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. 

 

Re-evaluation and Longevity

I was corresponding with a friend of mine whom I hadn't talked with for quite some time.  She had asked me what I was up to these days and I told her about some projects that I was currently working on, even though there are still some other dreams waiting in the wings. I had actually ended my employment (so-called "retirement") for the purpose of those waiting dreams, but the reality was that these projects I told her about were also important to me and somehow had intruded

One of the projects I told her about was organizing three generations of family photographs that I had promised my siblings I would do for the four of us.  The photo albums were quite thrashed and anyway, nothing that could be easily divided up into four parts, so I envisioned compiling Shutterly books, one for each generation, and then having volumes printed of each one for the four of us siblings.  There was no reason to have hundreds of baby pictures of me, for example, so this compilation would be more efficient and reasonable. 

My friend wrote back that she very much wanted to put into order all her photos, as well, but that would have to wait for when she retired, which I take will not be very soon.  Understanding her situation, I wrote back that it was because I, like her, had worked so much before that I just didn't have the time then to do all that I am attempting to do now.  I had been thinking that somehow I hadn't parceled out the various obligations or aspects of my life very well, but then I realized that hindsight is 20/20, so it is silly for me to think of what I should have done...I just need to deal with it all now and be grateful for whatever other things I had done in those previous years.

I am in pretty good health, actually, and more or less tell myself that I could have (maybe) 30 more years (just as a nice easy round number).  But it is sad that there actually are people around my age who are in nursing homes.  So while I keep my eye on the idea of 30 more years, I can't do what was a mistake in my previous thinking, and that is a sense that I felt like I could live forever.  Now with a dream of 30 more years, which means I could do a whole lot (just think back in your own life to see what you were doing 30 years ago and realize how much you really could have post your retirement age), I don't want much of this remaining time to just slip away.  Maybe there was a silver lining in the Covid situation (her in Los Angeles we are still in LockDown), where it has caused many people to reevaluate what things are meaningful in their life and which things aren't as important.

We've sort of taken a great big "time out" for reavaluation...or at least that has been my own situation.  Waking up very early in my bed for what seems like many months, I have been lying there with my eyes still closed and writing in my head my whole autobiography (I wish I had written all that down!) and it has been pretty enlightening.  I think "Know Thyself" Socrates would have been impressed.  Maybe it was due to all that that I finally got into the photograph organizing.  Suddenly, all those people, and all those years, had special meaning to me, more than ever before.

He's a story that seems germane to this particular subject.  I was on a Caribbean cruse out of Miami, on an almost brand new ship at that time, the MSC Seaside (gorgeous beyond belief, and this time I even had a balcony cabin!).  Travelling alone as I so often do, I talk with everybody and it seems that many people do like it when I do…I often make friends all over the ship, at least for the duration of the cruise, which is often a little mystical “time out” from normal life.

So one day on the cruise, I walked into my favorite lounge out of the many that were onboard, it had a combo from Brazil and I love Brazilian music, so I had come in to enjoy the music.  But first, I walked over to the bar to order a drink, and I saw a woman and a man sitting there at the bar drinking martinis.  I walked over to them and said, “I see you sitting there enjoying martinis.  I am 71 years old and all my life I thought I HATED martinis.”  I explained to them that one weekend, Jeannie and I, a good friend of mine (a really wonderful person who became a great success in her life) and I were sitting on my bed in our dorm and our goal was to figure out the recipe for a martini.  “I said to Jeannie, ‘It shouldn’t be all that complicated, it is only a mixture of gin and vermouth’. But no way could we manage a recipe that we could stand.  He kept trying various quantities of vermouth in the gin, but no matter how much vermouth we put in it, it just kept getting worse and worse.  Finally, before we got too drunk, we decided to hang it up, deciding that we simply didn’t like martinis no matter what the formula was.  And I had held onto that belief for about 50 years!”

