Fish on Land

Handwriting

The other day, I received a note from someone I’m working with, and their handwriting reminded me so much of someone dear to me, that it triggered many vivid memories. The person’s handwriting was a strange uncomfortable scrawl, as if this individual had never taken a penmanship class, but more insightful to me, it seemed as if they had had to re-learn how to write after having an injury or paralysis. The handwriting was a dead ringer for my grandmother’s – post-stroke. Grandma, before her stroke, had the cursive and neat penmanship of an attentive student. It was a serenade to long love letters and seems to be mimicked in romantic Hallmark card script. After her stroke, she could barely write in one continuous ink thread and often trailed alarmingly out of the line margins. Her writing was very difficult to read to the untrained eye. She was embarrassed by her writing, just as she was embarrassed by her stroke. Her ability to speak was also dramatically affected. She lost the ability to communicate and she never recovered from it. Her will to learn how to do these things all over again was stubbornly locked in apathetic refusal. She simply would not. Her ability to be happy never came back – it too was lost with her speech and penmanship.

I was on the phone with Grandma that Saturday morning around 10:15 a.m. when she had her stroke. She was talking with me about making pancakes for breakfast and my mom bringing me over in a little while. As she described what she had in the fridge for breakfast, I imagined her with the fridge door open and bent over looking in with the phone in one hand. She started to lose her train of thought. She paused on the words and then started kind of stammering, “Mmm…mmm…., ahhhh, sh….sh….hhhhh.” On the line, I said, “Grandma?” Nothing. “Grandma, are you there?” Nothing. A clank as the phone dropped. I walked over to Mom with the phone in my hand. “Mom, Grandma sounds funny, like she’s drunk or something.” I was around 10 years old. Mom seemed alarmed, “I just talked to her, she wasn’t drunk.” She grabbed the phone, “Mom, mom?” Nothing. Mom called Tia and an ambulance and we all rushed over there. Grandma was wandering around her house in a daze. She seemed lost. The paramedics indicated symptoms of a stroke and took her to the hospital. Grandma was around for many years after her stroke, in fact her body was in excellent shape, the health of a woman much younger, the doctors would say. It hurts to remember her once lovely handwriting and speech so marred by her “minor” stroke. A stroke that secretly took much more from her than speech and handwriting.

Oh Christmas Tree

One Christmas when I was 15, I was living with a good friend and her family. Jennifer and I were friends since pre-school but we really became close when we were around 9 or 10 years old. Throughout my teen years, I periodically lived with her – especially during summer vacation and holidays. On this particular evening, it was icy cold (as it rarely gets in Los Angeles) and we decided to bug her dad Jeff about getting a tree. Jennifer, her sister Gina, her mom Marta and I all bombarded him with requests for a Christmas tree as soon as he walked in the door. He resisted at first. He had no chance. Finally he suggested that we go downtown where the railroad freight cars unloaded all their trees. There was a public auction there. He would buy a tree, but it had to be cheap.

We winded our way downtown, past busted-up store fronts and twinkling Christmas lights. The area where the freight trains unloaded was a mish mash of retired and rusted out freight cars and homeless people plus the bright white lights and hasty spray painted signs of a makeshift Christmas tree lot. The parking lot was a wide-open dirt area, not unlike a demolition derby arena. We arrived and jumped out full of expectation. We could now hear the auctioneer, his voice booming over a loudspeaker. There were rows and rows of people standing, mostly men in puffy plaid work jackets, their family members keeping warm in the car. The auctioneer was on a concrete loading platform. Trees would get hauled up onto the platform and he would heartily grab them and plop them on the platform. The bidding would start. He didn’t upsell the trees, he just turned them around and started with a price. Some trees invoked serious bidding, 6 or more volleys. We watched many trees get bid on and purchased. This was a cash-only exchange. They didn’t help you tie it to your car. Jennifer and I kept tugging at her dad to bid on trees as they came up. We wanted something huge and majestic. He wanted something alive, small and as cheap as possible (did I already mention that?). Jennifer’s dad has a fond reputation for always being super cheap. How else would he have known about this place?

Finally a tree appeared that he felt good about bidding on. He had watched and learned. He raised his arm in the air and threw out a number, deepening and raising his voice. The auctioneer re-announced the bid. Complete silence in the crowd. The auctioneer repeated the bid. Silence. The auctioneer did the going once, going twice, SOLD chant. We won the tree! It was the tree that no one wanted, the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. It was magnificent.

