In The Post Office At Christmas Time

The post office is a crowded long wait in line nightmare at Christmas time at the best of times, but wow, imagine it during the renewed Coved fears.  I had run out of stamps and since I like to get sheets of commemorative stamps instead of generic stamps like I could get at the grocery story, I had to go to the post office.  Also, I had Christmas cards to mail, so mailing them directly at the post office seemed like there would be a better chance of getting them to their destination in time for Christmas.  

 

The first thing I saw when I went inside were two long lines, one headed toward the business end of the post office and the other headed toward the mail drop/package bin and next to it the self-service machine.  But the mail drop/package bin had a notice across it saying “Out of Order”, which was causing consternation for those who had planned on simply dropping in their packages.  So essentially that was a line for the self-service machine.

 

Not being able to mail my Christmas cards at the mail drop, I would be handing them to the person who would sell me the stamps, I now wanted to get into the other line.

 

I almost needed binoculars in order to see the end of the line.  It went all the way down to the farthest end of the post office way past the long rows of P.O. boxes.  This was because of the rule of keeping your distance from others, six feet apart.  I realized that it probably wasn’t any more crowded than normal (for Christmas), it just looked like it, because people in the line had to be so spread apart.  It was a peculiar “psy-op” in that it looked impossible and it was that visual impression that demoralized the people. That and having to wear the masks, of course, which means lining up in an impossible situation surrounded by unhappy people whose faces you can’t fully see and therefore emotionally “read”, coupled with a sense held by some that everyone else in there was a carrier of contagion.  Because of all of this, it felt to me like we were cattle in a line for slaughter.

 

Knowing that this was going to take some time, I settled into observing all that was going on around me. I watched people come into the front door and then look up and down the two long lines and realize what they were in for.  Many of them couldn’t grasp that whichever of the lines they wanted was really that far down (I swear, it was like being at the DMV), as if their vision simply didn’t extend that far.  So they would step into the line between two people social distancing not too far from the entrance door that was in actuality in the front 1/3 of the line. Of course they would be told, “The line is down there” and they were forced to look way down to where the ends of the lines really were.  They would stand there helpless for a while, as if pondering whether they could actually manage remaining where they had butted in (can you fight a person whose face you can't fully see?), or was it even worth staying in the post office at that time.  But soon enough social pressure squeezed them out and they crept on down to the end of line.

 

Every once in a while it would be an extremely elderly person who would come in and perform that “getting into the line too far forward” and when it began to happen to me, a wave of guilt washed over me, wondering if maybe I had a social duty to let them take my place in line while I went all the way down to the end of the line. It didn’t seem to me that these people could stand very long and therefore needed the courtesy of being allowed to butt in, somewhat like giving your seat to an elderly person on a crowded bus (and in Los Angeles, EVERY bus is crowded, which means that no man ever gets to sit), but as this was a “new” morality that I hadn’t so far evaluated, and due to the masks we all were less human anyway, I just stood my ground and defended my place in line.  And anyway, periodically giving up my place in line every time an elderly person came in meant that I would never be able to complete my task.

 

Who I most felt sorry for were the people who came in carrying arms full of packages they wanted to mail.  There was quite a lot of that and I figured that normally those packages would have been gifts that they would have brought to the recipients in person, but now that “Christmas was cancelled” and people were forbidden to have Christmas guests, they had to mail the gifts, instead.

 

One of those burdened with packages was the woman in front of me, who seemed to periodically accost me with evil eyes peering over the top of her mask to make sure that I kept my distance from her as by this time waves of people kept flowing between us since we were now at the level of the entrance door.  It was very tiresome for me to have to constantly jockey my position to accommodate the stream of people coming in the door, attempting to butt in front of me, and keep an acceptable distance from the package-laden women in front of me.

 

But who had it worse was an elderly man waiting in the self-service line holding too many small packages.  Finally his arms gave out and he dropped the whole load onto the floor.  As he was close to me, I felt that I should help him pick them all up, but I imagined him being horrified by my attempt to help, “Don’t you TOUCH these, don’t you know there is a pandemic going on!”, but he solved the problem for me by just leaving them on the floor and shuffling them forward with his feet.

 

This led my awareness to the area of the self-serve machine and I saw strangers helping other strangers figure out how to work it. That was nice.  And then somebody realized that the sign indicating that the mail drop/package bin was out of order only applied to the package bin, not the mail drop.  So he took it upon himself to re-adjust the sign so that it was clear that it applied only to the package bin.  That alone cause five or six people to get out of line, mail their letters, and then leave the post office.  Things were now easing up.

 

Later, a man inside the business end of the post office finished his transaction and as he was walking out, he saw the elderly man shuffling his numerous packages on the floor. He came up to him and pointed out a large cloth bin that was near the counter where he had been.  He said, “If you have already put postage on your packages, all you need to do is put them into that bin.”  Sure enough, the elderly man had already put postage on his packages, so he hadn’t needed to be in the line for the self-service machine. He thanked the man, shuffled the packages to the cloth bin, put in his packages, and then left!

 

By now, the woman in front of me felt that we were close enough to the business end of the post office so she stepped ahead and put her packages on the counter that separated the line of people from the post office windows.  From then on, when she got back up there, she would just need to keep pushing the packages down the counter until it was her turn to go to one of the windows.  When she came back to her place in line in front of me, I said, “That was smart!  I had been worried about you holding those heavy packages so long.”

 

She said, “They weren’t really very heavy, but they were awkward.”

 

I said, “Yeah, they were tiring to your arms,” and she nodded “that they were.”

 

Ultimately we got up to the head of the line, and then it was my turn.  They had on display numerous commemorative stamps and I said to the post office woman, “I don’t want to take up your time, but which of these do you have on hand.”  I knew from experience that they wouldn’t have all of them and with all these people waiting on line, I didn’t want to take a lot of time selecting my stamps.

 

She pointed to the most colorful one and said, “We have ‘Bugs Bunny’”.  I said, “That would be great, let me have a sheet of that one, please.”  They were very cute and funny stamps, enough to brighten ones day with a laugh.  I paid for them and then showed her the envelopes and said, “Can I give these to you or should I put them into the mail slot?”, referring to the one that we all thought had been out of order but which the helpful man revealed it wasn’t.  She said, “Oh, that’s okay, give them to me.”

 

I was then complete and as I walked out of the post office, I said to a person who had just come in, “The line moves faster than it looks.”

 

Outside on the parking lot, the woman who had been in front of me in line had her mask off and was backing her car out of its parking space.  She saw me, gave me a big smile and a wave.  I peeled off my mask, waved back at her, and gave her a hearty “Have a Merry Christmas!”

The Children Are The First To Crack

I have lived in this huge apartment/condo complex for around ten years now and this is the first time the management has ever sent out an alert regarding vandalism from the children who live here.  The notice said that children have damaged the plants and beautiful landscaping that was put in last month, and they have been getting into the laundry and damaging the washing machines and dryers.  Also, they have been playing around the cars in the parking garages and in the driveways, which has long been forbidden.  The management has now threated to evict any family whose children damage property.