“However, only a few weeks prior to this cruise, I was thinking about various standard cocktails and how peculiar it was that one of the most popular ones, maybe even the most popular one, was one that I hated.  And maybe that was my fault.  After all, I didn’t really know the actual formula.  So finally I did the reasonable thing that I should have done five decades ago, just looked up the recipe in a bar book!”

“And well, I saw what had been the mistake that Jeannie and I had made…we had started out putting in a little TOO MUCH vermouth, and all we did was compound that mistake until we had given up!  The correct recipe called for 3 ounces of gin and only ½ ounce of dry vermouth, and two pimiento-stuffed olives.  So I made that recipe at home and it was delicious!  Go Lord, all these years later….  Well, better late than never!”

At this point, the woman sitting at the bar said, “No, the best martini is no vermouth, just add in the olive brine!  But I LOVE your story, why don’t you join us and get a martini…made the correct way?”

So of coarse I joined them!  I liked the woman’s recipe perfectly fine, and so we began talking about all sorts of things and I told them some stories from my life and they told me some from theirs. This went on for an hour or two and it only stopped because it was near time for them to go to the evening’s show--they had tickets for the first of three shows--those were spectacular on that ship. My own ticket was for after dinner, the third show of the evening.

They said they really enjoyed talking with me and they both said that I definitely had to write a book and, of course, I agree with them (and have been told that a hundred and eighty thousand times), which is also one of the projects that I am attempting to finally work on.  But before they got up and left, they revealed that they were from Switzerland and both of them were physicians, and both of them were 100 years old.

I was nearly blown over…I honestly hadn’t had a clue that they each were a day over, well, I don’t know, they just seemed “timeless”, not of any age.  There they were having a ball with their martinis on this cruise and most people feel that they wouldn’t even be alive by then and certainly wouldn’t be gallavanting around the globe!  They were extremely inspiring just in whom they were.  So I like to keep a mental grip on an example like them; that can be me, and it can be you!

Gifts From Birds

One of the things I really like is learning about the remarkable attributes of various animals.  There is so much more to them than we generally appreciate.  For example, humans consider themselves to be the only animals that if they looked in a mirror, they understood that that was a reflection of them, not another person standing there in front of them.  It was considered to be an amazingly remarkable thing when it was discovered that a chimpanzee, too, understood that it was seeing a reflection of himself, it wasn't another chimpanzee.  Humans had to, sadly, accept that another species had that same level of intelligence and awareness.

Well, low and behold, Magpies, a type of birds, also understand that what they see in the mirror is a reflection of them.  Experimenters have placed red dots on the throats of Magpies, which when the birds saw that in a mirror, they scratched the dots off with their legs instead of touching the mirror.  Of course, various kinds of birds have different developments and abilities, so we all know that there are still other birds, such as parakeets, who will sadly fall in love with their reflexion in a mirror, feeling that this other bird is company, or maybe a mate.  I suffered for months from a poor bird outside my second floor office window that spent all day banging on its reflexion in the window.  It was admittedly confusing for him, because he seemed to live among the dense foliage of one of the big trees that was outside that window, and the lushness of the leaves and branches gently flowing and waving in the wind was an alluring target reflected in the large glass window.  He never grasped that there always was goig to be this invisible force field to prevented him from flying in that direction.  He always got a rude bumping sudden stop, fortunately not hard enough to hurt himself, but he was enchanted by his own reflection that it seemed he genuinely fell in love with and wanted to marry.  He was so horny for that bird in the reflexion that he never gave up trying, bumping into it and constantly banging his beak onto the glass in an attempt to get a rise out of that other bird.

I attempted to discourage him by taping a piece of colored paper on the glass from inside my office, which was stupid of me, because it didn't block the reflection at all.  So I asked a maintenance man to climb up the tall ladder and tape the paper on the outside of the window in the place where he always came to peck on the window.  But the bird only found his reflection of either side of the paper...I didn't want the maintenance man to block out the entire window, so I gave up on that tack.