The Artist

When I was about 9 years old, my mom became friends with her ballet teacher and we started hanging out at his house. His name was Mark. He was a red-headed, chain smoking, wildly artistic, loud and gregarious gay man. At his house in Echo Park, we’d make hearty improvised dinners and dance like loons on his creaky wooden floor to big band era music. At the end of the night, he’d put on soulful blues from Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. His laugh was a loud roar that wound down to a deep chuckle and it would wake you up if you were starting to doze off on the couch. I learned the delicate process of boiling and canning fruit to make preserves. Months later when we opened the jars, some tasted delicious and some were strangely sour, the fruit had yielded in an unpredictable way. It was a memorable lesson. Mark also taught modern dance, and I took lessons from him. He always encouraged me positively and made me feel like I had my own style and heart when I danced. He could be wonderful. There was a fine line between having fun with Mark and hating him. His loudness and over-the-top personality were too much for me sometimes, especially when I became an awkward teenager. When he bought a serious fixer-upper not too far from where my mom lived, he promptly set about adding a second room and building a deck in front, along with gutting the bathroom and building a new staircase. With basically no prior knowledge in building, he created a funky and cozy oasis. He would work all hours and sometimes left rambling and disconnected messages on our answering machine when he was drunk. When I was 10, he asked me to help him with a dance audition. My vanity got the best of me. When I showed up to rehearse, he showed me my costume: a large brown box, turned upside down. He wanted me to get under it and slowly move across the floor while he danced around and over it, all set to dissonant minimalist music – very modern dance. When we performed the piece, I scuttled slowly across the floor, and I could hear him landing near me. At one point, I sneezed from within my cardboard box from the dust on the floor. One of the judges chuckled.

As he got older, he became more and more eccentric. His lover of many volatile years passed away. It became harder and harder for him to make ends meet. My mom drifted away from him. I moved away to go to school. Every time I visit my mom now, I consider driving over to his place and seeing if he’s still there. I have so many memories of him, how he used to make my mom and I laugh so hard, we’d feel like we were going to pee in our pants. He introduced me to blues and soul music and a lifestyle of creative and artistic energy, constantly expressing himself. He embodied the passionate artist, with all its turmoil. I miss him often but never seem to make the trip over to his place. Time holds me back.

Dreaming Unfaithful

Last night I had a very vivid dream. I was with an ex-boyfriend from about 12 years ago and we were fooling around. We were facing each other on a narrow bed and we were undressing each other. We were mute, just hands floating and his eyes staring at me, empty and emotionless. Looking at his eyes in the dream, I thought that my eyes must look dead too. Just as we were preparing to commit to the adultery, because in the dream I knew that I was doing something terribly wrong, I looked to my right and my husband was standing there. He was staring and blinking, in alarm and shock, full of emotion. He turned slowly and walked out of the room. I suddenly could speak, but there were now no words, just weird throaty noises, like gargles and swallowed burps. I tried to get to him, my husband, but he was gliding away from me.

I awoke with the sensation of falling, and my arms automatically extended out to the side. My left arm collided with a warm body next to me in the bed. I turned my head slowly, as if waking for the first time after a coma, tentative that my neck could be trusted to work. The fright from the dream had my heart really pounding. I sucked in air and gingerly whacked the warm body to make sure that it was really there. The only sound that escaped from my lips was my husband’s name.

Love is Fine

My grandmother was from Canton, Ohio. She lived there with her husband and son and daughter. She also wasn’t far from her mother and father. My great-grandmother was a head strong and independent woman. She owned and ran a boarding house. She was an entrepreneur. When my grandmother was supposed to be happily married, she met an unmarried man who was older, suave, and had an unusual accent the likes of which was rare in Ohio. He was originally from Mexico. He returned to his home in Los Angeles and grandma soon followed in hot pursuit. She left her husband and 2 kids behind with her mother.

Eventually grandma returned home, to Ohio, and my great-grandmother could see that she was deeply unhappy. According to my grandmother, her mother said the following, “If you are unhappy with your husband, you shouldn’t be with him, Doris. Do you love this man in Los Angeles? Do you want to be with him?” Her mother followed this up with, “Maybe it’s time for a change of pace, why don’t we all move out to California?” My grandmother was smitten and her mother knew it. They sold the boarding house, drove cross-country like a caravan of gypsies and bought one of the first houses they looked at in Hollywood on Kingsley Drive. A rambling and solid Craftsman with room upon room and an outrageously huge, sprawling back yard.    

