October 17, 1989

Six weeks into the new school year, and I’d made a couple of new friends in our new town. They lived in the neighborhood behind our back gate and through the abandoned vineyard, and if you squoze in between the two pieces of fence you wouldn’t have to go all the way around. It was how we got to the bus stop every morning. I’d been invited to hang out after school with perhaps E or was it C (they were best friends and I was someone new and therefore maybe interesting), and the three of us were riding our bikes up and down the street and around the cul-de-sac named for a wine grape varietal, just like every other street in the subdivision.

We’d watched TV and had snacks and all their little sisters were playing together, and I was just getting used to riding my bike on pavement instead of a dirt road or field like I’d grown up doing, when all of a sudden it felt like the bike was being pulled sideways out from under me. I fell over.

At first I chalked it up to my still-wobbly riding skills (unused to smooth surfaces as I was) but then I saw the little sisters huddled in E’s doorway. “There was an earthquake!” one of them yelled. No wonder I was disoriented. We went to C’s house and the TV, which had been tuned to the Giants-A’s world series game, became instead breaking news about the earthquake.

I decided that instead of watching all the scary things on TV at my friend’s house, I’d go home and watch them there. When I got home, my mom said that she and Lissa had been on the California king-sized bed in my parents’ room, and at first she thought Lissa was shaking the bed. After a few seconds, however, she realized that it was an earthquake. There was no damage to anything in our house, and though we were all a little shaken up (no pun intended), we turned on the news to see the first footage of the massive destruction that the 7.1 Loma Prieta quake had caused all over the bay area. Fires raged in the Marina district of San Francisco. A piece of the Bay Bridge fell down. A mall collapsed in Santa Cruz. A whole section of freeway fell in the East Bay, crushing ~40 people to death instantly, and days of rescue efforts to extract remaining survivors from their cars would continue. We sat, speechless. It was the first time I ever remember feeling truly mortal.

Many years later, the 1989 quake became a touchstone for people living in California, people with ties to California, fans of the Giants or the A’s. We’d learn that because of a quirk of fate, the World Series game scheduled for that day in which the two Bay Area teams competed meant that a disproportionately large number of people were indoors watching the game rather than in their cars on the bridges and freeways, and therefore probably saved many lives (normally, at 5:04 PM, many thousands of people would have been commuting). I’d go on to date a boy in high school who celebrated his 11th birthday that day, and marry a different boy who had his own story about the quake, even though he lived three states away when it happened. Looking back, what I remember most was the feeling of disorientation, the feelings of dread and fear the scenes of destruction caused. I felt many other earthquakes over the years, and every time, as I stood in a doorway, I flashed back to that sunny afternoon on my bike. I think about it sometimes when we’re on a bridge, silently saying the “No earthquakes” chant like someone on Press Your Luck says “No Whammies.” The possibility and, honestly, the likelihood of an earthquake is just something that comes with the territory when you live on the West Coast. The uncertainty is one of the prices we pay for living here, just like uncertainty in general is one of the prices we pay for being alive.

Giant. Gold. Letters.

It was evening, and it was sometime early in 1997. I was at my boyfriend’s apartment and we’d probably just had dinner and were hanging out watching TV or studying or whatever we did then. It might have even been my birthday, because my mom called my boyfriend’s house (this was, of course, long before cell phones) to chat with me. It was during that phone conversation that mom broke the news to me.

“Jessica got engaged,” she said.

“What?!” I responded in disbelief. Jessica was my cousin. She was 18, just like me. She’d been dating a boy off and on for a year or so, I’d heard, one that was a few years older. When we were 15 she’d sent me a letter (it was truly the dark ages) telling me that she had a huge crush on this boy, Jimmy, but I shouldn’t tell my parents because she didn’t want her parents to know how much she liked him. Then all the drama happened with other boys and partying and alcohol poisoning and Jessica went back to her pious ways. While I was preparing to go to college, she was suddenly dating that boy she liked way back when she was 15. We’d been about as good of friends as cousins who see one another maybe once a year could be, and as my mom told me about their news all I could remember was the time maybe two years beforehand we shared a bed in the pool house and Jess mentioned how ‘far’ she’d gone and with whom. At that point, all I’d done was kiss a couple of boys, and I remembered thinking she was way ahead of me. I wasn’t ready for any of that sex stuff at 16.

So as I heard the details of her engagement to that boy she’d pined for at 15, all I could think of was that she was crazy. We were both 18 and I was light years away from wanting to make any sort of lifetime commitment to anyone. I hadn’t even chosen a major yet. Apparently, their best friends, another couple, had gotten engaged at Christmas and so Jess and Jim decided if their friends could do it, so could they. A date was set for late in the summer.

As I hung up the phone, the phrase kept going through my head: she’s crazy. Who makes that sort of life decision so young? She’d hardly ever dated anyone else! She was so young! Marriage was a huge commitment! What about college? Were they going to have kids right away? I was at such a different place in my life – staying the night at my boyfriend’s apartment sometimes, sure, but also studying and working toward a degree, going out and having fun with my friends, enjoying a bit of adult-ish freedom for the first time in my life because I wasn’t responsible for anyone but myself. Why would she want to give all that up?

Later that year, we went to Texas to visit my great aunt, and on the way home we stopped in San Diego to go to Jessica’s wedding. My favorite part of the event actually happened the night before, after we got to the hotel. Somehow, my sisters and I got into a silly physical altercation over a shoe on the lawn, and my mom must have taken a photo. My memories of this incident are among the best from that time in my life – just getting to be silly with my sisters when most other people around were stressed out about all the wedding fooferaw.

I cannot for the life of me remember why we fought over a shoe.

The next day, we got all gussied up (I’d had a difficult time finding a dress that was age-appropriate and fit well without showing off a ton of nonexistent cleavage, and so I’d actually sewed a piece of lace to the top of the too-big dress) and drove to the ceremony, which was at a giant megachurch in Del Mar. It didn’t look like a church so much as a big complex, with plenty of southern California styling; lots of palm trees and adobe. Above the entrance to the…chapel? Sanctuary? Place where the ceremony was going to be? was the word Jesus in giant gold script letters. JESUS! Then, we walked inside, and above the…alter? was an even bigger JESUS! in giant gold letters.