I am no longer working at that place, but a friend of mine who was aware of that bird told me that he is still at it.  That poor bird deserves to find a real mate, but so far, none seems to have found him.

Probably far more interesting are the extremely intelligent birds, such as Corvids of New Caledonia, that are tool makers.  They carefully fashion various tools out of twigs that can reach into cracks and holes that enable the birds to catch up grubs and other delicious things to eat that otherwise would be beyond their reach.  They meticulously use their beaks to carve the twigs into the shapes they want.  And their babies learn to make these tools, too, by carefully watching their parents at work and then play at making their own until they are able to make tools as good as the ones their parents make.   The birds keep the tools that they have made, in different lengths and with subtle different curves to fit into various locations, and they carrying them with them when they go hunting for food.

I am getting all this from the book, The Genius of Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman, which I highly recommend for anyone who might be interested in birds.  

One of the cutest things, in my estimation, was in a chapter on bird socialization.  Some of them are highly social, and to paraphrase from Ackerman's book, they manipulate, eavesdrop, argue, cheat, deceive, kidnap, divorce, and play.  They pilfer, warn others of danger, tease, share, vie for status,  kiss to console, and possibly even grieve.

What I thought was so cute, and says a lot about them, is that some of them give gifts.  Presumably this would to be to each other, such as a bite of food to someone having trouble.  But they have a sense of fair play, like evening a score instead of being a "hog".

A friend of the author had a bird feeder for crows, and those crows returned the favor by leaving for her gifts.  I love listing gifts that crows have left for people.  To me this is so precious:  a marble, a little wooden bead, a bottle cap, and colored berries, all left on the woman's doorstep.    But other people in the area who had bird feeders also claimed their precious gifts:  jewelry, hardware, shards of glass, a Santa figurine, a foam dart from a toy gun, a Donald Duck Pez dispenser, and even a candy heart with "love" painted on it, delivered right after Valentine's Day.  I tell you, all these gifts took thought!

In Seattle, there was a little girl who fed crows peanuts on a tray in her yard.  Trinkets showed up on the empty tray:  an earring, bolts and screws, hinges, buttons, a tin plastic tube, a rotting crab claw, a small scrap of metal printed with the word "best", and an opalescent white heart.  The little girl kept all these precious gifts in a plastic bag.  I would keep them, too...presented with love and appreciation from the brains of intelligent birds.

What's With All These Russians In My Neighborhood?

Los Angeles is a very diverse place, one of the most diverse cities in the United States.  There are 224 different languages spoken here.  I can't imagine how they deal with this in the schools.  I kind of like it, especially when it seems that most of them have attempted to learn English.  Well, I guess they have to...somewhere beyond Spanish, they aren't going to be able to function very well.  I mean, who else around here knows Gurani?  (That is one of the languages spoken in Paraguay.)  While I am not really all that good with learning foreign languages, if I moved to another country where they spoke something other than English, then I definitely would have to start taking lessons!  That's what I do even when I travel, even though I admit that my success is minimal and I haven't had to do it very much.  I learned how to do some basic "tourist" speaking in Spanish, French, German, Italian, and even Tahitian.  I pretty much failed even the most basic in Japanese, but fortunately I managed to find some very friendly Japanese people who understood some English.  I was spoiled in Sweden and Finland by the fact that they are all so good at speaking English.  It was funny in Sweden to go into a McDonald's kind of shop to get a hamburger or something and have the workers there NOT understand English.  I thought to myself, I thought they all new English!  But then I figured it out...duh!  They were young, probably young enough to have not yet learned all that much English in school yet.  Heck, I had three years of German in college and I know I wasn't as good at speaking German in Germany as these young guys spoke English in Sweden!

