Reporting Forward Progress Stopped

On her way home from work at around 6 p.m, my wife, Patricia texted me an Alert message she received from a neighbor on NextDoor, our local social media platform.

“Evacuation for fire in Greenbrae – Los Cerros, Vista Grande, Corte Cordova, Corte Dorado, Corte Patencio.  Go!”

The “Go!” in the Alert got my attention, When my cell rang and Patricia instructed me to put the dogs in the car and leave the house, I did as she said, immediately.  I took nothing, just Sadie and Picasso.

As I walked onto our street to get in my car, I smelled traces of smoke in the air. This reminded me of the devastating Sonoma County fires last October.  In Marin, we choked on particle infused air for two weeks.  How rapidly whole neighborhoods just north of us had burned out of control; by the time these fires were extinguished 42 people died and over 8600 structures were destroyed, with damages exceeding 1 billion dollars.  I allowed myself just a moment to feel the fear.  What would it be like to lose our home, our possessions, our pets?

Our house sits on a steep hillside, at the end of Tioga Lane, a very narrow windy road with two blind spots. “Slow down,” Patricia admonishes me whenever she is a passenger in my car, no matter how slow I am going.  The street safely accommodates a single vehicle traveling one direction at a time, so often there is another car or truck headed right for you.  Sometimes you can see it coming, other times, not.

Usually both drivers stop to engage in a negotiation where one driver invariably makes way for the other and no one falls off the hillside. For reasons unknown to me, people don’t use their garages and park on the street, so that also makes it extra fun.  And did I mention scampering deer and scurrying squirrels? Wandering coyotes intimidate the neighbors and someone recently spotted a bobcat, posting warnings on Next Door. Garbage and Recycling trucks have it really bad on Tuesdays. The street can get stopped up easily on good days, so in emergencies with a flee factor, you can’t mess around.

I considered the text Alert, and unsure if Los Cerros, the road into our Greenbrae area, was in flames, took the back way, down the hill on Manor Road. I encountered two screaming fire trucks headed up the hill. I could hear more sirens headed my way.

Several police cars lined Manor Road near Sir Francis Drake.   A policewoman when I rolled down my window and asked her what was going on, nonchalantly told me there was a fire on Visa Grande, the street right above my street.  “How serious?” I asked. She said that firefighters were getting it under control but she encouraged me not to go back just yet.

I drove on, as I had a couple’s therapy appointment in Mill Valley to keep, but I wanted to check my phone to see if there was an update about the progress of the Greenbrae fire.

I received another Alert, this time from the Marin County Alert service, concerning the vegetation fire in Greenbrae on Vista Grande: “IC reporting forward progress stopped. Evacuation order lifted.” 

I paused on the cryptic words “reporting forward progress stopped,” wondering who in the county was responsible for such bad writing, but soon directed my anxiety elsewhere since our home was be safe.  I noted that I needed to call the gardener to weed whack our yard immediately.

Juan, the gardener, an older Guatemalan guy, came over the next day and I surveyed the property with him.  Between discussing trimming the two kinds of overgrown Pyracantha shrubs, and cutting down the small dead oak tree that rests in front of a larger half-dead oak, Juan told me his story. 

He came to California thirty years ago and has worked two to three jobs most of the time.  At the height of running his own small business, he employed a crew of eight.  Juan wants to be retired, but can’t support his family on the Social Security he receives, $900 a month. He doesn’t qualify for Medicare yet, so his monthly healthcare cost for his family is $1200 through Kaiser.  He still hires a few workers and he explained that it is important to pay them a decent wage so they can support their families and also so that they stick around.   “Once I picked up a couple of day workers I didn’t know and we did a job at a very large house.  When we finished, they looked at me and suggested that we return to rob the rich people.”

“What do you think about what the United States is doing at the border, detaining children in cages and separating families,” I ask Juan.  This immigration horror unfolding is on my mind and is breaking my heart. I had a scare yesterday, unsure if our house would burn to the ground.  But having to leave your home because of violence and poverty, then having your children taken from you, as your own fate is equally precarious – this reality for people seeking asylum outrages and saddens me.

“Life is hard,” he sighs. 

