The Daily Brief

I can’t recall the context now, but this week, I ran across a quoted axiom on the difference between the English and the Americans, to the effect that to an American, a hundred years is a long time ago, and to an Englishman, a hundred miles is a great distance. It struck me as apt, because it is in a fair way to being true. The single oldest house in the town where I grew up was a tiny frame cottage, supported on river-rock pilings, which just achieved 95 years before the Sylmar earthquake dissolved the mortar holding the rock pilings together, and the main floor collapsed to ground level, broken like a smashed dollhouse. But this was California— about par, actually. Our very oldest existing buildings were the missions, a chain of adobe and stone structures built by Catholic missionaries under Spanish and Mexican rule, at best a couple of centuries and change, pale and makeshift reflections of the great cathedrals of Spain. No, a hundred years is a long time, as far as domestic architecture goes… and a hundred miles is not a long way. At best, as we measured things in California, in driving time, that would be a two-hour drive or less— a goodish distance, not something you wanted to do every day (although now, many do)— but for a weekend, or a special event? No, a hundred miles was easily doable, and a drive of forty minutes, or an hour nothing special at all.

And so, we spent a lot of time in the family car, JP and Pippy and I, the commodious back seat of a jade-green 1952 Plymouth Station wagon. This would be the car that Dad bought slightly used when I was about two or three, and which my mother drove for thirty years, a great solid square of a vehicle, with a cargo area in back which could be increased by folding the back seat flat, and a gear shift lever on the steering column. Dad eventually bought, and dismembered another ’52 Plymouth station wagon to keep “Old Betsy” in parts— door panels, windows and engine parts and all, although the split windshield was inadvertently wrecked by Wilson the Horse, who blundered into the garage in search of his specialty horse-food, and stepped flat onto the glass panes.

Old Betsy got a new coat of paint every couple of years, of Earl Sheib jade-green ( the $30 special), and one of our best-remembered and most thrilling early road trips was when Dad took the three of us to Tijuana, to one of the cut-rate body and interior-work shops to get a new headliner installed. While Betsy was being worked on, we walked around to the shops in the vicinity, and watched a glass-blower demonstration, and looked at painted pottery and coarse hairy serapes and other touristy junk. We so wanted to go to a bullfight, the arena had the most interesting posters outside, but the timing wasn’t right. In a bakery-grocery, Dad bought us fresh, crusty rolls, and fresh fruit, and bottled soft-drinks, nothing that would tax our delicate, first-world digestive systems— we had been strictly forbidden to drink the tap-water. Our great adventure, and the first time we had ever been to a foreign country, the first time JP and Pippy and I could look around and think, “Not American”. Not American, maybe, but not entirely foreign, not as long as we were looking at it from the back seat of Old Betsy.

How many weeks and months of my life, total, were spent in the back seat of that car? Going to my grandparents’ houses, in Pasadena and Camarillo, going to the old church in North Hollywood, countless trips to school when the weather was bad, out to the desert with Dad for camping trips, to Pismo beach for a dune-buggy meet (with Dad following behind, driving the little red chopped-down VW he had made into a dune-buggy), to Descanso Gardens, to summer-camp in the mountains, to swimming lessons, on a long, barely-remembered trip into the Gold Rush country when JP and I were still quite small. How many weeks and months would that work out to be— JP and I on either side, and Pippy in the middle, she being the littlest, and least inconvenienced by the hump of the transmission in the middle of the floor? Looking out the window, daydreaming as the cityscape and the countryside swept by… hills upholstered in crunchy golden grass and spotted by dark green live oaks, watching for landmarks as the grey highway unspooled in front of us, the landmarks that let us know how close we were to… well, wherever. The mock-log cabin in Laurel Canyon, across from the ruins of Harry Houdini’s estate… Jungle-Land, in Thousand Oaks, the place where they shone colored lights on three large fountains (we called it “The Great Fizzies”), the huge factory in Fontana done in Babylonian motifs along the concrete walls, the orange groves walled in by straight lines of eucalyptus trees—before they were ripped away and replaced with straight lines of suburban developments— the old Greene Hotel, in Pasadena… all these places that we knew, knew from seeing them out the windows of the car, sweeping by.