I knew that Jessica’s and Jim’s families were both religious, but I didn’t realize quite how much they’d decided to fall in with those beliefs; the last time I’d talked to Jessica, she wasn’t going to church at all. But that was probably a year beforehand. I wasn’t raised with any sort of religious tradition, and while I’d occasionally attended a very liberal low dogma church (mostly so I could sing in the choir and go to youth group) for a while, I was, at 18, very much not religious. I’d attended another wedding that summer and knew I’d need to be respectful through this service, but seeing the giant JESUS threw me off a bit, and then when the ceremony started I didn’t even know how to respond to all the weirdness. I sat in flabbergasted silence while the minister went on and on about Jesus, about how he would be at the center of their marriage. It got to the point where I felt like he was advocating that they have a three-way marriage, and I found that to be exceedingly creepy. As part of the service, we were all commanded to bow our heads in prayer (I did not, and instead kept my eyes on the crowd) and then asked if anyone had decided to accept Jesus as their personal savior as a result of the service, because Jessica and Jim really wanted everyone to do so. I saw a few people raise their hands. It was uncomfortable and kind of gross and I just couldn’t wait for it all to be done so we could go eat (I was hungry).

That was the first wedding where I ate Jordon almonds, and the first time I realized this divide in my extended family: the ones who were super religious (either Catholic or born-again Evangelical Christian) and the ones who were not. My sisters and I were seated at a table with our godless heathen cousins, and we all laughed and commiserated about how weird the service was.

Letting off steam after attempted conversion

* * * * * * *

That wedding was 14 years ago today. Jessica and Jim went on to have four kids, the first born nearly two years after they got married. Jessica never did much schooling after high school – maybe an early childhood certification so she could work in a day care. We’ve attempted to stay in touch through the years, but it was more difficult after my parents split up and we’ve really only seen one another at weddings. We went to their house once, during the trip to move me to Colorado, and there was religious stuff all over the place. But we had fun with them and their (at the time) 2 young kids, even going out to dinner with them and were delighted at how well-behaved the kids were. Her husband never did manage to make a paid career out of youth ministry and instead has been managing various branches of a fast food restaurant. Recently, they moved to Texas to facilitate the opening of a new branch of the same restaurant. Jessica’s devoted her life to being a Mom – homeschooling, gestating, rearing children. And now we keep in touch via facebook.

Today she wrote something about their anniversary: “I guess sometimes 18 year olds can make good decisions.” While I’m thrilled it’s worked out so well for them (and it hasn’t all been sweetness and light; they’ve been through their fair share of hard times, health scares, and at least one miscarriage), I think they’re exception rather than the rule. The best friends, the ones who prompted their early engagement, went through a nasty divorce due to infidelity right around the time of this wedding. They’re now a couple thousand miles away from the rest of the extended family. But they’re happy and healthy and it seems like my cousin really did make a good decision for herself. Would I have done the same thing she did, or advise someone else to do so? Never in a million years.

Odd Man Out

A message popped up on my Facebook screen. “Recital tomorrow at 6:30!” Heather wrote. “I know; I asked Denise about it a few weeks ago,” I responded. “I’m planning to be there.”

It was a hot Saturday of Father’s Day weekend, so of course it was time for recital. It’s always sunny and always hot, and they always have to pull the curtains on the high windows at the Citrus Fair so it’s always stifling with the hundreds of bodies in seats. We rushed back from Scarlett’s party in Santa Rosa and I made it to the Citrus Fair building with approximately two minutes to spare. I was greeted at the ticket table by my old youth group leader’s wife, who had the biggest grin on her face when she realized who I was. “I’m so happy to see you!” she said. We made a bit of small talk, and then she mentioned that I should look for her husband during intermission, as he’d be running the spotlight during the show. “John E. had a brain tumor,” she told me, “so if he doesn’t recognize you right away, just tell him your name and I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to see you.”

A brain tumor? I’d had no idea. I paid my $8 (some proceeds going to help defray medical costs for one of the four-year-olds at the studio, fighting stage four testicular cancer) and, taking a deep breath, I walked into the dark auditorium. I squinted at the sea of people, but didn’t see any convenient empty chairs, so I made my way to the top of the hard wooden bleachers at the back of the room. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light and I began to recognize people, I couldn’t help but remember all the other times I was here for the recital; only mostly those times I was up in the oven of a dressing room, wrangling littles, attempting hair and makeup that wouldn’t melt under the spotlight, wrestling into lycra-heavy costumes, my skin sticky with the miserable damp sweat you get in a tiny 120-degree room on a June day. Not two minutes after I sat down, Heather’s voice came over the sound system. “Welcome to the Cloverdale School of Dance annual recital. Tonight’s theme is ‘Wish upon a Star.’ There will be a 15 minute intermission.” Studio teachers, some in costumes and some in street clothing, stood in front of the curtain for introductions to the audience. Denise has been working on this for more than 20 years, I thought to myself. She grew herself a studio and teachers to teach for her, so she’s not teaching every class anymore. Good for her.

Spotlights, music, curtain.

* * * * * * *

I found myself squinting in the dark at the program, trying to make out the names of those children in each class, each dance. Who was the teacher or older student for each group? Which children had parents I knew? Parents my age? Parents who, the last time I saw them, were stumbling from lack of sleep after an all-night Project Grad? Or at my ten-year-high school reunion? I was so far back from the stage that I couldn’t tell whether any of the kids were easy to pick out as being related to someone I knew. It was difficult to relax into “watch tiny kid do cute things” mode; I was looking around at the audience with their babies and toddlers, their fluttering programs, trying to move the still air around a little. Which people might recognize me, there alone, no babies or toddlers, no nieces or nephews in the show?