“What this country is doing is wrong, so wrong, Baby jails,” I lament.  The voice recording released in the media of infants crying, and children calling for their papi’s and mommies, plays in a loop in my head. I am shell shocked by the cruelty, inhumanity, and trauma inflicted on people, on children and their parents fleeing dangerous, untenable situations with nothing.  My Jewish trauma genes activated, I think of concentration camps and families divided and sent to their deaths.  

“Yes, life is hard,” Juan repeats.

“We have to do something to stop this,” I say. “The political agenda of Donald Trump and the Republicans in control of the Senate and House is not just to stop ‘illegal immigration,’  it is to stop immigration period.  People deserve the opportunity to make their lives in this country.  We must be decent and kind to each other.” 

Our eyes meet and then we resume our discussion about whether to trim the Oleander bushes that have grown out of control.   He’ll be back with his worker in a day or two.

That night, when I return from an immigration protest rally in San Rafael and my Tai Chi class, Patricia and I have a stupid fight about whether or not Juan should cut the pink and white flowering poisonous Oleander now, or wait until the fall.  I retreat to bed, angry and sad from my day. 

“Wake up, wake up, honey,” I tell Patricia this morning at six.  “You must go outside before the next Alert and cut me a bouquet of fresh Oleander.”

She rolls over, but not before I detect a laugh.

Rings and the River

Since 1986, my wife, Patricia and I have worn our wedding rings, angular gold bands, subtly divided into two ridges and then brought together with a small round precious stone on the lower left face – a red ruby for her, a blue sapphire for me.

The year we got the rings, El Nino hit the Bay Area particularly hard. The Russian River in Sonoma County flooded its banks on Valentine's Day that spring, with cresting water reaching almost 50 feet. Winds blew roofs off barns and houses, leaving piles of debris once the water receded. For weeks, people fished mud caked couches, twisted lounge chairs, and water logged mattresses (the contents of Guerneville gay resorts,) from the meandering mellow river where nude sunbathers happily hung out.

When it finally stopped raining, one hot weekend, Patricia and I evacuated our Glen Park house and headed up to the Russian River.  Into the trunk of my red Honda Civic hatchback, we stuffed the silver and blue inflatable kayak that I had gotten from an advertiser in the Lifestyle magazine that employed me as a features writer. 

I’d choose an adventure or an adventure would choose me, and then I’d document the experience in an amusing way for the monthly magazine. I wrote about Hot Air Ballooning, Sky Diving, and immersed myself in a sensory-deprivation Samadi tank.  This last escapade was by far the most frightening, as I was enclosed and floating in a claustrophobic womb tomb, with only my breath and heartbeat to keep me company for what seemed like eternity.  When asked to try kayaking, I accepted the offered inflatable vessel and enthusiastically tested it out on Bay Area waterways. I didn’t think twice about taking it and Patricia to the Russian River for a paddle.

We parked the car at a canoe rental place on the outskirts of Guerneville, and used an electric air pump to blow up the boat.  “It’s so light and easy to get into the water,” I assured Pat as I handed her a paddle.  We put our backpacks into the kayak, and climbed in. I pushed off with my paddle, and we started down the river.

The brown water moved us along quickly, too quickly. Within a few minutes, we were headed straight towards cement pilings from a bridge that had long since been removed.  “Paddle harder,” I yelled to Pat, but we didn’t stand a chance and hit the grey barriers broadside. 

The kayak flipped and we were swept downstream, each going her own way.  I managed to hold onto my paddle, and when I bobbed up in the water, I didn’t see Patricia.   I did see the kayak, looking pathetically bent in the middle, but somehow afloat.  I swam towards it and held onto the side, still traveling rapidly downstream.  

Patricia meanwhile was in the middle of a scene from Deliverance.  She flailed and grasped onto tree branches on the far side of the river, desperately trying to pull herself up onto the riverbank.   Exhausted, she finally clawed her way to safety, just in time to hear my voice.

“We are so fucked,” I yelled. 

“Sue, where are you?  Are you okay?” she shouted back.

“We are so fucked,” I repeated.  “We are so fucked.”  I just kept saying this over and over, as I rounded the river bend.  “We are sooooooooooooooooo fucked.”  

