grandfather, known as TJ, was a rumrunner, I think, as well as an alcoholic and a womanizer. They had no class even back then.

On my dad's side, the Winterbottoms, I don't know anything about them except that my grandfather was 58 when my father was born. They used to lock my father in the closet -if claustrophobia can be inherited, I think that's where I got it.

My father out of high school was a very good baseball player. He played catcher and had a lot of potential, but he got caught drinking and was kicked out of school and that ruined his life. He died in 1984 when he was 68, which is basically ten years older than I am now, and he just looked so old. Alcoholic.

I was a year old when we came to California. It was May of 1948. As the story goes, my mother said to my father, "I'm leaving. You can either come with us or not." Her whole family was already out here …Nina, Jimmy, Uncle Tom, Aunt Doll…everybody except for Aunt Sis, who went to Florida. They had all come out during the war. Nina is my mom's sister, and she was married to Jimmy. Jimmy was in the Navy and Tom was at Fort MacArthur.

My father was not present during my growing up. Several times he'd come home after being in a bar fight, and my mom would put him back together. And I remember being sent to his apartment to get money from him. My mother would wait in the car and send me upstairs. But they never divorced. Nana lived with us the whole time.

My Uncle Tom lived up above Fort MacArthur. At one time I thought I'd pattern my life after him. He was a shipping clerk for the government; he wasn't anything, really, but in our family he was held up as the guy who made it. I remember he would whistle to call his wife, and she'd get her coat, and out they'd go.

Anyway, Uncle Tom lived up on a hill and we always had these cars that could barely make it. We never had cars that ran. Our cars had no brakes and they always over-heated. It was just the worst stuff, always somebody's hand-me-down. So I had the idea that if the car stalled, I would hold it while Nana, my mother, and Joanne got out. Eight years old and I thought it was up to me to keep the car from rolling.

We were living in Torrance then. We moved to North Torrance in '56. We moved in with Nina and Jimmy when we first came to town, nine of us living in a two-bedroom house. That was in Old Torrance, which was a real bad area.

Our entertainment was watching the tank farm blow up and looking at the oil derricks. We had grass growing through the pavement in the driveway, and broken screens. Timmy and Teddy Carter lived down at the corner right near the tank farm and they had an old wringer kind of washing machine on the front lawn we'd play in. We were the only family without a man - everybody stayed married then, regardless. And Nana was sort of like the neighborhood midwife. She'd put these women back together whenever they'd been beaten by their drunk husbands.

I didn't like my mother of course. As a matter of fact, I disliked her immensely. When my sister Joanne was first divorced, she didn't make much more money comparatively than my mother had made, but they had a house, and they had nice things. We came to the conclusion that our mother was very self-centered. My sister couldn't go to her "pink ladies" club until Mother's snack was made and dishes were done, stuff like that. I've seen even homeless people with their little kids skipping across the street having fun, whereas we weren't allowed to open the refrigerator. They turned the electricity off.

Joanne and I looked forward to going to the Pike even though it was the vomit and urine haven of the world. Tattoo parlors and prostitutes. I didn't know it. I remember one weekend we were planning to go, and Joanne had turned thirteen and her idea was not to wear lipstick so she'd still look twelve. Of course it was up to me to find my father to get the money, and he said no, so we didn't go to the Pike that day.

Jimmy used to come home and beat Nina. I'd be over there on weekends because they had food. I'd open up the goody cabinet and there were potato chips. To this day, every time I see a Butterfinger and smell Dial soap I am immediately rushed back to Lincoln Avenue.

They had all the food you could eat, but it came with that life. I could not understand it. I would rather kill myself. I would rather not live if that was all that was going to be. And I decided I just would not be like them. In a way, that made me stronger.

High school was the best time of my life. I loved high school. I went to North Torrance High School, class of 1965. We had a four-year high school, grades nine to twelve. I started playing football right away and lettered for all four years. I was really kind of small: 5'10" and 160 pounds, but strong. I played guard and linebacker. As a matter of fact, I came across my clippings the other night. It was so cool to look back.

I worked during high school too, starting at age fifteen. A lot of people did. My reason was actually to get food. I worked at MacDonald's, and you got $1.05 an hour, and they took ten cents out for food, so you got 95 cents an hour, but they lost money on me 'cause I'd eat so much. I even took food home with me.

Nobody even suggested college, and Vietnam was really starting to heat up then. I remember when my cousin Buddy got his draft notice. He was Jimmy and Nina's boy, and he was only six months older than I was. He almost didn't get in because Jimmy had deafened him in one ear by beating him, but he went into the Air Force.

So I figured, "I'm next." I went down, signed up and sold everything I owned, and then they wouldn't take me for six weeks because I had appendicitis. But on February 14, 1966, Valentines' Day, I went off to the war. I was supposed to go to Fort Bliss, Texas. My job was going to be helicopter mechanic, and I figured, "I'll get a good job with Hughes when I get out."

But actually, I was planning on getting killed. I didn't really think I was gonna come back. And they didn't take us to Bliss; they took us to Fort Polk, Louisiana, which, according to the rumor mill, was the stop before Vietnam. And the rumor was true: it was tiger land. It was raining and miserable when we got there. I would be nineteen in May.

I was given an opportunity to take the Officer Candidate School test and I did. I got a very good grade, the highest in the brigade. So I went straight through from basic to advanced training at Fort Knox, and I was an armor OCS. It was funny because I do have claustrophobia, but I was a tank commander, so I was either up top or driving around, and either way you can still see out.

Now I was a senior candidate. People had to salute me. I already had my orders cut for Rucker. I was gonna be a helicopter pilot, a co-pilot; first lieutenants were co-pilots. I went straight through and I would have graduated in January.

I was hurt on December 19, 1966. The accident certainly changed my life; maybe it saved my life. But I don't know if I wouldn't have come out the same way had I served. It's difficult to say.

Tina and I had been married since July 26, 1966. When I was a senior candidate I could get off post a little more, and we rented a basement in Elizabethtown, Kentucky with no running water and a walk-through bedroom. We'd gotten married in the courthouse in L.A. and spent our honeymoon at a hotel in Santa Barbara; our honeymoon dinner was Jack-in-the-Box. Looking back on it, it was funny. We got one of those vibrating beds and I had set down my root beer and it bounced off and was all over and soaked us. We had two nights 'cause her parents were gone. They didn't know we were married for about three months. One of our friends invited us over and took off so we could have time together. And I saw her I think three times before my accident. That was really the only time we had. We weren't allowed to live together, and she was not allowed to come back until the twelfth week.

So we were driving home for Christmas leave, from Fort Knox to California. I was real sick, extremely sick. I drove as much as I could, but I was running a very high fever and I just didn't feel well. It was December 19 and we were between Gila Bend and Yuma on Highway 8 in a little '66 Bug- the wind blew in from down the road and the Volkswagen overturned. I remember rolling and stopping. One leg stuck on the door and the other across the roof. We were actually up side down. Tina was kneeling on the roof. She hurt her shoulder blade or something -- that was all.

I wound up out through the passenger window. Somehow I'd cut my head and the blood was coming out through my ears. I thought I was gonna bleed to death. We were in the middle of nowhere and I was in excruciating pain. I lay there for about two hours before the ambulance came. Some truckers called, and they sent a '57 panel wagon.

My injury is not exactly level - I'm higher on one side than the other. I describe it as the sash that Miss America wears. I remember when they picked me up, they lay me on my back and I was just screaming, so they turned me on my stomach. That's all I remember until after the first of the year, so for almost two weeks I was in and out of consciousness.

Poor Tina. I was in Yuma at the Presbyterian Hospital, so they sent a little plane to pick me up, a Piper Cub, and I didn't fit in it, so they had to place the litter sticking out of the door, and Tina, who's scared to fly anyway, had to fly with the door open and me hanging out. She was 18 years old. Then she lived in this rat hole in San Diego that the Red Cross got for her. My mother went down and lived with her for a little while.

I feel so badly when I think about what that time was like for Tina.

I never really faced it until 1984, when we split up. I always had Tina or my son Steven to be my legs. Anything I wanted done, they did it exactly as I wanted it. I was just the worst. I was a jerk. There's no reason that she had to face the brunt of it, and I will always give her credit.

The way my mother raised me was that we were victims. If we were going somewhere and it rained, it was "Of course it has to rain; we're going somewhere." I don't accept that anymore; it's not my lifestyle.

People need to accept personal responsibility. I will not allow myself to blame anything on anyone else for which I should take responsibility. Personal victory. That's the key - it's about the individual battle. You define your own limits. This is still the best country in the world, and anyone can do anything he or she wants. That's what bothers me about the "woe is me" attitude; get over it. People from all over the world are coming here by choice. We do live in best place on earth.