* * * * * * *

It was mid-June of 1996, and I had just graduated high school the day before. Someone had picked me up at 5:30 AM with my hard-earned prizes from the very same building to which I’d be heading back in a few short hours. I’d been hypnotized, played casino games, attempted to counteract exhaustion with caffienated soda but still felt like a zombie, and at home I slept on the couch for a couple of hours because my grandmother was sleeping in my bed. We’d had whirlwind days: Lissa graduated 8th grade, and then my last day of school and high school graduation, followed by a party at our house and then Project Grad. I’d never been so tired, and I knew I’d be expected to be at my best for another whole day despite the lack of sleep. People couldn’t be quiet enough in the main part of the house to let me sleep, so I gave up, got up, ate something, and headed right back to the Citrus Fair building for dress rehearsal. It was going to be a really hot day, I knew, which meant those upstairs dressing rooms would be miserable. We dress rehearsed; we wrangled small kids who weren’t pleased about the hair and the makeup and the costumes and the heat; we put wet compresses on Heather’s heat blisters (!), and the four of us who had graduated and been up all night just gritted our teeth, went out there, and did our best to perform the dances we’d been preparing for months. The very last dance included a large group in traditional ballet costume performed to Pachelbel’s Canon. To this day, that song for me evokes not weddings but that sweltering June day, the pink tights and black leotards, my sleep-deprived performance.

* * * * * *

I couldn’t help but remember that day, as I sat in the dark room and watched some of the younger girls from that Canon dance were now teachers in my old school, credited in the program for their choreography. The dances were all done to Disney songs, and each teacher or older student came out with a group of littles to help them do their dance. I continued to study the program, and then I noticed a high school friend (with a niece in the show and two young nephews in the audience) standing at the side of the room. We had a short, whispered conversation in between performances, during which time I learned we weren’t the only ones from our class in attendance. “Toni’s here, Darren’s here, Liz. It’s like reunion,” she said. Only those other people had little girls or little boys in the performance; that was the difference.

At intermission I went up into the balcony to say hi to John E. “Emily!” he exclaimed, and gave me a giant hug. It was awesome. I hadn’t seen John E. in at least a decade, and his daughter I’d once babysat was now one of the teachers for the studio. “My youngest kid, Jordy? He just got his driver’s license yesterday!” he told me. I never even met Jordy, because I’d been too busy to babysit for most of senior year. “You’re making me feel old!” I told him. John E. was super proud of his kids, and was thrilled to see me. I hadn’t expected to see him at the recital but I was glad I did. As my high school youth group leader, he’d seen me at my worst (an angsty teenager) and still always saw the best in me. He was the kind of dad I wish I’d had, and I was glad that at least for a couple years there was an adult man I felt like I could count on to listen when I had something I needed to angst about. “I hope your kids spoil you rotten tomorrow,” I thought to myself. “I hope they know how lucky they are to have such a great guy for a dad.” Downstairs, I said hi to Liz and a few other people I knew in the audience, and then I spotted someone I never thought I’d see in a million years, someone I’d danced with at my previous ballet school; someone I hadn’t seen in at least twenty years. I gave her a hug, and she told me her daughter had been a mouse (as had Heather’s daughter and Liz’s daughter) in the Cinderella dance. “I’m not the only one here!” she told me, and led me over to her friend, who was someone ELSE I’d danced with as a kid and hadn’t seen in 20 years. We hugged and chatted a bit, and I told her my sob story about why I had to quit ballet. “I just stopped sometime in high school, because I thought it wasn’t cool,” she told me. “Now sometimes when I take my Pilates class I peek in at the adult ballet class next door and think about taking it.” We talked about how once we’d been those little girls on the stage. Now we were both here watching the children of our friends perform the same steps we’d once performed (or, at the very least, looked cute in costumes on a stage for a few minutes.)

The show started back up again, and the older girls began to do their own dances. I was no longer looking at last names in the program, because most of these kids were too old to belong to anyone I knew, but I did recognize a brother and sister as being the children of one of my sister’s elementary school teachers (you don’t forget a name like the daughter’s), and they were among the best dancers. Many of the families of the little kids had left after intermission, so there were quite a few empty seats. I found a space for myself and started to focus on the choreography and technique. I hadn’t even noticed until I looked to my left that another high school friend, M, with a daughter who had danced in the Mary Poppins number, was still there watching the 8-18 year-olds perform. “You used to do this, didn’t you!” she whispered to me. “Yes, and I’m still friends with the owner of the studio,” I whispered back. “Who are you here to see?” she asked.

Myself, I wanted to answer. Myself, but I haven’t danced on this stage since a swan song the summer I was 18, a solo interlude to help give the studio’s dancers time to change costumes. I was working at the pool that summer and at the Boys and Girls club, and I divided my time between being waterlogged and sweating in the studio to learn a 3-minute solo, the calluses sloughing off my toes and into my pointe shoes; my feet constantly bloody. I knew after my diagnosis it would be the last time I’d ever dance on stage, and I don’t know that anyone in the audience of that recital realized just how much I’d be giving up. I was so good, even if I could never have been pro because of my body type. Compared to some of these girls dancing in this recital, I was so, so good. And I can never do it again.

My daughter or son, I wanted to answer. The child I haven’t had yet. The one who will, someday, be the reason for me to come to a performance or a competition or a meet. I’ll be the one in the audience with the giant grin on my face, with my son or daughter the one in the cute costume mugging or frowning at the dark sea of faces. Or, if he/she takes after my sister, will be the one directing everyone else on the stage during the performance.

“Heather’s girls,” I said.

* * * * *

After the recital, someone from the school (possibly Denise?) put this photo up on Facebook. It’s that group of dancers from the Pachelbel’s Canon number. We were doing a photo shoot with a professional photographer a couple of weeks before recital, and I think this was one of the outtakes – a “silly” photo. I’m the standing furthest left, and looking at this photo, it’s hard for me to believe that was really me. I was 25 pounds underweight. My eyebrows were caterpillars and my skin was terrible. I was exhausted from rehearsals for recital, for the play I was in, for all the huge end-of-year school projects. I didn’t have any boobs or a butt or muscle in my arms. But I was beautiful.

Four of the girls in this photo are now mothers, and one has her first baby on the way. At least five of them were once or are currently teachers at the studio. One I know absolutely nothing about. I’m the only one I know of for sure who can no longer dance. And I’m glad I can’t go back and tell 17-year-old me that in 14 years she’ll be right back in the same place, watching her friends’ kids on the stage, knowing it will be many years, if ever, before the kid on the stage in the costume is hers. It might just break her heart.

