Past Essays

A Way of Seeing

“The landscape of our life shapes our nature,” wrote Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of New York’s Central Park and, as a sociologist, I’ve always considered the landscape of our life as the society that nurtures us, that instills in us our wants,
our needs, our expectations, our hopes, our very way of seeing.

The same sentiment has been expressed in less elegant ways: “You can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy” and “The apple never falls far from the tree.”

This notion that we are products of our society was much on my mind as I strolled and ambled and climbed along the Pacific Coast Trail,   one of a dozen men and women on a Sierra Club summer retreat. Even our standards of beauty, the pictures that words like “nature” and “gardens” paint in our thoughts, stem from what is generally regarded as “beautiful” or “natural” in our culture.

Some time ago, a botanist, a man who had recently returned from two years with the Peace Corps in Paraguay, asked me an intriguing question: “If you could choose a flower to represent the way you would like to be seen by others, what would it be? Quick! Don’t think about it too long!”

A parade of flowers marched before me, including some of Georgia O’Keefe’s flamboyantly erotic blossoms. I wouldn’t dare! I know the interpretations.

“A rose,” I blurted, finally. “A gorgeous, large, velvet-petaled, richly

 perfumed, deep red rose in full glorious bloom!”

“But you’d have thorns,” he shot back. “Is that the way you see yourself?

“Well . . . Yes and no. Yes, I’m not easy to pluck – but my thorns can be removed by the right hardy soul.”

I had disappointed him. “Well, what flower would you choose to represent you?” I asked.

He was ready with the proper botanical name: arabidopsis.

“It’s a tiny white flower,” he said, “that grows in Central America and it’s so small it can’t be seen unless you are down on the ground and, then, you must move aside the leaves that cover it. It blooms briefly in the spring and then is seen no more – and it’s absolutely exquisite.”

I was abashed and embarrassed, felt rude and crude – a lush, tasteless, common, gaudy bloom against his delicate, rare and precious flower.

Watching the delight of some of our group, listening to their expressions of joy at the discovery of, to me, a rather ordinary yellow or purple flower, I must confess to some of the same feeling of embarrassment I felt with the botanist. This was my first venture into the Sierras and my eyes didn’t see what the others saw. Those clumps of anonymous gray leaves with the leggy, faded, dead-looking flowers, why were they so special? Why couldn’t I appreciate them?

My tastes in gardens, in nature, in flowers, were formed in England. The English are enthusiastic gardeners, great lovers of flowers, plants and trees but the suburban garden of childhood memory, as well as the garden of the manor house, was perfectly manicured, orderly and neat, fruit trees espaliered against ancient brick walls, each branch equidistant from the one above and the one below. Hedges were shaved so that not a leaf was out of place, edges of lawns trimmed with nail scissors, every blade of grass even with its neighbor.

The model, the standard to which all aspired but could never hope to attain, was the garden of the stately home: Blenheim, Kew, Kensington Palace, Chatsworth . . .  formal gardens designed by “Capability” Brown, formal gardens with terraces and orangeries and waterfalls, stands of oak and elm, willow and horse chestnut that formed magnificent vistas, complete with cattle grazing on meticulously well-maintained meadows.

And the flowers! Always large and perfect: roses, delphiniums, banks of lavender, hollyhocks twelve feet high, each blossom a perfect specimen in peach and orange and yellow and violet – hollyhocks that we girls embroidered on tea time tablecloths, always as background to the maidens in gaily colored crinolines and bonnets we filled in with lovers’ knots and lazy daisy stitch.

As we tramped in single file along the dusty trails of the Tahoe Forest, I reminded myself that England has no wilderness comparable to the California terrain. Even the wildflowers there—forest bluebells come to mind—seem as rich and, yes, as cultivated as the flowers in our back gardens.

With a mind creaking open to appreciate a wider range of flora than I knew during my formative years, I had learned to plant varieties of cactus in my Los Angeles garden, plants well suited to a water- conservation-conscious era. I had even learned to love some of them, especially the cereus peruvianus that flowers only at night and only for one night. It sends out a spectacular, creamy, many petaled miracle of a blossom that, while native to the desert, has all the attributes of a flower I could admire.

Yet, somewhere around our third day in the Sierras, standing on a high granite ridge overlooking a vast valley, I was overcome with a profound and inexpressible joy. This was perfection and I, a writer, struggled for words to describe it.

What could be said about forests and lakes, firs and pines, the blue sky and the warm sun that had not already been said? It was not that we were seeing anything we had not seen on our previous excursions . . .

Aha!

Whereas, before, all the little forest flowers with open faces were “daisies” to me, now I recognized and could name the purple/pink flowered spyrea and the manzanita with its small dark leaves and red/brown berries. The lacy tracings on the fallen tree trunk were the work of the pine bark beetle; I could distinguish the red firs by their long witches’ fingers – pointed, gnarled, falling and drooping, hooking and twisting from the broad tree trunk towards the earth, towards the sky. Looking down, every patch of soil yielded tiny treasures, each worthy of loving attention: a lone mariposa lily, its three delicate petals opened bravely against dark pebbles; corn lilies – bolder, taller, thrusting clusters of small bells upward into the forest.

The tall tree with the red tessellated trunk was now a familiar friend: the “gentle Jeffrey,” with his long needles in bunches of three, his large cones smooth in the hands, his bark exuding vanilla-butterscotch-pineapple perfume, and the fragile pale-brown and white cones along the forest path I knew had dropped from the Western White Pine. I picked up one newly fallen to admire the delicately painted edge to each wooden petal and savor its sticky resin that smelled intensely of lemon, sweet lemon.

These gifts of the forest, now mine forever, I received with pleasure, but they were only a foretaste of this perfect day.             Imagine leaving the shaded forest path to enter a glacier meadow, a frozen sea of granite formed eons ago and opening onto natural lakes edged with mountains, banks of pines, boulders placed by a knowing hand so that each step brings yet another sculptured arrangement more captivating than the last. Imagine slipping into the cool, clear, silky water of a mountain lake, swimming in the silent, scented air, the water rippling green on green, reflecting stately pines. Emerge from the water and climb up the rock face in the nurturing warmth of the sun to view the entire valley below.

Words?  Perhaps pure joy cannot be expressed, only experienced.  Cole Porter understood how impossible was the task. “You are too beautiful, too beautiful for words . . . For me, the joy came not only from the encompassing beauty. It came from seeing the neon-green lichen on the forest floor, so bright it dazzled – and knowing what it was; from weighing the awesome age of the granite rock face against the tiny seedling firs finding their footing in its crevices. It came from the gradual comprehension that the forest and its flowers, the mountains and the lakes, were not alien, that I was part of them. Most of all, it came from the understanding that I was being transformed, that my horizons had grown wider, that I could “see” in new ways.

Even a sociologist must allow that as our landscape, social as well as geographic, changes, so, of necessity, do our tastes and habits, and it is not only “society” that shapes us, nor does it shape us for all time. Rather, one remarkable individual, a poet or a teacher, perhaps, or a leader on a nature retreat, can influence us, at any age, to change direction, to see the previously unseen and to fall under its spell.
Copyright Monica B. Morris. 2010.

 

 

Like I said . . .”

Was it Winston Churchill  - or, Bernard Shaw – or maybe Oscar Wilde – who first alleged that the United States and Britain are two nations divided by a common language?

The phrase has been variously attributed, even in the Oxford English Dictionary but regardless of its source, I am reminded of this division often: when, for instance, my jokes give rise to bewilderment rather than amusement or when I, in my turn, am puzzled by Americanisms rooted in baseball.

After more than forty years in America, a citizen since 1976, I still respond naturally to British terminology as though I live in England. I immediately understood “Sod the Lot!” when I read it and knew that it did not mean turn the bare earth into a lawn! It was the recent British elections ousting the Labor government that gave rise to the phrase, posted in various locations across England’s fair and pleasant land.

Sod, of course, derives from sodomy, although I suspect that few using the word think of that anymore than the F word raises pictures of copulation in the mind (or maybe it does?). I vividly recall my mother, in a spat with my dad, muttering “Go to buggery” – buggery being yet another copulative term used without apparent thought of its precise homosexual meaning.  “Sod off!” and “bugger off” have their equivalents in American speech, and we all know what they are.

Language and its different usages have long fascinated me and I am fully aware that language is a living, changing system. Nonetheless.  I continue to be dismayed as non-grammatical usages find their way into every-day English, seemingly actively promoted by those who surely know better.  I have had to concede that “hopefully,” is here to stay, when “it is hoped” or “let’s hope” is intended. I still wince when I hear it or see it and just hope that it is never used by any of my past students. I gave it my best.

My current bête noire is “like,” used everywhere and all the time to mean “as though” or “as if.” Just today, I found it misused in the Financial Times, of all arbiters of careful usage, by a man who purports to be editor-in-chief of  Monocle:

“. . . the two who have contorted themselves into such bizarre

shapes that they look like they’re auditioning for Cirque do Soleil.”

Had he written, for instance, “they look like tightly wound springs” or “they look like acrobats from the Cirque de Soleil,” or “they look as if they’re auditioning. . .”  he would not have caused my heart to miss a beat.

I can hear readers groaning at what may seem like a triviality. After all, we know what he means, so why be so picky? Because it’s sloppy speech, that’s why! And sloppy speech distorts meaning and clarity.

Let’s assume that readers of the Financial Times  are adults whose language skills were acquired long ago. They will recognize a misuse when they see it, accept it without much thought, or respond with a shudder, as I did. When, however, the perpetrator is a writer of children’s books who injects sloppiness into every page, I’m troubled. My awareness of the misuse of “like” began quite recently when Rachel, my ten-year-old granddaughter, on her summer visit, chose two of the “Mallory” books from the library for us to read together. Laurie Friedman’s characters speak pretty much as nine-year olds do, and her stories always teach a moral or two in thoroughly acceptable ways: “Take the bad with good,” “When given lemons make lemon pie,” “Even if you fail, keep on trying,” and so on. My beef with her is that she takes this one particular grammatical error and magnifies it, repeats it over and over again, dozens of times in each of her books, and so perpetuates it. Any child reading the stories will absorb and use the error for all time. It’s nice to teach morals but it would be nicer if sloppy language were not taught at the same time.

Here are a few “Mallory” examples:

“Everyone looks like they’re happy.”

“Max nods like he loves the idea.”

“Mom looks at Max like he should be doing his own jobs.”

“I don’t feel like I’ll be fine.”

“She looks like she’s waiting for me to make a decision..”

“Joey nods at Mary Ann like it’s no problem, but then he looks at me like it is a problem.”