 

This complex has a large swimming pool, a kiddie wading pool, an indoor basketball court, a gymnasium, a billiards room, a party room, several outdoor grills and picnic tables where people have parties and birthday parties, and lots of grass to play on. In the summers, the management provides a free camp for young children involving games, crafts, sport tournaments, and other activities.

 

But ever since the first lockdown in mid march, due to Coved all these facilities have been closed. The quad is really a ghost town most of the day.  I hardly ever see an adult at all.  I do see children after 3:00 when “home schooling” ends for the day, but it is hard for them to find places to play, thus they are in the garages and I guess in the planters, and so on.  Also, I am certain their parents are under various stresses and that affects children as well.

 

This year there was no summer, no beach, no family summer trip, no birthday parties, no Halloween, no Thanksgiving, and now the biggest of all, the “cancelling of Christmas” to whatever extreme that really means.  I’ve been getting in the mail gift catalogues featuring photos of beaming children on Christmas morning getting the toys that wanted, and adults, too, photos of a happy Dad with his new golf driver or a smiling Mom with something beautiful for the home or to wear.

 

Children thrive on ritual…and adults, too.  When I think over my own childhood, there were dozens of things we had to have each year or something was wrong.  Here are just a few examples.

 

For my birthdays, my mother would take us and my friends to a local amusement park.  It was like our own tiny Disneyland and we never got tired of it.  My two sisters and brother had summer birthdays, so their parties involved diving for pennies in the swimming pool and having barbecues outside by the pool

 

Always every summer the family go out into the woods for a picnic, and weekly our mother would take us to the beach at Santa Cruz to play in the waves.

 

If we took a driving trip across country to visit our relatives in North Carolina, we loved it whenever there was a “bumpy ride” where the highway went way up and down, Dad would drive faster than normal because the thrill ride made us all scream and laugh.  Our parents would stop at every “see the hila monster” or “rattlesnake”, whatever junk attraction there was in some small town off the road.  When it was very hot, there was always that obligatory stop at Dairy Queen.

 

At least once every month, the family would go to the drive-in movie and we would wear our pajamas.

 

On Thanksgiving, each one of us had to have one of those turkey candles at our place setting and loved to see whose turkey would remain burning the longest (you know some of those were fickle birds!).  That was always a heated contest, even our father got in on it, to the extent that one Thanksgiving, my brother’s and or father’s candle was still burning after we finished our meal, so we kept it burning on the dining room table while we went into the family room to watch the annual “Wizard of Oz” on television. When it was time to get dessert, Mom saw that the dining room table was on fire due to those turkey candles that had gone on the loose!  We have no idea who won that contest that year, but the dining room table wore its newly-created tattoo for the rest of its useful life.

 

Speaking of fire hazards, every Fourth of July Mom and Dad would get us a huge “block party” fireworks kit and Dad would put up on the tennis court a complex of ladders for attaching various spinning fireworks to and we had the neighbors and friends come over for the festivities and we all would all have hot cider and hot dogs.  Mom armed us all with numerous sparklers that we loved to toss far up in the air.  Apparently one Fourth of July somebody’s sparker ended up buried in the tanbark that was all over the ground near there and there it continued to smolder for years!  Mom kept a garden hose dripping in the vicinity of that slow burn, which would slowly migrate across the landscape, but never actually burned out.  She said that for sure she was on some fireman’s “bad list”, since the Fourth of July block parties and throwing the sparklers up in the air never abated. 

 

Christmas of course had its own long list of must-does.  For example, we had to have an advent calendar, the Christmas count-down had to begin.  Naturally we all were involved in decorating the Christmas tree (some years we had more than one in the house) and Mom had to decorate everything in a Christmas theme—pillows on the couches that she had made and towels in the bathrooms and Christmas themed plates and drinking glasses and things hanging on every doorknob and Christmas lights all around outside.  Christmas music played all day throughout the house and also outside. Of course we had to get in the car and go all over everywhere (Atherton where we lived, and Menlo Park, and Palo Alto) to see the Christmas lights.  We read all the dozens of Christmas cards that our parents would get from friends from all around the country; we children new who all those people were.  When Christmas was over, we read all the Christmas cards again and then had the ritual of burning them in the fire place one at a time (sending all those good wishes up into the ethers).  We had fire burning in all the fire places in the house, which means in the living room, the bar, the kitchen, the family room, our parents’ room, and outside by the pool.  What’s Christmas without a fire in a fireplace in almost every room?

 

We children would spend hours lying on the floor by the Christmas tree and would look at the gorgeously wrapped presents that were there and if it had our name on it, we tried to guess what it was.  These were presents from Mom and Dad and each other, as well as gifts from our friends and friends of our parents and certain relatives.  

 

Christmas Eve, we kids were just too wound up to stand it, so Mom dropped us off at a movie theater and every year we would marvel how it was light when we went into the theater and dark when we came back out after the movie.  Then the family ate dinner at a restaurant called “Gale’s” in Menlo Park, which, sadly, no longer exists.  It always had to be Gales for Christmas eve dinner, just because.

 

We children were allowed to open just ONE present before going to bed that night, and it had to be from one of the siblings. Obviously the presents from Santa Clause would arrive sometime in the night.  Dad would get up on the roof and stomp around and say “Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas!” (we figured out who it had been years later).  That was magical for me even when I was old enough to learn the “truth” about Santa Clause, because I believed and still do.

 

We made a big deal of leaving cookies and milk for Santa.  When Mom got into health food, Santa got “Tiger’s milk”, because he needed to have strength for his mission of giving toys to all the boys and girls. (P.S. In our family, it wasn’t “good children” and “bad children”—all Children deserved love from Santa Clause.) And every Christmas morning we made sure that Santa had left us a thank-note for the delicious cookies and the empowering Tiger’s Milk.

 

I think back on these things, and so much more, and appreciate how glorious and powerful our childhood was, and how our rituals wove together the whole family and actually the whole culture.  And Christmas was especially powerful, so that its power lasted within far into my adulthood. I think it remained in our mother’s heart all her life.  Fortunately, we all were mostly able to get together every year, even though there had been a lot of moving about so that no longer were we children living near each other, or near our parents.  But we would drive, fly, or take a train to be together whenever possible, which was most of the time.

 

Ritual keeps you whole, moral, caring, and always getting wiser.  Messing with this is destructive.  And I think when cherished rituals are messed with, it is the children who are the first to crack.  It is like the rug is pulled out from under them, quickly or slowly, and they no longer feel secure about where they are anymore.  And absolutely they need to play.  That is really their main job and requirement, playing, and what I say about toys is that toys are a child’s tools.  They need those in order to accomplish and to grow up.