But I must gather knots of flowers, and buds and garlands gay

The beginning of the dance

Last week, Helen Jane kept writing about May Day on twitter. I tweeted back at her about how, when I was in 3rd grade, I’d danced the May Pole at the May Day festival in Geyserville. Someone else, who I don’t know but must live in Geyserville, responded that Geyserville still had a May Day festival. I googled, I thought, I asked Dan if he’d be up for attending a (free!) quaint small-town festival. He was game, so on Sunday we drove to the ‘ville, to the Hoffman Picnic Grounds (formerly known as the Geyser Peak Picnic Grounds), where Geyserville’s May Day festival has been held since around 1991.

Old oak tree

* * * * * * *

May Day is a long-standing tradition in this little hamlet. Geyserville’s had a May Day celebration since at least the 1920s, and from then until the early 90s it was held on private land known as the Hoffman Grove. I looked forward to the May Day festival every year when I was a kid. There were sweet things to eat, and face painting. There were pony rides, barbecue, a Dixieland band with old men and brass horns in little white hats. Prizes could be won if you fished the right duckie out of the kiddy pool, and the fire department would compete with the one from Cloverdale to see which hose could push the ball better. (Because that wasn’t suggestive.) But the absolute best part of May Day was the dancing of the May Pole. I remember being very small, probably four or five, and thinking how big those 3rd graders were (in Geyserville, it’s always the kids from the 3rd grade class who get to dance the May Pole). Each boy got a small boutonniere; each girl a wreath of flowers for her head with ribbons hanging off the back. When I was little, I was so jealous of those big kids and couldn’t wait for it to be my turn.

Geyserville 3rd graders pose in their finery

In 1987, the year I skipped second grade and into third, I was completely miserable. Skipping into a class of kids, many of whom had been held back at some point so they were two years older than I was, in a school where there was only one classroom per grade so EVERYONE knew who I was and that I had skipped a grade, did not do wonders for my social life. In fact, it wasn’t until we moved to another town that I ever felt comfortable around classmates again. But I’d been looking forward to being in third grade FOREVER, because that meant on May Day it would be my turn to dance the May Pole. All the miseries and the teasing and the taunting and the shunning were swept aside in April, because April was when our morning teacher, Mrs. Garrett, began to teach us the May Pole dance. We heard the same music over and over. We practiced the motions around a bare pole before we got to use any ribbons. I remember that it was vastly important, during practice, that one get a “good” ribbon color. And then, finally, the day came. I wore my favorite dress, and I got a beautiful wreath for my head. It’s been nearly 25 years, so I don’t remember what color ribbon I got. But I still remember how proud I was that I got to dance in front of the whole town with my classmates.

Which color would you want?

* * * * * * *

I wasn’t sure about this May Day festival. Living here these past several months, I’ve run into all kinds of people I hadn’t seen in decades, and I didn’t know how up for that I was on Sunday. I also wasn’t sure what kind of activities there might be, but the website said the May Pole would be danced at 1:30 PM so we got there around 1. The Picnic Grounds are no Hoffman Grove (the May Day festival, I learned by talking with one of the town’s patriarchs, had moved from the Hoffman Grove after Mr. Hoffman died and Mrs. Hoffman was concerned about liability issues with having hundreds or thousands of people on the land ever year), but they’re still pretty. We looked at the historical displays of photos and newspaper clippings. I recognized people with whom I’d gone to elementary school. I recognized my old bus driver. A Healdsburg resident toting a large camera and I struck up a conversation about the festival’s history and my memories of May Day Festivals Of Olde, and he was the one who introduced me to the Grizzled Town Patriarch. I even learned something less than savory about the land we lived on and the little cabin we lived in when I was growing up. Mr. Bosworth (said Grizzled Town Patriarch) mentioned that when he was young, his father and grandfather, town undertakers, had to collect the body of a hunter who had been shot in his cabin by “Indians” (his word) who were interested in robbing the man in order to buy liquor. (His story, once again.) The father and grandfather retrieved the body and brought it to town, and young men in their cups dared one another to see if they could run from the bar, across the street, to the basement where the corpse was held before burial to see how long they could stand the smell. The cabin where the hunter lived and was killed was, of course, the very same structure where I lived from birth to age 10. No wonder I saw ghosts when I lived there.

Grizzly death stories aside, we both found the event pretty charming. Everyone brought their kids, and there was a rock climbing wall and a bouncy castle. People were painting faces. People were selling ribs and other food. The fire department had a booth, but didn’t bring out any hoses. My third grade teacher, Mrs. Garrett, was there, and she remembered me (!) and told me she was still in charge of teaching the kids the May Pole Dance. We found a spot in the shade to wait, while Dan people watched and I tried to figure out whether that person over there was so-and-so’s mom, or my friend’s old neighbor, or whatever.

Then, at long last, it was time. I moved into the sun in good position for taking photos, and Mrs. Garrett went around to whisper to each kid not to stop dancing if the music stopped. One little girl said to another, in a Very Serious Voice, “It’s not like practice. It’s the REAL THING.”

Nearly ready to go

Mrs. Garrett gives last minute instructions

Two little boys sat grinning under the pole to keep it upright, and then the same old tinny music came out of the speakers.

Someday, when they're grown, these boys will remember when they held pole.

The ribbons flew, and the kids skipped, and the ribbons shook and the kids wove.

Weaving ribbons

Nearly finished!

Here’s what the dance looked like.

And here’s what they made, at the end.

Wrapped May Pole, post-dance

It was a ritual that’s been done for hundreds or thousands of years, along with the rabbits and the eggs and the flowers – all signs of fertility, spring, new life. It’s been done in Geyserville since the 1920s. And its still done, in 2011, by 8- and 9-year-olds who probably have no idea that this 32-year-old lady watched and remembered when it was her turn to shine in the May sun in front of the whole town, with the same teacher whispering the same thing in her ear: “Don’t stop if the music stops; just keep going.” Maybe when those kids are 32, they’ll remember their hair garlands and their ribbon dance, and maybe even then the third graders of Geyserville elementary school will be learning the May Pole dance.

The best bad guy ever

One of the first movies I remember going to see in the theater was Return of the Jedi. It came out in 1983, which means I probably saw it when I was four years old. Most of what I remember about that first time seeing the film was, of course, the ewoks – the little mobile teddy bears that lived in a primordial redwood forest and somehow managed to take down the Evil Empire despite hardly even having opposable thumbs. I know they were the 1983 version of Jar Jar Binks, and I’m sure the teenage boy contingent hated them, but to a little girl the Ewoks were the best part of Return of the Jedi. They were cute! They kicked ass! They stole speeder bikes and sang the chub yub song! And I’m glad there was something to appeal to four-year-old me in the film, because there sure were a lot of scary parts.