I've been taking stock of my life lately and I feel good about my accomplishments. I am the only college graduate in this end of my family. I refuse to wear sweats and I won't wear a t-shirt. I became sort of an advocate/activist for the handicapped, which is ironic because I don't like cripples anymore than I like old people, but some people get lost; they just disappear. I founded the Dayle MacIntosh Center to help foster independent living, and in 1977 I was involved in bringing the first 16(b)2 vehicles into Orange County. There was no transportation for elderly and handicapped people before then. When I worked for State Senator Paul Carpenter's office, we were like low-paid psychologists; people would call with the most inane problems, but we helped everybody.

I was on the Board of OCTA a year before becoming Vice Chairman; I was Chairman in 2004, and I'm still the public member. I felt especially good about my chairmanship and accomplished a lot of what I wanted to do, such as keeping Measure M in the forefront.

I guess what I value most are my relationships with people. I'm proud to have an incredible group of long-time friends, and the social discourse in which I can engage is just marvelous. There's Daly and Greg Sanders, and Lyle and Stan … brilliant, educated people. Our friendship is a constant; I'm like the hub, and the spokes go out from there; my friends recognize how much I value them. I have also experienced a great romance in my life, and I know it's better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.

I guess you have to be realistic and brave enough to face hopelessness.

But I won't allow the dark side to win out.

Your Heart Will Tell You: A Visit From Artist Michael Drury

A well-known landscape painter and teacher, Michael Drury came to visit Vista de las Cruces School in 1998 and talked to the kids  about life as an artist. He grew up in Santa Barbara and has been painting professionally since 1970, when he met his mentor, Ray Strong. He recalled his first day of painting at the Hollister Ranch with Ray. 

"I had a really amateurish collection of equipment, and Ray had a French easel. We were at the top of the ridge that runs through Long Canyon-those wonderful v-shaped hills and shadows! I'm watching him make this painting, and I'm doing my pathetic stuff. It was getting dark, and we drove down in his VW bus, and we talked about lessons. And he said, 'Let's forget about this lesson stuff. Why don't you and I just paint together?' And that's how it began."

"But really, I always painted, always loved to push color around. My father was an amateur painter -- a pretty good watercolor painter -- so I always had the materials around the house, although my parents thought I'd be a teacher of literature."

"When I was a kid, I had a paper route and gardening job, and when I went to put my money in the bank, I noticed that there were six big paintings on the wall behind the tellers' cages. They were by a man named Fernand Lungren. I didn't know who he was -- all I knew was that those paintings really spoke to me."

"Then in 1963, after I graduated from high school, I went to the Impressionist Museum in Paris, and I looked at the paintings there, and I knew right away that's what I wanted to do with my life."

"When I had admired the paintings in the bank as a kid, I hadn't consciously thought I could ever do that. It seemed like some sort of adult thing. But when I saw those paintings in France -- and they were little paintings -- I could actually see the way the paint was put on, and that's when I realized that someone actually did this, somebody had taken a brush and stuck it into paint and made these marks on the canvas! That's how it all started."

"Everything from that point on was about figuring out how to become not only a painter, but an open air painter -- a guy who goes out with his paint box and easel and paints right outside. So I bought a paint box in Paris and started making these horrible little paintings right then. My best friend who was traveling with me still has the first one, and he won't give it back to me, so I can't destroy it."

Michael told us that his favorite places to paint were the Gaviota Coast, Big Sur, northern Nevada, and Ireland, where he had recently traveled. The Ranch in particular has been a constant source of inspiration to him.  He spoke of big shadow shapes with a corona of summer grass in the summer, and the way the ocean turns hard blue with white caps. "You have to love the Ranch on its own terms," he said. "It's an ecological safety zone that needs to be protected, and a psychological space too." 

"I have painted certain places often," he continued. "I can start at a place I know well and finish at home from memory, because I never use photographs. I remember the first time I painted a picture completely from memory. Larry Iwerks, an artist and friend of mine, needed a painting from me right away for a desert show. I didn't think I could do it. I went over to Ray Strong and I said Larry wants me to do this painting, and he said, 'You've been painting the desert for thirty years; you should be able to invent a painting,' and so I put this canvas up on the wall and started thinking about what I wanted to paint and I made a painting of a volcano that's about fifty miles north of Mojave, with a big cloud formation over it. That was the first time and one of the few times that I just stood in the studio with my music on and made a painting from memory."

Most of Michael's paintings are done outdoors, and he has to paint quickly before the light shifts. "Normally you paint in sunlight," he explains, "and even on a foggy day, the light changes, so really, to be consistent you only have about two hours in the morning, and a little longer in the afternoon. At noon, the shadows disappear. So at the most, I spend three hours working on a painting, and that means I'll probably come back to it the next day, although it also depends on the size of the painting. And a lot of it depends on how much I thought about the painting and how well I know the spot."

"I like oil painting the best because it has weight out of the tube. When you are pushing it around on a brush you can actually feel the paint. With watercolor, you have to be very delicate because it is really just tint. But oil paint has some stuff in it."

"Occasionally, I've done little pastels from memory. I just think to myself, 'I want to do the hill behind Agua Caliente after sunset.' And I remember how the hills become big dark shapes, and the way the road is cut. I did a whole series of those, and they were really fun. I didn't have to prove anything because I was doing a medium I don't normally use, so nobody expected anything in particular. People bought them up!"

"I enjoy getting compliments, and people come up while I'm painting, and they're mostly very nice. Once I was in a place called Upper Sardine Lake which is near the Sierra Buttes way up above Lake Tahoe. Glacier lakes and big cliffs -- really spectacular. I was there on a fall day painting this place. The guy who was the caretaker for this lodge was standing behind me, and after awhile he says, "It don't look like that to me," and he walked away. It brought me to earth. Here I was feeling pretty good about my painting, and the guy who actually lives there says it doesn't look like that."

Michael and friend Rudy, 2011.

But such moments don't discourage Michael for long. He is a man doing exactly what he loves. "I can't think of anything else I enjoy more," he declares, "It's the most fun you can ever imagine."

Michael's paintings at the time of this visit were selling from five hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, depending upon the size of the canvas. "It's weird," he mused, "because when you think of what a painting is, all it is is a flat surface with some colors pushed on it, so in terms of its physical worth, it's maybe five dollars worth of materials. But what people are responding to, hopefully, is that I'm communicating the emotion of how I feel about what I am painting -- and thirty some years of painting experience."

"I paint, I teach, and I surf. That pretty much takes care of the day. I get up way before sunrise and I go to bed at 8 o'clock at night, so I don't have any extra time."

"But you always have to look at stuff to figure out how to get better. If you're a surfer, you look at videos of surfing to get better. If you're an artist, you have to look at paintings. In terms of the subject matter of art, there's really nothing new. The visual world is unchanged from the way it was a million years ago. Light still hits trees, plants and animals the way it did all that time ago. It's just putting all those things together in a different way, in your own language -- that's how you make it art. So I look at paintings, I look at books, I go to museums. I look at stuff all the time."

"My advice would be to listen to what your heart tells you - not just your intuition - your heart will tell you what you need to know, and you really should listen to it."

"In the meantime, read! Turn off the television and read, because there is nothing better than reading a good book. The TV gives you stuff but very rarely asks anything of you. It's giving you all this imagery but it doesn't ask you anything. A book asks you to use your imagination, and imagination is like a muscle -- you have to exercise it. It's like if the surf is flat on the Ranch and you don't get out and paddle around in the summertime, then when it finally gets big, you're out of shape. The brain is just that same way, if you don't use your imagination, it becomes a limp muscle."

"So listen to your heart about what you want to do. You don't have to make any decisions now, but the one specific thing you can do is read good books. And your teacher didn't tell me to say that."

Melting Away Into Leaves

A few days ago I went to a gathering at El Chorro Ranch to celebrate the life of Esther Isaacson, a special lady who lived to be 102, most of those years spent in that very place. As the memorial booklet said, Esther was a lover of family, wildflowers, birds, books, chocolate, tall tales, mischief, and El Chorro. Born in Solvang to Danish settlers Anton and Karen Ibsen, she was teaching at the Solvang Grammar School when she met a cattle rancher named Baine at a dance in Los Olivos. "I had no intention of becoming a rancher's wife," she said. "That would be the living end." They married in 1939. 