 

Everybody must be aware of not letting precious rituals slip away.  And when the children crack, you will be next, and somewhere before that is the time to say “enough”.  Do not let whom you were get taken over, but proudly grab onto it will all your might.  You are the sovereign.

HUGGING A BIKER

For the three years I lived back in my home town of Asheville, North Carolina, I had a job as a customer service representative at a medical supply company.  I started there as a temp from an agency, but then my boss there ended up hiring me.

 

There were many things that I could say about that job, good and bad, that I may write about in other entries.  On the whole, though, the entire experience was as a good one where I got to work with some very admirable people, and be involved in a kind of work that is clearly beneficial to the world.  It was a job that assisted in the getting into the hands of hospitals, doctor’s offices, nursing homes, and even retail customers even though this was primarily a wholesale company.  

 

There were four of us working in that position, each one having a cubicle.  I was the newest one of the four, and at first it seemed that I could not possibly function in that job.  The company sold any and everything that had to do with anything medical, everything from needles to band aids to surgical kits to nurses clothing to medications to examination tables to waiting room furniture to art on the walls, and much, much more.

 

Most of the orders came in via telephone (although some came via fax) and the phones rang constantly. Many of the people who were calling to order supplies would have only the sparsest description, such as, “we need another case of shot needles”, and it was up to use to know what were the ones they liked, or if they didn’t know what they needed, it was up to us to hurry up and figure it out.  Yes, the company also had a sales force that was mostly out in the field, but for the most part, the actual connections were with the customer service representatives.

 

Thank goodness I discovered that the company had copious catalogues and I filled the shelves in my cubicle with them all, and during whatever time I could spare, I would pour through them to learn all the items they had in them.  The other reps blew me away, because they would rattle out the appropriate item numbers, of which there were an infinite amount.  “Oh, you need the BD102439-X, would you like a dozen more cases?”  I would hear that kind of thing coming from, say, the cubicle next to me, and I would nearly be paralyzed, how could I ever function like that? I have trouble remembering even my own telephone number, let alone intimately know millions of equipment item numbers.  Learning Japanese would be easier that that!

 

But sure enough, and miraculously, those numbers and the characteristics of every kind of medical supply ultimately got burned into my brain, and I had developed numerous hospitals and medical offices whose employees considered me to be their chosen customer service representative.  

 

Throughout all this, I had the boss who had hired me, Charley, who was a southern “good ol’ boy” (which I say positively, not negatively).  He would arrive in to work on his impressive Harley.  When he and his wife went on vacation, they went on bike/camping/fishing trips all around the south, Charley in front, his wife hugging him from behind.  He was a no-nonsense, tough, strict man with high work standards, who would fire on a dime, yet watched over me kindly.  He liked my progress and if representatives of a hospital called him up to asked him if I could come their hospital to meet all of them and have a lunch with them, he would let me go, because he knew that ours wasn’t the only medical supply company in town and as you know, often the most important business connection is the person you get on the phone and how they handle you.  So a guy like me was not only keeping the business, but actually expanding it.  There were many lessons I got from that job that helped me a lot later since.  I think working in customer service might even be a better education than college.

 

Charley was also generous with my raises, which of course I was greatly thankful for.  And he didn’t stop me from taking what I considered to be additional privileges that were fun for me but also helpful for the company. I was allowed in the warehouse portion of the building where customer service reps normally didn’t go. Sometimes a client would be in a lurch and needed to make sure that we had a certain item that they needed in a hurry, so I would go into the warehouse to verify that what they wanted was actually in stock (not necessarily being dependent upon the data on the computer) and maybe pick their order myself, had permission to drive the picking machine that could elevate you way up to the top shelves in the warehouse.  If, alas, we were out of something that was desperately needed, I could nose around the stacks and find a suitable substitute that was actually on hand, and take it all over to the shipping department for immediate packing up for delivery.  

 

I also developed the useful privilege of going into the medicine freezers.  That was probably the most sacrosanct area of the warehouse. Every employee needed to pass the “pee test” before hire, and then would be sprung upon us at random later, because there were some powerful drugs (narcotics) locked up in those freezers. There were certain series of medications that patients of a doctor’s office would be on that required having the same lot number in a series, let’s say a series of four of a particular medicine. There were some item pickers in the warehouse who would send out the correct medication by name, but neglect selecting the correct lot number if part of a required series, which was a pain for the pickers, but crucial for the patient.  It was customer service who would receive those angry phone calls from the doctor’s office, saying that the wrong lot number had been sent out.  So I took it upon myself to find the right ones myself whenever an office ordered one of those medications.  Sometimes you had to really hunt around stacks of medications in order to find one with the right lot number.  Instead of interfering, I was helping the busy stock pickers, plus helping the patients.  I also developed good relations with the packers, becoming good friends with them, which also made my job a whole lot easier since speed and accuracy in shipping was sometimes a crucial thing when it came to “on-time” medical supplies and sending out the wrong thing was not acceptable.

 

Also, I became the go-to person for retail sales, people from the general public who would drive out to the industrial boonies where we were to buy retail supplies from us at wholesale prices.  Most of them were on Medicare and were getting some rebates on their supplies that were needed chronically, such as colonoscopy bags, catheters, and feeding tubes. I was the only one there who wasn’t afraid of filling out the Medicare forms, and when customers had troubles getting their purchases accepted by Medicare, they would come back to me and I would go to bat for them by calling Medicare and making sure those customers got the rebates they were due.

 

Charley always seemed to keep a watchful eye on all this that was going on and apparently he was appreciating what I was doing, and lets just say that not every boss I ever had in my life was good like that.

 

Since I had become a “voice” between the company and the outer world, Charley happened to let me know that the company’s policy was to never give out any references regarding former employees.  I have mentioned that Charley would fire on a dime, well, just in case somebody happened to call me in order to obtain an evaluation of a former employee, he wanted me to know that nobody was to say anything about a former employee other than they worked there from this date to that one, but nothing else whatsoever.  

 

Since a good friend of mine had been hired from the place, I guess he felt that my friend might ask me to be a reference for him as he attempted to get a new job.  I assumed that Charley figured this might happen and so he wanted me to know that I was not allowed to say anything.  (As it happened, my friend never asked for that.)

 

I said to Charley, “Really, why?”  He explained that saying something bad about a former employee might lead to the company being sued, and they wanted to avoid that.

 

I said, “Yeah, but what about the good employees?  Don’t they deserve to have their good performances shared?” 

 

He said, “Well, you can’t do that, because then it becomes clear when you are avoiding giving out a bad reference when you give out only the good ones.  The safest course is to never say anything about their performance no matter what.  And besides, what do we care, they are people who left us, so we really have no skin in their game anyway.”

 

Well, as time moved on, as much as I loved living back in my home town, I decided to move back to California.  It was kind of funny to see how many of my coworkers were scared for me at the prospect of going back to California, and to Los Angeles, no less (that hellhole!).  I had always felt that California had a good reputation with people in other states, and in fact maybe was even envied, but that is actually not always the case. Their general attitude about my moving back there was, “Oh, please be careful!  We wouldn’t want to even visitthere!” 