“I talk to them like I’m a teacher.”

“Oh no! says Grandma like she can’t think of anything worse.”

Rachel and I read alternate chapters aloud; when it was my turn, I corrected every “like” to “as though” or “as if.”.  Rachel soon got the hang of it and made necessary corrections when she read. I’m willing to bet she’ll rarely misuse “like” in the future – but I worry about all the other little girls who love the otherwise excellent Mallory books.

Copyright Monica B Morris 2010

 

An’ the end of it is sittin’ and thinkin’
--- Rudyard Kipling---

What a gift! Some thoughtful, unknown donor placed a handsome, sturdy, iron-framed bench just beside the footpath, where passing walkers might rest and take in the view. It’s a wooden slatted bench with decorative metal urn shapes set in its back. A bit hard to sit on, but the vista is glorious. On a clear day, the far away ocean can be seen glistening in the sunshine.  Facing due west, the seat is positioned perfectly for watching the sun set over the Pacific, the sky lit in brilliant pinks and reds behind a stand of palm trees on the opposing hill some half a mile away.

 My husband and I marveled at the generosity.

 We worried a bit that it would be stolen away on some dark night. It is a bench of some quality, not nailed down or set in concrete, and it would fit nicely into any of the local back yards. Who would know? Still, the bench remains and we continue to enjoy it, always with the nagging doubt that it will be gone next time we head towards it.

 Could this be an experiment we wonder; has some social scientist  received a grant to see how such a gift would fare over time? Maybe he or she is investigating the notion of  “The Commons.” Only local residents know about this narrow footpath over the bluff, and some have diligently edged the path with stones to mark where the cliff drops dangerously, ensuring that  walkers stay safe. Will our community acknowledge this anonymous gift, too, by respecting it and maintaining it as though they had paid for it themselves? Or . . .  

 It took only a few weeks before the seat back was defaced with initials gouged by someone’s knife or by a sharp steel nail. Shortly thereafter, someone well-meaning but ill-advised, scratched a message on the back slat of the seat, itself, asking that people not graffiti this bench! As if in response to that request, that marked slat was crudely smashed. To do such damage, a strong wooden or metal rod must have been inserted between the back two slats and levered up, leaving an ugly splintered wound. A few days later, that entire broken rail was gone., carefully unscrewed and lifted away. Had someone taken it to repair and reinforce it before replacing it?  Weeks later, though, the rail is still missing.

 Recently, a pad for the seat appeared under the bench - for the comfort of those with little padding of their own, perhaps? Or is it simply someone getting rid of the stuff in the garage? The padding is a bit muddy, resting in the dust as it is.

Now, too, half smoked cigarette butts litter the ground around the feet of the bench.  It’s nice to think of someone having a quiet smoke as the sun is setting, relaxing after the trials of the day – but the wild grasses are tall and dry around here;  houses above and below could be consumed in moments by flames sweeping up and down the hillside. It would takes only one  thoughtless smoker to set these grasses on fire.  

 Meanwhile, I sit quietly, listening to the traffic hum, dulled by distance, on the freeway below, and to the birds chattering around me. A humming bird     alights on a flowering bush for a tiny moment and then flits away, nothing but a whirr of wings, and I wonder about philanthropy – and how good intention can be transformed into something far more complicated than intended.

                                                                                                            * * * * *

 Copyright Monica B. Morris 2010.

 

Willpower
A Short Story

To be honest, I have to say I loved the guy.  My wife says “in love with him, more like”. She rolls her eyes when I mention him, the way women do when they are exasperated. I met him in college, and you know how it is when you leave home for the first time. You're at your most impressionable and some people make an impression that remains for the rest of your life.

Will Waterson - yes, that Will Waterson- has always been the kind of guy who draws people to him. He was rarely seen on campus without a retinue of students, some boys -- but mostly girls, begging him to play his flute or strum on his guitar and sing some of his songs.   I wanted him for my friend.  I wanted to be like him. More, I wanted to be him. He was everything I admired, everything I was not. He was a talented athlete, he was - still is -- handsome in the way people think of as typically mid-Western: fine featured, fair skinned, tall and muscular. He dated the best looking girls on the campus while the rest of us took what we could get.  And, man, was he was a fine musician! He'd grown up reading music manuscripts as easily as I read adventure stories.  Classical music, to my folks, tended to be of the “Chopin's Greatest Hits” variety, so I was as good as illiterate in that area.  Only in academics did I do better than Will -- overcompensating for my perceived deficits, some would say.

Maybe I've made him sound a tad smug, but Will seemed truly unaware of his effect on others. I guess he took his talents so much for granted, was so comfortable with himself, that he could be generous in his dealings with more ordinary folk. “Art,” he'd say to me, as though I was  the special one, “Art, you're brilliant! How did you solve that equation so quickly? It passed right by me……”

So, yeah, we became friends, best buddies, confidantes, and being known as Will's friend cast some of his aura over me so the girls who flocked around him looked with favor on me, too. “He's a genuine genius!” he'd boast, making much of my modest accomplishments, piquing people's interest in me.

I helped him with math and science, he introduced me to poetry and music, both of which he composed as instinctively as breathing.  Or so it seemed to me. At that time, I didn't know how good Will's poems were; I could only marvel at the way they dropped from his lips, fully formed, complete stories told in spare sentences so elegant they made you gasp. Did he scribble notes at night? Did he work out rhymes when he should have been studying calculus?  Did he secretly resort to Roget  to find the perfect word? I don't think he did any of those. He was a natural.

He was a natural at the piano, too, but he kept that to himself. He rented one of those private studio spaces in the town where he'd go several times a week and play for hours. I was one of the few people who knew about it, and I'd tag along with him from time to time and listen.  When he remembered, he'd name the pieces as he played them so I began to hear the difference between a Beethoven and a Mozart sonata, or a Kodaly and a Chopin study. Mostly, he forgot I was there and the music poured into the room as though he and the instrument were fused together, sharing a heart and a brain.  Sometimes, I leafed through the sheet music, amazed that those dots and lines and dashes translated into the sweetness, the melancholy, the joy, and the delicacy of the sounds that filled the small room.

Will often played Schumann's Kinderszenen: Scenes from Childhood, so I was soon able to recognize them.  “I learned them, literally, at my grandfather's knee,” he told me. “I was about six years old and I'd sit on granddad's lap and listen to the stories he made up about each 'scene'. Then he'd play them for me, one by one. Playing them brings him back to me. Crazy old curmudgeon.” He laughed. “Hated kids, he said. He'd roar at all my cousins and terrify them so much they'd run away from him, but he took a shine to me, the youngest grandchild. I guess I was the only one who liked his kind of music.”

Julie, my wife, thinks I live too much in my college days. She gets impatient with my reminiscences. “Isn't it time you moved on?” she chides. “All of that was nearly forty years ago and anyone would think you're still there.  Lot of water under the bridge since then.” She's right. She's often right, though it pains me to say so. She barely remembers the names of girls she dormed with; her concerns are immediate and practical. She lives in the moment, for the moment, and she accuses me of thinking more about Will and the past than about our sons and our grandson.  She's wrong about that.

The thing is, since we graduated from college and went our separate ways, Will and I never met, although we wrote a few times.  I've seen him on television, of course, as everyone has, and I once saw him live in concert in Central Park, singing his songs of social significance. That was decades ago, years before I met Julie. Having been at school with Will Waterson gave me great cachet with my date that evening. She drooled over every word I let drop about him. She wanted to meet him after the show, but I wasn't going to fight my way through all those thousands of fans. Besides, I wasn't ready to meet him yet.

You see, I had a dream. You're going to laugh, I know, but hear me out. I was going to learn to play the piano and, when I was really proficient, I would perform for Will. I would play brilliantly, with exquisite attention to detail, to nuance, every note falling into the air, clear and crisp and perfect.  Will would listen, silent and respectful, and when I finished playing, he would say nothing, just reach over, shake my hand, and nod as he did when he was truly blown away.  It would take years, I knew, but I was determined.

My first piano teacher, a sweet young woman who usually taught tiny children, persevered with me. She was saintly in her patience, but I was incapable of remembering anything she told me. The notes on the page remained an incomprehensible code, just dots, some with, some without tails.   People who are good at math are supposed to be good at music, too, aren't they?  Not I. Why couldn't I learn, as eager as I was? I was twenty-two, then, and in my first year with Shambourne Brothers, the accounting firm, doing well, juggling formulae all day long, crunching numbers, making progress. I had a future there.

After nearly six months of frustration for both of us, my teacher suggested we call it a day and wait a while, until I was less preoccupied with work and career and could pay more attention to my piano lessons. She was letting me off the hook graciously; I showed no talent whatsoever.

A couple of years later, when I'd worked up enough nerve to try again, I found a retired music professor to work with, an old guy who was surely experienced enough to help me through my music block. “I understand your problem,” he comforted me, nodding sagely. “I've come across it before. Sometimes, when people want something really badly, they put up an unconscious resistance. We'll start slowly with simple children's exercises and work from there.” Completely at ease, his hands barely skimming the keys, he played a piece of great beauty, great simplicity and sweetness. I knew I was home and dry.

Only six weeks after my first lesson, the professor acknowledged that he'd met his match. “I'm sorry,” he said, shaking his head, perplexed. “I've had a number of students come to the piano as adults and do quite well but you - you're throwing your money down the chute. I feel I shouldn't encourage you any further. I don't think you'll ever master the instrument, no matter how hard you try. Give it up!”

You'd think I'd accept that kind of verdict without argument and creep away in shame. I didn't do that. Even a total lack of talent couldn't  make me abandon my dream. I protested, I begged, I cajoled, I was pretty damn near to tears. The professor wouldn't budge.

Eventually, we worked out a compromise. “Look”, I suggested. “I know I'm hopeless at deciphering the dots on the page but even monkeys can be trained to pick out tunes.” I warmed to the subject. “I read that monkeys can actually compose music, given enough time.” The professor's mouth dropped open. He waved his hand in front of his face, knowing what I was about to suggest, appalled, wanting no part of it.

“Train me as you would train an ape,” I said. “Let's take a piece of music and I'll copy everything you do, note by note, measure by measure, until I can play it right through.”

“It can't be done, he insisted. “You're out of your mind.”

“Maybe,” I granted, “but let's try.” I rushed on, carried away by my own audacity.  “I want to learn all of Schumann's Kinderscenen; I don't care if it takes years!”

“You don't understand!” His voice rose several tones. “Schumann sounds deceptively simple. It's actually among the most difficult music to play well. If you love the work so much, buy it! It's been recorded by some of the best pianists in the world: Horowitz, Moiseiwitsch……”

“No!” I was doggedly insistent. “I want to play it myself and I want to start now!”

