The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

Paddling Upon the Azure Lake

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Lake Berryessa, Napa County, CA, Summer 1973: My cousin Bruce was a video wizard, and he lived in Berkeley. (This was some years later than the time he pulled the plastic bra off the 30-foot tall woman in San Francisco.)

He invited me and Barbara A, the writer, to go a-boating. This was because he had a new boat. Well, sort of a boat. It was a yellow inflatable boat, and he was eager to take it for a sail upon the nearest lake.

Barbara A. and I foolishly agreed to go.

Bruce and Leanna brought their young son, Mordred, oops- I mean Nathan. Well, he was a little obstreperous, but then so was Bruce. (And, truth to tell, me too.)

So the trip in the car seemed eternal.

This may have been due to our supply of green cigarettes. All things considered, considering the confusion, cross-conversation, maps, questions, squabbling, and wrong turns, it is miraculous that we found the lake at all.

The lake, eventually, turned out not to be one of those wooded alpine beauties tucked quietly among the hills. Rather, it was a man-made long blue swatch lying among brown summer hills out in a vast nowhere somewhere east of the city of Napa. All the same, it was a big stretch of quiet blue water, and we lugged the boat down to a bit of deserted shoreline. Then we lugged the boat back up to the car, and with a motorized gadget plugged into the green cigarette lighter, we pumped it up.

And then we carried the inflated boat down to the water and set it upon the lake.

We piled it with oars and a picnic basket. The two women climbed in. Little Nathan scrambled in. Bruce and I got in.

Then, because the boat was sitting on the bottom, Bruce and I got out and we eased the boat to deeper water and clambered in again to take up our oars.

We paddled out a bit, and enjoyed the blue water around us, as we sat under the broiling sun. Somehow it now seemed that going over to a stretch of trees along the far shore might be a good idea, cooler for our picnic. This decision was long and involved, and somewhat difficult, but finally all were agreed: we would paddle to the trees and have our picnic.

I sat in one end of the boat, with Barbara near me. I could hear Bruce and Leanna and Nathan talking and squabbling behind us. I paddled.

And I paddled.

And I paddled.

It was hot, but I kept on paddling.

And paddling.

But the odd thing, I slowly realized, was that we seemed to be making no headway at all, even though I was paddling and paddling and paddling.

Barbara and I discussed this, as I paddled, and after a bit of discussion and comparison of certain trees and rocks, she agreed: we were making no headway.

Calling out to Bruce behind us, we got him and Leanna to consider the phenomenon. They couldn’t quite agree whether we were making headway or not. Bruce was cussing in between paddle strokes, and I’d become tired of trying to follow their conversation, and I quit paddling.

Suddenly I noticed that the boat now seemed to be going backward!

Turning around, and looking at Bruce’s back, and him still paddling, I found the mystery was solved.

The two of us were paddling in opposite directions.

How to Speak Chinese

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Lyon Street, San Francisco, 1990: Adrienne worked at the Fine Art gallery in Sausality, driving the surveillance vehicle to and from work. That’s what we called the grey Nissan Sentra, because I’d bought it when I was Dr. Detecto, the private investigator.

But fact is, there is a limit to how long you can sit in a grey Nissan Sentra, just surveilling. My limit turned out to be about fifteen minutes.

That’s why Adrienne drove the surveillance vehicle to work in Sausalito. We still lived in the fourth-floor garrett at Lyon and Oak, perched high on the corner overlooking the Panhandle Park, originally named because it’s like a handle on the pan of Golden Gate park further up the street. Later the Bored of Supervisors changed its name from Panhandle Park to Panhandle Park. It’s the same name, sure, but now it’s named after the bums that hang out and pester you for spare change.

So, we lived there beneath the gabled roof, high above Panhandle Park.

THE BAY TO BREAKERS RACE

There was a Sunday morning, every year, when sleeping would become impossible, because as the sun was peeking through the high branches of the tree outside, we would hear, from the road below, a great murmur and clatter. Peering from our high windows, we’d see, spread out for blocks and blocks, the throng of runners in the Bay to Breakers race, as they ran in a chattering mob along the street and through our Panhandle Park.