I don’t have much memory of what scared me about Jedi, although having seen the movie dozens of times since then, I can probably guess. Jabba and many of the creatures at his palace; the saarlac pit; Yoda dying: all would have been quite frightening to a four-year-old me. But the scariest part of all, and the only other real memory I have of that first viewing of Jedi, was Darth Vader.

Darth Vader is the best bad guy ever. He’s got a deep, frightening voice, and his breath is all HOOOOOOH HUUUUUR, and his head looks like a shiny insect carapace. That beetle helmet slowly descends onto his scarred head, with a hiss of smoke or steam, and he looms. Scary music follows him wherever he goes. He can choke people with his mind! People who aren’t even in the same room! (Though, now that I think about it, why didn’t he just force choke Obi Wan when he thought about him during the time interim between Revenge of the Sith and Jedi, while Obi Wan was still on Tattooine?) Darth Vader fights with a red laser sword and everyone is afraid of him, and did I mention the HOOOOOOOH HUUUUUR?

That’s the part I remembered the most, for several months after I first saw Jedi. I had nightmares about hearing the breathing and seeing the shiny black helmet-clad bad guy coming after me. I think Darth Vader played my own personal boogeyman until I saw the Rankin-Bass animated version of The Hobbit and then it was Gollum for years and years, or maybe it was Gollum first but he got a break for a while and Vader took his place. My memories of early childhood aren’t especially clear.

What is clear, though, is that Darth Vader holds up as a great bad guy all the way until George Lucas has to go and show us why he became the monster that he did with Episodes 1-3 (and Episode 2 goes a long way; I mean, the guy obviously had some anger management issues and wasn’t especially good with people even before he betrayed everyone he loved and murdered a bunch of children) and we get 2 movies of whiny Hayden Christensen. It’s hard to see Episode 3 and then watch Star Wars again and still feel the same twinge of fear or apprehension when he orders the hit on Alderaan, since the previous time we saw him groveling and sniveling, limbs charred and face half-gone, after his big lava planet fight with Young, Hot Obi Wan. He is, however, still good for this. (Use it wisely. I’ve found many occasions where it came in handy.)

Proof I saw snow before I moved to Colorado

Sweet jacket, 3-year-old me!

Sometime before I was born, my parents bought a piece of property in Mendocino County. The top 40 acres of a mountain outside Potter Valley, it had a mostly-burned-down house and an intact outhouse, and during the time my parents owned it my dad built most of a barn and most of a cabin. We didn’t get up there all that frequently, though I think at some point my parents had planned for us to move to the property. Many of my memories of the place are tied to specific events or stories they told me from when I was too young to remember, and to photos that were taken of me as a little girl, on a sled made out of the hood of an old VW bug in the snow, standing amongst tulips, walking along a wooden bench or the border of the sand box. I had to be rushed to the emergency room in Ukiah at least twice, once because my dad had thought I had swallowed a nail and I’m not sure what the other time was, but Bad Things always seemed to happen when we were up there.

I do have a memory of riding on my dad’s shoulders, and of him tripping and falling over some downed barbed wire fence, and me going sprawling and being scared stiff because I’d had the wind knocked out of me and I couldn’t breathe. Luckily, I wasn’t injured, just frightened, and I was OK after a while.

We’d go up to the property a few times a year, and it seemed like every time we were there we’d have to clean up all of the damage done by mice and squirrels and raccoons, and nothing stayed the way we’d put it the last time we’d been there. It was essentially camping in an unfinished, unheated cabin, with old blankets and old foam pads on the floor. I remember eating hot dogs and baked beans on paper plates, and drinking Pepsi out of the tall swirled glass bottles, and my dad’s old flatbed truck that had ended up there for some reason.

As the years went by, we made the trek up to the property less and less often. I went once with my dad when it was winter, and while he did a bunch of stuff I mostly sat on rocks or in the cab of the truck, reading my book and eating skinny pretzel sticks and making halfhearted snowballs to throw at nobody. I might have been 9 or 10 years old, and would have much rather been anywhere else, but those few hours weren’t really so bad, looking back on it.

The last time we went to the property, it was a summer trip, probably the summer of 1990, and I had been spending my school vacation swimming, hanging out with my best friend, and babysitting. I invited her to come up to the property with us, and it was one of the best times I remember up there, because I had someone to joke and laugh and sleep in a tent with; I didn’t have to sleep on the musty foam mattress or be anywhere near my snoring sisters. We walked up to the ridge where the barn was still unfinished, and over to the pond, and we talked about cute boys and makeup and whatever else middle school girls talk about.

My parents sold the property (which they’d always thought of as bad luck, not only because of all the bad things that happened to us while we were there but because of what had happened to the previous owners (a crazy firebug torched their house)) in 1991 or 1992. And only a few years later, someone who belonged to the people that bought the land from my parents ended up going to prison for some drug-related relative-killing. Bad juju, that land, and I’m glad my family isn’t tangled up with it anymore.

Today, Dan and I, wanting to get out of the house, decided to drive north for a while. We passed the Rock Shop on the way to Hopland, and then we passed the gas station where my family would always stop to get It’s-Its. We drove through Ukiah and all the way up to Willits, which has the first stoplight on Highway 101 north of San Francisco (a title that was held by Cloverdale until the freeway bypass went through in the mid-90s). I hadn’t been north of Hopland since 1999, and the road conditions are certainly better than they were back then, and the rest of it is just as beautiful as I remember.

We turned around at the north end of Willits, and headed back south. When we got back to Hopland, Dan suggested we stop at the little gas station/corner store to see if they had It’s-Its for sale. We did, and to my surprise, they did. We bought an It’s-It and shared it. It tasted exactly the way I remembered, an ice cream sandwich I probably last ate in 1990, on the way home from the last trip up to that cursed property in Mendocino County.