I was apt to get car-sick; the most reliable preventive was to be amused, to have a window open and the fresh air blowing in, and to apply the usual solution: to sing. We had a wide repertoire of folk songs, of hymns, of campfire songs, all sung in tight family harmony… and we would talk. So many things we talked about— the back of the Plymouth is where we first heard that we were going to have a baby brother, where Great-Aunt Nan talked about her half-brother, so many family moments. The back of the car, on the way to so many places; that’s where family is, that’s the place that family memories happen.

The Road goes ever on and on

In an upscale neighborhood halfway between Redwood House, and Granny Jessie and Grandpa Jim’s tiny white house on South Lotus, there was a magical place tucked into a dell of huge native California live oak trees. Looking back, we— my brother JP, my sister Pippy and I— seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time there, in those lovely leisurely days when mothers were expected to stay at home with children, but not to spend every waking minute ferrying them frenetically from scheduled amusements, playdates and lessons, with barely time for a snatched meal from drive-through or take-out.

Compared to our peers in the 1960ies, Mom may have been a bit of an overachiever, with Cotillion on alternate Tuesdays, Girl Scouts on Wednesday, and Confirmation on Thursdays. That was during the school year, though… in the summers, we three had swimming lessons at the house of a woman in La Crescenta who had, like her mother before her— been on the American Olympic swim team in their respective days. Mom sat with half a dozen other mothers on the deck in back of the house, while the two women dragooned a dozen tadpole children through their paces: diving, back-stroking, holding our breath and diving down to the bottom of the nearly Olympic-sized pool, treading water. It must have been rather boring for her, I imagine. Mom must have enjoyed the time during our lessons in nature appreciation at Descanso Gardens more, because she could walk around the acres of Manchester Boddy’s landscaped estate.

He was a newspaper publisher in the 1920ies and 1930ies, an aesthete with a mad passion for camellias, and a lovely chunk of property, close against the hillside and thickly grown with huge native oak trees. His house was still there, back against the first rise of the hillside, a large, graceful white house with the hollow and institutional feel common to a mansion that has once been a great home, but now full of empty, or nearly empty rooms, given over to official enterprise. Owing to a number of business reversals, the estate and garden wound up being in the public domain, but unlike the house, the gardens were burgeoning, enchantingly full of life… and flowers.

As children, we loved the camellia woods, but Mom loved the rose garden, two acres of roses, Grandpa Jim’s tiny formal garden expanded exponentially. Like his garden, it was for roses and roses alone, bare thorny stems rising up out of carefully tended weedless ground, planted in curving beds, and straight disciplined lines, trained over arbors and pergolas, every selected bush lovingly tended and encouraged to bloom, bloom and bloom again, encouraged with every atom of the gardeners’ art and skill with water, and application of clippers and fertilizer. Under the hot spring sun, the scent of acres of roses in bloom was intoxicating… but the rose garden was baked and bleached by sun, shimmering off the gravel paths, and we preferred the cool green shades of the camellia grove and the pond with the ducks.
The gardens seem to have been much improved upon, since we were there so often, and even since I took my daughter in the early 1980ies, perhaps the large artificial pond, just inside the old main entrance is no longer there, or in the same form, but the gardens that I remember was threaded with artificial, but skillfully built watercourses, and the main catch-pond was the home of a flock of tame ducks. There was a coin-op dispenser that for a nickel, administered a handful of cracked corn— so very clever of the garden administrators to charge the public for expense of feeding the tame resident waterfowl. By afternoon, the ducks would be lethargic, sleeping off their orgies of gobbling corn from the hands of small children, but in the morning hours, when the garden had just opened, they would throng hopefully towards anyone approaching the main pond, and the ever-bountiful coin-op dispenser.

On the other side of the pond there was an oval lawn, shaded by towering oak trees, and groves of shrub camellias, acres of cool and misty green paths planted with Manchester Boddy’s pride and joy, all dark glossy green leaves and pale pink and white or magenta flowers. We loved the camellia groves, and the tangle of green paths threading the dell: we knew the chaparral hillsides, and the open, sun-blasted acres of rose garden— it was what we lived our lives amongst— but acres of cool green woods, and stone-trimmed water-courses, that was something rare and exotic and special.