I first met Esther about twenty years ago. I was a teacher at Vista de las Cruces then, and my students and I were interviewing people in the community, and my friends Bob and Sally Isaacson very kindly arranged for us to come out to El Chorro and talk to Esther. It was April, a bright hot morning, and the earth was singing, and we were all under a magic spell as Esther led us on a bit of time traveling. She told stories of the early days in Solvang, and delighted in sharing memories about Baine and the boys and life at the ranch. She spoke of blackout curtains during the war, treasure hunts, kite-flying, even a miniature steam railroad. She wondered aloud if my students knew how lucky they were to live in the country. Then she grabbed her cane and rose from her chair, went into the house, and returned with three boxes of popsicles.

In the years that followed, I came back a few times without students to talk to Esther on my own. She was always so proud of her family and their various accomplishments. She talked about Baine’s hard work and vision, and the fact that El Chorro would be permanently protected by an agricultural easement. She loved the Ranch with all her heart. "I wouldn't be anywhere else," she said. "It's a magic place. It always has been."

Esther herself initiated my last visit. It was a couple of months after her 100th birthday celebration and she wanted some help putting a few thoughts on paper, so she asked her caregiver to call me. I felt honored to have been chosen to serve as her scribe. I set out in the morning with a notebook and pen, and found her sitting at the table in front of the window looking out at the trees beyond. We chatted about being here in this familiar and enduring place, about sons and daughters-in-law, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, old friends from town and valley. But it turns out that what she really wanted was to write thank you letters to people who had been kind to her. Thank you letters! She was having difficulty writing, wasn’t sure about names and addresses and the logistics of getting things mailed, but what she wanted most of all was to tell people…thank you.

So I only knew Esther in the latter part of her very long life, but what a privilege it was to glimpse the person that a century of living had shaped. My own mother, also named Esther, died earlier this year, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we grow and learn and change over time, how life keeps throwing us challenges and questions right up to the end, and how maybe we eventually become whatever we most truly are. Esther Isaacson weathered loss with courage and faced mysteries with grace, and it seems to me that everything finally distilled into the two things that mattered: gratitude and love.

Memories were shared and songs sung at the memorial gathering, and Esther's granddaughter Katie read Mary Oliver's beautiful and fitting poem, Long Afternoon at the Edge of Sister Pond:

As for life,
I’m humbled,
I’m without words
sufficient to say

how it has been hard as flint,
and soft as a spring pond,
both of these
and over and over,

and long pale afternoons besides,
and so many mysteries
beautiful as eggs in a nest,
still unhatched

though warm and watched over
by something I have never seen –
a tree angel, perhaps,
or a ghost of holiness.

Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
It suffices, it is all comfort –
along with human love,

dog love, water love, little-serpent love,
sunburst love, or love for that smallest of birds
flying among the scarlet flowers.
There is hardly time to think about

stopping, and lying down at last
to the long afterlife, to the tenderness
yet to come, when
time will brim over the singular pond, and become forever,

and we will pretend to melt away into the leaves.
As for death,
I can’t wait to be the hummingbird,
can you?

One of the speakers, Jim Poett, said this: "Esther lived forever. She is eternal, as far as I'm concerned."

I think so, too...as long as there are oak trees, blue birds, hills and sky.

I Didn't Like Being Indoors

“It’s a fun job, out by yourself. You spend a lot of time outdoors; you see a lot of wildlife. I get to ride different ranches and go into the hills with my horse. I see different views of places you’d never see from the road. And I get to do work I like doing.”

Jon Brough was born in Connecticut, moved to California at the age of five, and first set eyes on the Hollister Ranch when he was nineteen. He worked as an abalone diver in the Channel Islands for fifteen years, and his reminiscences reveal a lot about that now-vanished livelihood.  When we talked to him, around 1998, he was earning a living day cowboy-ing at local ranches.

Jon passed away in January, 2014, two days before his 60th birthday.

“When I was diving, I got to see the Channel Islands and go surfing out there. I spent years out there; that was a real treat. I dove near San Miguel Island, which you can see on a real clear day, and San Nicolas, which is the furthest one out in the chain of seven islands. I used to hike down and could see where Indians used to live — back then you used to be able to just walk around — and there’d be kitchen middens — big piles of abalone shells — bowls, and lots of artifacts lying around at the camps.”

“The diving was not really hard work, although you’d spend seven or eight hours underwater — you don’t make a lot of money sitting out on the boat. Usually there would be a deck hand and two divers.”

“We’d use 600 feet of hydraulic hose and an air compressor on the boat, so we didn’t have a big tank on our backs, just a face mask and our wet suits and swim fins. Sometimes a deck hand might forget to turn the compressor on, or sometimes they would move the boat and the hose would wrap up in the propeller, so your air supply would be shut off, and then you’d just have to remember that you’re underwater, and it’s okay, and what you would do is come up slowly. If you come up too quickly, you get nitrogen bubbles in your blood, and they lodge — it’s called embolizing — and it could be real serious, so you always have to exhale, because when you’re down below, the air compresses. If you took a balloon down there, it would be this big, and then when you came to the surface, it would be much bigger, so you always have to remember that. If you held your breath when you were fifty feet down and swam to the surface, your lungs would blow up. So be exhaling when you return to the surface.”

“When the black abalone were healthy, there was a daily limit of twenty dozen, sold as a live product to Los Angeles and flown to Japan. With red abalone, we were allowed between two dozen and five dozen a day – the price started out at $90 a dozen, and went to $450 a dozen. They also went to Japan — the yen was more valuable than our dollar — it didn’t seem like a lot of money to them, but it gave us a lot of money.”

“The state of California closed abalone diving temporarily to study a disease which pretty much wiped out the black abalone. There are three different types that were commercially harvested: black abalone, pink abalone, and red abalone. There’s some white, like a pink. The abalone developed a disease or virus and they all started dying, so the state shut down the fishing for commercial and sport use in order to study the results of the disease. There’s no real cure for it, and it hasn’t really stabilized much, and they are not really sure where it came from, although they think it might have come from Korea when they were bringing oil platforms out on barges.”

“Before I became a diver, I was a sword fisherman. I’d go out on long trips, sometimes two weeks at a time. Abalone diving was just an overnight trip — you’d get to come home a lot more. The money was good, and when there was surf, you could go surfing, because the water would be too dirty to go diving. So when the surf was up, you couldn’t go to work — you had to surf — that’s my kind of job. It worked good that way.”

“When I was in high school I did a lot of ceramics and became an apprentice for a guy who was the head of the UCLA art department. He let me work in his studio and I went into business on my own. I made a lot of ceramics and sold them, but after awhile I didn’t like being indoors. I’m more of an outdoor person. That’s when I started commercially fishing.”

“I didn’t start horseback riding until about seven years ago. A friend of mine at the Ranch let me ride his horse, and I thought it was kind of fun, so I bought one. There weren’t many people on the Ranch who had horses then other than the cowboys, so I started riding with the cowboys, like John McCarty and Justin Cota and those guys. That’s when I started learning how to be a cowboy.”

“It’s all seasonal work. Right now the cows are calving, so there isn’t a lot of work to be done. In January, we’ll bring mother cows in with calves and start branding them. The brand is identification so they don’t get mixed in with neighbors, or for selling them. When we brand them we also vaccinate them and give them all the medicines they need so they don’t get sick.”

“The brandings are almost like a little rodeo, because we rope all the cows to brand them. One person will rope the head of the calf, and wrap the rope around the horn of the horse, and then you’ll rope the heels of the calf and stretch it out, and that way the calf can lie on the ground and you can give it its medicines and its brand and whatever it needs, then send it back to mama.”

“Next time, when they are bigger, you get them ready for shipment. You gather them again, give them vaccinations, separate them from the mother, then run them through scales, weigh them, and load them onto trucks. They get sent either to a feed lot or out to Nevada or Wyoming or someplace for the summer grass, because when we have grass out in California, they have snow, so we get some of their calves to graze out here. When our summertime comes, they have grass, so we ship our calves out there then.”

“It’s a fun job, out by yourself; you spend a lot of time outdoors; you see a lot of wildlife. I get to ride different ranches and go into the hills with my horse. I’ve worked at Cojo, a couple of ranches in Los Alamos, Lake Cachuma, San Fernando Rey, sometimes Simi Valley, and of course, Hollister. I see different views of places you never see from the road. And I get to do work that I like doing.”

“I enjoy our house and our canyon most of all — it’s my favorite place to come at the end of the day and get something to eat. But the whole Ranch is a beautiful place.”

“I’ve liked all my jobs. Everything is always work, and if you don’t enjoy your work, you’re not going to enjoy your life. There’s gonna be bad days and good days, but if you basically like what you’re doing, it makes it worth it.”