In this house lived my great-grandmother, my great-grandfather, my grandmother, my grandfather (Martin, the pursued older man with the accent), and my uncle Teddie and my aunt Nancy, grandma's kids from her Ohio marriage. Grandma even told me that her first husband was a fine man, nodding her head. Fine, in my grandma’s language, meant that he was the best man that he could be, under the circumstances. She used to use “fine” to describe picturesque sunsets and good meals. The word was reserved as the ultimate compliment. After her stroke, descriptive language was difficult, but she never was a woman of many words.

Before Martin, she had never experienced all-consuming love. Looking back at candid pictures of them out on the town as a couple, her smile is radiant and her eyes are twinkling with joy. She looks positively radiant. It’s clear that she loved him passionately. Part and parcel of my grandfather was his charming way with all ladies, exacerbated by the fact that he ran a famous nightclub in Hollywood and occasionally came home with lipstick on his collar. She must have remembered how she was wooed by him and it made her crazy to think that other women received that attention. They had horrible fights. By then, they also had 2 daughters, my Aunt Virginia (Tia to me) and my mom, the baby girl, Doris Irene, who has always been known as Dorene. When their 2 daughters were in their late teens, grandma and granddaddy separated permanently. When he passed away, I was about 5 years old and I remember grandma saying that she didn’t believe in funerals and that she didn’t need to say goodbye. Not long before her death I asked her if she had been truly happy moving to Los Angeles and settling here with granddaddy. She nodded her head,
“Oh yes, yes, it was hard, it was crazy. It was fine.”

Summertime

One summer when I was about nine years old, I went with my uncle by marriage and my aunt to West Virginia to visit my uncle’s parents. My uncle Bob had married my mom’s closest sister, Tia Virginia (funny coincidence in the name similarity), and I think my Tia thought the trip would be exciting for me. In addition, my presence would do a good job of deflecting in-law scrutiny on her. This was my first trip out of Los Angeles proper. It was the first time I flew on an airplane. It would also be the first time I rode a horse bare back and the first time I would wade through a fierce running river, feeling fish brush against my legs, with sneakers on my feet to protect them from the rocks. When we weren’t on road trips, I would ride a bike around the small college town, on smooth shaded paths, underneath the canopy of the largest trees I had ever seen. I liked to imagine what it would be like to be “all grown up” in college, like the students I would pass on the grass, waiting for their friends, reading leather bound library books.

I eventually befriended a girl named Christine, who was about a year younger. She lived 4 blocks away in what could be considered the bad part of town. I was being adventurous to even ride over to that part of town, because it meant crossing a busy street. The way I met her was, like many things, purely by chance, she came running down the front steps of her 4-plex apartment building, yelling something back to her mom, not really paying attention to the fact that she was about to collide with me on the bike. I sort of swerved out of her way and when she noticed me veer and stop and openly stare at her, she started asking me questions: “Is that your bike?” “Did your Mama get it for you?”  “Can I ride on the back?” She was, at that young age, already trying to hitch a ride out of the town. She was precocious and she liked playing with me. I once asked her if she had other friends that she played with and her straight light brown hair swayed back and forth as her head indicated no, she was preoccupied with the sidewalk where she was drawing an unsteady hopscotch. It felt strange to judge her so harshly, as a poor kid in a small town, even as I sought her company on those long hot summer days. Eventually, I stopped riding over to her apartment building and knocking on her ground floor door. It was an abrupt end to a friendship that had begun in much the same way. On our last visit, she had become angry that I didn’t want to keep playing into the night and for most of the day she had seemed frustrated about something. I decided on the way home that I didn’t want to play with her anymore, and since she had never come over to my house to play, she had no idea how to find me.

I was more interested in playing with Eliot, the older boy from across the street, and his friends. They played touch football and rode around on their bikes in a pack. They let me play football with them once and I actually scored a touchdown, so I thought that they would willingly let me in. I painfully discovered that walking over to his house and knocking on his door to see if he wanted to play was not a welcome gesture. On the last occasion that I did it, I saw him come home minutes before I walked over and knocked on the door. His unsmiling mother tentatively answered the door and said that he wasn’t home. As I walked back home, I looked back and could see an indistinct round face watching from the second-story curtained window.

I realized then that I was, in a more straightforward fashion, being shut out the same way that I had shut Christine out. It was such a strange realization. It came slowly and gradually, like climbing into a bath full of honey, sinking down, slowly being covered, the weight of understanding pushing on your body. I was dumbfounded and even though I had trouble understanding why I wasn’t worthy of his company, why his mother felt that I wasn’t worthy of his company, I felt like I deserved it. In my shame, I wandered back to Christine’s on one of my last days there, and she was ecstatic to see me. We played all day, her animated face lighting up with ideas, while I remained passive and resigned, nursing my wounded heart.