Bearing to the left of the duck pond was another bit of exoticism; along about in the late 1960ies, they built a Japanese tea-house, a lovely little tile-roofed pavilion, led to by a series of bridges, walkways and a carefully clipped landscape of bamboo and azaleas. The watercourse was extended into a lagoon around the tea-house foundations, and stocked with fat golden carp. The teahouse served tea, of course, courtesy of a concessionaire who was in the good graces of the Japanese-American organization who had funded construction. The tea was clear greenish-golden liquid, served in handle-less cups and accompanied with fine-grained, soy-salt tasting crackers. We sipped it, looking out into the serene green depths of the camellias and the sheltering oaks, and thought there was nothing more restful, nothing more peaceful in all of the world, than Manchester Boddys’ wonderful gardens.

(Reposted to allow comments— Sgt Mom)

(Dad and Mom, with Pippy, JP and I, c. 1963)

Happy Father’s day to one of the best Dads ever— the one who thought to teach us all sorts of useful things, like how to change the oil on a 1968 VW Squareback, to tell time, hang drywall, and to handle snakes.

Make a phone call, even if you remembered to send a card!

The enchanted island was a place of cliffs and grottos, and vine-hung pergolas, open to the soft sea-breeze and a view of the blue Mediterranean, a place of tiny footpaths and stone staircases rather than roadways and sidewalks. Only a tiny fraction of it could be described as level ground; like swallows’ nests, all the buildings clung tightly to slopes that sometimes achieved nearly vertical, the windows of a house looking down on the mellow terracotta roof tiles of it’s next door neighbor.

“Pffui, Capri,” remarked the wife of the owner of the Casa Albertina. “They pay six times over, just to have the cachet of a house there.” Blondie and I were staying at the Casa Albertina in Positano, on the recommendation of a guidebook to small pensions and hotels. The three stories of the casa, set back like stair-steps, overlooked the dome of Positano’s main church, a gorgeously colored riot of colored tile, and the lounge-chairs on the pebbly beach below. From the little terrace outside our room, we might have almost been able to drop pebbles onto the dome, or the sunbathers down below; Capri proved to be even more precipitous.
Three days before, my daughter and I had watched the town of Patras, and the mountains of the Peloponnesus grow small, as the car ferry to Brindisi churned a white wake out behind. Goodbye to Greece, where we had lived for nearly three years, as long as my almost-five year old daughter could remember. Good-bye to the lovely, sunny first-floor apartment on the corner of Delphon and Knossou, our landlord and his family, to Kyria Penny and Kyrie George. Goodbye also to three years of a disintegrating political situation, of strikes, and graffiti, of vandalism, the incessant grinding worry about terrorism, of the ever-touchy Greek politicians’ hair trigger propensity to take offence at nothing at all. Goodbye also to sharing ill-marked roads with the worst drivers in western Europe. I had discovered on the drive from Brindisi to Bari, and over to Salerno that Italian drivers were several magnitudes of improvement, and they were acquainted with the function and use of the turn indicator— terra incognita to Greeks. But we were on our holiday now, a long, leisurely holiday, almost the first one I had taken in over four years. I could indulge myself, for the next six weeks. I didn’t have to report in until mid October, and it was only just now the beginning of September, a mild southern September of blue skies, and leaves only beginning to turn crispy and golden.

Early on one of those mornings, with the morning overcast turning everything pearl and gold as the sun burned it off, Blondie and I walked down to the quay and bought tickets at the little window for the motor launch that made regular runs across the bay to Capri. While we waited, Blondie scrambled down to play on the beach. She gathered water-tumbled scraps of glazed tile, terra-cotta bits all worn to rounded edges by the tide, a single facet of it glazed all colors, brown and yellow, red and blue, little bits of builders’ rubble the size of a quarter, a nickel, half of her palm. She buried the trove in a hole in the sand below the edge of the quay when the motor launch roared in.
“There is a Green grotto, of course” said the wife of the owner of the Casa Albertina. “It is on the coast, as beautiful as the one on Capri… “She shrugged, “The tourists do not know of it, so it is not as popular.” But we were tourists. We could ignore the tacky souvenirs for sale where the launch docked at Capri, where the little funicular climbed up the steep hillside to the saddle between two rocky promontories, but I had to buy tickets for us to go by motorboat out to the grotto, and negotiate the transfer into a small, low-riding boat with a single oarsman.