“As a boy, I liked to hike down cliffs and play in tide pools. I started surfing when I was eight years old and spent a lot of time at the beach. I liked to slide down the hills on cardboard through the mustard when it was dry and sticks. We made big tracks and slid down hills on them, mostly playing outdoors, getting in trouble outside.”

“My advice to kids is to remember there are all sorts of aspects of life. You don’t have to make any decisions for your entire life at age eighteen. Just stay in school, make it through high school at least, then decide what you want to pursue after that. Maybe you’ll want to further your education in college, but not everything is offered there. Find your passion.”

“Look how many times I’ve changed jobs. The main thing is to pursue what you like. There’s no reason why you can’t do what you want to do.”

Maybe It's Dusk

“Death does not puzzle me. Life does. Existence does. Consciousness of existence does. And that is why at the age of 60 I must peer back, sift through what is left or what is remembered and try to make some sense of it. Try to draw my life, try to decide who I’ve been. ”

I barely knew her. A mother, daughter, sister, teacher, and beloved friend to many, Janis Key passed away in December 2014 at the age of 64  due to complications from her long fight against rheumatoid arthritis. I met her just once, a couple of years ago, but she had a certain presence: strength and gentleness in equal parts. I remember her sitting straight-postured in a wheelchair, quietly attentive, intelligent, and kind. I never saw her after that. 

But then, just a few days ago, someone showed me these beautiful words that she had written, a testimonial to grace and equanimity in the face of death, and they touched my heart, and I knew they belonged here in this place where stories and life lessons are gathered and shared:  

GOING HOME

First she gathered the grandmothers: the one with the embracing arms, the one she never met and the step-grandmother who taught her to read. Then the huge, quiet grandfather but not the other one who left so few traces, although he seemed ever-present in her childhood. Of course the solid father and the fragile mother.  An older brother and baby sister. She was going home.

She’s gathering the external. Fading photographs and brittle letters. She’ll transfer them to the internal. Memories and feelings.  Accuracy is not the goal. She’s trying to make sense of what arises as she squints back. She is trying to get home before it is too late. It is already late.

Maybe it’s dusk. Age is measured in so many ways. Years and months are counted. That’s one way. By that measure I’m 60, hardly old they tell me. My body, however, must be 90 or thereabouts. Older probably. My body is my responsibility, but it is not me. I refuse to claim ownership of it or dominion. I lug its ubiquitous bulk but possess neither love, nor hatred for it. Not even pity. It is my duty, that is all. I calculate my age by the rich furnishings of the home I’m reconstructing. I consider the love, for instance. How many years is that worth?  How old is someone who has collected this much? This much wonder and awe? This much agony? These people? This much ecstasy and this much pain?  It must be dusk. I must be nearly 100.  I’ve nearly lived too long.

She places the photo of the grandmother who died so young, leaving four children, close to the photo of the sad little girl who grew up and became a mother of her own. She slides the photo of herself aged three next to them. And the loving grandmother as a young telephone operator. A wedding photo of her sister. Only women on the dresser top. That is plenty. Don’t rush they tell her. There is plenty of time. She knows there is not plenty of time.

I’ve been growing older since I was born.  I’ve been growing old. I’ve never slowed nor wavered. Steadily traveling. Really, we’re all only waiting. Really, we’re all only going in one direction, heading in the same direction, toward our ends. I’m trying to time it right. I’m trying to last until I get home.

Here is the grandfather whose large body takes up the entire photograph. His heart was that big too. His quiet wisdom, although he only managed to get through sixth grade, steadied her when she shook with doubt. Here he is on the book shelf next to the dresser. She places her father, not as large, but as kind and wiser perhaps, beside his father, her grandfather. Word for word, she remembers his guidance. Don’t judge a man by his successes but by how he handles his failures. Don’t judge a man until you understand the burden he carries. And most importantly, Love everyone, even fatheads. The book case stood in his law office for years. His office was home too. The men.   

I’m trying to get it right. And I’m trying to explain or justify something but I’m not sure yet what that is. Or why. Why can’t I just slip out? What exactly must I explain?

There’s nothing wrong about being alone, nothing sad. Maybe because for me it’s solitude, not loneliness. Maybe because I’ve had so much practice. Maybe because I’ve developed so much patience.

Two she never met. The tiny baby girl whose ummbilical cord strangled her on her way.  An accident. A tragedy. The grandmother whose brain hemorrhaged and was carried to the hospital never to return to her tea cooling on the kitchen table. An accident. A tragedy. The two she never met. The baby, a six pound swaddled angel. The fine long finger nails, the thick black hair. The grandmother’s loving letters about her four darling children. The purple ink. The artistic penmanship. Those who remained called her an angel. Two angels she never met. Two tragedies. She has carried them and kept them close all of these years. She has moved them into her new home.

Shasta daisies bloomed along the back fence. The swing set was in the corner by the alley. I spent hours on the cool grass, in the middle of the back yard, staring at the stars. Still and dark Colorado nights. The place to contemplate. Sometimes I could hear Mr. Niederhut whistle for his boys to get home on the double. Or I could hear the Crane’s dog bark down the street.  On some nights I could hear my mother finishing up the dishes, the kitchen light casting a faint glow across the yard. And on my back I identified planets and watched for shooting stars.

I’ve died before. Grief smothered me.

She asked for a hummingbird feeder outside her bedroom window. Her son-in-law surprised her with one on a Saturday morning. Now she can rest in bed to support her neck and watch the hummingbirds gorge and fight for territory, A tulip tree the next block over is green all year round. She contemplates her old life as a hummingbird: flitting to the classroom, then to meetings, then to pick up her daughter then home to fix a meal, then to drop her daughter at dance lessons, then to the grocery store, then to pick her daughter up, then home to grade essays, then to her daughter’s side to help her with homework, then. . .a few years ago she ceased being a hummingbird. Soon she will cease being.

A new friend recently insisted, tell me your life.

I looked around the tidy, new home. The photo of a man in a WWI uniform. A blue plate, purchased in Boston to honor a tiny new angel. A pencil drawing of a chaotic corner of another home in Boulder a thousand miles and forty years away. A color-tipped photo of a rosy-cheeked young girl, eyes downcast, lost. A black and white snapshot of me, blushing and holding a ribbon after my first 10K, first in my category, the sole entrant.  My red weaving.  The red and green quillt given to me and my then-husband for our first Christmas, pieced by his great grandmother. Floor to ceiling bookshelf filled with literature I still think about.  A graceful young woman en pointe, my daughter.

Which one, I asked?   

She slides several packets of letters onto a shelf in the closet. One day she will read them. They have been bundled in ribbon for more than thirty years, since they were packed in the car and moved from one coast to another.

Thirty one years ago on this day in October I had to find a safe place for my daughter who could not stay, and so I invented heaven. Or accepted its ready-made version, because I was rushed. My baby had to be comforted and swaddled. My mother and my three grandmothers could sing lullabies and rock her, and feed her and hold her and hold her and hold her. The idea of heaven was so perposterous to me until I was desperate for it. Hell, a crazier idea, one I’ll never have need of.

She has placed them beside each other, her mother’s Bible and her own, on one bookshelf. Her Bible was an award for perfect attendance at Sunday school. She loved Sunday school and church. She learned to genuflect properly and cross herself carefully. She felt God’s presence nearly as mysteriously as she felt the presence of the holy ghost. She read the King James version and her Bible now looks worn, read, handled. But she has no memory of reading it. She can’t cite a single verse. She thinks Genesis a ridiculous story. She’ll tell you to be resposible for your own sins and not hand them over to Jesus.  Yet she loves him, and because she loves him would never ask him to burden himself with her sins. Her sins are hers to keep.  She has the two Bibles. And she has her mother’s Shakespeare and her own. Hers well worn. And she can quote to you from it.

I have been saved so many times and by so many people.

Stories have a way of getting told again and again until they become the truth. Again and again I was told the terribly sad story of my mother returning me, six weeks old, to the hospital. I had cried all night long, refused a bottle, and had a dangerously high fever. My grandmother swaddled me tightly and placed me in a basket. Take her now, she insisted to my mother, and I’ll stay here with Greg. My mother returned, hours later with an empty basket. Everyone cried. My grandmother, my grandfather, my brother and my mother whose husband was fighting in Korea and probably didn’t even know he had a baby girl. A letter took so long to arrive behind the lines. I have the letter now, 60 years later. Written by my aunt. Dear Earl, You are the father of a beautiful baby girl. She is small. Six pounds. Jeannie is doing well. Greg is lively. Love, Carol. The empty basket story. This story probably was true. Certainly, someone cried every time it was told.