It was very satisfying to make the coffee, staring bleary-eyed down through the branches, watching the runners and thinking how nice it was to not be among them.

Also entertaining were their bizarre costumes. Runners dressed as hot dogs or streetcars, and sometimes they were nude, except for the running shoes, of course. It must have really hurt, pinning the cloth number on, without a shirt.

And this morning, after the coffee had sped me up, I remembered that I’d promised to help Adrienne with the Chinese art dealer.

STANLEY HO, THE CHINESE ART DEALER

She had this customer in Hong Kong. It never seemed clear whether he was a collector, or an art dealer himself. His name was Stanley Ho.

As you know, China is on the other side of the planet. As we all learn when we are children, if you dig down through the earth you will pop out in China, where everybody is walking upside down. They must be upside down because anyone can see that we are right-side up.

Not only are they upside down, but they are sleeping in the middle of the day, and they are running around all during the night. Our day, and our night, I mean.

Now Adrienne was very happy about Mr. Stanley Ho, because now and then he called up the Fine Art gallery, and he would buy Erte sculptures. If you have been so fortunate as to have missed Erte sculptures, let me tell you that they are little statues about a foot tall, depicting mostly women in 1920’s or Art Deco garb, looking totally thin and blase from a long time ago.

Plus, they’re really, really expensive.

So it was just swell whenever Stanley Ho would call up the gallery and buy an Erte sculpture from Adrienne. There is apparently no end to the Erte sculptures. Like Barbie dolls or the science-fiction novels of L. Ron Hubbard, mere death of the artist seems not to slow production at all!

THE PROBLEM

However, the problem was that Adrienne was supposed to telephone Stanley Ho. She had agreed to call Stanley Ho. She had attempted to call Stanley Ho. She had several times risen in the wee hours of night, so as to catch the daylight hours in China.

And each time, Chinese secretaries answered. They would mutter in sing-song Chinese, or in garbled English. But regardless of the conversation, never, never, never would they put Adrienne through to Stanley Ho. Never, never, never.

Adrienne had promised to call. She’d tried to call, over and over again. But she couldn’t get past the incomprehensible secretaries. It was like an impenetrable wall of singsong. Adrienne told me about this at great length, and last night I’d promised to help her.

And this morning, as coffee fumes cleared my brain, I realized it was time to strike, now!, before the Stanley Ho business office closed for the day!

And so I dialed the number in Hong Kong.

It rang.

It rang some more.

A diminutive female voice answered with some Chinese gobbly-gook. I interrupted her.

“Stanley Ho!” I said sternly. She chittered at me. I spoke louder.

“Stanley HO!” I said. She began talking again.

“Stanley HO!” I yelled furiously.

“One moment,” she said.

There was a pause. I motioned Adrienne over. I handed her the phone as a male voice said, “This is Stanley Ho, may I help you?”

Tutti-Fruity

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When my mother told me this story it touched my heart, because in a way, it was part of who she was for the rest of her life …

Henrietta, Texas, Summer 1922: My mother, Margaret Hurn, known as Maggie, was six years old, and very excited that Saturday. For the first time, riding down the dirt road in the wagon with her mother and father, Maggie was going to town.

She had a nickel in her hand. She held it tight.

Eight miles seems so little now, for any car can cruise the paved road in just a few minutes. But on that day, on the dirt road in the wagon behind the horse, it took several hours, with the sun high above and dust rising to float in the air behind them, and she was holding that nickel all the way.

She had a plan.

Tutti-Fruity ice cream. That was the plan. A nickel would buy a big double-dip ice-cream cone at the Henrietta drugstore. The soda fountain there had a marble top, and fancy stools that spun around with shiny red seats. Behind the counter, lined up before the huge mirror, was a shelf of colored bottles. Every kind of delight, in town, right there at the soda fountain.

Maggie wanted Tutti-Fruity.

She was shy about going in, but her father said, “Go on,” and gave her a nudge, so she edged slowly through the door. Instantly dismayed because everything was so fancy, she waited, holding her nickel, and before long, the big man behind the counter noticed her and leaned over.