Maybe the professor was inspired by the challenge, for within six months I had committed the first eight measures of About Strange Lands and People to memory. A year later, I could play the entire piece. Even the professor admitted it didn't sound too bad; a pale copy of his own playing but not too bad.  I used it as a ninety second party piece, charming impressionable young women with my talent and sensitivity. Heady stuff, except I had no encore.
Another eighteen months passed and I'd memorized Traumerei.

“Arthur,” the professor was growing visibly older and more tired every day.  “Arthur, enough! At this rate, it'll take twenty more years to get through the whole collection. I haven't got that long. Be satisfied with your achievement and call it quits.” He meant it.

So, my dream could be realized, if and when Will and I met - if we met under the right circumstances. At the very least we'd need a piano; at the very least I must keep my two pieces practiced and polished at all times, ready to be performed at the drop of a hat.

I played whenever I could, for anyone who would listen and I must say that being a pianist, even one with my limited repertoire, had its advantages. Young women swooned and swayed when I played. They dimpled at me, they showed their teeth in pretty smiles. Especially did they find my modesty endearing. I would never hog the scene. “Let someone else play,” I'd say, after my second piece, graciously relinquishing the keyboard to others. I wowed a lot of girls that way. Not Julie, though. She says she was attracted to me for quite other attributes. In any case, she claims to have a tin ear.

So, I was ready for Will but, as you know, our paths didn't cross. I meant to attend our ten year college reunion, but Julie had just delivered our first son and college get-togethers were not at the top of my list of priorities. The twentieth reunion coincided with my promotion to the board of Shambourne Brothers and, with it, the move to a fine new house in the suburbs.  Something always came up.

Meanwhile, Will was becoming an international superstar in the world of folk music. I followed his career through the alumni news letter, through newspapers, the radio and television and through his very occasional, obviously hastily written notes.  Julie and I followed his tours through Africa, Europe, South America. We bought all his recordings and every book of poems he'd published and we read somewhere that he gave a large part of his enormous earnings to support social causes. Not for him those million dollar houses in Beverly Hills or the Hamptons. He lived simply, we heard. No wife, no children, just hard work and commitment. “Too good to be true, that troubadour,” Julie teased me. I know she admired Will and the philosophies he espoused in his poetry and his songs, but I think she wished he wasn't so important to me, that I didn't have “unresolved issues” with him. Unresolved issues. I hate that kind of psychological jargon.  It's not as though she knew what she was talking about. She'd never met Will or seen us together.

We were actually ready to go to my thirtieth college reunion with our bags packed and stowed in the trunk of my car when Mark, our younger boy, just sixteen at that time and with a new driver's license, totaled Julie's Civic - and broke his nose and two ribs. We were foiled again, assuming Will would attend the gathering, anyway, and not be on tour.

I wish I could say that either of our boys showed any flair for music but, given their parents, what could you expect? Piano lessons, which we insisted they take for a year or two, were barely tolerated; getting them to practice was an endless struggle. We had the piano, you see, just an upright, but a decent instrument that I'd brought to the marriage and on which I still practiced my two pieces -- when no one was home.

I had been playing those pieces for so many years, on and off, that I was no longer sure I had all the notes right, and as I couldn't read the sheet music I wasn't able to check. I might have listened to some fine recording artist' s version, I suppose, like Radu Lupu's, but I was uneasy about that. Maybe I can explain my reticence. A successful painter friend of ours, a “primitive” artist, who didn't pick up a brush until he retired at sixty, once told us he had given up visiting art galleries and museums; he found himself so intimidated by the artistry of the masters, it stopped him from working on his own stuff. Extreme?  Yup, but understandable, wouldn't you say? Anyway, both pieces sounded good to me. If anything, my playing had improved over the decades, was richer and more assured, although I was becoming reconciled to the fact that Will would never hear me perform.

His letter was a surprise, even though we knew that Will was to appear in concert at the Hollywood Bowl; we'd already planned to be there among the eighteen thousand other fans. He wrote briefly, in his big, looping hand as always, simply suggesting that we meet while he was in our area, have dinner together perhaps, catch up on the forty years since college. He'd like to meet my wife …

His mentioning Julie bowled her over.  “Do you think he'd come to the house? We'll fill the place with flowers! Do you know kind of wine  he likes? I could make my teriyaki salmon or the barbecued chicken…? Maybe he's a vegetarian, though. I could make a vegetable quiche…” She was as excited as a teenager.  No disparaging references to him now as “that troubadour.”

Will's appearance at the Bowl met all expectations. A standing ovation, shrieks and whistles, stamping and hollering, cries of “More! More!” lasting for fully five minutes after his last encore, after he had left the stage and was probably well on his way back to his hotel.

It was a great evening but nothing, really, compared to the concert he gave just for the family in our living room the next night. Accompanying himself on his guitar, he sang any and every song we requested, and some he had just written, that no one had heard before. He sang a few of Dylan's numbers as well as his own “There's Room in the World for All of Us” and “A Workingman's Life” -- songs that had inspired us in the radical sixties. He sang gentle, romantic songs, wistful songs of youth, songs of disillusion, songs of hope, songs of love. He sang for our sons and their wives, he sang “Every Little Boy Deserves a Chance” for our grandson and showed him how to play the accompanying chords.  Most winning of all, he sang for Julie, a song he must have composed on the spot: “Gentle Julie, warm and wonderful,” it began. She was completely captivated by him, blushing like a girl.

He was just as I remembered, charming everyone. He was older, of course, as were we all, and, his face had grown leaner, his features sharper, his eyebrows a bit unruly, but he was as handsome as ever, especially as he'd kept all his hair, now silvery white.

Would I have a chance to play my pieces for him?  I'd have to wait until everyone else had left, but no one showed any signs of wanting to go home. Another song and then another. I love my kids, but they were beginning to overstay their welcome.  “School tomorrow?” I hinted to my grandson. “Oh, grandpa, it's the summer. No school 'til September!” My daughter-in-law got the message, or realized the lateness of the hour. “Is that the time? Home, guys. Let's go!”

You know how some visitors linger at the front door. It's nice, in a way, that they'd rather stay than leave, that they still have more to talk about, that they feel so comfortable with you that they can't break away.

Go home already! Couldn't they read my mind?  Fifteen minutes more of fond farewells and kisses and hugs and handshakes and backslapping ensued before they all climbed into one car and drove away.

My time had come. Or had it?

“I should be going, too.” Will sounded reluctant. “I've commandeered enough of your evening….”

“No, no!” I insisted. “Don't rush away on our behalf.  It'd be great to spend some quiet time together, now the kids've gone. It's been so long since we talked…”

“Please,” Julie added. “Please, do stay.”

“If you're sure. I'd like that. Thanks.” He seemed in no hurry to get back to his hotel room. He lowered himself into our most comfortable armchair and stretched himself out, his long legs straight out in front of him. We were all quiet for a moment. Pensive.

"Do you know how lucky you are to have children, a grandson?” Will broke the silence. “I've been on the road more or less nonstop since I was twenty-one. It's been good. I'm not complaining but you always make compromises, no matter what route you choose. Mine meant giving up on the idea of a family. Yes, there have been a few relationships as they're called these days, but no commitment to settling down. Funny, really, when you think that family always meant so much to me. Parents, grandparents. Family seemed more important than anything….” Julie and I glanced at each other, surprised by the yearning beneath his words.

On the other hand, lest we get too moist-eyed about it, the man was an icon, a performer known across the world, recognized as a brilliant musician and composer, his concerts always completely sold out. Maybe he gave away millions, but he would surely retire with enough to live well for the rest of his life. Would I have made the compromises he did, assuming the same talents? Talents. There's the rub…

“Will,” I began tentatively. “There's something I'd like to play for you, if I may, given your feelings about family…” He was surprised and a bit confused. “Play?  A recording of some kind?”

“No, the piano,” I said, rising from the sofa, ready to seat myself on the piano bench. My heart was thumping so hard, I was sure the others could hear it. I hadn't expected to be this nervous.

“I didn't know you were a musician, too, Art.” Will's face lit up; he was clearly intrigued. He got up from his armchair to be closer to the piano and, from the corner of my eye, I noticed Julie quietly leaving the room. I've never loved her more. She knew how much this special moment meant to me and she wanted to leave us two guys alone to share it.

“I've prepared this especially for you, Will, in memory of your granddad.” He smiled expectantly, his head tilted, questioning, as I lay my hands on the keys, readying myself, steadying my nerves.  I had been preparing for this moment for more than half my life.

I started with About Strange Lands and People and from the very first measures, I could tell something was amiss.  Will had turned his ear, the side of his head, towards the piano. His brow was furrowed, as though trying to discern where the false sounds were coming from. The piano had been tuned only a few days before, so I knew that couldn't be the problem.
With terribly clarity, I heard what I was playing. For the first time, I allowed myself to listen, coldly and objectively, to my music as it spilled into the room. I heard it as Will, the consummate musician, must have heard it.  It was a disaster. Over the years, I had unwittingly embellished the piece with odd grace notes and curlicues that would have made Schumann gyrate in his grave. Will pursed his lips. His jaw twitched; he was having a hard time keeping his mouth shut. I'd got the rhythms all wrong and the sweep of notes from the left to the right hand jerked and jumped instead of flowing smoothly.  I understood, now, why Julie had left the room.

The minute and a half it takes to finish the piece -- and I was determined to finish - felt like eternity. I was drowning, gasping for breath, hands growing cold and clammy.  Incidents in my life flashed before me, childhood, college days, marriage, career…..

It was over at last and I found courage enough to look Will in the eye.

He was smiling, a sweet, generous smile with, perhaps, the merest hint of sadness in it. “Thank you, Art,” he said, after a moment or two. “That was great! Trust you to remember how much the Kinderszenen mean to me. Only my best friend would know something like that.”

He reached out to take my hand and shook it, and nodded as he did when he was truly blown away.

You can see why I loved the guy, can't you?

 

 

Piano Trio

My first piano was manufactured by A. Heap of London, whose unfortunate name was emblazoned in gold inside the keyboard lid. It was inherited indirectly from my father's parents via an aunt who had stored it in her damp cellar for years. The ornate brass candleholders were badly corroded and most of the keys had to be struck several times before the notes sounded. I doubt it had ever been tuned, even when it sat in my grandparents' parlor, the room unlocked only on ritual occasions like weddings and funerals. One of my earliest recollections is of my grandfather's coffin set on two chairs in that room, of neighbors paying their last respects, and of Mrs. Moordrick, the crazy old lady from the upstairs flat, throwing herself on the casket in a terrible and inappropriate display of grief.