I am not puzzled by death. I am not afraid to cease being. In this form, I did not exist before I was born. I don’t mind returning to that state, non-existence. Death does not puzzle me.  Life does. Existence does. Consciousness of existence does. And that is why at the age of 60 I must peer back, sift through what is left or what is remembered and try to make some sense of it. Try to draw my life, try to decide who I’ve been.  

They ask me, but isn’t it unsettling, the thought of what you’ll miss? No. I wonder, every so often, how my great grandchildren, should I have any, will live. Who will they become? But I have left the party early many times and never regretted it. I’m content with what I have; I’m not greedy for more and more experiences.

In junior high school she was taught how to draw perspective. Draw the horizon. Place the vanishing point on the horizon. Draw the scene to the vanishing point. And she drew western ghost towns and modern cities and her neighborhood and orchards of fruit trees from the viewer’s point of view back to the vanishing point. She entered her drawings knowing she could travel toward the vanishing point but never reach it. The vanishing point was imaginary; it had no width. She could travel forever into the drawing. But now she sees something, an object perhaps, at the vanishing point. It no longer forever recedes in the distance.

Treebeard's Gift

Yesterday I drove up into the mountains above Santa Barbara to see my old friends Marc and Julie. My purpose (or so I thought) was to interview Marc, otherwise known as Treebeard, for this very website, but it turned into an informal visit, which was actually even better.

Although retired from an illustrious career as a teacher, Treebeard is a busy man, fully immersed in an ongoing labor of love. He explores the backcountry near his house each day, zooming into an often unseen universe of insects and plants, documenting these for posterity in an extraordinary online archive of photographs.

We looked through a few images together at his computer: butterflies, a multitude of mushrooms, myriad forms of life both weird and gorgeous. There's the transparent shed skin of a spider, a katydid nymph, a shiny new oak apple gall, the tiny sporangia of slime molds growing on a fallen branch of Coast Live Oak. There's a Sara Orangetip on Bitter Gooseberry, a mating pair of Western Boxelder Bugs, and the pale blue flowers of Native Greenbark Ceanothus.

"Beautifully intricate," Treebeard has written of the latter, "like little origami boxes."

That's the poet in him. He's a talented and patient photographer, and the images are beautiful, but each is also accompanied by an illuminating caption that is explanatory and often lovely. He presents the scientific and common names, fascinating facts and observations, and some journal-like comments about the specifics of the day, all shared with eloquence and clarity. His sense of wonder is palpable.

Worrisome changes loom, globally and locally. Around here it's been too dry, eerily warm, seasons askew, repercussions yet unknown. But there's so much life happening, so many miraculous things unfolding.

And some folks look up at the heavens, pondering distant galaxies. My friend Treebeard explores a different infinity. He peers into the micro-cosmos...quietly observing, recording, and archiving.

"For all we know, some of these things may be happening for the last time," he muses, hoping that's not true. "But I'm documenting as much as I can."

Here is the link to Treebeard’s photos, an extraordinary gift to all of us.

A Candy Store and A Chopped-Up Piano

My mother passed away earlier this year, a fact that still shocks and unmoors me. She was 91 years old, and had become increasingly unsteady and bewildered, but her resilient old body knew only to keep going and somehow it seemed she always was and always would be.  Communication was difficult, primarily because of her deafness, and I used to write her notes, although eventually even those were hard for her to follow. So you can imagine my surprise when I recently discovered an audiotape I made of a conversation I had with her a decade ago. It’s a poor quality recording with a distracting background hum, but it’s startling to hear her voice again, loud and clear as it used to be, with its almost comical New York accent.

Even then, she had obviously forgotten many details, and my own prompts and responses during the recording are unfortunately intrusive, despite my good intentions, but at times she did launch into lucid little narratives, and they are fascinating and touching. I wonder now why these fragments of her long life lingered in memory with such clarity while others blurred and vanished entirely, and I'd like to share a few.

She talks about her ill-fated musical aspirations:

I had a piano in Corona in the room in back of the store. We had the store, remember. It was an old upright, a nice piano, and I wasn’t playing it yet. I just had a couple of lessons. And you know, my mother, she chopped it up for firewood. I cried. I says, “Why, Mother?” She said, “We need the wood for fire.” I lived in a cold flat. It was a cold flat in back of the store. She had someone come and chop it up...Oh, I felt so bad. But we were poor, you know. And we needed the firewood."

When I remind her that she used to be a good singer, she recounts a story I remember her telling me when I was a little girl:

"Yeah. I went to a studio to test my voice. My mother took me. We went on the train. We had to go to Brooklyn. We went to the studio and they told me to sing a song. Do you know that I wouldn’t open up my mouth?! I was so shy. The man told my mother. 'She’s not ready yet. Take her home.'”

It must have been a terrible disappointment for both of them. A lost voice, a lost opportunity. I wondered how her mother reacted:

"She wasn’t mad. She was a good mother. May she rest in peace. She was a good mother, my adoptive mother."

There are lots of memories about the candy store her parents ran when she was a child in Corona, Queens:

"We had candies for a penny, and we had candies for a nickel. My favorite candy bar was the Wow. It was a nickel. It was a big bar with marshmallow. I loved it….Besides candy, they sold nuts, salty seeds, Indian nuts, and what do you call the other seeds? Pumpkin seeds. We had big jars and you scooped them out. I think it was like a penny a cup or two cents a cup. Yeah, we had that candy store for a while. I lived in back of the store. We had four rooms in the back and we lived there. We lived upstairs too for awhile. But we moved down. The janitors were the Picklers."

 "And I had a friend there that used to come. Her name was Mildred Piantanida. She used to come for her Coke. She loved her Coca Cola. And cigarettes. We sold cigarettes, you know. And she would sit and talk with me. Her name was Mildred Piantanida. She passed away a long time ago. She was quite young. She had two sons, two boys, and her husband was Italian. Piantanida. Oh, she was a nice lady. She was my friend. She gave me a lot of business, you know. Yeah, she was older than me. And I moved away. And then I heard when she had passed away. She was sick. I never forget her. She was very nice."

Speaking of a job she held in Manhattan’s Garment District in the 1940s, my mother seems proud:  

"I worked for Kolmer Marcus in New York. One day George Raft came in for his coat. I filled out the slip. They sold men’s suits and coats. Expensive…Daddy couldn’t afford a suit there." 

But speaking of Daddy:

"You know where I met Daddy? At a dance. With my girlfriend Sylvia. That’s where I met him. I met him at The Manhattan Center. It was a dance hall...he came over, and he swept me off my feet."

"Then I got married and I moved into the house where he was living. His mother was a sick lady. She had that illness. Multiple sclerosis. I met her, she met me. She took a liking to me. They used to have a lady come in and take care of her. She passed away in the hospital. She was young too. I remember. I didn’t go to the funeral. And then when Daddy came back I said, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” I felt bad. He handled it fine. He was strong."

There are more meanderings on the tape, mostly bits and pieces prompted by my specific questions and hints, and I recognize that there are mistakes and points of confusion, but I am so glad I made this effort to record her when I did.

This is all I have now of my mother’s voice, which would otherwise be lost for all of time.  

And her memories seem like glimmers from a different era, still shining here like dewdrops, small occurrences that helped to shape a life now ended.

This is why oral histories matter. This is why The Living Stories Collective exists, and we hope it continues. 

Listening to My Father's Voice

My father's voice is pressed onto a little disc recorded about seventy years ago when he was stationed with the 145th Signal Company of the 5th Armored Division at Camp Cooke, California, located in northern Santa Barbara County between Lompoc and Santa Maria. He drove a half–tractor and operated a radio in his army days, but he never saw combat, and at some point he landed himself a desk job at the base working for The Camp Cooke Clarion, writing various articles, poems, and book reviews. I saw a snapshot of his office once, complete with water cooler, Northern Pacific calendar, and the plain round face of a wall clock that read twenty to eleven. 

One of his stories, called “The Moment”, was dramatically enacted at the service club, another, a touching wartime Father’s Day tribute, was picked up by a couple of "real" newspapers. But for me the most memorable piece was about Zombie, the beloved wire-haired terrier of Camp Cooke's Buzzer Company canine corps. It's an article that was cut out and cherished by at least one anonymous reader, and I know this because I found it decades later in the files at the Lompoc Historical Society.