 

It’s funny, because as I think back on it, I remember reading many years ago an article by a man living in Argentina who went on a trip in his Volkswagen from the Tierra Del Fuego all the way up to the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska.  Reading that, I thought to myself that I would love to be able to go on a trip like that (the entire west coast of the Pacific Ocean), but I would be too afraid to.  Surely there were some extremely dangerous locations on that route, portions of Colombia, Nicaragua, El Salvador or Honduras (take your pick), Mexico (with the drug cartels, for heaven’s sake), even (or especially) the Alaska Highway, from which I imagined ones car ending up thoroughly pummeled by loose rocks along the way, but he wrote that the trip was glorious and the most dangerous place on that whole trip wasLos Angeles!

 

It actually was a sad day when I had to tell Charley that I was going to go back to California.  I had managed to really make a place for myself in that company where I had ended up even having a positive reputation up in the national headquarters in Richmond, Virginia.  On my last day there, they gave me a really nice going away party with a delicious farewell cake and some wonderful parting gifts. And some people were crying and it was all I could do to not be crying myself.  When the time came to leave the building, I went into Charley’s office to say goodbye.  I realized how much he had meant to me, so, overcome by emotion, I, “California style”, gave him a big hug.

 

As I hugged him, he just stood there awkwardly and embarrassed, with his arms at his sides as I hugged him, nor returning my hug.  Uh oh, now I was worried, was this a big mistake?  Men didn’t hug men?  This southern good ‘ol boy, Harley biker man, probably wasn’t taking this hug very well.  So I quickly backed away, thanking him for the fruitful years I had enjoyed there, and then slinked out of there with the packages of my farewell gifts.

 

There is a whole lot of story that follows between that farewell and finally getting myself into Los Angeles, which will be worth some other stories.  But meanwhile, let me say that one thing genuinely bad about Los Angeles is that it is very difficult to get a job here, especially if you have moved in from some other state.  For one thing, the competition is fierce (it’s the same in New York City, as well). It seems that you have to pay some sort of dues, such as I did by doing a couple of years of “temp work” to prove that you really “mean it”, that you hadn’t come to L.A. with the dream of getting into the movies (which, by the way, I actually had come here for that, but that is a “whole nother” story, too). So many people cram into Los Angeles from some other place, do not manage to make a go of it (mostly your money runs out), and then bounce back out again to wherever they had come from.  People hiring for “other” jobs want to make sure that it is this job you really want, not something to tide you over while you struggle to get that big movie part.

 

So I sure did my share of spreading around my resume, looking for a job.  One of the places I went to was a medical supply company in the Los Angeles area.  After all, I had already done three years of work in that field in North Carolina. The HR person interviewed me and studied my resume.  She said that she wanted to check out my references and I was to call her a few days later to see what was up.

 

So a few days later, I did call her and she said, “I am sorry, the person who was leaving decided to stay on after all, so the position ends up being no longer open.  It’s too bad, because you come highly recommended. They sure did rave about your performance at that medical company in North Carolina.  The person I talked with said that we should snap you up, that they have maintained your cubical there as a shrine!”

 

I thought to myself, uh oh, who was that she talked with, giving out a rave review was explicitly against their rules!  I told her that I really appreciated hearing that, would she mind telling me the name of the person she talked to.  She said, “Oh, it was a man named Charley.  He said that he had been your boss there.”

 

Charley!  You rascal! You southern good ol’ boy Harley biker, I guess that goodbye hug from me was okay after all.

THE WORLD NEEDS PEOPLE

In what I think of as in the "good news" category, I happened to get a travel e-mail entitled "The Most Beautiful Small Towns In The World".   (There happen to be other variations of that, as well, such as "The Most Beautiful Small Towns In The United States", but it was the global one that grabbed by attention).

 

Ever since Coved, I had been immediately deleting all travel e-mails coming my way, because I can't go to any of those places anyway, so what is the point, but this one interested me and I was blown away by the beauty of each town shown.  Every one of them was a place that I could completely see going to, maybe that would be possible someday.  

 

As I looked at the pictures, I suddenly had an important thought:  those Most Beautiful Small Towns in the World require people.  I don't mean visitors, or a small corps of demonic "elites" who will remain after all their yearning population diminishment is completed, but normal, real, organic human beings, living their free and individual lives.  What makes a Most Beautiful Small Town worth going to is not buildings and quaint streets and views of mountains or oceans, but normal people living there to have hotels and restaurants and cooks and bartenders and stores and entertainment venues, and not existing for the benefit of tourists, but because of their having their own lives that they live for themselves and only incidentally happen to also maintain for the benefit of those who come through there for a visit. Visitors need to have there a sense of hospitality and discovery and creation of delicious food, and charming cultural events, and unique arts and crafts, and maybe even intriguing languages that express different points of view or help us to understand the meanings behind our own words.  

 

It is people who care about where they live who keep it going, have safety in the streets and keep their houses and gardens filled with color and in repair, who smile and are happy with each other, are proud of their town for its own sake, and are places where a visitor may feel like jumping up and join into a crowd of people dancing to the music of local musicians.  These are places where you can joyfully meld in among the people whose home this is.

 

NONE of this can exist if there are no free and independent people living lives that have meaning for themselves.  All the buildings would fade and crumble and the streets would shift and crack and the gardens would dry up.  Wild animals and the jungle would take over.  In short, if those who are demonic get what they want, there would be nothing beautiful left. Certainly not in their own quickly sagging ancient fleshy bodies overwrought with plastic surgery and all the heart transplants in the world (presumably done by medical robots).  We have already seen some of this.  Their future would just be filthy depressing concrete skyscrapers (until the next big earthquake) populated by countless semi-asleep human bodies connected to computer systems and surrounded by robots that few people would know how to fix or to correct the inevitable devastating screw-ups in the programs that had not been foreseen.

 

There would be no more innovations or art or music or any creativity at all, as it is only free and sovereign people who create such things.  Like how unemployed people given a minimum living wage would stop working, so would an "elite" who expect everyone else to be their slaves would stop doing things for themselves, and would stop learning and creating until they knew how to do anything for themselves.  In short, it all would be a hell of the greatest proportions for them and they would have no ability to extricate themselves from what they had committed by structurally damaging those who could fix the situation, or could have prevented it in the first place.

 

They think that with all their trillions or whatever measure of wealth, and their several mansions and their yachts and their private airplanes and corps of machines at their disposal that they would have it all, the entire empty planet would be theirs (the United Nations Agenda of whatever number they want), all theirs, to explore and to inhabit with no more "stupid sheeple" to disgust them and to clutter up the world and for them to steal from like taking candy from a baby because their victims did not spend all their time figuring out schemes by which they could take from others who were busy living their lives and caring for their families.  Finally they would feel that they had it made!