The piano came to me because free lessons were offered at my high school, the only stipulation being access to an instrument. Those chosen were termed “Junior Exhibitioners of the Royal Academy of Music”, the impressive title disguising our real role as students of students of the Royal Academy.
Dorothea, all of nineteen years old, taught me the rudiments of music during school lunch hours, readying me for presentation to her professor. Thereafter, I took the 52 bus over Vauxhall Bridge to Baker Street every Saturday morning, walked past Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, and entered a foreign land, the Royal Academy of Music, where strange and wonderful melodies and harmonies issued from dozens of practice rooms. Viola and tubas and cellos, none of which I could have named at the time, sang their lovely songs and lured me into thinking I might be a musician, too. I sat at the piano in the presence of the Maestro as he watched and criticized Dorothea's teaching technique, doing my best for my teacher, savoring every moment.

My presence there had little to do with me, as I learned when I dropped out of school at fifteen and was informed that the program extended only to school children and that I was no longer eligible. For several Saturdays after that, I continued to ride the 52 bus, walked by Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum and lingered, longingly, outside the Academy, hoping someone would welcome me back into that magical place.

In the meantime, my father had the Heap restored, the candleholders and the gold lettering removed, and the lacquer stripped, revealing handsome, walnut casing. The little upright now sang with a surprisingly rich and mellow tone. It would be mine when I married, my father said.

I credit the Heap as the deciding factor in Manning's proposal of marriage when I was eighteen and he not much older. He had taken music lessons as a child and he played confidently as he sang the popular songs of the day in his light, lyrical baritone. In the early and middle years of the twentieth century, before families sat hypnotized in front of the television, the “sing-song” around the piano in the parlor was a common form of entertainment, new sheet music snapped up as fast as it appeared, much like the latest CDs today. Popularity was assured for the fellow who could read the dots or knew the chord structures and could weave melodies around them.

The piano in Manning's parents' council flat had been bought new and paid for in small monthly installments. Like the music lessons for the children, it symbolized a substantial sacrifice of resources for a working class family. It was to remain in the front room, tuned every year, even when no one remained to play it.

My grandparents must have bought the Heap in the early 1900s during the time of the piano's greatest popularity - the 1870s to the 1920s. In those fifty years millions of pianos were built and sold across the world, a piano in the parlor a solid symbol of elevation into the middle class. Schools established music programs and composers wrote easy pieces especially for amateur players.

With the Great Depression of the 1930s, the piano industry collapsed. Then began what Jonathan Franzen has terms the “electronic assault”: first radio and the gramophone, then television and taped movies, now the computer and video games, supplanting with isolating experiences the more socially active and interactive forms of home entertainment. It was predicted that the piano would die but, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the report of its death was greatly exaggerated. Pianos are built to last and even with the dramatic decline in the number of manufacturers, pianos remained popular.

Manning courted me at the keyboard, the arpeggios rippling through our apartment satisfying my watchful parents that we could be alone in the front room. Manning loved the Heap. He loved me, too, but that my piano could become his tipped the scales in my favor. It was the first piece of furniture in our home together, a fixture, there from the start. It was there for our two young sons who, within a few years, were reading music as naturally as they read text.

The Heap suited us well - until one of my father's clients offered him a Broadwood Boudoir Grand if he could find a good home for it. He could. Ours. Not only was the piano a gift, the donor also arranged for its delivery to our house and introduced us to Mr. Dove, the piano tuner who had cared for the instrument for more than three decades.

Mr. Dove, a gentle fellow in his late fifties, came from a Broadwood “family.” Several generations of Doves had been employed by the company for all their working lives.

“Let me show you something,” he said, giving the piano its first tuning after the move. Neatly carved into the unpolished wood behind the keyboard was the signature, 'H. Dove.' “That was my great grandfather. He was just a young chap when he worked on this piano.”

H. Dove, I learn from David Wainwright's excellent history: Broadwood” By Appointment, was apprenticed to the factory in 1850, placed under his brother, T. Dove. A diary of the time mentions a tip of seven shillings and sixpence given to the foreman by the older brother, as was the custom when the foreman welcomed a new apprentice into his shop.

While the Heap had lacked lineage, the Broadwood's pedigree was indisputable. The London firm of John Broadwood is the oldest piano manufacturer in existence, dating back to the early sixteenth century, when it produced harpsichords. Broadwood made harpsichords for Reynolds and Gainsborough, for Joseph Haydn and, later, a piano for Beethoven, who was said to be “delighted.” Among John Broadwood's innovations, introduced in 1783, was the “sustaining pedal” - the device that some call “the soul of the piano” - that keeps the dampers raised above the strings as long as the pedal is held down.

Broadwood has provided pianos to every British monarch since George II. Our instrument, probably built around 1860, was embossed with the royal coat of arms above the words “By appointment to her Majesty the Queen.” Queen Victoria, of course.

Our elegant Royal Boudoir Grand was made of rosewood, the fretwork of the music holder so elaborately carved and curlicued that we had to trace around the curves with a finger to decipher JBroadwood. Both our boys practiced on that piano as they worked their way through the
examination grades of the Royal Schools of Music. With so much music in the house, I was inspired to take up piano again and I sat Grade 4 with my older son, then eleven years old. The examination included a series of aural tests to determine the candidate's musicality. For example, a note was played and the student was asked to sing the note a given interval - say a third - above or below the sounded tone. My son passed With Distinction. I, just barely.

The Broadwood was shipped to Northern California when we emigrated there in 1963 where it again took pride of place in our home. Instruments gradually multiplied around it. One boy added the violin to his repertoire - and if you want a foretaste of the horrors of Hades,  a child learning the violin should do the trick - the other took up the tuba, Our daughter, the baby, learned the cello, while Manning turned to the double bass, which he played in the university symphony orchestra and with local dance bands. I monitored the children's practice, which mostly meant shouting admonitions to “Slow down! Slow down!” in ever rising pitch, but I did not play. California's then outstanding “Master Plan” of higher education offering me the chance to pick up what I had thrown down nearly two decades before. With studying, overseeing three children, adapting to semi-rural life, driving miles to music lessons, driving miles for groceries, driving miles for school activities…playing the piano had slipped off the end of my list of priorities.

The musicians in the family recognized fairly early that all was not quite right with the Broadwood. It was not noticeable when played alone but when it accompanied another instrument, something sounded slightly off. The string players struggled to tune to the piano, taking their strings down a tad, then a tad more. Our vintage Broadwood, we learned, was tuned to European pitch, somewhere between a quarter and a half tone below accepted contemporary pitch. Any attempt to raise it resulted in snapped strings. To conform, it would require complete restoration, a stripping out and rebuilding of its innards, an expense we could not consider. It remained in tune with itself, slightly out of tune with the rest of the musical world, for as long as we owned it.

The piano that sits in my living room now is a Mason and Hamlin 6' grand. It was my Christmas gift to Manning a few years after we moved to this house in Los Angeles. Much had changed in our lives by 1979. Opportunities not available to us in England - and perhaps no longer available in America - had reshaped us in ways we could not have foreseen. Manning and I were both working professionals and the children were either through, or moving through, various institutions  of higher learning, The time had come to replace the Broadwood.

We wandered through a vast warehouse of used pianos, Manning sampling one instrument, then another, as they took his fancy. This was, after all, the first piano we would choose and purchase for ourselves. He narrowed his choices to two: a Steinway and the Mason and Hamlin, both dating from the 1920s, both with glorious tones, both bearing the same price tag. We knew of Steinway's stellar reputation but the more Manning compared the two instruments, the more it became clear that  the Mason and Hamlin, a make unfamiliar to us, was his instrument.

If you crawl under a Mason and Hamlin grand piano and look up at the underside, you'll see steel arms radiating spider-like from the center of the soundboard to the outer rim. This patented device, called a crown retention system, maintains the “crown” of the soundboard. Without the right amount of crown - a slight bowing of the soundboard - a piano loses its volume and vivacity; it sounds lifeless. The crown retention system locks the rim permanently so it resists the forces bearing down on the soundboard for the lifetime of the instrument.

We knew none of that, then. No salesman informed or advised us. We were sold simply on the brilliance of the instrument's voice, a voice that sang with even more clarity when we got the piano home.

Manning's loving relationship with the Mason and Hamlin lasted for ten years. He played it every day, sang songs of love to it every day. As the only musician now at home, he could indulge his passion whenever the urge overcame him.

With his sudden death, the music died; the house grew uncannily quiet. The dreadful hush became a kind of reproach. After four decades of rollicking music in the house, how could there be silence? How could I allow a beautiful instrument to grow mute? I ran my hands over the keyboard, The touch was a bit heavy for me: the instrument had been chosen for stronger hands than mine. And I hadn't played for fifteen years. Was it too late to start over?

“I'll ask Joe if he'll take you on: my daughter volunteered. Joe was the pianist for the chamber group with which she played cello. He was completing his music degree at the local state university.

Joe had a different approach from previous teachers. “You know the scales and you can read the dots, so let's enjoy!” He wrote ENJOY! ENJOY! ENJOY! All over the sheet music, and enjoy I did. It was a peculiarly private, almost illicit, enjoyment, making music just for myself. I was fond of my reputation for competence and I wouldn't share my halting, Grade 4 efforts with anyone.

My goal was a reasonable rendition of “Of Strange Lands and People” from Schumann's “Scenes from Childhood,” and I struggled with it gamely. During this time, I was being courted by Clark, now my husband. He heard me practicing as he climbed the steps to my front door. “It sounds beautiful” he'd say, love being deaf, it seems, as well as blind. I closed the piano lid and stopped playing when he came into the house.

I had been taking lessons for several months when Joe announced his plans for a student recital.
“Not I” I made it clear. “Don't ask me  to play!”
“But you must,” Joe said, gently. “It's the next step. You know your pieces and it's time to play for an audience.”
“No! No! No! I have no intention of ever performing in public. Ever! I won't do it! Please don't ask me again!”

So how was it, adamant as I had been, that I was sitting in a roomful of people at the university, sheet music in shaking hand, waiting my turn to perform? Joe's persistence had won out against mine. About to graduate, he made such a strong case for the need to present a program by all his students, that I finally succumbed.

I had three months to learn the music by heart. By the day of the recital, I had memorized both the Schumann and a little piece by Kabalevsky and actually played them for Clark who, delighted that I had finally let down my guard, applauded tumultuously, like Daddy encouraging his little girl.