I somehow got myself into the kayak, and paddled towards her.  “Get in,” I instructed. She looked doubtful.  “Our backpacks are gone, we have no car keys, no wallets, NOTHING!” I noted.  “We have to get to town, where maybe someone can help us.   We are so fucked,” I began my lament again.   Probably just to shut me up, Patricia got in the kayak and I paddled half-heartedly as the current, thankfully, slowed down.

About 100 yards ahead, we spotted a woman standing in about a foot of water, bending over and pulling something from the river.  The grey backpack.  She unzippered the front and pulled out a soggy Ms. Magazine. Behind her on the riverbank, a group of three women reclined on lawn chairs, looking up at us from their picnic.  Near their brightly colored blankets and sleek wooden canoes (containing life jackets -- who would have thought those were necessary) rested my soaking wet blue backpack with the car keys and my wallet.

We emerged from the kayak like defeated drowned rats, dripping relief.  As we recounted our accident, we started laughing, and didn’t stop laughing for the next few hours, as the kind lesbians offered us oreo cookies, sandwiches, and cold drinks from their coolers. One of the women, Linda Fisher, told us she owned a jewelry shore in the East Bay.  Later that afternoon, they loaded us into their canoes, and paddled us to town, towing the semi-deflated kayak. They even drove us the 15 miles back up the road to the parked Honda.

When Pat and I decided to get wedding rings – gay marriage was not yet legal but we had been together long enough to want to symbolically affirm our partnership – we headed over the Bay Bridge to Linda’s store.  The ring glinted gleefully in the glass case, and we both fell instantly in love with its design.

Cut to Austin, Texas, my sister’s Buddhist wedding a few years later, where a group of my parents' Jewish friends and family members sat uncomfortably whispering among themselves throughout the rituals.  If they could have chanted “Oy Vey,” they would have.

My dad’s longtime childhood friend, Al Weiss, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary and his wife Joan, had flown in from San Diego, for the event.  Joan, an elegant and strikingly beautiful woman, impeccably attired in a white linen suit and beige silk blouse, sat next to me at dinner, and she kept staring at my left hand.  She finally reached for my hand, gently holding my ring finger between her perfectly manicured thumb and index finger, and examined the ring.  

“Can you take that off”” she asked.  “Does it have an artist’s mark inside?”

“I think so,” I said, twisting the gold band from my finger.  “We got our rings at a jewelry store in Albany.”

Joan examined the inside of my ring, which had been engraved with the letters “PAT,” and then recognized another mark.  “You’re not going to believe this, but Al’s daughter, made your rings,” Joan told me. “See here, there’s her initials – LW.”  

Turns out that Al’s daughter, another Linda, worked as a jeweler in Petaluma and sold her creations at Fisher’s Jewelry.  And of all the rings in the world, we had chosen ones made by my dad’s oldest friend’s child.

When the Supreme Court recently ruled that the Colorado baker could refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, Pat posted a picture on her Facebook page from our Prop Gun Wedding, held at the last minute in 2003, right before California passed Prop Hate (8) banning gay marriage.  The photo was of the cupcakes we fed our friends and family that day.  She aptly noted that “Masterpiece Bakery can keep their cakes and hate. We prefer cake baked with love.”   On that day our dog Picasso was our ring bearer, delivering our gold bands to us in a tied up handkerchief.  Our daughter, Sophie, played us an Irish jig on her violin.

I like to remember this story of our rings and all of the calamity and serendipity that culminated in a ceremony of connectedness that is our vicissitudinal love. This love still flows 33 years later, like the Russian River.  Over the years, Patricia has lost her ring two times -- when Sophie was a toddler, Pat retrieved it from a leaf pile in our backyard after hours of searching, and the other time, just months ago, she found it on the floor of our garage after looking for it to no avail for two weeks.  I admire the fact that Patricia never gives up, not on rings, and not on what matters in life. 

Switzerland

My mom has mostly stopped talking. First, she lost random words, then entire sentences.  It’s been a cruel progression, or rather an unraveling. She isn’t mute but she can no longer hold thoughts and memories.  Ever pragmatic and practical, she just doesn’t say much anymore.