But most of what I know about my father's time at Camp Cooke was gleaned from photographs and clippings he kept in a handsome leather album, with captions and commentaries written in ink along the bottom borders.  As a child growing up in 1950’s New York, I was fascinated by all this. World War II had ended just a decade earlier, and the raucous city was still good-hearted and full of postwar optimism. But there was something compelling, elusive, and already historical about those black and white photos of stark new barracks on dusty fields, jeep convoys along desolate hills, and my father in uniform, dark and handsome, gleaming with dreams, a familiar stranger. “It was beautiful country,” he told me once, referring to that Santa Barbara land. “I always wished I could return.” It seems so serendipitous that I live here now, perhaps fulfilling his dream by proxy.

And yet at the time, of course, he was eager to go back home, and on one momentous day he went into the nearby town of Lompoc to see about booking railroad tickets east.  Afterwards, he stopped at the USO facility with some buddies and made a little record to mail home. It eventually went west again and now resides with me. 

"This message will announce my homecoming verbally," he says. "I will be home around January 5. Until that date, I can hardly wait." He goes on to make jokes about KP duty, sends his love, and adds, "We're having a heck of a time trying to get tickets for a steam liner. By ten o'clock we will know whether we have succeeded..."

When he discovers he has more time on the record, he sings "My Old Kentucky Home", and maybe it's an odd choice for a New York boy, but that fundamental yearning for home resonates. 

The actual record requires a phonograph that can be played at 78 rpm., so I didn't hear it for many years, but one day my dear friend and colleague Marc Kummel (aka Treebeard) played it for me on his old-fashioned Victrola. There I am below, after listening for the first time. 

Treebeard made me a CD of the record, which I downloaded onto my computer, and henceforth whenever I have had the whim to hear my father's voice speaking and singing across the decades, the wonders of technology have allowed it.  And now I am sharing it here too, on this living archive of voices and stories, because I want my father to be a part of it.  

So have a listen, and don't mind the scratchiness at the start...that just adds to the magic:

We never stop missing the ones we have loved.

Living In the Realm of Anything's Possible

Jim Brady has been teaching children and leading journeys with them for about forty years, and he's traveled with students all over the globe with a company called Educational Safaris, which he started in 1982. He was one of the founders of Dunn Middle School, has been with Santa Barbara Middle School for twenty years, and has been involved with the Rio Beni Health Project in Bolivia, begun by the late Dr. Lou Netzer. He served on the Leadership Council and Accreditation team of the Association for Experiential Education and worked as an educator in Thailand on a State Department refugee training program. And that’s just the stuff he might put on his resumé, if he ever had to do one. He’s also a family man, surfer, cyclist, songwriter, and musician.

And it’s a good thing he’s an old friend of mine, because most of the audio recording of the interview I did with him on November 13, 2014 was destroyed by a technological malfunction. I was mortified, but he was as understanding as only a friend can be. “Everything is ephemeral,” he said. “We can think of that recording as a Buddhist sand mandala, there for a moment, then gone.”

Very Zen. We even have a vague plan to regroup and try again.  But in the meantime, until I can present a full interview with Jim, here’s a glimpse I've crafted using salvaged excerpts from the Lost Tapes.

Jim was born in 1951 in Santa Barbara, an admittedly lucky place to start out. His love of travel, camping, and the great outdoors began with boyhood Sierra trips:

“My father would take us out of school twice a year, autumn and spring, and we'd go to Yosemite and hike. Then when I turned sixteen, we started going by ourselves. I was the oldest, and supposedly in charge. We'd drive all night across the desert and figure it out from there."

"I had no idea what we were doing, really. No tent, no stove. It was just the boys, and it was a dream. By the time we got back home, we felt like we’d been to the end of the world. First thing we'd do after we got home was get to the beach, surf, and start planning right away for the next trip. We did those trips for three years in a row: we would go to the Sierras, park the car in Camp 5 in Yosemite Valley, hitchhike to the trailhead, and then hike back a hundred miles or so.”

“I also read a book that influenced me early on. It was Colin Fletcher’s Thousand Mile Summer, where he hiked from the Mojave Desert up to Oregon. He may have started in Mexico.  Just walking, sort of to find himself, and he went through a place called Silver Canyon, a creek up in Alpine County. Of course by 1968 and ’69, we figured the Sierras were way too crowded, and we felt Yosemite Valley was out of control, so we started going further north. So we went up to Alpine County, which was the least populated place in California. We would go off-trail, up canyon and down, and along the creeks. So those early trips led to way bigger trips.”

And then, there were those golden Hollister Ranch days:

“In the summer of ’67, before we went to the mountains, my dad said, ‘Hey, wanna go up to Hollister? I’m meeting my friend J.J.’ So we drove into Hollister Ranch, hopped in a jeep, and went everywhere, up and down and around and about, and clear to Cojo Creek on roads that you can now barely recognize as old footpaths.”

“At that time Hollisters were looking at selling, and what were they gonna do with it? My dad really didn’t want to see it bought up by the private group and made into some big campground. At that time his idea was that it should be made into a state or national park. Thankfully neither of those actually happened. But for better or worse, he wanted it preserved. That was his interest. He knew it was unique.”

“So after that cruise in the jeep, I was noticing the beaches, ‘cause this place was in our surfing realm–The Ranch–or we just called it Hollister, and my dad said, ‘You boys wanna go up there regularly?’ Oh, yeah! So we got this little card. My brother in Australia still has it. It’s a little handwritten card that says, ‘Let the Brady brothers in.’ So we would get there super early in the morning and wait for Jim the guard to sober up as much as possible and open up the gate.  Choirs of angels when the gate opened! And that was the summer of ’67.”

"Those were some pretty special years.  During my junior and senior years of high school. I played tennis, read books, and went surfing at the Ranch as much as possible. We all had jobs in those days too. I worked two or three nights a week and we were at the Ranch as much as possible, which basically meant just go, see you later, and be home sometime around sunset. That was pretty much the rules. We thoroughly thrashed the '59 Ford Country Squire station wagon that we had; it got stuck on the beach, stuck in the mud for two days at Rights and Lefts. Adventuresome days. I remember standing on a cliff, in southeast raging winds, and thinking, 'Oh, my God!' That beginning, when you’re sixteen or seventeen, and… “Am I gonna be looking back on this, like it’s something that happened during that long ago time? Or can I actually live like this? I knew I wanted to live someplace that was by the ocean.”

 Jim has succeeded in living near the ocean, and with access to the mountains and backcountry too, but there were plenty of detours along the way.

“I went away to college like I was supposed to, for one year to University of Santa Clara. ’69, ’70. An insane time to go away to college. And about halfway through that year, I said, ‘No. I should not be here. It’s not working for me.” But I felt I was destined to go to college, I felt I was maybe going to be a lawyer or something. So I came back to City College and thrived. Loved it. Had really good classes. Worked where Brophy’s is now, and shared an apartment, part of a house downtown, with two of my buddies. The combined rent was 75 bucks, so $25 a month paid the rent. By this time I had a VW bus and split my time playing tennis for the team, going to school, working, going to the Ranch as much as possible, and to Rincon.”

“And I'm also wonderin' what the heck I’m doing, ‘cause it kinda felt like I ought to think about something here. Then I had a conversation…no, I had listening session…with one of my high school teachers who taught me a philosophy class, Why Man Creates, kind of a gender-specific title in those days, but it was a philosophy class, the big ideas…and this teacher, who was a full academic, told me, ‘Jim, you don’t really have to go to school all the time.’ I said, ‘I don’t?’ Really? He said, ‘I can see you have no idea yet. Just don’t go. Work for a while. Travel. Study. Read. Figure it out.’”

Good advice.

“So after City College, when I had my AA, I was gonna not go to school. Trouble is this was the height of Vietnam. My student deferment was gonna give out.”

Like all the American men of my generation, Jim remembers his draft number:

“Number 40. Four-o. Oh yeah. I remember the night in the dormitory at University of Santa Clara when those numbers came out, and you could hear guys go, “SHIT!” from their rooms as they were announcing these, pulling numbered balls out of a round thing,  like it was a game show. I remember the night. So I was number 40. The moment I left school, I was gonna lose that deferment.”

"So I’m still in school and I recognize by this time it was mostly guys of color, the poor folks, that were going to Vietnam and it was white guys were still in school, and I knew that wasn't right, but I wasn’t sure what to do. I’m like, ‘Oh no! I might get drafted!’ so I went for a road trip with my girlfriend at the time, up the coast in my VW bus, surfing, going to beaches, went to Humboldt, trying to figure out if I could go to school there. I wound up at Cal State Bakersfield, in its second quarter open…they were takin’ anybody…and I went and lived out in the San Joaquin Valley for three months, close to the Sierras. I had no idea what I was doing.”