Well, this little girl is a grandma and the other performers ranged from four years old to fourteen. I listened to eleven children perform their pieces, one tiny boy needing direction to middle C on the keyboard before he could get going, and joined in the standing ovations with all the adoring, camera flashing moms and dads and aunties and uncles,

I was the closing act.

Clark, valiantly supporting me, patted my shoulder as I rose from my seat in the audience and walked with brisk self assurance to the piano. Self assurance took swift leave as I sat down to play. Face burning, palms dripping wet, I put up my music and, hands clasped for a moment in my lap,  I tried to compose myself. The room went terribly quiet. Expectations were clearly high.

I have no idea what I played. I knew I had lost my place fairly early on and I omitted all the repeats and great chunks of the bass parts. I do recall flashing a furtive smile at the audience, trying desperately to hang on to a shred of dignity. At last, it was over. The audience clapped politely. Clark kissed me and told me I had done brilliantly. Joe kissed me and told me I had done brilliantly. They lied.

I didn't touch the piano again for almost two years.  Not that I lacked for music. I serve as a docent for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra's “Meet the Music” program. It presents concerts for hundreds of public school children and, a week or so before the children are bused into the concert hall from all over the city, docents go into the classrooms to talk about the music the children will hear. We're given hours of training and a rich selection of materials - slides and CDs - from which to devise presentations lively enough to hold the attention of third and fourth graders.

One of my fellow docents, knowing my history, suggested a teacher she felt might suit me. The appointment with Tania, to see if she would consider me, went well. I feared she would find me unworthy of her time, Juilliard trained as she was, with an impressive list of students, both children and adults, but we hit it off straight away. Tania's pleasure at learning that I own a Mason and Hamlin was palpable. She glowed. Of her two grand pianos, one is a Steinway, but the one she likes best - indeed, loves - is a Mason and Hamlin. She considers those built in the 1920s and '30s among the finest instruments in the world. Several of her students own them and most of us now share Mr. Erdmann, a specialist in tuning and restoring this make of piano. He, too, rates vintage Mason and Hamlins very highly and has a waiting list of people hoping to acquire one, if such can be found.

My lessons with Tania led me into new realms. I was to  ENJOY! Yes. But I was also to arch my hands, drop my wrists, and curve my fingers correctly. I slowly learned, a few bumbling bars at a time, the second movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto #17 in G Major. Tania told me that another of her students was working on the first movement and was playing  “brilliantly.” She was seven years old.

Oddly, this did not intimidate me. I don't aspire to brilliance. It takes all my concentration to read the notes, to work out the tempos, and to remember to use the sustaining pedal. Every now and then, though, I take time to listen to the piano, to its tones and its reverberating overtones. It sounds like an orchestra in my living room and I am filled with pleasure.

 

“Don't Should Yourself in the Foot!”

     If you  feel that you're running around in ever decreasing circles,  you are not alone.  Moms at home with young children complain of being overwhelmed by their responsibilities. Retired folk who, you'd think,  have all the time in the world, wonder how they ever managed to hold down a full time job. And women in the workplace sometimes feel that if they let up, even for a moment, their families would go hungry and their homes would disappear under a blanket of dust.
    
     What is going on? Why are we under such pressure so much of the time?  Could it be because we have bought too wholeheartedly into the notion that we women are invincible, as the song goes, able to do everything and anything that is asked of us?
    
     Don't get me wrong;  I am a feminist, with a deep belief that women are enormously capable. We  prove that everyday. Perhaps, though, we have so absorbed others' expectations of us that they become our expectations for ourselves. Even when we know in our hearts that we should say “no” to some requests, we feel pangs of guilt unless we  say “yes.” And, sometimes, when we do  say ”yes” we add resentment to our feelings of guilt!.
    
     Who determines  these “shoulds”? And must we continue to follow the “rules” when they add to our burdens and diminish our joy?
    
     I was talking recently with two mothers, both of whom had just thrown birthday parties for their kids, one  a year old, the other seven.
    
     “You wouldn't believe what goes into the “loot” bags! It's getting really expensive,” one said, talking of the party gifts for the guests that are now the expected thing, at least in their neighborhood. Each party giver, it seems, raises the ante, placing ever more elaborate items in the be-ribboned bags.
    
     “One little boy asked me if there were any party favors. I told him, 'Yes. You'll get them when you leave. Are you leaving now?' ” She grimaced. “That pretty much shows how I felt.”
    
     “And the kids come with both parents - which means you're feeding as many as twenty people for a party for eight kids!”
    
     “ Don't the parents  just drop the kids off?” I asked.
    
     “ Oh no. And you're so busy socializing with the adults that  you don't enjoy the kids. You're just sort of … relieved… when they all go home.”
    
     The two women nodded, agreeing that it was all a bit much, but not even considering some alternatives.
    
     How sad that throwing a kid's birthday party has become a burden and a chore!  Can't the parents agree among themselves that the parties are just for the children? And can't they end the competition to provide the most “loot” for the kids? How about taking nice digital pictures of the kids having fun, printing them out during the festivities, and giving them to the children to take home to their parents? All that other “stuff” will soon end up broken or discarded, anyway.
    
     We “should” ourselves in the foot in other ways, too. I know a retired couple who feel they cannot  travel far from home - in case their grown children need them to baby-sit or to help out in other ways. They are always on call if this one must go to the dentist, or that one to the gym, or to run the children to school.  It's lovely to give a helping hand from time to time,  but we are rarely as indispensable as we think. We might like to be told,  “I don't know what we'd do without you, Mom,” but the phrase  ties “Mom” in place and limits her options.
    
     The demands press upon us from all sides. We are told that  our health is now in our own hands. We should exercise and eat right, walk  briskly every day, lift weights. We should also be civic-minded, volunteer, help out where we can. We should assist others, financially and physically. We should participate in our children's education, set up a college fund. We should save for our retirement.  We should keep up with world events, keep our minds sharp, do crossword and sudoku puzzles to head off  Alzheimer's! We should follow politics and vote, and support our troops…..! And we believe all these things.  We knock ourselves out trying to behave as we “should.”
    
     Help! It's time to throw off the mantle of guilt and do what we really want to do.  And if we are kinder to ourselves, we'll build up our stores of energy and enthusiasm - and actually have more to give to others if and when they truly need us..
    
     Where do we begin? How long has it been since you asked yourself, seriously, what lights your fire? How long since you asked “What would I like to do if  only I had the time?” How long has it been since you said “I want to do this”, rather than “I should do this?”
    
     I always jot stuff down when I'm trying to solve a problem or answer a question. You, too, might try making a list of all the things you would like to do, however far-fetched they might seem.  You  may be surprised to find that you are already doing some of them, but instead of seeing them as pleasures, you see them as chores to squeeze in among all the other tasks you “should” be doing.  Clear a way for yourself! Don't feel guilty if you take an hour to practice the piano or to go for a walk. Yes, we “should” exercise - but we can find a way that not only stretches our limbs and sinews but also allows our imaginations to wander, allows us a little quiet time for contemplation. 
    
     I'm not suggesting for a moment that you throw all your responsibilities out the window and head off into a life of dancing and debauchery! And I haven't forgotten that some of us have to care for ill and infirm children or other family members and must put aside the luxury of self-fulfillment for now. Most of us, though, have made a habit of being all things to all people and have forgotten that we don't always have to do what others think we “should.”    

Copyright. Monica B. Morris. October 2007

 

 

For the Love of Literature

My friends laugh when I tell them that I'm back in school, and that I'm learning how to read and write! The last time I sat in a lecture hall  was thirty-five years ago. From England not many years before, I was dazzled by the opportunity to go to college. California's “Master Plan” offered me free courses at the Junior College - no out-of-state fees-until I established residence and could attend the local State College, also nearly free at that time. Learning was a luxury for me. A gift. I reveled in it, happily  juggling time and tasks, sharing the caring of three young children, one still an infant, with a willing and supportive husband.

Graduate school followed, with the help of  a National Defense Education Act Fellowship. I could hardly believe my good fortune. The outcome was a twenty year career as a professor of sociology. When I began teaching, my husband took his chance for a late education and also moved into a profession. Ah, California! (Then).

To spend more time writing, I took early retirement, and typed up a storm! But, here I am, back at the same university where I used to teach, a student once more.

On the first day of class, professors sometimes ask “Why are you taking this course?” and the answer might be, “It's required,” or “ I need it to graduate.” “For the joy!” would be my response, although I might not say it aloud. My dream has always been to study literature, to read the great works in some organized way. The opportunity came when I saw a tiny item in the Los Angeles Times about the “California 60 Program.”

It took some research, some surfing the web, to learn that eligible people, sixty or over, can take degree courses at participating state universities, for virtually no cost. Presumably, this is to encourage men and women to find second careers or, simply, to enrich their lives. Only a few universities “participate” and would-be students have to make formal application, provide transcripts, and wait to be accepted. They have no priority standing;  they must take the courses that are still open after all the “regular” students have registered. Fair enough!

I have just completed “The British Novel from Conrad to the Present” and “Writing Fiction,” both at the senior level, both needed for admission to the Master's Program. I  have to earn the equivalent of a B.A. in English.

It has been a revelation! Instead of dashing through a novel, reading for story, and glossing over the boring bits, as I always have, I must now do a “close reading” of the works. The English majors in the class knew what that meant; I did not. The papers for the class entailed taking a passage out of a book and examining every word, every sentence, for its implications for the rest of the work. I didn't know where to begin, until the professor, generous with his time and advice, offered help and guidance. It was a challenge, a puzzle, which became an exhilarating creative exercise.

Whether this enhances the pleasure of reading, or hampers it is, of course, open to debate. As I was analyzing and inventing, I  was reminded of something Doris Lessing allegedly wrote. A university English major, dissecting one of Lessing's books, wrote to her for some insights. Lessing 's take on this  was that there are thousands of wonderful books waiting to be read. Why waste precious time closely scrutinizing just one book?  Professor?

As for the writing course, it, too, was all I hoped. The professor was delightful: a writer, a poet, an inspiration, he referred to us as “writers and scholars” and treated us as colleagues. He began most classes with a reading from one of his favorite works. It was like going to the theater. I couldn't wait to get to the classroom.

Why would I take a course in writing when I have already written and published several books and numerous journal articles? Like many faculty members, I had little formal training in writing,  honing my  skills as I went, feeling my way by instinct-and by constant reference to manuals of style.  It didn't hurt that I'd gone to English schools as a child, at a time when attention was paid to speaking and writing grammatically, but, still, I felt I had a lot to learn.