Oh, here's something that amused me.  Many, many years ago, at the very beginning of even having an Internet, on "Compuserve" I met a young Swedish man who was a Baron.  His father owned a Scandinavian tobacco company.  Beyond their house in Stockholm, his parents also owned a castle out over the water, where they went to live only during "crayfish season".  We hit it off on line and lo and behold, he said that he always wanted to come to see San Francisco, and since I lived not that far from there, I said, "Well why don't you come visit me and I will show you California?"  He took me up on that offer, he came to California, and we had a great time.  He spoke perfect English, probably better than I even spoke my own language.  He spoke English with an upper class British accent.  Well, he was a snob anyway, all that tobacco money and his noble title, you know, but that only added to the uniqueness of his character.  Years later became the Secretary of State of Sweden, but he explained that Secretary of State of Sweden wasn't quite equivalent to that position in the United States.  But pretty impressive just the same.

One day I asked him, "Why do you speak English with an English accent?"  He said, "Well, in school, when we are getting ready to start learning English, we can choose which accent we want to have, British or American".  (I understand that kind of choice.  If I want to learn Portuguese, which I do, I could choose a Brazilian accent or a Portuguese accent.  I would choose Brazilian, because I would be learning it because I want to go to Brazil.  Also, I want to be able to understand the lyrics of Brazilian music, which I love.)  He continued, "Depending upon which accent we want, that will be the English language class that we will have for our studies."  And then he looked at me and said, "Which one would YOU have chosen?"

Ha ha, he had me there!  Of course I would have chosen a British accent myself!

Although nowadays, frankly, I much prefer my own American accent (which, based on the places where I grew up, from birth to graduation from high school, I would say that my accent is 55% California, 40% North Carolina, and 5% Boston.  My brother and I had the discovery that we preferred our own accent over anything British at the exact same moment.  It was early in the morning in England, we were on a Narrowboating trip that I had set up for some family and friends, and we had been tied up on one side of the canal where we all had slept that night.  It was our turn to walk into the nearest town to get some bread and milk, which had to be bought every day fresh, because we discovered that in England they did not fill those items with preservatives (much more healthy), but they wouldn't last past one day (the bread would be stale and the milk would be sour).  As we walked along the canal, there was a man walking toward us, and as we passed him, by brother and I said, "Good morning!"  He was very nice, but his return greeting sounded to us like "Awyeay aiai!"  My brother said to me, "What did he say?"  I answered, "I guess he was saying 'Good morning' back to us."  But it sounded like just a guttural gibberish that was honking up from the bottom of his esophagus.  Frankly, it sounded kind of ugly, especially in comparison to our beautiful, solid, clear, proud "Good Morning".  I said to my brother, "Doesn't our accent sound much better?"  He said, "Well, at least you can understand what we are saying!"

I hasten to add that I realize that there are all sorts of classes of British accents and who knew exactly where that one rated along the class continuum, plus we were on the brink of going into Wales, and that might have had an influence, too.  And, after, all, one of our guests on this trip lived in England, too, and his accent was very clear and elegant.  He later became a member of Parliament, so there you go.  But I enjoyed preferring our own accent, now, and gee, we can hardly watch any British television of movies anymore without wishing we could see some subtitles.  And a Scotish accent is the worst, that is hopeless for me, I have to have subtitles for that!

Okay, now that I have angered the British, I must leave that and get into what this entry is about (so now I can anger the Russians!).

In my marvelously diverse apartment complex, which is about 1/4 of a large city block in size, the majority of the residents are Hispanic (that's true all over Los Angeles), Whites are next, Blacks after that, and I can't think of a single Asian in this complex.  However, for some reason, the majority of the Whites are RUSSIAN, and almost NONE of them know a word of English.  And not one of them is the least bit nice.  All the Hispanics and all the Black are extremely nice, they are truly wonderful to be sharing this place to live, but as a White person, it does sometimes feel a little bit lonely due to so many of those White people being Russian.