Blondie and I sat nervously in the small boat, while the oarsman waited for the tidal-surge, and made one mighty dig with his oars and roared “Down!” We ducked down, below the level of the gunwales, the oarsman flattened himself expertly as the boat glided through the stony-roofed passage and into a world of blue, deep blue like the heart of a sapphire. There were other boats, with other nervous tourists circulating in the grotto. We admired for a while, and then it was the same in reverse and out in the open air with the boat bobbing like a cork. All in all, I was rather relieved to return to the quay, and walking up the little road that zigzagged up to the heart of Capri, the little paved square at the center of it all. We walked by pocket villas with tiny orange trees and lemon trees leaning out from behind low walls, tiny gardens behind ornate wrought iron fences, full of tomato plants, lushly hung with bright red fruit. The owners may have had to pay six times as much for the privilege of such a select address, but they still saved a bit by growing their own salad vegetables. In the little square, a terrace railing offered a view, as if from a balcony.

I had it in mind to see the villa, the ruins where the Emperor Tiberius had lived with his books and madness and perversions. The ruins were at the end of the island, and the various little paths led to it through what counted on Capri as the suburbs— more little houses and gardens, on either side of a paved path that climbed higher and higher until we were in the tree-grown, haunted ruins at the top of sheer cliffs, fanned by a cool breeze. Whatever evil had been done here was long gone, the sharp edges of it worn to insignificance, as harmless as the shards of tile Blondie gathered from the beach. Here was nothing but peace and quiet, and the soft air stirring in the pine branches overhead, and for the first time I could feel grateful for it.

My slightly younger brother, JP and I have always counted ourselves fortunate that we got through primary school in the happy baby-boom years of the very early 1960ies, before a hitherto solid and well-established education system suddenly lost all confidence in itself and began whoring after strange gods, fads and theories. We both were taught the old phonics way, carefully sounding out the letters and the sounds, until – oh! There was that flash of understanding, at unraveling a new word, and another and another. We read confidently and omnivorously from the second grade on, and were only a little scarred from the infliction of the New Math on our otherwise happy little souls. It seemed like one semester I was memorizing the times tables and the ‘gozintas’ (two gozinta four two times) and wrestling with very, very long division, and suddenly it was all about prime numbers and sectors and points on a line, and what was all that in aid of?

I really would have rather gone on with word problems, thank you very much, rather than calculus for the elementary school set. It was at least useful, working out how much paint or carpet to cover an area, or how what time a train going so fast would get to the next city. Thanks to the New Math I wound up working out how to figure what was 70% off of $15,000 when I was forty-three. Got to love those educational fads. You spend the rest of your life making up for having them inflicted on you. Pippy’s elementary education was far more adversely affected; she caught the ‘whole word’ reading thing in the neck. While she did successfully negotiate the second grade and learned to read on schedule, she never enjoyed it as much, or read as much as JP and I did routinely.

Our baby brother, Sander had the worst time of all. Mom racked up conference after conference with his second grade-teacher over his failure to advance, and generally unsatisfactory class behavior. Mom was a pretty experienced and hard-bitten mom by the time she rotated four children through the same set of public schools. She had cured many of our teachers of their initial habit of carving off great dripping slabs of condescension to parents in a nominally blue-collar working class suburb by tactfully making it clear that both she and Dad were college graduates also. Sander’s second-grade teacher remained pretty much a burr under Mom’s parental saddle, especially since he was struggling desperately and unhappily in her classroom. It never got so bad that he was wetting the bed, or developing convenient illnesses, but he was adamant about not enjoying school – or at least the second-grade class.

We began to wonder if the difference was in the teacher; she seemed to be very cold, and judgmental. He had done very well the year before, an active, charming seven-year old, the youngest child in a family of mostly adults, who were devoted to books and education. Later on, JP would suggest that Sander was thought to be so bright by his teachers because he would constantly uncork four-syllable words that he picked up from us. It really wasn’t the way, then, to blame a teacher entirely for a problem, but this was our baby brother, our real doll-baby and pet, but everything his teacher tagged on him was always his fault. First his teacher adamantly insisted he was a discipline problem, then that he was hyper-active and out to be in a special class – and then took the cake by suggesting that he was mentally retarded. Mom had gone to a great deal of trouble to get him after-school tutoring, and she blew her stack at that. Whatever was his problem, he was not retarded; and she was shocked that an experienced teacher would even make that unsupported diagnosis.