 

But then the time would come when what they had originally seen as a private paradise only for them, had inevitably degenerated into (metaphorically visually) looking more like the Highway of Death from Desert Storm or the jungle take-over of Cambodian ancient cities and temples.

 

Why is all this revelation a good thing?  Because what I have been thinking this whole time without understanding it concretely is that while they seem to have all the money and the power, and they have several decades of planning and laying down the ground work, and have utilized countless human data to determine how best to control a population by fear, I kept thinking but we have the people!  How is that a plus--scared, impoverished, separated, surprised, and indoctrinated people, of what use is that?  Clearly all these people can be easily steam-rolled all over; the people have "lost" before they even knew that there was a war.

 

Well, I finally saw the whole structure, the entire system, and how all this would impact the people who think they are in a separate and superior camp versus everybody else.  But they may as well feel the same separation from and superiority over the planet itself, and nature, and the sun and the stars.  They did not create this Universe and they are not even all that special as people versus all the others.  Somewhere along in their greed and in their narcissism they thought they were a species above and that they deserved to own it all and to control it all. Stop and think of what has happened to others throughout history who thought this way.   The current versions of those people think that it is high technology that makes the difference... now they can be as "gods" because never before had the world had this level of technology before.  Some even feel that they can become immortal.  (The Greeks have a story about that.)  Beyond the thought that only now do we have such a high level of technology might not be true (there is some evidence of there having been very highly technologically advanced people before us who managed to destroy themselves), we don't even have to go there.  Just a simple imagining a little bit forward to what it would be like for those who think they are superior if they got what they think they want, they will realize that they really don't want that.  Obviously, in every way, instead of being a great victory for them, it would be worse than their worst nightmare.

 

Let us all grasp that ourselves, and keep our minds on it not happening, not being trapped by fear, but instead filling that space with thoughts of all the great things we now will be able to do.  Let us realize that we are successfully coming out of a major transformative period that gives us a chance to enliven our deeper dreams with an expanded power.   Our continued existence is what will save them, as well as our selves.  Let them realize that in their own thoughts or dreams.  Ironically, they are the one who need to wake up.  Let's manifest a good future for all of us and fully understand, no matter who we are, we need other people, and every kind and type of people, fully creative and sovereign beings as we all were created to be.  All across the Earth.  That's what the world naturally has, we can see it clearly, and it is a sure bet that that is the way it should be.

 

The World Needs People.

THE HOUSE WITHOUT A ROOF

Like most young people at the time, Tijuana for me and some of my friends was merely a place to go across the border for a day to walk around the streets, make bargains in leather or jewelry shops, perhaps have a good meal of Mexican food, and for some, enjoy the nightclubs.  But for Steve, a friend of mine who grew up in the San Diego area, Tijuana was something more serious.  He was acutely aware that there was a huge difference between the economic lives we were living in California versus those living just across the border.  While there certainly were some phenomenally wealthy residents of Tijuana, it was the poor and disadvantaged that he cared about.

 

Steve discovered an orphanage for girls run by an order of nuns and he realized that they could use his help. For example, the orphanage had a school bus that required a driver to take the girls to school, or elsewhere outside of the orphanage for some adventure or recreation, such a taking them to the beach at Rosarita.  He also decided that they needed farm animals (presumably for reproducing and later eating, but that aspect was never discussed), so he built a rabbit hutch that he filled with bunnies and built pens for several pigs that he bought and housed on the orphanage grounds.

 

I visited him there several times, even sleeping there over night several times, and I can say that the place was really wonderful with very sweet, loving girls, and extremely admirable nuns who were very dedicated to the girls in their charge.  Much later when I went vagabonding into the depths of Mexico, I was the guest of the mother house of that order in Mexico City and I also visited with the family of one of the Tijuana nuns at their house in a village in the hills beyond Mexico City, but those are stories for another time.

 

Not all the girls were living in the orphanage due to not having any parents.  For some of them, the issue was extreme poverty; that they had parents, but parents who could not take care of them.  There was one girl in the orphanage whom Steve particularly took a liking to, whose mother lived way out in the desert beyond the outskirts of Tijuana.  He had met the girl’s mother one day when he gave the girl a ride home to visit with her mother.  Steve realized that he could help the mother, as well. 

 

One day, Steve suggested that the he and I go out there and visit with the mother, maybe have lunch with her.  He said that it would be an enlightening experience.  Always ready for adventure, I agreed to go with him there.  He warned me, though, that I was going to see a level of poverty I probably had never imagined.

 

Where this woman lived was in a dusty, desert area that had no roads.  It looked to me that the various shacks that were out there were more or less squatter’s encampments.  The house was an oblong shaped cinderblock structure that looked hand-made, like somebody had stacked and mortared a playhouse.  The front door was a blanket that hung across the entrance like a curtain. The woman had heard Steve’s car come up, so she came outside to greet us.  She was a very attractive woman with a beautiful smile and welcomed us profusely. There was no sense of misery or despair to her at all.  She held open the doorway curtain and invited us inside.  I could see that the structure had been built to have two rooms, this front entryway that was to be like a living room and bedroom and the other room was the kitchen which contained a large black iron stove and a sink and some kind of water supply.  I did not see any refrigerator or any electricity at all, but the kitchen did have a kitchen table and four table chairs.  It is possible that she slept in the front room on the floor in a sleeping bag, I don’t know.   Also I didn’t see anything that served as a toilet and shower, but outside maybe behind the structure there was an outhouse.

 

Also, neither room had a roof!  The structure was entirely open to the heavens.  The woman had already begun cooking our lunch on the stove, was done via burning wood that was in the stove, and the smoke from the cooking simply flowed up into the open air.  What was being cooked smelled delicious!

 

Steve gave the woman some news about how her daughter back at the orphanage was doing.   Steve had not told me that the girl wasn’t the only child of this woman.  She also had a two other children, a boy who was the oldest, I guess he was somewhere on either side of puberty, and a girl who was maybe two years younger than the boy. The daughter who was back at the orphanage was the youngest of the three children.  These two older siblings stayed home with their mother.

 

Both of these children were sitting down on the dirt floor of the entrance room, the boy leaning against the left wall and the girl sitting in the other side of the room, in the front corner.  They both wore nothing but some kind of diaper, but not any other clothing.  As I walked past the boy, he suddenly leapt up and grabbed me tight around my body with remarkably strong arms while making very loud moaning noises that were a combination of despair and ecstasy.  In a moment I realized that he had some kind of extreme disability that nobody had thought to alert me about, but his behavior and sounds explained it all.  While at first I was frightened, his moans let me realize how crucial to this boy’s life was this physical contact.  So instead of attempting to wrench myself away which would have been an expected response, I hugged him back and rubbed my hands up and down on his naked back and we stood there hugging each other while he cried with noises I had never heard before, but whose meaning was amply clear.