My first experience with one of the Russians living here...it sort of waylays me, because simply looking at them, I can't tell that they are Russian.  My apartment has a two-story high ceiling in the living room and I had a large, heavy tapestry that I wanted to hang high up on he upper reaches of one wall.  I didn't have a ladder that was two stories tall, but I saw that a man living in this complex had a huge ladder on his big truck, so one day I saw him down at his truck and I went over to him and asked him if I could borrow, or perhaps "rent" his ladder for about an hour sometime.  I explained what I wanted it for, to hang a tapestry high up on my two-story hight wall.

He said, "No."

I said, "I would be happy to pay rent for it, which is what I would have to do if I rented one from Home Depot or some place, but I can't see how I could fit that into buy car."

He said, "I don't loan out my ladder.  Only I can use my ladder."

I said, "Well then, could I hire YOU to work with me to get this tapestry hung up on the wall.  I could pay your normal hourly fee for whatever you normally do in your work."

He said, "I am a plumber."

I said, "Okay, but this time, you could just climb up a latter for your plumber's fee."

He said, "I only do plumbing.  I do not climb up ladders unless it has to do with plumbing."

Hearing him saying these things made me realize that he was Russian...he had that guttural Russian voice, but at least he knew English.  He clearly had no intention of helping me in any way.  Well, that was his prerogative, but certainly was not very nice.

So to heck with him. I happened to find a multi-folding ladder at Home Depot to buy, much better than his ladder, and, folded up, it even fit into my car's truck, so I installed up high up on the wall the gorgeous tapestry.  That is always the best way anyway, do things your self.

Over the years, I might run into other Russians there in the complex, such as in the laundry room or getting their mail.  They are the ones when I say "Hi" to them, they ignore me completely.  I am just being friendly, they can't even smile and say 'Hi" back?  Maybe it's that thing of not knowing English, they haven't even bothered to grasp what something as simple as "Hi" means.

About half a year ago, I was sitting in my balcony (which is on the third floor) and I saw down below at the gate an elderly woman and man.  The woman was pulling behind her a folding grocery cart, and the man was very rustily shuffling along pushing a walker.  It looked like he was in agony, that possibly his legs were riddled with arthritis, like every step hurt but he continued anyway.  I thought to myself, poor man, what are they doing?  Surely they couldn't be walking to the grocery store...I myself wouldn't walk that far.

An hour or more later, I was still out there and that couple came back, the man agonizing shuffling along, the woman pulling what was now a cart packed solid with groceries.  I was flabbergasted, they actually had shuffled their way all the way to the grocery store and back.

Maybe a month later, I was out on my balcony again and down below was that couple again.  Same situation, her with the grocery cart, him agonizingly shuffling along pushing his walker.  I deliberately stayed out there until they came back hours later.   I greatly admired them, those two, going through that routine again and again.  Clearly the woman was supporting his exercise, trying to keep him moving, rather then degrading, yet was patient with his slowness, never seemed to hurry him along, but tolerated his slowness and accepted that was their situation.  I wanted so much to tell them what I felt, how inspiring it was for me to see them...that I thought they were heroes, unsung heroes.

Well, a couple of months ago, I was down on the walkway and who should come shuffling along but that couple!  So I immediately launched into telling them about how I had seen them from my balcony and "wow, how wonderful you two are", saying to the man "you bravely continue with this great effort" and to the woman saying "you are so patient with him", telling them that they were both heroes to me.  But they just stared at me, the woman with annoyance creasing her face, the bowed down man looking up at me with watery eyes as if I were a madman.  I didn't understand, why were they acting so peculiarly to what I was saying, but fortunately Nancy, a Black lady who is a friend of mine there, walked by and she said, "They are Russian, they don't understand what you are saying."  I was so frustrated, I wanted them to know what I felt, how much I admired them, but there was no way to get through to them, they might as well be zombies in an insane asylum, which is what they seemed like to me now.  They went on their way down the walkway to the gate, their brief interruption with what was obviously a deranged man meant nothing to them, "don't pay it any mind, he won't trouble us now".