Being critiqued by a class member was chastening. My short story, which I thought was perfect, was torn to shreds! I brooded over this for a long weekend, until I realized that this bright, young person, was not my audience. My story was about an older man coming to terms with life's disappointments. How could a twenty-year old identify with that? She wanted the story to be about the young girl I introduced as a foil, not the least bit interested in “the old geezer.” Lesson well taken. Know your audience!

What shall I study next term? I pour over the class schedule, savoring the possibilities. Shall it be a seminar in 20th century American fiction? Or shall I venture into Shakespeare's sonnets? Or American Women Writers? Or African Literature? I'm like a child trying to decide among chocolate brownies, lemon meringue pie, and raspberry ice cream, wanting to taste them all.

* * *

 

Swan Lake at Sunset and Western
(or Dance of the Sugar Plum Traffic Cops)

The automobile and I are not friends. As a girl in England, attempts to learn how to drive ended badly: one instructor was rather too free with his hands and I, a straight-laced and properly shocked sixteen year old simply opened the car door at a red light and walked away.

My father persuaded me to try again - at a different school.  This time, to the instructor's horror, I managed to steer the car up onto the fender of the car alongside me -  a feat not recommended in the Highway Code.

I gave up, able to depend on excellent public transport, especially London's Tube - until the 1960s when I came to Northern California with my three young children. No Tube. No busses. No trains . Not even sidewalks in the village of Cotati  along which to propel a baby in a push chair. I had to learn to drive.

The quiet country roads offered  much easier routes for a new driver  than did the busy London streets.  I could practice three point turns and parallel parking as freely as in an empty parking lot. I passed the test on the first try, the  examiner shrugging away my bouncing off the curb with “You're not perfect - but it's never the new drivers who cause the accidents!”

So, I zipped into Petaluma to collect fresh eggs from the farm, dashed into Santa Rosa for groceries, delivered the kids to event after event.  I began to take my driving prowess for granted.

When we moved to Los Angeles to take up a Fellowship at USC, I discovered that I would have to maneuver the 10  and the Harbor Freeway - that part of the 10 where one has to negotiate across traffic lane after traffic lane to exit. I had no alternative; I managed.

I managed for years, until I was swept off the freeway, sideswiped by a  vehicle that veered into my lane. Broken nose, broken ribs, a totaled car - but I was alive to tell the tale, still in one, slightly scarred, piece.

For decades, now, I have avoided driving on the freeways, nor am I happy on the freeway when someone else is driving. I fidget, I do not relax. Ever. I tighten up. I wince. I am a pain in the neck.

I still drive, of course, and I do fine. Mostly, I drive only for the essentials: getting the groceries, visiting the doctor and the dentist, occasionally shopping for clothes. These are generally local trips, within ten miles of Hollywood, where I live. To get downtown, I use the subway - the Metro - and pretend I'm in London.

Recently, required to make some longer trips, I have become aware of how  difficult it is now to get from one side of town to the other. It took two hours to return from Santa Monica to Hollywood one Friday evening and even longer to get back from Carson, trips that used to take forty-five minutes, at most. Traffic stands still for minutes on end, tempers are frayed. For the first time in my driving career, a young man in an adjacent car flipped me the bird. I was so surprised, and so amused, that I laughed out loud, and flashed him a wide grin - not the response he had expected, to judge by his half-heartedly returned grimace. He would have raced away but he was cemented in place, as were we all.

Across the city, traffic is clogged from morning to night. The problem is exacerbated by the omnipresent road repair crews, and lane closings to accommodate equipment at building sites.

Add to this the frequent failure of traffic lights and you have what could be an image of Hell, a cacophony of  hooting and yelling and screeching of tires. The other morning, though, when I was halted at Sunset and Western by two cops directing traffic, I was treated to a performance I won't soon forget.

The two, a man and a woman, had  beautifully choreographed and coordinated their movements so that they seemed to be dancing to some glorious music in their heads. Their hand gestures were as courtly, as mannered, as if they were in a Moliere play. They beckoned cars on with elegant circling of their wrists; to stop the flow of traffic, they held up their palms delicately but decisively. They stepped around each other gracefully, bowing smoothly, matching their steps, moving from lane to lane in a well rehearsed ballet.

I was so enchanted by their polished performance that I was loath to move when it was my turn to be waved on. I wanted to call “Encore! Encore!” out of my window; I wanted to sit through another set. There aren't many compensations to fighting traffic in Los Angeles but these two almost made it worthwhile.

Monica B, Morris. Copyright 2006

 

 

Slap Happy

The slap, slap, slap, slap, slapping resounded through the air, punctuated by the occasional scream of pain and some slightly hysterical giggling. It sounded like dozens of hands thwacking dozens of bare buttocks.

Several rooms, each with ten willing sufferers stretched out on upholstered chaises longues were being simultaneously tortured by nubile girls and agile boys.

Where was this den of depravity? Were we in some ante room of Hell. Or was it Heaven? It was neither of these. It was a respectable  establishment devoted to Chinese foot massage.

Our guide had suggested that we use the spare time before heading to Guilin Airport for the flight to Shanghai to enjoy - if that's the word - this unique form of Chinese medicine.

“Afterwards,” he enticed us, “you won't need to ride the bus. You'll feel like running along behind it.”

“Foot massage” doesn't begin to describe the experience.

We removed our shoes and socks - and only our shoes and socks - and relaxed comfortably on the sofas, chatting companionably with our fellow travelers, while our feet were soaked in a clear golden liquid that might have been warm tea. As none of the attendants spoke any English, we had to draw our own conclusions.

In unison, the young people seated at our feet began their routine, as they did in the several other partitioned spaces. Attention was first devoted to the soles of our feet. I suppose they used acupressure, digging into selected points with what felt like Thomas screwdrivers. Every time I screamed - and it was excruciation - the little imp administering the pain, grinned from ear to ear with sadistic delight, and probed even more deeply with her scissors-sharp knuckles.

That torment finally over, pants legs and skirts were rolled up to our knees and work began on our ankles and calves. Either we were numb from the previous assault, or we were so grateful for the respite from the intense pressure,  the pummeling, hitting, and kneading that then began  felt almost pleasurable. The din was such, rising from  the palms of fifty or sixty operators beating and slapping fifty or sixty pairs of lower limbs, that all conversation ceased. The attendants had been trained to use cupped hands,  which made for the greatest possible magnification of sound.

We were still far from finished. Gestured to turn and sit facing the back of the chaises, we folded our legs in front of us and relaxed while our backs, necks and heads were expertly and soothingly manipulated. I could hear my husband crooning to himself. He loves to have his head rubbed.

In all, the “foot” massage lasted a little over an hour, every attendant in the place starting and finishing  the routine at the same time, trained to the second. The cost was twelve American dollars, and I have to wonder  if and when some enterprising entrepreneur in the States will set up a string of  “Chinese foot massage parlors.” The mass production aspect of what is usually an individual and personal treatment could make it a profitable proposition, especially at several times the cost of the service in China.

Did we run behind the bus on the way to the airport? No, but we were all in so euphoric a state, we felt no pain as we breezed through security at the airport, and we smiled all the way to Shanghai.

* * * * * * *

Copyright Monica B. Morris. 2005

 

Love in a Cold Climate

Hand in hand, on the edge of the sand
They danced by the light of the moon.
 -- Edward Lear

The owl and the pussy cat - hardly the most perfectly matched of couples - met, married and, we  assume, danced happily ever after.

The simplicity of  Edward Lear's image of love charms as it amuses for, in our post-modern era, “relationships,” - to use the contemporary term - have become exceedingly complex.

Listening to young, and not so young, women expressing regrets about their circumstances, it seems clear that were their wishes granted they would  either have to redirect their hopes and ambitions, or life with that elusive “soul mate” would soon turn from romance to rancor to ruin.

The mid- twentieth century model of marriage that dwells in the imagination is outdated:  it did not serve its participants well even at its peak. The economic well-being of the family rested solely on the husband's shoulders leaving most wives one man away from poverty. Still, the illusion of the perfect  1950's family persists. Mommy waited with cookies and milk for the children's return from school, and, prefaced by a simple blessing, evening meals were a family affair, when the day's activities were discussed, and life lessons were imparted.

On a recent three hour flight, a 37 year old woman, never married, confided that she longed to find a husband but she just didn't have time to look for one. She loves her work as a corporate lawyer, devoting sixty to eighty hours a week to her career.
“Closing a deal” she said, her face lighting with enthusiasm  “is the greatest thrill in the world”.

“I know if I were looking for a position, I'd do the research, spend time interviewing, and so on, and I know, too, that finding the right man requires the same kind of dedication - but I just can't spare the hours…”

Even if the perfect man arrived on her doorstep, what kind of marriage would she, could she, share with him? What kind of mother would she, could she be, to her children? Would she give up the work she loves?  No one would expect her to make that sacrifice.  She would, like most of the professional women I meet, hire nannies and baby sitters, and feel guilt and anguish that her marriage isn't what she expected.

One of my friends, a beautiful, once married woman, now fifty years old, has talked about remarrying for more than a decade. But since her divorce, she has gathered around her a stalwart group of like-minded women friends, mostly single, who support each other emotionally, take trips together, go out on the town together.

“I have such a good time with my friends. We laugh, we joke, we talk seriously about the world, we enjoy just hanging out. They're a delightful bunch. The men I meet are not a patch on these women. They're dull and self centered.”

Men her own age or older, she says, want to start a family, or start a second family. She has done with child rearing.  Younger men she findS shallow and boring.

Another woman acquaintance in her 40s, also divorced, complains that she cannot meet anyone who meets her standards. Among other forays into the world of dating, she has signed up with a matchmaking agency, paying a fee of many thousands of dollars for six “matched” introductions.

Her complaints about each of the men she has met so far  are trivial. “I don't like the way he dressed, especially his shoes”. “I don't like men with long hair”. “I like a man who understands food and wine, and that one didn't care about those things.”  It is clear to an observer, at least, that she, as an economically self-sufficient professional woman, neither needs nor really wants to settle for just one man.

Where do men fit in the reality of 21st century marriage? One man I interviewed was indignant that women nowadays expect men to “slot into” their lives. “They have careers and houses and cars and possessions. They don't need husbands except as accessories, as trophies.”

One is reminded of George Gilder's objections to he women's liberation movement in its heyday of the 1970s and 80's. Gilder acknowledged that women are as intelligent and as competent as men but he feared that once women took over “men's roles” - as they were then perceived, men would have no place in the world. Marriage  civilizes men, he wrote. Without the responsibilities of married life,  men would become wild and hedonistic.