 

Meanwhile, Steve seemed to keep his distance from the girl sitting down in the corner, but the mother went over to her, gently pulled her up to her feet and lovingly hugged her while her daughter clung onto her and made her own version of wailing, ecstatic noises. What ran through me was a combination of deep sadness and much compassion.

 

The mother looked over at me with a expression that I read to mean “What else can I do?”, that hugging them was really the only communication possible with them.  I looked over at Steve, who explained, “They both are blind and deaf, and therefore cannot speak words that they cannot hear.”  

 

After a while, the mother let go of her daughter and the girl sank back down to the floor.  Then the mother came over to me and gently pulled on my arm to indicate that I should let go of the boy now, and she took him off of me and guided him back down to the floor.

 

The mother then took me and Steve into the kitchen and indicated that we should sit down at the kitchen table.  She then went back to preparing our lunch while she and Steve talked with each other in Spanish.  From time to time the woman would say something to Steve that she wanted to say to me, so he would translate what she said into English.  

 

The woman explained to me via Steve’s translations that her first child was the boy, she told me his name, but all this was a long while ago, so I have forgotten all of their names. Once she had understood them, she had accepted the boys maladies, his inability to both see and hear and therefore was unable to make his needs known via words.  She said he was the boy that God wanted her to have and so she accepted that.  She regretted that he could not go to school or ever have any kind of a life, but she loved him with all her heart and all she could do was take care of him and give him the crucial hugs that made up the only stimulation he could really have. She said that he will always remember the hug that he got to share with me, because it was a different experience for him in a life where there was very little to experience.

 

Then she went on to have another child, a girl, and that one, too, was blind and deaf.  While she could not understand why, this was clearly God’s will and anyway, since she already had the boy who was that way, taking care of the girl was not much more of a burden.  She knew how to give her the love that she would crave, like the boy.

 

She then went on to say that she had the third child, the totally healthy and normal girl that Steve knew at the orphanage.  In my thoughts, I could hardly imagine that after the woman had given birth to two deaf and blind children that she would go on to have yet a third child, and yet look what happened, that one was not deaf and blind.  So clearly there was not predicting any of it and the woman’s point of view was that it was all God’s will and she would accept whatever would come. She loves all her children no matter what they are like.

 

Nobody explained to me why there was no man around, and I don’t think even Steve knew.  It was just an accepted fact, the man left for whatever reason, maybe just the idea of the woman having had two blind and deaf children in a row was too much for him.  This woman was not someone to feel self pity or to damn the events of her life. She knew that her third child needed to have the advantages that she was unable to provide her, and therefore was thankful that the orphanage would take her third daughter in.  This way she could grow up in a stimulating atmosphere, have lots of friends, go to school, fall in love, get married, and have her own full life.  As far as I could see, there was great courage and acceptance for the woman to take on having to care for her two seriously handicapped children, but also have the selflessness to allow her youngest child have what was a better situation in the orphanage.  I can hardly imagine how all of this must feel to this woman who is doing whatever she knows is the best for her children.

 

While Steve never verbalized it, I could see why he would want to help that particular woman and why he would show that to me.

 

Throughout our visit, the two children in the living room area had been moving around from time to time, finding different positions, but in all cases keeping along the walls.  I could imagine that for them having only touch, taste, and smell as senses, the void of the space beyond the walls would not even exist to them.  

 

I also saw that both children spent an inordinate time fingering themselves inside their diapers and along their nipples.  Of course. Again, when touch takes on a greater importance, which areas of the body are going to receive the greatest attention? I felt bad at seeing them at moments that we would describe as requiring privacy, so I would look away, but they never had any privacy and the idea had no meaning to them.  This was yet another aspect that I am sure their mother had to accept and maybe even be thankful for.

 

When the lunch was ready, the mother brought bowls of food to her children sitting in the living room, which her children happily ate--more senses to be thankfully engaged.  It was a delicious lunch which both Steve and I greatly enjoyed.

 

All too soon it was time to leave.  There was more hugging all around and then Steve and I said goodbye to the woman, telling her that we had a great time.   I said to the woman I had been so happy to meet her and her children.

 

As we drove back toward the U.S. border, I thought about those two children.  Not everybody can be a Helen Keller and have the advantage of a brilliant and sensitive tutor to help them break through like she had had. This experience opened up a deeper layer to the implications of poverty.  I could hardly imagine what kind of life those children would have, almost totally locked inside of themselves with only hugs, food, and whatever their body can feel as the stimulations of their lives.  We have no idea what kind of brains they have that by circumstance are locked up inside a hood and earplugs.  And for their mother, except for the human love that she gives and receives, having them would be not much different from having two houseplants or a pair of goldfish swimming around in a bowl.  

 

As we got into town, Steve saw a building supply store and said, “Tell you what, next time I come in, I’m going to buy and install for her a corrugated roof…I think four of the 12 foot long panels would cover both rooms. Those panels cost only about $20 each, that’s not very much.

SQUIRRELS, COCKROACHES, AND GIANT WATER BUGS, OH MY!

 

Squirrels

 

After I graduated from college, for a brief period I lived with my maternal grandmother in Asheville, North Carolina, where I had been born and had always yearned to live there again.  Sadly, my grandfather had died by then.  My grandmother now lived alone in their huge, glorious house on a hill on five acres of land. Running along two sides of the house were babbling brooks with wooden bridges across them.  There were immense trees all over the property, and many beautiful blooming bushes.  The house was two stories with a full attic and full basement.  My mother and her two brothers grew up in that house.  The bedroom that was to be mine had been my mother’s when she was a little girl.  All the bedrooms in the house had their own bathrooms.  My bedroom had windows all across the two walls of the room, with beautiful views and a three-ring circus of squirrels scampering up and down the trees next to my windows.

 

My grandmother was a fascinating woman and we spent many nights up to three o’clock in the morning talking.  She had travelled all around the world several times.  She had ridden camels across the desert and slept in tents with sheiks, and she whispered, “don’t tell your mother”, that she had smoked hash with the sheiks in their tents.  She had camped in the jungles of Cambodia and had to keep large spiders out her sleeping netting.  All this was to let you know that she wasn’t generally a delicate, frightened woman.  Except for one thing…she claimed she was deathly afraid of rodents.

 

Rodents.  And that include squirrels, of which she was surrounded by the dozens, but as long as they were not in the house, they weren’t a problem.

 

But one night, I was awakened by the sound of pounding coming from my grandmother’s bedroom, down the hall on the opposite side of the house.  I flicked on a light and went over to her bedroom to see what was going on. She was wearing a nightgown and had a broom in her hand and was banging the wooden end up on the ceiling ahead, much like one might do to shut up a noisy neighbor in an apartment above.

 

“There’s a squirrel in the ceiling,” she said in a panicked voice, “inside some kind of space on the other side of it.  I am trying to scare it away.  I had heard him scampering along the ceiling and every once in a while he would drop a nut.  Obviously he is saving food for the upcoming winter.”  And to underscore the veracity of her claims, I, myself, could then her the scampering of feet overhead, interrupted by the sound of a momentarily dropped nut.  I could imagine the squirrel sitting there for a moment, breathing hard from his labors, before he picked the nut up again and continued along his way.