 

Memory Lane

One of the things that we discovered when we arrived here in the ‘dale is that my mom left a bunch of my stuff in the house, things she’d been keeping for me since I moved out to go to college. I spent a few hours looking through old yearbooks and old schoolwork and old literary magazines (complete with poem by Sara entitled My Hands!), through the basket of letters I received during the summer after my freshman year in college, and reading through all of the old school newspapers I’d saved for some bizarre reason. I found a VHS tape of my High School Video Yearbook that may be some time before I get to watch, since I don’t know if I know anyone with a functional VHS player. And I found this stuff.

“Carlitos” was an exercise I had to do in one of my Spanish classes, though why it has someone else’s name on it (on the top of the page, above the photo), I have no idea. In case you can’t see what I wrote in each of the bubbles, I’ll provide both the Spanish and the English translation.

Panel 2: “¿Por favor, tengo quiero usar el baño?” (Please, I have to want to use the bathroom?) (It should have been, “Por favor, ¿puedo usar el baño?”, or Please, can I use the bathroom?)
Panel 3: “¡Pero es muy importante! ¡Necesito ir al baño AHORA!” (But it’s very important! I have to go to the bathroom NOW!)
Panel 4: “¡Ay Caramba! Es demasiado tarde.” (Oh noes! It’s too late.)

Me at a dance with High School Boyfriend at his school. Perhaps Valentine’s Day? I’m wearing a dress of my mom’s circa 1970, a silver peace sign necklace I got at the Renaissance Faire, and awesome white low-heeled pumps! It’s a photo of a photo, so not exactly the most accurate representation, but you get the idea.

From top left: Handmade doll with embroidered face, yarn hair, etc. I named Rose; Snoopy doll I got for having my birthday party at the Redwood Empire Ice Arena, the ice rink owned/operated by Charles Schultz and family; stuffed lamb sans one eye; small stuffed raccoon; baby doll that used to have a matching bonnet. I forget her name.

I could write an entire blog post on this alone, but I’ll try to make a long story short. When I was first babysitting, I pretty much saved all of the money I made and used it to pay for camp in the summer. Eventually, I had made enough that I had a bit left over, and I decided to buy my very first pair of shoes myself. I was probably 13 or 14 years old, and up until that point, my parents had bought all of my clothes/shoes for me. I’d wanted a pair of Birkenstocks for a long time, and I finally had enough money to buy them for myself. So I did.

As you can see, I wore these shoes all the time. I wore them with socks when it was cold and without when it was warm, and I love love loved them, as they were the most comfortable shoes ever (and to me, paying $80 for a pair of shoes felt totally obscene, so I was determined to get my money’s worth out of them). When I bought them, they were a pretty slate blue, but as the years went by they faded to a dull grayish color. I didn’t care, though; I still wore them all the time. I wore down the soles and wore out the toe and the heel, and eventually they started looking pretty ratty, but I couldn’t imagine giving them up.

The summer after high school graduation, my family went on our very first ever (and, it would turn out, only) family camping vacation. Our first stop was a campground someplace in the Western Sierras, and when we had the tent set up my sisters and I went for a walk down to the river, a tributary that would feed the American. Wearing my Birks, I climbed out onto a big rock to sit only to catch my right shoe on something. It fell off my foot and into the fast-moving snow melt runoff river.

I was so sad. I felt like I’d lost my best friend, something that had been with me for so much of my teenage years, something that had cost me EIGHTY DOLLARS and I just couldn’t bring myself to through the unlost shoe away.

Something tells me that it has been long enough now. This is not moving with us to our next domicile.

I DID write an entire blog post about this one. Here’s the sole Piers Anthony newsletter I ever received, where I responded to the pen pal request for a certain Kent B Golden of Hamden, CT. Who knew that 16 years later I’d be attending his wedding?

The Tale of the Laser Disc

So I believe I may have mentioned before that I grew up in two different small towns. The town where I went to high school had a population of approximately 5000 people while I was living there, and when we moved there in 1989 I was going into the sixth grade. Most of my classmates, approximately 100 of them, had been going to school together since kindergarten, or in some cases, preschool. Anybody moving into town was considered Fresh Meat as far as the kids were concerned, it being the sort of town where everybody knew everybody, and everybody’s families were intermingled and such.

While my family wasn’t related to anyone else in town, and while I occasionally had crushes on various boys in my class, I was never truly interested in dating anyone I went to school with. The idea of it felt a little incestuous, especially since in most cases I remembered them before they’d grown a foot, before they’d started having to shave, before their voices changed from soprano to baritone. Various people dated various other people, and then they broke up and started dating other various people, but because it was the same small pool, rumors got around about who was better at what sex acts, who had a kinky side, who might be mentally ill. I wanted no part of it, had no interest in being the subject of a “drunk at the river” Monday morning story. So I didn’t date anybody I went to high school with.* The closest I did, in fact, was to date someone from two towns to the south, and that was only briefly (we worked better as friends). Once, for a few months, I dated a guy who lived in my town, but he attended school elsewhere and had just moved to town (we met at swim team over the summer). Although to be fair, I don’t know if you could call what we did dating, per se, since he seemed to be horribly afraid of doing anything other than holding my hand and quoting nerdy movie lyrics at me.

I believe I’ve also mentioned before that I went to church camp every summer from 1991 to 1995. One of the major appeals of attending the week-long event was the opportunity to meet boys who did NOT live in my town, boys I hadn’t spent our formative summers watching them attempt to hide proto-boners in the local pool. Camp was my chance to get to know boys from other places, who of course would be far more mature and more interesting than the ones in my hometown. And meet them I did, each summer, and each week-long camp experience (with a three-day weekend mid February mini camp) brought new crushes to my tender, naive heart. Anyhow, schmaltz aside, one summer I met a boy named Chris and developed a big crush on him, but I was already sort-of-dating the one back home in the ‘dale with the lovely swimmer’s shoulders. So I quashed my feelings until February, when I dropped the Rush freak like a hot potato and started dating Chris in earnest.

The trouble was that Chris lived in Fremont. And I lived in Cloverdale. This was a distance of approximately 120 miles, which is significant when you are an adult, but for a teenager who isn’t yet old enough to drive, it might as well be a light year. The only reason we were even able to maintain a relationship for as long as we did (an entire year!) was due to public transportation.