Her mind, like the Sears department store in the shopping mall near her Memory Care facility, just suddenly closed for business one day.  It used to contain a wealth of merchandise -- clothing, jewelry, home appliances, tools, lawn and garden supplies, paint, sporting goods, automotive parts, electronics, and of course, baggage, lots of baggage.  But now the big building that anchors the Northgate Mall in Marin County is vacant, and the red letters that screamed SEARS no longer appear on the expanse of the pinkish grey stucco wall.

Who would have imagined that Sears, such a formidable icon of American retail from my childhood and before, would ever fail? But Target and Walmart and Amazon came along and the whole business changed.  SEARS declined.  It lost its way.  It’s kind of like that with my mom and the dementia. 

Ever business minded, my mom would like this metaphor. She owned her own small  pharmacy in downtown Denver; she spent her days behind the cash register, ringing up prescriptions and maintaining an odd inventory of products. She got a kick out of putting “racy” items at the counter.  I can’t remember exactly what these were, but they involved breasts and penises, and made me incredibly uncomfortable when I worked at the drugstore as a teenager.  

She actively invested in the stock market, and now her “winnings” pay for her exorbitant assisted living costs. The day when she stopped understanding money and abdicated all control of her finances to me floored me. She just let all that go. I had stopped by the ATM Machine to get her a twenty.  When I popped back into the car, and handed her the bill, she looked very confused and said, “I don’t need that, do I?”

Like the Stock Market she taught me to play, she’s volatile within a reasonable range.  The medical marijuana she takes has improved her mood and she is much less anxious.  As she is less anxious, I am less anxious.  Some days she’s better than others, more alert, somehow. Other days she’s barely present and struggles to move her feet. She’ll look down and announce, “That one won’t work.”   I know how to keep her going – I take her hand, encourage her to take her time and lift her foot.  I tell her we’re on an adventure, that we will have some fun and get some food, or go see a movie.  She is happy always to see me. By the time I punch in the combination to unlock the exit door from her building, she’s forgotten where she is and where we’re headed.  But she still knows how I am.

I’ve been working this past year to let her go, and to put more space between us.  For someone so very complicated (I’m still analyzing her past) she now is remarkably simple. At 89, she is losing her mobility, control of bodily functions, and her speech. She still enjoys eating, though often forgets what to do with a fork or spoon, reverting to using her hands.  I don’t say anything, unless there’s a bowl of soup in front of her.

She has lost my father and several of their friends and relatives who populated her world.  Occasionally she asks where my dad is, and I remind her that he is dead. “But he’ll be coming around the corner,” she asserts.  “You’ll see him again soon,” I tell her.  “Probably In heaven, watching a Broncos game.”  Her awareness of her own loss of function is also thankfully disappearing. She used to stop mid-sentence and frustrated would announce, “I can’t even talk.”

“I wonder what’s going to replace Sears,” I say to my mom as we drive past the mall on our way to lunch. As we drive, I blast Frank Sinatra tunes on Pandora and my mom sings, remembering lyrics to these songs, not missing a single word.   This singing comforts both of us.  I am surprised at how many lyrics I know too, since this wasn’t my music; it is hers. 

The loss of language has happened gradually over a decade; in my mom’s brain, there’s a tangle of vines, like the Himalayan Blackberry on the hillside across from my house. This tangle produces a canopy that limits light to plants growing beneath, killing them off.  And so it is with language.  I used to be able to find the word or complete her sentences for her, or guess what she was trying to tell me about and fill in.

But lately, I have no clue.  When I spend time with her we don’t say much.  I ask simple questions like, “How you feeling today, mom?” and she responds, “Good,” or “Fine,” or “Ok.”  If I ask her what’s new, she always answers the same, “Absolutely nothing,” because from moment to moment she can no longer remember what she has done or what has happened.

She exists in the present, and increasingly, in this silence.  My mom never was a big talker.  She lacked the chat gene. People who used to call her were taken aback by the shortness of their conversations.  She would hang up within a minute or two.  It wasn’t personal. It was just my mom. It wasn’t that she didn’t have thoughts and judgments -- she had many; however, she quickly got to the point, with a directness that often disregarded feeling.  The autism spectrum wasn’t a thing when she was growing up, so my mom never was placed on it.  But I think she belongs there.