“What would you like, little girl?” he said. Perhaps a bit deaf, he spoke loudly, and it startled Maggie. She cast her eyes down.

“Tutti-Fruity,” she said softly.

“What’s that?” he said. “What would you like?” Maggie felt suddenly dismayed, embarrassed, as if scolded.

“Tutti-Fruity,” she said softly.

“I can’t hear you!” the man said loudly, “What do you want?” A well of tears blurred her vision.

“Tutti-Fruity,” she whispered.

“What?!!” he demanded. “Speak up!”

But now it was too late. Confused, ashamed, she ran crying from the store.

All the way home, on the long journey up the dirt road as the late shadows grew longer across the road, sitting in the wagon, she held the nickel in her hand.

The Christmas Present

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Newport Beach, California, December 1985: Taking the Startel job was a colossal blunder. It’s very clear now, but not then. All women wish to be loved, cherished, and protected. I was married to Lori, but I failed miserably to show that I cherished her, and I failed to protect her.

And that brought me the most painful days in my life.

Do you believe that all events are foretold? I do. Lori and I had written our marriage ceremony, and when I gave it to Father Bob Cromey, he read it and said, “There’s nothing in here about commitment. That’s a mistake.”

He was referring to the lines where it said, “I will remain with you as long as it shall please you.” Father Cromey was correct, and so were my written words. I was with her as long as it pleased her.

This was back in the time of books like Open Marriage and such tripe, but I was turned on by these ideas. And although I never became involved with other women, when I began to ignore her, concentrating on work, building the Line Seizer device, working on computers … when I ceased being fun, when I ceased paying enough attention, when I ceased demonstrating cherishing … she started going out, I’m sure of it.

It started innocently enough, with Oz Koosed’s jitterbug class at the Avenue Ballroom. Lori, as tall as I, kept trying to lead. Either I wasn’t strong enough or focused enough. And when it came to a move called ‘The Drop’, I didn’t have the physical strength. This is a movie-move, where the woman, with body rigid, tips over and almost hits the floor. By strength of arms you hold her just inches above the floor. I couldn’t hold her. Big mistake.

She started going out to dance with the brother of a friend. I’m pretty sure it became the horizontal mambo. And idiot that I was, because I’d thought this openness was good, I put no stop to it. That was the beginning of the end.

One thing led to another. When Lori asked me to move out, I yielded to anger rather than handling the danger. Soon after, around my 40th birthday, I was offered and took a job working with Startel in southern California, and moved far away.

Oh, the business reasons made sense. We needed some equipment to advance the answering service we ran together. She already ran operations, and my marketing department already had a manager. I would bring in a lot of money. Blah blah blah.

I loaded our Volkswagen, which blew up in the desert heat along the way, continued in a rented car, and stayed with her folks in Covina while I began selling answering service equipment for Startel Corporation. Then I bought a Pugeot, rented the house in Newport Beach, and really shouldn’t have been so surprised, that first Christmas here in Southern California.

Because late at night on Christmas Eve, lying in the dark together in a bedroom at her parents home, she had something to tell me. I can still hear her voice in the darkness. She said that she’d fallen in love with another man.

I saw my errors crashing around me, shattering like glass, like mirrors, timeless and cruel as stone.

Mama

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Henrietta, Texas, 1958: For the big 7th grade Valentine’s party, I wore my white sport coat, Easter finery, memorable from the rocket-fuel incident. I was already stealing Kent cigarettes, and had a partial pack in my right-hand jacket pocket.

Stealing Kent Cigarettes

My mother was fussing over me, which at fourteen, annoyed tremendously. I kept brushing her hands off my jacket, my hair, but she kept at it, and sure enough, felt the cigarettes in my coat pocket. Her face froze.

“What’s that?” she demanded.

“Please, Mama!” I cried out, “Don’t ask me!” I was near tears.

She let it pass, and I ran from the room, downstairs and out in the back yard, where in a fury I tore the cigarettes into bits, scattering them in the grass. Like as not she watched from the window above, but I was in a fit of grief and upset.

Somehow, I pulled myself together for the big party. This party was in the little building on the block just outside the graveyard. No pall lay on the big party. There were kissing games. Somehow I got the exotic Linda A. into the coat closet.