I was already a seasoned user of public transportation by the time Chris and I got together. Not infrequently, I would take the bus from Cloverdale to Santa Rosa, where one could shop in a mall, or see a movie in a theater that played more than one movie at a time. After we decided to try a long distance relationship, I found out that there was a bus that would take me from Santa Rosa to San Francisco, and then I could take BART from San Francisco to Fremont. Usually, when I made the trip, Chris would meet me at the BART station in the city, and when he came north, I’d meet him in Santa Rosa and we’d ride the bus back to the ‘dale together. (Or I’d sweet-talk my mom into driving me there to pick him up.) I think we saw one another around once a month, on average, with the 5+ hour trip each way meaning a weekend together was really more like one day. I saved my babysitting money for bus fare, and he had somehow acquired some youth BART tickets (for kids under 12, maybe, back when BART had a different fare structure), but nobody ever checked the color of the stripe on your ticket when going through the turnstile and so the BART portion of the trip was usually free.

(And I’m not entirely sure why I even dated him for a year, to be honest. Most of our relationship was conducted through letters and phone calls, and back in the dark ages before unlimited minutes and cell phones, phone calls were actually kind of expensive. Plus, it turned out I wasn’t really all that attracted to him, physically, and then there was the added factor that he was not the sharpest tool in the shed. Hey, don’t make me explain it. I was fifteen.)

One time, when I was sitting at the bus station in Santa Rosa waiting for the bus that would take me down to the city, I was reading my book when suddenly a strange man plopped down beside me on the bench. The first thing I noticed about the man was that he smelled like mange. Have you ever smelled a mangy dog? It…isn’t a very pleasant smell. The second thing I noticed was that he was wearing a tattered black leather jacket. He appeared to be in his late 20s or early 30s (though to be fair, when I was 15 it was difficult for me to judge the age of anybody over about 21; past that they were just kinda old), with scraggly red hair and a scraggly red goatee. He had at least half of his teeth. He had black half moons at the tips of his fingers, and a few tattoos on his hands, and he was carrying a vacuum cleaner box and a laser disc.

“Hi!” he greeted me, enthusiastically.

“Hi,” I responded as succinctly as I could, and pointedly went back to reading my book. Of course, I considered myself to be totally jaded and worldly by this point, because I’d successfully made the trip down to San Francisco a couple of times and was not unused to weird people trying to talk to me.

Sadly, my attempt at brevity and my nose in my book didn’t stop him. He spent the entire time we were waiting for the bus telling me the long story about why he was carrying a vacuum cleaner in a box. Obviously, I couldn’t care less about this, but I managed a few polite “uh huh”s and “mm hmm”s. When the bus arrived, I paid my fare and sat in a seat about halfway back, ready to enjoy some mange-free air for the first time in half an hour. Of course, as soon as I’d settled in, who should sit beside me but Mangy Toothless Vacuum Man. He proceeded to spend the next twenty minutes or so describing to me the mysterious inner workings of the laser disc machine. After a while, I couldn’t ignore him anymore, so I managed to get in a question here or there. “It’s the wave of the future!” he exclaimed, punctuating his sentence by waving the laser disc around. “A year from now, nobody will be using VHS. It’ll be nothing but laser discs in the video stores!”

“Uh huh,” I said.

The laser disc he was using to gesticulate was a copy of The Nightmare Before Christmas, a movie I hadn’t seen. When I mentioned this to him, of course, he spent the remainder of the bus ride telling me the plot and everything else there was to know about the movie. (Fortunately, I forgot it completely, because many years later I managed to finally see it in a midnight showing and loved it.)

Finally, Mangy Toothless Vacuum Man got off the bus at one of the side-of-the-highway stops someplace in Marin county. A short Mexican man in restaurant scrubs got on the bus and sat in the vacated seat. I spent the rest of the ride into San Francisco in sweet, sweet silence, and resumed breathing through my nose for the first time in nearly two hours.

*The irony here, of course, is that I spent three years of college in a relationship with someone I’d gone to high school with, and we got together pretty much as soon as we got to Berkeley.

Twenty eleven

My third birthday, of which I remember some vague images and feelings, was at a local Chuck E Cheese. My mom made a cake in the shape of a butterfly, and a few friends (and their parents) were in attendance. Here you can see me with my mom (pregnant with my sister, born 4 months later) and dad.

My mom made me a new pink skirt with suspenders and two matching hair barrettes. I loved them. It was my fifth birthday, and we went roller skating. 3 out of the 5 people in this photo are still in my life – Scarlett, Oldest Friend, and Brian Foster, all of whom (like me) still look like they did in this photo. Brian’s hair is a little darker. Also pictured are Kristina and Megan, preschool friends of mine.

I had a big party for my 16th birthday, and, in going through the photos I have, I found quite a few of all my friends and hardly any of me. Which was just as well, because my face looked like a pizza. I had a great time, though. The shorts in this photo were a size 2, and I sewed the blouse myself. Also pictured are my friend Julia with a mouthful of cake and Laurel, who was about 8. I think I’d just opened a gift, which was a necklace from one of my friends that tragically broke after only a few wearings, but I liked it so much I saved the beads.

Here’s Joey with me on my 21st birthday. I had a big party for the first time since my 16th, and I had an amazing time. I think it was potluck; people brought or made all kinds of food and drinks, and my college ex made my chocolate-raspberry birthday cake. I only have a few photos from the evening, and this one was the best of them. So many of the people I was closest to came to help me celebrate, and I couldn’t have asked for a better 21st. (Also: Holy shit was I skinny.)

Today is my 31st birthday. It was both good and bad: good, because I went to the gym and had a tasty breakfast and a tasty lunch and expect to have a tasty dinner. I’ve found a new drink I enjoy (whiskey sour!) and I have 2 kitties. And Dan’s making me a birthday pie. Bad, because I’m so far away from most of my friends and family, and I’m so far from where I want to be in life. I think I’m hardest on myself during times when I reflect on how much potential I once had. I was 3, and 5, and 16, and 21. Now it’s 10 years later than the last photo, and the only difference between then and now is where I live and who I live with. Sometimes I feel like my relationship with Dan is the only thing I have going for me. I don’t own a house, or a graduate degree; I’ve not gone on nearly as many trips as I expected and I want to be something completely different in my career and I’m still practicing my parenting skills on small felines.