I struggled with her communication style for much of my life.  I didn’t think she had much interest in what I had to say since her responses were so abbreviated.  My dad, on the other hand, loved lengthy heartfelt discussions.  He kept the questions coming and listened carefully to my answers.  He also loved telling stories, and if the story contained something positive about him, he loved to repeat it, at least three times.  This was a running shtick with him.   I landed somewhere between the two of them, with a passion for using words and an aversion to small talk.  I relish meaningful dialogue.

 

“Mom, will you be sure to put something in your will that let’s me take you to Switzerland if you suffer from dementia and can’t write or talk?” my daughter asks.  “They allow assisted suicide there.”  We sit at our dining room table in the warm afternoon sun, discussing the state of my mother.  I’ve told my daughter that if I lose my mind, I do not want to hang around.  “Absolutely,” I say.  “Just tell me it’s time to visit the Swiss Alps, and then let’s fly away.”

True Friending

An old acquaintance fondly reminisced on Facebook about the J-Bar Double C Ranch camp in Elbert, Colorado a rustic outpost where I also spent the summers of my pre-teen years. “I loved Ranch camp and laugh often about it with my pal, Deedee Pike, who raised hell there with me.  My favorite counselor was named Carol Chazden,” I commented. 

Another good friend of mine from high school, Joanie, saw the post, and sent me an email telling me that a woman named Carol Chazden belonged to her synagogue in Boulder, She wrote her an email, asking her if she was “the same Carol Chazden,” and copied me.

We heard back from Carol.  “What a trip down memory lane. Yes, I was a counselor at JCC Ranch camp for three summers, the best summers of my life.   And yes, Sue Zemel was one of my favorite campers. She and her buddy, I remember her as Robin Pike, was always full of fun and mischief.  In fact, I think I still have a pair of handcuffs that those two presented me, along with a sheriff’s badge for keeping them in line!”

We received a photograph of these artifacts from Chaz, and asked if we could give her a call since I happened to be in Boston visiting Deedee.  Chaz told us to phone her the next afternoon, but of course, always the rebels, we didn’t do as she requested, and called her in the morning before I flew back to San Francisco. 

Fifty years later, we all connected as if it was yesterday.  I recently had a similar reunion with another friend, Ellen, who was the first person I met in a bar the night I arrived in a small town in Wisconsin to attend college over 40 years ago.  We got together with another Beloit College pal, Maud, in Key West, and enjoyed every minute of our time together; I visited Ellen in Israel this April on a trip with my best friend, my wife, and we all laughed more than I’ve laughed in a long time.

I learned the value of friendship from my father.  He had friends from all phases of his life and maintained these relationships without the assistance of social media. Imagine that. He just picked up the phone and called Al Weiss, his childhood friend, or his college roommate, Bob Rottenberg, or his pal Shelly Pike (the father of my friend DeeDee), one of the first new friends he made when we moved to Denver in the mid-sixties. 

He listened, he made his friends laugh, and he always looked forward to seeing them. It didn’t matter if they lived next door, states apart, or hadn’t been together for days, months or even decades.  I watched him take care of his connections over the span of his life.  He really knew his friends and this knowing was reciprocal.  He conversed with his friends with openness and candor; he went deep and asked important questions. His exquisite sense of humor enveloped his relationships, bringing light and laughter to the challenges everyone faced. His curiosity and abiding interest in how his friends’ lives unfolded proved irresistible.  His friends loved him dearly and he loved his friends.

As we both grew older, my Dad and I established a bond that celebrated who we each were, our strengths, weaknesses, and our vulnerabilities -- our complexity.  He taught me to be fearless when peeling away the layers with a friend, remembering that the core is the core; once you truly know someone and love him or her, that core is both your place of departure and your place of return.

Full of fun and mischief.  Interestingly, my best friends have always been playful troublemakers. They have encouraged me, accompanied me out of my comfort zone, and rewarded my creativity with their laughter and support.  I feel seen by them and I think that they feel seen by me. I trust that I will always be able to re-engage with my friends, regardless of distance and time.  They occupy an enormous place in my heart.

As my dad's birthday approaches (he would be 90 on June 13) I am thinking a lot about him. I am so grateful for this gift of friendship that he modeled for me, and consider it one my life’s greatest blessings.