At least Nancy understood.  She said, "They are everything you said they are, but you just can't communicate with them.  I see them all the time and she's a tough one!  He had lots of trouble going up the stairs, you can imagine.  But I've seen her, she doesn't help him at all, she makes him do it no matter what, she doesn't want him to get soft.  Sometimes he is too tired to go another step, but she just shrugs her shoulders and goes on inside the put the groceries away.  After a while, he finishes the last few steps and goes back inside."  I said, "What else do you know about them?  Their names, their history?"  But Nancy just says, "I don't know them at all.  Only what I have seen, that's all.  I don't think anybody knows them."  Well, if Nancy doesn't know them, she is right, nobody else them.

Just yesterday, the weather was so wonderful, everybody around seemed excited and happy about that.  I brought out a book to read and a bottle of water to drink.  I got onto the chaise lounge and saw an elderly couple also outside, out on the patio of their condo, in the complex across the street from our complex.  The woman wore a pretty pink blouse.  I felt like waving to her, like we are two kindred spirits outside enjoying this balmy evening.  The sun would soon enough set and that would be a glorious sight.  But I didn't wave even thought I had a strong impulse to do so, it felt downright rude to not do it.  Most people don't see things the way I do, so I didn't...she wouldn't have a clue as to who I was and my distance from her was probably far enough to make it not seem to her that we had any kindredness with each other.  So, in frustration, I just read my book, and when it got dark, the elderly couple across the street got up, went inside, and closed the blinds.  As for me, I got up, turned on my party lights which I can read with and read for another hour.

Today, around the same time as yesterday, I picked up my book and my bottle of water and went outside to the balcony again.  And guess what, that elderly couple was outside on their patio again!  This time the woman was wearing a yellow blouse.  I was so excited to see them again, I turned on my party lights so that my balcony would be clearly delineated.  I decided that I was going to get up and go across the street to the sidewalk a little below their patio, point out my party-lighted balcony over there and explain that I know this probably seems crazy, but with us all enjoying this wonderful evening after having been in this nearly two whole months of Lockdown, that with this minor escape I feel a kinship with them, so if ever I seen them again like this, I will wave hi to them and that is why I am doing that.

I put on my shoes, got my keys, and went down the three flights of stairs and out through the parking gate and across the street to those people's patio.  When I got to where she was sitting, I gave her my spiel. "See that balcony over there with the lights, that is mine," and I explained why I was there talking with her at that moment and halfway thorough my speech, through the mouth in her stone cold face with no expression on it at all, the woman uttered only one word. "Russian."  That was it, that was all, that was all she had in her and that was all she felt she needed to say, could say.  "Russian".

I felt the same frustration that I had with the shuffling old man and the grocery cart toting woman, that hopeful expression of sharing a feeling from one human to another human, to express that awareness that that normally we live in this culture in such isolation from and misunderstanding of each other, but here I am, someone wanting to throw off the imposed solitude, wanting and willing to reach out and share a recognition of our common kinship...all I got was yet another RUSSIAN.

I was so wound up that I said my whole speech anyway, gesturing to my lightened balcony, telling the woman my name and indicating with my sweeping arm her in her balcony with a hope that understanding might break through, but I might as well have been attempting to act out the Declaration of Independent in a game of charades.  I was met not even with a stare, but a stone face looking straight forward, not at me, In her desire to get me to scram, since the one explanatory word of "Russian" didn't do it, then maybe pretending that I wasn't even there might do it.

As I walked back to my apartment, I saw that the Hispanic woman who lives with her husband in the apartment directly below me was out on their balcony.  They are out there a lot; I usually see them when I come in and park.  The woman doesn't know English fluently, but she can understand enough of it, so I told her about my frustration with the woman across the street and her not understanding a word, but then I said, "But you are also enjoying this great evening and we share this kinship even if I can't even see you.  I bless you, and hope you continue to enjoy yourself like you do.  Keep yourself well." English was not her native language, but she understood me.  And I do mean it...I bless her.