Here’s hoping that, sometime during this next year, the things I want to help move my life forward happen. And that I somehow contract the serenity I need to look back at 3-year-old me and 5-year-old me and 16-year-old me and 21-year-old me and realize that where I am at age 31 really isn’t so bad.

You can’t go home again

When we were planning our trip to California for Christmas, Dan told me that he wanted to do something he had never done before. I’d been thinking about trying to go up to the place we lived until I was 10, something I hadn’t done since 1991, but this settled it for me. Dan assured me that seeing the place where I lived as a child would certainly count toward the “something new” quota, and so it was settled.

On Christmas Eve day, we got in the car and drove through the town where I went to elementary school, across the bridge, turned left, and meandered through the barren vineyards, passing farms and homes and trees. The mustard had started coming up but wasn’t blooming yet, and the century plant was where it had always been. “That’s where Geno crashed his car,” I thought, and may have pointed out to Dan. “That’s the back way to go. We’ll come back out that way.” Instead of continuing up the road until it ended, as we would do to get to the place where we got married, we turned right just before that and hairpinned back and forth, Dan intent on his driving and me boggling in anticipation and memory. Same, different, same, different. Around another bend. The big tree was still there; the fancy house looking shabbier and smaller after all of these years. The first potential locked gate wasn’t even in existence anymore. Down, past the house where there was a robbery while my mom was housesitting. Around the bend, over the creek, up and down another hill to the sign tree, with directional signs to ranches owned by new families and old neighbors still living in their houses, up yet another hill, pass the trees, pass the next gate (both unlocked and open). I have so many memories of stopping here on this hill, with the drop on one side and the hillside on the other, helping my mom to open the gate, fiddling with the metal combination lock, remembering the story my mom used to tell me in the car when we’d drive to ballet lessons or to go grocery shopping. I remember that when I was first learning to read I thought the sign here said “No trees passing” and thought that was funny because how could we not pass the trees and still get to where we needed to go?

Up through the open clearing, and then the next batch of trees, mostly manzanita and madrone until the next set of hairpins, and then everything opened up to be scrub and big pines. I wracked my brain trying to remember the names of everyone who lived there, whose driveway or side road that was, which one belonged to which person. The next hairpin took us through what I always thought of as the open field, with a big new fancy house on the opposite side. Another curve, another set of trees and driveways (that’s where the Greenbergs were! wow, the people there still have horses!), the spot where my dad had to clear the tree off the road that one time of the Valentine’s Day flood, and then the final ascent past the wild plum trees and the open grassy fields to the spot where the people who own the property now have built their fence. We parked the car there, under the oak trees that still have oak galls on them, next to the drainage/creek, and managed to squeeze through the fence and hike the last 1/4 mile or so, me pointing things out to Dan and seeing my past through a haze. “That’s the hill that I used to climb,” I showed him. “There’s the funny gnarled bay tree where I used to sit.”

I pulled out my camera to take a photo of a dead thistle head, but the batteries in my camera were dead. “You’ll take pictures for me, right?” I asked Dan, and he said he would.And we came around the bend.

I knew, intellectually, that the house our neighbor (the one who used to mow his orchard nekkid) lived in was gone and replaced by an Italian villa. I knew it, but I didn’t really KNOW it until I saw it with my own eyes. But so many of his trees, olive and orange and apple (and FIG OMG the FIG TREE) were still there, still obviously bearing fruit.

And then I turned to look, and I saw where the A-frame and the tool shed and the barn weren’t. In the field where I learned to ride my bike and had an easter parade with my stuffed animals dressed to the nines and where the cows would hang out, at the far end, was a huge barn-like thing that I’m convinced, judging from the sounds and signs surrounding it, was actually being used as living space for someone (a caretaker?). The house that I’d lived in for ten years, where I’d had birthday parties and jumped off the roof and hadn’t dreamed about since sometime in the 90s, was still there. They kept it.

Our house was still there.

Granted, it was barely recognizable as our house. They’d removed the living room and all of the internal walls and redone it completely from the inside out, but the basic structure was there. Our apricot tree, our walnut tree, the huge rose bush, the huge oak growing out of the deck my dad had built, all there. I showed Dan everything, where the rope swing had been, and where the fountain had been, where we’d had our sand box and the chicken coop, where there was once a jungle gym, where I’d spent hours once looking for a four-leaf clover, all the spots that were MINE. They were all still there, even if they didn’t look the same, even though they didn’t look the same. The huge old tree under which we’d buried all of our pets was there, though it was obviously a victim of some parasite or sudden oak death or something because it certainly wasn’t healthy, but the place where Daisy Deer and all of our dogs and cats rested their bones still existed.

Dan pulled out his camera, and his battery died after the second photo he tried to take.

The wind went out of my sails. Now I could see everything that was different, all the changes they’d made in 20 years. The house was a guest house, with brand new fixtures and perfect white linens and a spread of tasteful magazines on the coffee table in front of the flat screen television. The area had been landscaped to match the Italian villa down the field. It was cute and kitchy and not my house. It really looked nothing like it did in my memory, and the apricot tree was so much smaller than I remembered, and the oak trees were dying.

A little while later, when I got tired of seeing everything that was no longer there, we wandered back over to the orchard and I saw that the fig tree had lived through the ordeal of the earthquake, or at least some of it had, because coming up from the split were many obviously newer branches. I desperately wanted to take pictures of it, kracken-like in its wild tangle. I picked an orange from one of Geno’s orange trees, and we headed back down the road. I showed Dan where the water pump had been, and where I’d first seen cows having sex. We got to the car. I peeled the orange and tried to separate it, but it had very little structure, and mostly turned into a big juicy mess in my hands, so I shoved half the thing in my mouth at once, not realizing until I started to chew just how many seeds were in the thing.

We drove away with no photos, no drawings, nothing to show what was there now or what had been there once, and I felt curiously hollow inside. I only hoped that it had been worth it, that Dan had seen something of what it had meant to me to grow up in that place, even if it was a place my mom had hated, even if my sisters barely remembered it, even if my childhood friends’ parents had needed 4-wheel drive to get up our road in the winter. It was a significant place in that it helped make me who I am. It was the last place I was truly free, and there’s something to be said for visiting that place again, no matter how different it is from what it once was.