 

“And look where he is storing it all,” said my grandmother as she walked over to the wall right where her pillow would be as she would lie down her sleepy head.  She said, “I could hear this” and she scratched the wall where her head would be, a slow but insistent gnawing on the wall.  The sound of it would make me laugh if the situation weren’t so serious.

 

“It could gnaw itself out threw the wall and start chewing on my face as I slept!” she said.  Wow, this really was terrible!

 

I looked at her helplessly, but she said, “I will have John go up on the roof tomorrow and find the squirrel’s hole and patch it up.  That should fix it.  But meanwhile, I will sleep out on the sleeping porch tonight.

 

Ah, the sleeping porch. I loved that.  All along that side of the house was the sleeping porch, with five beds all lined up.  My mother said that was where the family slept in the hot summers, my grandfather, grandmother, my two uncles, and my mother.  There was no air conditioning in those days, just the cool night air that wafted in through the screens of the three walls of the sleeping porch.  My grandmother loved to say that the house had been built before there was electricity.  All that had to be put in afterwards when people began to electrify their houses.

 

The next day, John was up on the roof.  John was the all-around handy-man who apparently could do anything; my grandparents’ chauffeur, auto mechanic, butler, bar tender, dish washer, and gardener. He thoroughly inspected every square inch of that roof, but sadly came back down from his half day on the ladder, saying that he couldn’t find any evidence of a hole.  He also had inspected all over the ceiling of the attic, but to no avail.  My grandmother said, “Oh, well, I guess I will have to hire an exterminator.”

 

But I couldn’t stop thinking of that circus of squirrels that I would enjoy watching outside my bedroom windows.  Certainly the roof seemed to be a logical place to look for a squirrel entrance to an upstairs bedroom, but where so many squirrels “began” were down there on the ground below my windows.

 

So I decided to walk around outside the house and inspect from the ground, starting at the region that was under my window on the second story and below that was the dining room in the first story.  The house had a full basement, so it actually began underground, but the visible, above-ground portion of the house, where the first story began, was a half-story of broken chunks of rock mortared together.  These were not like oblong bricks with flat surfaces, but millions of misshapen rock chucks, such as the tailings from quarry, each chunk about the size of a closed hand.  So there had been a lot of mortaring done to fill in all the spaces among the various chucks of rock.  I looked closely all over this side of the house and happened to find a chink surrounded by three or four chunks, a genuine hole.  It looked like some of the dried mortar might have cracked and fallen out, but what was really encouraging was there were several light brown hairs around the inside of the crack.  Could those be squirrel hairs?  They sure could be!

 

I rushed into the house to tell my grandmother what I had seen, and even though it didn’t make sense that her squirrel had begun his journey from down below the first floor on the further side of the house, it was worth having John mortar that hole closed. I took John outside to show him what I had found and he said, “That sure does look like squirrel hairs to me!”  I said, “But you think that that squirrel could get from way down here all the way up to above the ceiling above Nana’s bedroom on the other side of the house?”  He tapped his head with a grin and said, “Squirrel, he some smart rascal!” and then went to go mix up some mortar to plug up that whole.

 

 That evening, sitting in Nana’s room, we heard no sound of the squirrel.  Nana grinned at me.

 

I said, “Well, let’s wait for a few days just to make sure that was the actual hole.  Keep your broom stick handy!”

 

She laughed and said, “I have a feeling that you found the right one”.

 

A couple of evenings later, she handed me a brand new hundred dollar bill.  When Nana gave us money for gifts, she always gave brand new money.  Some of her brand new money helped me pay for law school years later.  I said, “What’s this?”

 

“Squirrel’s gone, you saved me from the squirrel.”

 

“Aw no, Nana, I didn’t do that for money.”

 

“I know you didn’t, but you deserve it. I would not be able to sleep at night with that squirrel gnawing at my ear.”

 

To this day, the reality of that situation still gets me.  For a squirrel to go into hole among some rocks, and find a way through the walls up two and half stories and then across who knows how many mazes to get to the further side of a large house, and choose a storage site behind a wall, carrying nuts, how could it do that, and why?  Throughout that whole journey, wouldn’t there have been dozens of closer and more suitable locations to secrete his cache?  Why all the way up there?  Maybe that was the warmest and most inviting place in the whole house.  After all, I am sure my grandmother kept it heated at night. But what amount of long-distance sensing did it take for the squirrel to discover that to be the chosen place?

 

And maybe there was something else—the sense of the living warmth on the other side of the wall, where my grandmother slept.  Maybe the squirrel liked the idea of having my grandmother on the other side of the wall. For a human, it would be like having a pet, if only my grandmother hadn’t had such a phobia.

 

Cockroaches

 

A couple of years after I lived with my grandmother and had returned to California, I decided that I would like to live in New York City.  So I packed my car with clothes and a few other crucial things (such as my typewriter) and drove across country to Manhattan.  This actually was the first place I had ever lived on my own, not living with my parents, my grandmother, or in college dorms.   Due to financial necessity, the apartment I rented was small, and even then I was able to afford it because I had a sublease on a rent-controlled apartment.  Despite it being small, I really loved living there and even to this day, I still think back to that apartment quite fondly.

 

It was kind of funny though, my first night there after I had my dinner, I walked into the kitchen to wash my dinner dishes and when I turned on the kitchen light, I saw several cockroaches perk up and scamper away to hiding.  Uh oh, I had cockroaches!  I had never seen them before, but I knew what they were.  But instead of this disgusting me like I think it would most people, I thought it was kind of cute.  Something about the way those little buggers scampered away seemed sort of human, like they had thoughtful personal characteristics, mostly of the “bad kids” mode.  I didn’t really think that I needed to do anything about them; their presence seemed to be a normal experience of living in New York City.  It was almost a game…most of the time they were in hiding, the situation was a matter of “out of sight, out of mind”, but then there would be the times of my turning on the light in the kitchen after dark and I would see them scatter.  I felt like saying, “Aw, I don’t mean you any harm.”

 

There was one cockroach, though, who was a bit rebellious and marched to his own drummer.  I would see him, and only him, in the bathroom just before I would go to bed, sitting on my toothbrush, to be exact, with his little antennae waving back and forth. I guess he was drawn to the scent or maybe a residual taste of the peppermint toothpaste.  Toothpaste fumes, not exactly a sufficient meal for a hardy cockroach, but he took to being my nightly companion on the toothbrush.  I assume that the very thought of a cockroach on your toothbrush would disgusts people even more than the running away cockroaches in the kitchen, but this one lone cockroach who did not scamper away, but instead nightly waited to see me, was charming instead of disgusting.  When I would come to the bathroom, he would politely step off my toothbrush (“I believe this is yours, sir”) but continued to still stand there on the toothbrush holder. I mean, his behavior felt like he had a unique personality and this made him seem almost like a pet.  And he wasn’t a coward, you know, didn’t run from the light, and also seemed to seek human companionship, so that elevated him in my mind, like he was a friend, and I was happy to see him every night.