I’d never kissed anyone, and didn’t know exactly how to do it. I’d come prepared with a flashlight, and so by the flashlight we gave it a try. Not bad.

My mother had watched over me fiercely. My father hadn’t lasted long, having left us before I could toddle. I met him later; he generally seemed a bum to me. She’d worked as a nurse for my Uncle Doc, and originally we lived behind his office. Later, she’d married the other doctor in town, Dr. Strickland, and now we lived above his office. Since we lived on the second story, I guess we’d come up in the world.

From this time on, with the ignorance and tactlessness of the young, I thought poorly of my mother, never realizing how she’d shielded me, tried to keep me safe from life’s relentless vicissitudes, comforted me when they came along. It was a shock when she was gone.

In June of 1975, I was living in San Francisco, in the studio apartment on Third Avenue, and working at the Westbury hotel. I was studying magic and meditation, and had just made some silver amulets of protection. They were to be given to a girlfriend and her daughter, emigrating to Australia. On one side the amulet said “I protect whoever knows my name,” and on the other side “Omnia Gaudium Est Presens Nunc Ipsum.” No Latin scholar I, but I meant it to say, “All the Bliss there is, is here right now.”

I got a call. My mother was in hospital. It was serious.

She’d lost a huge amount of weight some months before. She’d been generally plump, quite round, since her marriage to Dr. Strickland. He’d passed away, and she moved to the farm, my grandparents former home. There she’d somehow found a boyfriend named Herman, a retired Air Force shooting instructor who’d taught Olympians. Ostensibly, he lived in an Airstream parked below the house, and he was raising bird dogs in the field to the north of the house.

Living now in her girlhood home, this particular morning, mama had gone out to play with the puppies. She was sitting on the earthen floor of a former chicken house, playing with the hound puppies.

She said, “I’ve got the most terrific headache.”

Herman looked up. She passed out. She’d had a stroke.

The amulets went off to Australia. I made the arrangements as I left San Francisco. In the Wichita Falls hospital, she was on a machine that breathed for her. But she died.

At the funeral, tears in my eyes, I suddenly saw Judy, a former girlfriend. She’d read the news that morning. She came with me to the farm, and we spent some time together, but we had little to say. She left.

We children chose some things we wanted to keep, and I shipped my things in boxes to my new home in San Francisco. The young brothers, Paul and David, were to finish high school, staying with my Uncle Doc.

I flew back to San Francisco. She was gone.

I’d brought away some things I’d given her: a carved wooden box, a wooden perfume bottle from Spain, a Dunhill lighter, and a wooden comb.

On the wooden comb, the scent of her hair.

I wept.

Tiny Flowers

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Weed, California, Saturday May 10, 2008: Usually around mid-day, the dogs and I like to take a little walk around the house and the very large vacant lot next door. It’s mostly an open field, with some tall and graceful trees at the far end.

If we have walked to the end, and walked around one or more of the trees … well, we know we’ve been somewhere.

Today, the air was cool, but the sun was warm on us, and I plodded along after Charlie the dashing young boy, and I was lost in thought, watching my feet, for the now fast-growing grasses can hide gopher holes.

And I saw …

Tiny little flowers, a pale lavender color, just tiny little things.

And I remembered … back when I was four and five and seven and nine, and visiting my grandmother’s farmhouse, and how along the paved walkway to the chicken yard and the barns beyond … on the left she kept bushy thick plants with a million tiny little flowers, in yellow and blue and purple and white.

I don’t know what they were called. I had forgotten them.

And now, those tiny, tiny flowers came back, over the years. And as I walked here in the now, I realized they were everywhere at my feet, the tiny purple flowers. Everywhere. I smiled.

“Hello,” I said, “Hello, Grandmother.”

I walked on through those tiny galaxies, and once again I felt loved.

I realize: the flowers are everywhere, if you look.

The world is filled with twilight and memories and shifting shapes, if you look. The ones who have gone have left ripples, and sometimes we feel them eddy around us. And within us as well.

Tiny flowers. Filling the world.

 
 

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