Or perhaps they do become accessories, playthings, passing fancies - unlikely partners for an everlasting pas-de-deux by the light of the moon.

* * * * * * *

Knitwits

Once upon a time, every woman knew how to knit. Daughters learned from their mothers who, in turn, had learned from their mothers. I have a charming old sepia print of my grandmother showing one of her granddaughters how to wind the yarn over the needle and pull the stitch through. Both heads are bowed together in the deepest concentration.

Slowly,  knitting as a routine activity disappeared. Older women continued to make sweaters for their husbands and their grandchildren but younger women, now involved in careers, lost the skills, or never learned them.

Well, as they say, everything that goes around, comes around. You must have noticed that knitting is back, here in America. You can't have missed those skinny scarves draped around everyone's necks. Too thin to add even a calorie of comfort, they are a “fashion statement.” I've seen women waiting in line at the movies knitting away at these two inch wide strips. When asked, they say they are making gifts. In the shops, these items can sell for a hundred dollars or more.

Knitting shops have sprung up in neighborhoods across the land. They offer knitting lessons - and, just as smoke shops sell smoking paraphernalia, so these shops offer every kind of gadget and yarn to produce garments, simple and complex. But, where knitting used to be an economical way of clothing one's family - and a teenager might even have been embarrassed to wear something “homemade” - now, “Hand Knitted” has cachet, the yarn, alone, costing many times more than a sweater in a department store.

The knitting shops also sell finished, hand made sweaters, some for hundreds of dollars, but they  are nothing like the neatly finished garments of yesteryear. No,  instead of stitching loose threads into the inside, where they can't be seen, the knitter leaves them hanging outside as decoration. Seams are sometimes outside, too, so the garment looks as though it is inside out. and edges are made to curl instead of to lie flat.

Knitting needles used to cost a  couple of dollars; now, at up to twenty eight dollars a pair, a starter set of several sizes can break the bank. And for the price of a tiny ball of yarn - a handful of exotic fluff - you could feed a family of four to a decent lunch.

Long ago, in another lifetime, I designed patterns for both hand knitting and for home knitting machines and I knew that,  tucked into the top of a closet, were still some odds and ends of  yarns. The time was ripe, after, maybe, twenty years, to climb up and take inventory for, just as houses have appreciated, so, surely, had my little stock.

The haul was substantial, if not particularly inspiring.  A pound or two of this, and a pound or two of that, most of it in plain, practical colors and textures.

Imagination deserted me for a while. None of this stash was anything like the wild and hairy stuff currently in the shops. I mixed and matched and mixed some more - and created a fabric I would have discarded as outré years before but which might be acceptable now. I would knit a full length coat and finish it with a dramatic scarf, one so long it could be draped, flung over a shoulder, make a statement. In keeping with current trends, the coat would not be tidily buttoned but would curl away from a single clasp revealing  whatever clothing lay beneath.  The only question was, would I dare to wear it in public?

Well, I dared. I wore it to a concert first, and was embarrassed - and gratified -by the number of women who approached me to ask where I had found  that “marvelous” coat. I felt as proud as Joseph must have done in his coat of many colors….in my case, purple and blue  and brown and white and pink and more. I stopped clutching at the front to hold it together and let it curl open wherever its nature led. I stood tall and strutted my stuff.

I have worn it several times since and I must say, it changes my personality. And who could ask more of a home-made coat?

* * * * * * *

Monica B. Morris. Copyright 2006

 

Catching Up

In the years following  the second world war,  the late 1940s and the  1950s,  artists and writers, many American, some already recognized and celebrated, lived for a while in Europe, in Rome.  Among them  were  Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Samuel Barber, Harold Acton,  and others. Enclaves of  creativity were similarly formed in Paris after the Great War and in Bloomsbury, where Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard, set up the Hogarth Press, and gathered around them artists, writers, thinkers such as Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell and E, M. Forster. In New York in the 1920s, too, writers convened at the Algonquin Hotel. Imagine those legendary Round Table conversations!  Picture sitting there  next to Dorothy Parker…How one's wits would have been honed! Or sharpened?  Vidal's essay on Tennessee Williams, whom he called the Glorious Bird,  is a reminder that wits, like him, sometimes unsheath catlike claws!

These luminaries, we are led to believe,  formed intellectual  communities, eating and drinking together, sharing ideas - and beds -  gossiping with and about each other, and, when I read about them, I realize that I have never, ever, been within, even on the periphery of, such an illustrious group. When Joan Didion was in New York, inadvertently, perhaps, gathering material for later writings, I was living the narrow life of a lower middle-class girl in a London suburb, never  meeting a writer, an artist, of any kind. Marrying when I was barely out of my teens, I soon started a family, as was expected and required of a respectable young woman in that confined circle.

I wonder, sometimes, what I might have become, had I the advantage of an early college education, had I left home at eighteen to “discover” myself.  Am I resentful, regretful, melancholy about what might have been?

Yes, once in a while. And then I remember the satisfactions of those years. How comfortable I was in the role of good little housewife, adoring - and adored - young mother, competent handywoman - painting and decorating, gardening and knitting, sewing and baking - often weary, but never lonely, never bored.

I would not have belonged in Paris or Rome, Bloomsbury or New York among artists. At the Round Table, I would have been mute. I was in no way prepared to commune with those people. I am not prepared even now.

My involvement with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, as a docent for the Meet the Music program for elementary schoolchildren occasionally brings me face-to-face  with a world renowned musician or a high level administrator - and I freeze. Nothing intelligent or even intelligible emerges from my mouth.

Why am I never prepared? I have a doctorate in something, for God's sake! Why am I overwhelmed by talent, even by petty authority? I know a little bit about music, about management, about a lot of things. There's the rub, I know a little and they know a lot.

People say I am “aloof.”  It isn't true. I am shy. Outside the college classroom, that comfort zone where I can speak authoritatively, I tend to listen rather than opine. During my later formal education, when I sat on the edge of my seat greedily drinking in the wisdom imparted by  my professors, hardly believing my good fortune as a recipient of California's Master Plan, I was aware that  I should have known this stuff twenty years before, that I should be building on an already established foundation.

The formative years, by definition, shape one's personality, or aspects of one's personality, for ever.
                        I'm playing catch-up;  I will always be playing catch-up.

* * *

Copyright Monica B. Morris. 2006

 

The Reluctant Dog-minder

The British are reputed to love animals.  All animals. The Queen sets the supreme example with her horses, and her clusters of Corgis running before her wherever she goes. She is closer to her animals, it is rather nastily rumored, than to her children - who also love animals. Princess Anne, hints have it, so loved horses she came to resemble them, and Charles, too, was more comfortable playing polo on his horse than dealing with human beings.
    
     That being said, I must confess that I am that rare Englishwoman who is not generally fond of animals. I had a dog once, and loved him, but once he was gone I vowed never to have another. Dogs smell doggy. Their food smells doggy. They slobber. They need endless attention and affection. They tie a person down...
    
     So, how come I was recently seen in the Hollywood Hills frequently walking a very large, very elderly dog? The dog, Inge, named for the German Shepherd segment of her varied pedigree, belongs to Steve, my son, who was escorting my little granddaughter, his niece, back home to Houston after her summer visit to Los Angeles. In other years, I have flown to Houston alone, and back to Los Angeles with child, then to Houston with child, and back to Los Angeles alone. This year, to my relief and gratitude, Steve volunteered to take on one of those round trips. In return, I was to look after Inge while he was away.
    
     I suppose I was lucky to escape the responsibility of his four chickens. Where would I have put them, having no real garden? In the garage, was one suggestion. Fortunately, a neighbor offered to let them run free in her backyard, hoping none of the chicks would be dinner for her cats and dogs, who also run free in the backyard.
    
     Still, here I was with one old dog, complete with a pronounced limp and an unreliable bladder, We soon learned the hard way that this meant walking her every four hours, day and night. Early to bed, I set the alarm for two a.m. and flung my pajama'd self and the dog out of the house for a walk on the dark side. I walked the dog so frequently that, by the end of her stay, she no longer limped and insisted on running around the block. At two in the morning, rudely awaked from deep sleep, the last thing I needed was a fast, wild run through the hills.
    
     Now, Inge is a girl who doesn't say much, She doesn't bark. If she did, if she gave even the tiniest hint of her needs, she might not have required such frequent walks. But when she is moved to talk, she speaks volumes. The greeting she gave Steve when he came to collect her was unforgettable. She sang an entire opera, complete with arias of love and lament. She warbled for fully five minutes, letting him know how much she had missed him, how she was afraid he wasn't ever going to return. She kissed him so fervently that she nearly knocked him off his feet, It was beautiful, and touching.
    
     So, I may not care much for animals in general, but I must say I have developed a soft spot for old Inge, whose love for her guardian (I think that's the politically correct term these days) is larger than life itself.

Copyright Monica B. Morris. 2007

Let's Hear it for L.A!

     Los Angeles is a sitting duck. Anyone seeking a metaphor for the decline of civilization finds an easy target here.
    
     “Los Angeles is a Disneyland for the decadent, the thrill-seeker, the stimulation freak,” wrote Kate Braverman, the Los Angeles poet and novelist. “One doesn't come here for scenery or the culture.”
    
     Braverman isn't expressing a new idea. Writers have long delighted in putting Los Angeles down. At the very least, and at their most benign, they describe it as a place where all the crazies and loose screws slide when the United States tilts. Los Angeles is lotus land, where the sunshine makes people sluggish and where everything and everybody is laid back and hanging loose. At worst, according to social critics, people with self-destructive tendencies flock to Los Angeles, where they promptly shoot their veins full of heroin and stuff their nostrils with cocaine. They would never dream of doing these things in New York, or Chicago, or London, one supposes. Those places have culture, after all.
    
     Back in the thirties, when Nathanael West wrote his powerful indictment of Hollywood, there may have been some justification for a depiction of the place as Sodom and Gomorrah combined. Then, Los Angeles had little to offer besides the movie industry. People who came for a comfortable retirement in a warm climate found an emptiness so profound that they lusted for excitement; they found it in drugs, perversion, crime and violence. It was the day of the locust…
    
     Joan Didion, too, among the most cynical of writers about California, has not spared Los Angeles. Her terrible despondency, though, unlike West's, is because things are not what they once were. Personal freedom, mobility, and privacy - above all, privacy - are no longer possible.
    
     It's easy to write in extremes. It catches the reader's attention when a city is described as evil rather than good, as black rather than white, as death-inducing rather than life-enhancing. The ordinary, the average, the everyday events don't excite. Glitter and glamour, reports of abuse, violence and horror - these are exciting because they are not part of most people's experience.
    