“So I was there taking classes and working, or I would drive home, go to the Ranch…we’re just about losing our pass right about this time, but Hollisters, MGIC and Macco and all that was going on, so we still could kinda get in. And I still had no idea what I was doing, but I took a philosophy course at Bakersfield, and I thought, 'I kinda like this thinking stuff.' I was about as good at it as I was a surfer, which was, well, not great, but okay. But I knew what I loved.”

“I knew what I didn't love too, and I didn’t love living in Bakersfield. That was nuts. It was this little community south of Bakersfield, just a little four-way crossroads out on Highway 99. By now I realized it was time for me to not go to school.”

“I went back to Santa Barbara and I filed for my Conscientious Objector status. Wrote all that up, submitted it, and right about this time, was surfing Rincon a lot, December ’71 maybe. I think we’d lost our Hollister let-the-Brady-boys-in pass by this time, so we were mostly surfing Rincon, and the place we’d go a lot after surfing Rincon was my friend Scott Coffman’s parents’ house.  He had this one sister. I didn’t know her, but we had gone to high school together for two years. So one day, after surfing, we arrived at the house–Scott’s mother, Mary Alice, would cook breakfast for anybody that showed up–so one morning I showed up for breakfast, and I’m standing there, still dripping, and there was this beautiful young girl, my age, standing there in her nightgown by the heater, and it was Robin. So that is the moment. It was love. And now we’ve been together…whatever that’s been…43 years.”

“Meanwhile, my brother Tim and I had this plan, and then Scott joined us. We were outta here! We were gonna save some money and then go surf Europe. My C.O. status was still pending. Never heard. And I had no idea, but I had lost my student deferment. It was a real transitional time in the draft department.”

“Basically, we saved just enough money. $800 is what I saved. And we had a leather business, Robin’s brother and myself, called Little Drake’s Leathercraft, in Carpinteria, made purses and belts and flip-flops and stuff like that, and kinda sorta barely made enough money. And the three of us boys left…I was 21…Tim was 17 or 18, and Scott was about 18 or 19, and Robin needed to work for a couple of more months, save some money, and then she was gonna join us. That’s as far as the plan went.  So the three of us flew with five surfboards to Amsterdam. In those days you put the surfboards in cardboard and hope for the best. You had to ship ‘em air freight, hope for the best, and go pick ‘em up some other place at the airport in Amsterdam. “

“Amsterdam. That’s a long ways from surfing. But the ticket was cheap. And we wound up there, bought a VW bus made into some sort of a camper, an old Dutch plumbing van, and drove south to France. We had hand-drawn maps. Some of our buddies from the Ranch, like Paul Kemnitzer, had been over to France the year before that, so we had one map book that was kinda like vintage World War II, and a bunch of hand-drawn maps showing where to turn to go find this or that place. That trip took us to northern Spain, France, the Basque country, through the Pyrenees, and Italy, where I visited my sister, who was living in Florence at the time. We arrived in Florence in our VW bus with five surfboards inside and on top, and we were stunned by the artwork and the culture there. From Florence, back across central Spain, up through eastern and western Spain, then into Portugal. Then Robin flew into Lisbon and we all hopped on the boat with the VW and went to North Africa, Morocco, and spent the winter down there. Again, we had a couple of hand-drawn maps as to where to go. It was real adventure.”

“I called home while we were in Morocco. In those days, it was like the old French phone system. You make a reservation, and they tell you to come back at 2 o’clock, and you go and pay your money, and you get this crackly phone connection.  So I say, 'Hey, Pops!' And he goes, 'Who’s this?' I say, ‘It’s me!’ And he goes, ‘Who?’ ‘It’s me!’ So I go, ‘Is Tim there?’ He gets Tim. Turns out my dad didn’t wanna talk to me because he’d gotten my draft notice, and he had told the draft guys he didn’t know where I was, but he had sent off my induction notice to the American Express office in Rabat, I think, which he dutifully remembered we had told him had closed. So he had done what he had to do. He had sent off this thing that I never got. But things were a little weird then. He was not convinced.  He said, ‘Well, they could be keeping track of who I’m talking to. You never know. Play it safe.’

“So that was strange. I was 21 years old.  My C.O. had obviously been rejected, and I had been asked to report for some sort of hearing, never got that, and then they just gave me my 1A. For a little while, I thought, ‘Am I gonna be one of those guys who lives in Morocco for the rest of my life? Where you can’t go home? Am I against the law now?’ It was a very strange feeling.”

In Morocco they shared a house with two Hawaiians and a couple from L.A. Across the street lived a group of Australians, the most fun, crazed neighbors you could ask for. "So there was the Yank house and the Australian house in this one town. That was it. We surfed there for a month, then headed southwards towards the desert and some place we'd heard about called Anchor Point. We camped there for a month."

Eventually there came the long unmemorable drive back through Europe, and a flight from Amsterdam back to California. He had been gone for seven months. .

“When I got back home, coming through customs, I thought, ‘This should be interesting.’ I had no idea what was gonna happen, and nothing did. They just stamped the passport and back we came. So it turns out, I was eligible, 1A, and if you were eligible, and weren’t called, like if you had a higher number, you could just go ahead and be eligible for a year, and if you weren’t called you were put in a holding category, and with number 40, well, I would have been nailed. But the draft had been slowing down. Remember that headline? Nixon and Kissinger: Peace Is At Hand. It turns out I went into 1A, eligible to be drafted, in December, and in January, since I hadn’t been called, it flipped me into a holding category. So I got this little H card in the mail months and months after I got back home. H for holding category, until you’re 35, or whatever it is, which was weird. It just felt strange. I felt that I had ducked it, and I didn’t like that, but on the other hand, I was just glad I didn’t have to go.”

Now it was time to go back to school at UCSB, surf, start a gardening business, rent a little trailer with Robin on La Cumbre Road, and discover his love for teaching. But Jim’s passion for travel had been unleashed.

“The floodgates were open. We were ready. We recognized that there was a whole lot possible beyond what looks possible.” 

Alas, lost until the retake is the audio of Jim telling me about his and Robin’s next three-year journey, back to northern Spain, a winter working in Cornwall...and two years in Kenya, the Seychelles, South Africa. Lost for now are Jim’s colorful first impressions of steamy Mombasa, as surreal and exotic as the cantina scene from Star Wars. Lost until later is the story of how Jim and Robin ended up teaching in East Africa and joining the Peace Corps there. Not to mention Jim's years of adventure traveling with kids, his lifelong love of music, and working with families and children from Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia in the refugee camps of Thailand.

Even without audio or transcript, though, I do remember what Jim said when I asked what gives him hope. He told me that he remembers seeing people in Kenya from the Luo tribe. The idea that someone descended from this group would one day become President of the United States, Barack Obama, well...that would have been utterly unimaginable then. But it happened. Fantastic and impossible things do happen. And there’s a lot of hope in that.

“I live in the realm of anything’s possible,” said Jim.  

He means it.

Annie's Quest

Since you can’t fix everything, you finally have to pick one thing and begin. Even if it’s a big thing that seems seems insoluble, you act as if it isn’t. You imagine how it could be.  And if it requires a million tasks, you try tackling one of the million. You do your best. That's why I want you to meet Annie Rothschild, whose commitment to reducing the daunting problem of plastic pollution is earnest and inspiring. It's time for a glimpse of someone young and idealistic, still at the start of her journey, but thinking long term, little by little, and not losing faith.

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Annie Rothschild would like her pregnancy to be an environmentally conscious journey. She has long been concerned about the harmful effects of plastic on the planet and human health, but impending parenthood has intensified her sense of mission.  Expecting a baby does that. You feel vested in the future in a profoundly personal way. You want with all your heart to set good forces in motion. 

Annie is a musician who plays upright bass for a band called Nocona (“Americana rock and roll music”) and has also worked for about ten years as a wardrobe specialist and makeup artist for film, television, and photo shoots. In other words, her life is hectic, and she readily admits that her pregnancy, which occurred while she and her fiancé were still in the midst of planning their October wedding, was an accident. “It’s very exciting but we definitely got thrown off course a bit,” she says. “And here I am now interviewing midwives and trying to figure out what we’ll need for the baby, and trying to do it plastic-free.”

How does one do it plastic-free? Annie is actively involved with an organization called Plastic Pollution Coalition and hopes to find some answers to share with others.  She knows it won’t be easy.  “Once you open your eyes and see the plastic all around you, it’s overwhelming,” she admits. “It’s in every grocery store, all the beauty products, all the toys and baby stuff. It’s everywhere.”