 

However, many years after I no longer lived in New York, but had gone to law school back in California and then moved to Los Angeles and rented a large apartment in a classic old building from the earliest days of Hollywood.  There was much to recommend this place, the two story high living room, the two bedrooms, the formal dining room, and the beautiful architecture inside and outside, but the immense cockroach infestation the revealed itself weeks later was a huge negative.  Unlike in New York where the cockroaches were kind of pets, these in Hollywood had no charm at all.  For one thing, there were just so many of them, they would be experienced in every room in the apartment, and it was impossible to get rid of them.  I would “bomb” the apartment with anti-roach poison once a month, which would kill them for a while, but then new ones could come in from the neighboring apartments and the cycle would be repeated.

 

To give you a sense of how many cockroaches there were, do you remember those early digital clocks that told time by little plastic sleeves that had the times written on them and each minute would flip down the next numbered sleeve (called a flip clock, from the 70s).  I had one of those on my nightstand and after a while, the clock stopped working. Something had happen in the inner workings of the clock.  I decided to see if I could open it up to see what was wrong with it, and I nearly vomited…cockroaches had turned the clock into a nest and they kept filling it more and more with their bodies until it was packed solid with roaches and their bodies jammed the inner works to a grind halt.  The cock was completely filled with dead cockroaches.

 

The day I moved out of there, the movers would pick up chairs from the living room to put in the moving van; they would turn the chairs upside down and hold them overhead and unexpected cockroaches would spill out from behind the cushions and fall into their hair.  It would make them disgusted and angry while I attempted to become invisible.  I vowed to never again live in a place that had cockroaches and so far, I have succeeded, may that last for the rest of my life!

 

Giant Water Bugs

 

But maybe I shouldn’t have made that vow, because a decade or more later, in Los Angeles, I was bothered by something worse.  Actually, I don’t really know what they are.  Thank goodness they come in singly, not in hordes like the Los Angeles cockroaches. These are a reddish insects that I swear are at least six inches long, but that may be an exaggeration, although not by much.  I did a Google search for large red insects and didn’t find anything comparable to what I had.  Normally Water Bugs are only about two inches long, and these things were gigantically larger than that.  

 

Where I would find them was in my bathtub.  The bathroom in this particular apartment had a window for outwardly venting the shower steam, but the window was to an airshaft, not to the outside directly.  Presumably, the apartment next to mine and those below me all ventilated into that same airshaft.  If you look into it, it was like looking into the inside of a chimney.  I believe that there was supposed to be a screen or grid at the top of the airshaft so that critters couldn’t come in, but it must have had a hole in or, or maybe was missing altogether.

 

This was another old Hollywood building.  Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy had lived in this building when he first moved to Hollywood. I hadn’t known that until after I had moved in there and happened to read about where all the places Laurel lived. I must have some affinity to him, because when our family moved to California when I was five years old, we lived in Canoga Park for a while and only a couple of blocks from our house was a swimming pool where I took swimming and diving lessons.  That pool was all that was left of an estate that Laurel had after he became more established.  I think that by now even the pool is gone.

 

But these horrible bugs…well, they were horrible to me because they were so big.  No way could I tolerate them being in the house; they weren’t like cockroaches that could go disappear behind the walls, these insects were just too big for that.  They seemed to like to move along the walls, that they aren’t secure going out into wide open spaces.  I imaged them crawling over my bare feet while I worked at my computer and I was almost phobic at the idea of that.  At least I knew when they came in if I were home.  I could hear the sound of the thump as one of them landed in the bathtub.  That was creepy; I don’t like the idea of an insect being heavy enough that its weight makes a noise when it lands that I could hear anywhere in the apartment.

 

So that thump meant that I was going to have to go to battle.

 

I was compassionate toward these huge bugs.  While I didn’t want them in the house, I didn’t want to have to kill them if I could avoid it.  I didn’t mind their existence in the world, I just didn’t like their existence in my house. So several times I attempted to capture then in an empty shoebox or some other box.  My idea was then to take them outside and dump them in a planter.  I for sure did not want to touch them, so I used something to attempt to corral them into a lidded box, such as a ruler that I could use to goad them into a box.

 

But no such luck. Attempting the get them into a shoebox was more difficult than trying to get a cat into carrier for going to the vet. Wherever those bugs wanted to go, into a box is not it!  The minute they sense the shadow of the box and ruler, they start running, but they are in a slippery curved bathtub.  They move and maneuver very fast, and the field of the bathtub is large enough for them to have a lot of running room.  From my perspective, it had been like trying to corral a zigzagging pinball with a golf club.  Both of us were thoroughly motivated…me to get these damned thing out of there and they thinking they had to save their lives.

 

These insects were more fragile than their size suggested.  It seemed that every touch by my tool was breaking off pieces of their wings and body, and fragments of them would litter the bathtub.  There even was some kind of smoke or dust that seemed to come off their bodies, as if their life’s essence was floated off throughout the struggle.  The force of their manic running back and forth and every which way was also causing them to break apart pieces of themselves, so it wasn’t all me leading to their demise.

 

While I had been attempting to save them, I was only making it worse, and unfortunately, both of our adamant resolves, me to capture them, and they to run away from the capturing, was leading towards their sure deaths.  Finally I realized that they would become too damaged to survive, now my task was to put them out of their misery.  But directly killing them was just as difficult as corralling them had been. Despite the fragility of the externals of the insect, it seemed their inner core was an armor.  I finally had to end up beating them cruelly in order to end it, which made me feel sad, because killing them had not been my intention.

 

After a few experiences like that, I knew that the only option when I heard that thump in the bathtub was to directly kill them, not attempt to save them.  The last couple of times, I used various insect poison sprays, lathering them with glittering poison as they did that same speed running back and forth and all around in the slippery tub.  Again, I hated having to do this, it seemed that it was such agony for each insect I had to kill and due to their size and efforts, it was like killing an animal like a dog or a lamb.  I am thankful that at least these insects can’t make any noise, although their physical gyrations were a silent scream.

 

If I were going to continue to live in that apartment any further, I would have insisted that the manager have that chimney finely screened, because I would not tolerate any more battles with these insects.  As it happened, I had been wanting to move to a much better apartment, which I did pretty soon after my last insect battle.  I am truly thankful that I have nothing like this going on where I live now.

 

The worst “animal” thing I have to deal with nowadays is every once in a while a bird will fly into my balcony and rest on the wire of my party lights.  I like to watch them as they gently rock to and fro.  They do leave bird droppings that I have to clean up, but their beautiful singing is compensation.  The pollen blown from the line of trees nearby creates more of a clean up problem than the birds do.  But that is only seasonal and the trees are so beautiful.