     A balanced picture of Los Angeles would not deny that it is a city of excesses, as are most of the world's great metropolises. There is a lot to loathe in Los Angeles; the crime rate is high, the air is often filthy, good, cheap housing is scarce, the gap between the rich and the poor is wide, the public schools and rapid transit leave much to be desired and, for many people, the dreams they bring with them will never come true.
    
     On the other hand, the area is rich with fine universities, great teaching hospitals, and huge financial institutions. The entertainment industry, while still important, is no longer the only, or even the largest, employer. And Los Angeles is no longer culturally barren. Music, poetry, crafts and drama of all kinds abound and much can be savored free of charge or for a small donation. If the preference is for lavish productions in elegant settings, those are also here.
    
     The city enjoys an ethnic diversity unmatched elsewhere. Waves of immigrants bring constant enrichment and renewal to our culture. Restaurants offer more variety than we could sample in a lifetime of dining out. And simply counting the ways of worshipping here, of learning, of enjoying leisure, of healing, and of rearing children, could keep an anthropologist busy for a hundred years.
The majority of Los Angelenos do not spend their days and nights drinking and drugging themselves to death. They work hard and they play hard. They are “into” fitness: they jog, swim, cycle, “Spin,” skate, play tennis and volley ball, and work out at the gym. It would take a more vivid imagination than mine to translate these life-enhancing activities as manifestations of a death wish!
    
     Further, Los Angelenos find time for service. Without fanfare, they support endless causes: they donate life-giving blood and platelets, they run to raise money for the Special Olympics and for services to people with handicaps, they organize fund-raisers for the enhancement of the Music Center, they tutor non-English-speaking immigrants, they help language-disabled children in the schools, they serve as docents at  museums and for orchestras…  These are “ordinary” things, rarely reported in the newspapers.
    
     Perhaps it takes a foreign observer to see what Los Angeles is and how it has changed. John Grimond, in a long article in Britain's weekly magazine, The Economist, sees Los Angeles as “a great and wonderful city.” Perhaps it's time for our own writers to stop taking pot shots at Los Angeles and to take aim at their outmoded metaphors instead.

Telling Tales
A Short Story

She loved the way he talked about his wife of thirty-five years.
    
     “She travels quite a bit,” he told her, “but I have these pictures of her in my mind, so I can conjure her up at any time. She'll talk to me on the fly, sometimes, hovering in the doorway on her way along the hall, and - click! - I have her photograph, her profile half turned towards me, hair quivering, still in motion. Whenever I look at that doorway, I see her. I see her, too, reading in bed. She looks up from her book when I come into the room and smiles. I have that smile engraved in my memory - the way she crinkles her eyes, the tilt of her head - so she's there, on her side of the bed, even when she's on the other side of the world.”
    
     The young woman, whose only experience of a long marriage was of her parents' thirty years of mild bickering and friendly insults, was enchanted. She surreptitiously studied her seat-mate's features, wondering if his face might offer some clue, some characteristic, indicating that a charmed life was destined, was in the genetic make-up.
    
     At such close quarters, he was aware of her scrutiny. Encouraged, he went on.
    
     “We love to dance together. Always have. Dancing is about more than the steps, of course. It may not be about the steps at all.” He paused. “We were at a dinner party not long ago and an older woman - not much older - a widow, very attractive, had seen us dancing and asked, 'When are you going to ask me  to dance?' I couldn't be rude, so I stood up immediately. She was almost as tall as I am. The top of my wife's head comes just to my chin, and I'm used to the feel of her in my arms.  But this woman's face was right in my face. I couldn't avoid looking directly at her eyes and mouth. I tried to hold her at arms' length, but she moved right in close. She wasn't wearing anything under her blouse, and I could feel the softness of her breasts against me. It was most disconcerting - those body parts, her mouth so close, her breath on my face.”  He laughed, remembering. “I must confess, I thought about her, on and off, for a couple of weeks.”
    
     “Well,” the girl felt suddenly wise, as though she had matured into adulthood in the moment. “Well, her behavior was certainly provocative.”
    
     “Yes,” he agreed. “It was certainly that.”
    
     They were silent for some moments, the young woman a little startled at the revelations that can be offered between strangers.
    
     They would land in fifteen minutes. Seats in an upright position. Luggage  stowed under the seats in front of them. They braced for the moment when the wheels would hit the ground and the plane would shudder and bounce along the runway. He was changing flights, his destination London; she was on her first break from college. Her dad would be waiting to take her home.
    
     “Lovely talking to you,” her seat mate said, as they waited for the aircraft to pull into the terminal.  “I've never known the hours go by so fast.”
    
     She watched him stride across the concourse, the straps of his bag slung across his shoulders.  He was much taller than she had realized. Six feet one  or two, probably, and slender as a youth. She turned to greet her father and smiled at the contrast between the two men. One potato, two potato, couch potato, Dad, she thought, wondering if he ever spoke of his wife in that loving way. And she realized that she knew nothing of her parents' life together, except for the banter they exchanged in public. Maybe her father clicked pictures in his mind, too, and shared them with strangers. She couldn't imagine it.
    
     She'd read once that in every marriage there are two marriages: his and hers. But maybe there were as many marriages as there were people watching, as there were events to observe. Perhaps her older brothers' views of their parents were different from hers. 
    
     She kissed her father's bristly cheek and tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow as they walked towards the car park, each carrying a piece of luggage in their free hands.

    
     There's no law that says one always has to tell the truth.  Mark Mercer had enjoyed telling stories to that nice little girl; he'd enjoyed the way she'd hung on his every word, breathing in his lovely tale of marital bliss like the schoolgirl she was.  Once out of her sight, he let himself slump, the weight of his bag dragging his shoulder forward on the walk towards his international flight. It had been a long day and it was far from over. Ten hours to go before he hit Heathrow.  God, he hoped he could sleep.
    
     The flight was delayed. Settling into one of a row of hard seats, he inhaled deeply, his lungs feeling depleted, as though the air had been replaced with lint.  His upper back ached.  He rolled his head forward, to the left, back, to the right, and forward again in an attempt to ease the stiffness in his neck, and closed his eyes against the glare of the lights. If only he could escape the noise: the one-sided cell phone conversations; the announcements over the loud speakers; the complaints of travelers whose journeys had been extended two or three hours; the raucous television program playing on the far wall. Ear plugs were somewhere in his bag, but he was too tired to grope for them.
    
     “I wish I were alive!” The voice, yearning, gentle but clear, cut through the cacophony.  He opened his eyes to see who had spoken. That silver-haired woman talking to her companion? The words intrigued him, no matter who had said them.    
    
     He understood the sentiment. I wish I were alive, too. How long had it been since he felt truly alive, springing out of bed, hardly able to wait to start the day? The morning run through Green Park had become a chore, a must do. He used to delight in the easy movement of his limbs, the effortless racing along the paths, skimming across the grass, the soles of his Nikes barely touching the ground.
    
     Turning fifty had been easy. That birthday had come and gone, leaving no trace. But the sixtieth was something else. Sixty. That isn't old, these days, but the weight of all those years, the idea of being sixty, had affected him profoundly. The surprise party hadn't helped. Balloons printed with messages like “Over the Hill” and pictures of Father Time carrying a scythe were meant to be funny, but he wasn't amused. Worse  were the beautifully wrapped and be-ribboned packages that yielded not tomes of wisdom or art work for his study, but medical supplies: heating pads; indigestion tablets; arthritis aids, and even a package of adult diapers. And worst of all, his wife had laughed, laughed with the others, at these displays of execrable taste, and at his obvious discomfort. Was she getting back at him, getting even for thirty-some years of slights, of insensitivity and deceptions - as she perceived them? 
    
     He had, in fact, been faithful to her, physically if not always mentally. What red-blooded man doesn't follow a pretty woman with his eyes, doesn't sometimes have fantasies of what if? 
    
     On his hard seat, his small suitcase against his leg, his head dropped forward and he dozed, only half-asleep, waiting for the call to board. To judge from the crowds, the plane would be full, and he'd have to endure another ten or eleven hours with his knees pulled to his chin. There'd be time to
think about Claire and what, if anything, he could do, they could do, to save their marriage.
    
     When he spoke to strangers about his life, his wife, and his family, few would doubt that he was one lucky guy. His colleagues, envying him, called him Silver Spoon Mercer. That little girl really got an earful! He felt slightly foolish, now, remembering his exaggerations, but her eyes were so wide, he couldn't resist.
    
     Boarding had begun. He tried to straighten up as he walked towards the aircraft, wincing at the ache in his back, and at the prospect of the flight ahead. What was there to look forward to? To anticipate with pleasure?
    
     Once, a long while ago, Claire would have met him at  Heathrow, no matter how late he got in. They were giddy youngsters, then, so much in love that the days and weeks apart were real agony. He had to travel. Her work kept her in London, no matter what he'd told that little girl. Eventually, Claire filled those days and weeks with friends he didn't know, with activities he didn't share. They had so little in common, now, they'd become polite acquaintances rather than passionate lovers.
    
     Seated, now, between two overweight businessmen, he sighed deeply.
    
     “Are you okay, mate?” The man on his left was concerned.
    
     “Oh, yes, I'm fine. Thanks for asking, though.”
    
     The aircraft engines throbbed, the regular rhythm putting people to sleep all around him in the dim cabin. His eyes were closed, but his thoughts wouldn't let him go. Must the joy necessarily diminish with the years? He supposed so. The work of the world would never get done if infatuation didn't simmer down and change into . . . into what? What he and Claire had together? It wasn't enough. He wanted that old feeling back. He wanted to see her at Gate 5, drop his bag to the floor, and rush towards her. He wanted them to go home together, rush upstairs, and tear off each other's clothes. He wanted them to be in love again, the way they'd been in love before dullness set in.
    
     Both his seat companions were deep in sleep. One snored, the other whistled gently as he breathed in and out. He envied them. Were they going home to loving and passionate wives? He sighed again.
    
     What he had told that little girl used to be true, and he could still conjure up Claire's face, her smile, in a kind of snapshot. He cared for her so deeply that even thinking of their separating frightened him, brought bile into his mouth, made him shudder. She must know that.
    
     He left the plane, bag in hand, and as he moved towards the gate, he took a picture in his mind. Click! She would be there. He could see her, her beautiful smile lighting her face, her eyes crinkling with pleasure.
    
He walked through the crowds, looking for her on all sides. No. Not this time.  He trudged out of the building and called a cab.

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Copyright Monica B. Morris, 2008