“And the truth is that people don’t know how bad plastic is. It’s such a lightweight, clear, seemingly easily disposable item that it seems like it doesn’t have a heavy environmental impact, but it’s the opposite.  So through organizations like the Plastic Pollution Coalition that I’m a part of, we’re trying to educate people, and we’re also just trying to figure things out and come up with alternatives, and I want to be involved and help out. It’s become a passion of mine, and it’s never going away. I’m obsessed, basically. Hopefully in a healthy way.”

Annie may be obsessed, but she’s not naïve. “Even for someone like myself, I’ve tried so hard never to buy it, and I generally don’t, but sometimes you’re stuck in some kind of situation…” She laughs. “I feel like I’m confessing. But immediately eradicating plastic from your life would be very difficult. Maybe the key is to just try to do a little bit better than you did yesterday. Yeah, even a little bit better is still great.” 

If we resolve to do a little bit better, starting wherever we happen to be, then little by little, who knows what we can achieve? One of the first opportunities Annie perceived was to bridge the music community and the environmental community. At the Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee, she helped develop a pilot project called Plastic Free Touring (more about that in another post) that demonstrated how musicians could reduce their plastic footprint on the road, and it’s making a difference. 

The idea is to look around in your own life and see what spheres of influence you have, what connections you can make, what platforms you can use.  Whether within schools, offices, or community organizations, it may come as a surprise to realize how much you can help shape an event and gradually change a culture.  

Our own individual habits are of course crucial as well.  Annie intends to make careful choices throughout her pregnancy and into parenting that are consistent with her knowledge, values, and passion. She’s just beginning, and she’s humble about it, and she would love to hear about the experiences of others.

“So far I have one tangible thing I can talk about,” she says. “Cravings for food. I have to say I’ve eaten more food from plastic since I’ve been pregnant than I had for the prior two years. It’s because I crave dairy, in particular, organic, plain cold yogurt…I need this yogurt! I finally found an awesome yogurt packaged in glass that they sell in only one place I know of in San Francisco. The brand is St. Benoit, and it’s heavenly.”

“Another thought I’ve had is to reach out and try to engage actual manufacturers. Start a real conversation. I know that’s kind of a big thing, but what are they thinking? I’d really like to know. Like, what’s up with the plastic baby bottles and plastic nipples? It’s a shocker that those are even being made anymore.  And pacifiers. Is that plastic our babies are sucking on? What are we sticking in their mouths?  I just want to know. I just want to find out what alternatives we have.” 

Annie is determined to delve into this more fully after her wedding, which, by the way, will be a plastic-free event, and that’s been an adventure in itself. (”They all looked at me like I stepped off the moon when I said I’m not having plastic. No plastic cups, no plastic straws, steel cups for everybody!”)

“I’m excited to be on this voyage,” Annie says. But this is a journey of learning, as much about asking questions as giving advice, and she hopes there are other parents and parents-to-be who will travel with her.

2

Annie’s awareness of plastic pollution and its health and environmental impacts developed gradually. “About four years ago a friend of mine mentioned something about not wanting to buy plastic,” she explains. “At first I didn’t get it, but it was like a seed was planted. You just start noticing all the little things, all the to-go cups, all the straws, the plastic bags everywhere. I started feeling guilty…just throwing all that stuff away gave me a weird feeling of guilt. So it was like a seed had been planted, and that seed grew into a garden, a whole ecosystem.”

Impending motherhood has only deepened Annie’s concern and commitment. She has gone from wedding mode into baby world faster than she ever envisioned, but even in the midst of all the planning, preparation, and major life changes, her resolve to keep plastics out of the picture remains as unshakeable as ever.

“Maybe part of it is based on fear,” she admits. “I’m genuinely nervous about what my child’s exposure to plastic will be. Our baby is not going be drinking out of plastic bottles and things like that, but it’s also challenging to find household furnishings without toxic chemicals, and non-plastic toys.”

Even as we speak, a baby shower is being organized for Annie, and she has discovered she’s uncomfortable about telling well-meaning friends what they should and should not give. It conflicts with an old fashioned sense of etiquette that she attributes to her Southern upbringing.

“I aspire to be gracious,” she says. “These are friends and family who are coming from a loving place. They want to stock our house with presents and things, and it’s generous of them, and I don’t want to seem rude or ungrateful.”

So how does one get the message across without sounding pious or preachy or unappreciative?

“I’m glad we’re talking about this,” Annie says, thoughtfully. “I have to be soft, but strong. Maybe if I can just add it onto the registry or invitation, No Plastics Please, it wouldn’t sound too abrasive, but sends an honest message about my values. I see this as an opportunity to strengthen our commitment, not stray from it. This is who we are, and this is how we feel about things, and we want to incorporate these ideals into this next phase of our lives, including our new family member.”

One hopes that friends would understand and respect that, and it’s possible we’re overthinking this. But in fact, we’ve wandered into a bigger forest, bumping against the same basic question: how do we constructively communicate our concerns about plastic pollution to others in the multiple moments of every day when the issue rears its head?

3

Sometimes we feel embarrassed and awkward about championing even knowledge-based values that concern us all.  We don’t want to appear to be proselytizing or pontificating, we don’t want to seem heavy-handed and self-righteous, we just want to be reasonably affable and on our way. 

But we live in a world where everyday transactions involve the proffering of plastic, and once you are aware of the consequences of this unmitigated generation of trash, it’s hard to remain silent. Do we just say no to the plastic, or do we add a little information? How can we effectively communicate when these moments arise?

Annie has concluded that it’s all about tone, and finding the right tone is one of the struggles in working for any cause, not just combating plastic pollution. “If it’s holier-than-thou, it isn’t going anywhere,” she points out.

She’s right.  No one likes to feel scolded. We need to implicitly acknowledge common foibles as well as common interests, and we must set an example with our behavior rather than preaching. The specifics may depend on a quick assessment of each situation.

Annie has plenty of anecdotes to share. There was the time she spent two hours in a store shopping for ribbon to be used for various wedding-related purposes, brought armfuls to the counter for check-out, and was helped by a pleasant woman in her seventies.  After ringing up the order, she promptly began putting the ribbons into plastic bags, which of course Annie didn’t want.

“Oh, it’s okay,” said the woman. “These are biodegradable.”

Annie examined one of the bags more closely. “This is not biodegradable,” she said. “They’re lying to you.”

The woman’s response: “It doesn’t matter anyway.”

Ouch.

“She threw down the gauntlet there,” says Annie. “I told her, ‘It does matter! It does.’ But did that have any effect on her? Probably not.”

“These kinds of moments present themselves all the time,” she continues. “Like at the airport, a woman at the concessions stand asking me if I want a bottle of water, and I said, ‘No thank you, and you shouldn’t be drinking this either, for these reasons.’ She looked at me blankly. She was just doing her job. She meant well.”

“Even with my parents,” Annie continues. “They understand the problem. But they think, how are you going to do anything about it? The world’s going to hell anyway.”

That’s deflating and not much to work with, but it’s also an understandable response. We all feel overwhelmed and discouraged sometimes.  And that’s all the more reason to act with integrity, try to adhere to our convictions, and maintain a degree of optimism, which is a life-giving force.

As for educating others, such as those we encounter in plastic-transactions, you have to quickly decide in each situation if it’s a potentially meaningful chance to be instructive. Often it is not. Avoid getting upset or frustrated or condescending. 

“It’s such a fine line, even in talking about environmental stuff, where you don’t make that person the bad guy,” says Annie. “I just don’t think people are very educated about it. We’ve gotten into this norm, where we use all this plastic stuff, and people don’t think about it or realize it’s a massive problem. But I actually do believe that deep down in some level of people’s consciousness they know it’s not good, and they feel bad about it, or guilty. It’s a huge waste management crisis, actually, and it’s not sustainable.”

Annie has developed some handy, informative talking points. But she also recognizes that in most situations, the best way to decline a plastic bag, cup, straw, or whatever, is a simple, “No, thank you. I’m trying not to use plastic.”

With that response, you’re setting an example, not telling someone else what to do. Furthermore, if it elicits the question “why?” that gives you an opportunity to explain, and if it elicits some understanding that was already there, you have reinforced the message.  If it garners only cluelessness, don’t get too upset. The tide will turn, little by little.

And that brings us to another important message. We’re taking on a huge job here, and we cannot expect immediate success. The point is to do a little better each day.  As with all environmental problems, significant legislative action and economic policy will be necessary, as well as compromise, sacrifice, and innovation, and progress will likely be slower than we wish, but we can start in our own lives right now. Here’s the question we can ask ourselves: Am I doing a little better today than yesterday?