About halfway through the semester, Mom noticed that Sander rubbed his eyes a lot, and they always looked a bit reddened and crusty at the end of the school day. Eye problems? I was nearsighted, as blind as a bat without glasses, which was about the first thing that all my teachers knew about me, and I had never had that sort of trouble. Mom took him to the ophthalmologist; it turned out he was quite the opposite from me— he was far-sighted, to the point where it was acutely uncomfortable to concentrate for long on the written word. Once he was fitted with glasses, all the problems— except for the basic personality clash with the unsympathetic teacher— melted away.

Mom added her scalp, metaphorically speaking, to her collection, right next to the scalp of my 8th grade English teacher, Mrs. Range, who was only called Mrs. De-Range out of her hearing. Her students all knew very well that she was a nutcase almost immediately, beating the school administration to that knowledge by several years. Late middle age had not been kind to Mrs. De-Range; in fact it had been quite brutally unkind. She was a tall, gawky Olive Oyle figure of a woman, with faded reddish hair scraped back in a meager old-fashioned bun, long, yellowish teeth like a horses’ and a figure like a lumpy and half-empty sack suspended from narrow, coat-hanger shoulders. As a teacher she was fairly competent in the old-fashioned way; a strict grammarian and exacting with punctuation, wielding a slashing red pen with little regard for our delicate self-esteem. She expected us to keep a special folder of all our classroom and homework assignments, to methodically log them in by their assignment number, make a note of the grade received, and keep them when she returned them to us, all splattered over with red ink corrections. This was eccentric, but bearable; as teacher requirements went, not much variance from the normal.

What wasn’t normal were the sudden rages. In the middle of a pleasant fall day, doors and windows open for air, and the distant pleasant sound of a ball game going on, and maybe the drill team counting cadence drifting in from the athletic fields, when we were engaged in a classroom assignment, nothing but the occasional rustle of a turning page, the scritch of pencil on paper, someone sniffing or shifting in their chair – Mrs. Range would suddenly slam a book on her desk and go into a screeching tirade about how noisy we were, and how she wouldn’t put up with this for a minute, and what badly-behaved, unteachable little horrors we all were. We would sit, cowering under the unprovoked blast of irrational anger, our eyes sliding a little to the right or left, wondering just what had set her off this time. What noise was it she was hearing? Her classroom was always quiet. Even the bad kids were afraid, spooked by her sudden spirals of irrational fury.

I have no idea how much of this was communicated to our parents, or if any of them would have believed it. But I am pretty sure that Mom had Mrs. Range’s number, especially after the legendary teacher’s conference— called at the request of Mrs. Range. I had too many missing or incomplete assignments, and it seemed that she took a vicious pleasure in showing Mom and I all the empty boxes in the grade-book against my name, at the after-school conference in the empty classroom. This was almost as baffling as the sudden rages, because I was fairly contentious – a little absentminded, sometimes, a little too prone to daydream— but to miss nearly a third of the assignments so far?
“Show your mother your class-work folder!” commanded Mrs. Range, and I brought it out, and opened it on the desk; my own list of the assignments, logged in as they were returned to me, the corrected and graded assignments all filed neatly in order.

All of them were there, every one of the ones that were blanks in Mrs. Range’s book, corrected and graded in her own hand, all checked off on my list. Mom looked at my folder, at Mrs. Range’s own assignment record, and said in a voice of velvet gentleness,
“I believe we have solved the problem of the missing assignments. Thank you for your time, Mrs. Range— will there be anything more?” Mrs. Range’s face was unreadable. There was the faintest gleam from the steel gauntlet, the tiniest clink audible, when Mom threw it down, adding, “Of course, we will pay – special attention – to the completing of all Celia’s class and homework assignments after today. Good grades are very important to us.” Mom took up her car keys, “Coming, Celia?” Out in the parking lot, she fumed. “Horrible woman! And such a snob. She went to a perfectly good teacher’s school in Texas, but she groveled so when I told her that your father and I went to Occidental – it was embarrassing. And so strange to have missed so many of your assignments. Good thing she had you keep them.”
“Yes,” I said, “A very good thing.” I was still trying to puzzle the look of Mrs. Range’s face; bafflement, fury frustrated of an intended target.

What on earth had she been thinking, what sort of mental lapse was this? I would never know, but two years later, after I had moved on to High School, JP came home with the intelligence that Mrs. Range had truly and ultimately lost it, melting down in the middle of a tirade to a class of terrified students, from which— according to JP – she had been removed by men in nice white coats armed with a strait-jacket, drugs and a large net. The school administration may have been shocked, but I am confident that none of her former students were surprised in the least.