Malo

true   I’m driving up Echo Park Avenue when I see him -- a seven-month-old puppy being dragged behind a Jeep Cherokee.  His leash is tied to the trailer hitch and he’s bouncing and skidding along the street as the Cherokee slows for a red light.  I lean on my horn, stop my car and run over as the driver steps out to see what the commotion is about.  His hands go to his head when he sees the dog.  “I had no idea,” he says over and over.  I lift the leash off the trailer hitch and the dog collapses by the sidewalk; there are blood puddles all over the street.  I kneel down next to him and see that two of his paw pads have been virtually stripped raw.  There are abrasions everywhere, deep ones, all along his legs and underside, but amazingly none of his limbs seem broken.  I’m sure there must be internal injuries. A police cruiser arrives and two cops walk over, a young woman named Orantes and a male cop in his fifties.  They radio for an Animal Rescue Unit from the shelter, but they warn it could take a long time.  I run over to my car, take out a Disney beach towel that belongs to my daughter, and cut it into strips to stop the bleeding.  Orantes holds the dog while I wrap the wounds.  The pup is quiet, obviously in shock and pain, but holding his own.  He’s all black, part chow, probably mixed with shepherd; his face is remarkably untouched by the accident.  Still, I think he’ll die. Orantes asks the driver if he knows the dog and the man says no.  He owns an auto parts store on Glendale Boulevard and whoever the dog belongs to shouldn’t have left him tied to his truck.  He had no idea.  “ I have to leave now, I have an urgent appointment.”   Orantes gives the man a skeptical look but she has no proof that a crime was committed.   She nods her head and the man rushes off. Orantes warns me Animal Rescue is often days late and I tell her if they don’t come in a few minutes I’ll take the dog to the vet.  I realize I’ve just agreed to adopt the dog.  Orantes smiles, she knows it too, and she’s glad.  She and her partner drive off and suddenly it’s just the dog and me.    Malo looks stoic in the harsh L.A. sunlight, head resting in my lap.  He licks my hands, which are covered in his own blood. Just then a man runs over, drops to the dog’s side.  “Malo, my poor Malo,” he cries.   His name is Roberto and he’s the owner.  He’s homeless, but he does odd job for the man who owns the auto parts store.  Roberto says he ties Malo to the back of the owner’s truck all the time.  His boss always untied him before, but today he was in a rush and must have forgotten.   Or else he was mad, Roberto isn’t sure. Roberto is tall and bony and has a salt and pepper beard, now wet with his tears.  He sits next to me on the sidewalk next and cradles Malo.  “I was only gone ten minutes,” he says quietly.  “Ten minutes, that’s all.” Malo and Roberto and I sit in a row, waiting for  Animal Rescue.  I look at Malo, wrapped all over in strips of beach towel.  Little Disney characters steeped in blood.  I tell Roberto that Malo needs stitches, pain medication clean bandages and antibiotics to control infection.  I say if he doesn’t want to wait for Animal Rescue, I’ll drive him to the animal shelter.    Roberto nods gratefully.  “God bless you,” he says, several times. As I leave to find a phone and get the shelter’s address I explain to Roberto that if Animal Rescue comes when I’m gone he mustn’t tell them he’s the owner, only a witness, or they won’t treat the dog.  After Malo recovers, Roberto can adopt him.  Roberto nods.   My car is parked across the street, by the house on the corner that belongs to Sister Lorena, the psychic.  I know she’s a psychic because the sign on her porch tells me so,  “Brighten your Future with Sister Lorena,” it says.  “Readings, Love, Health, Wealth.” Sister Lorena is standing in her yard leaning against her fence.  She’s young, pretty, wears a black and white checkered skirt and a turquoise headscarf.  Happy, sparkling eyes.   She calls to me, says she saw the dog being dragged, the man was doing almost forty.  I tell her we need to take the dog to the Animal Shelter, does she know where it is?   “Come inside,” says Sister Lorena, “I know someone we can ask.” She ushers me into the house, beyond the psychic reception room and into the kitchen in the back of the house.  It’s dark in here, all the shades are drawn and her husband, or brother, or friend, or whoever he is sits at the large wooden table drinking from a large mug.  He’s huge, and in the dim light he looks like Buddha.  Beatific.  Omniscient.   I ask him for directions.  Buddha says the shelter is on Alvarado, just a little past Temple.  “Are you sure”? I ask.  He gives me a patronizing, all knowing smile as if to say,  `Look where you are, you idiot.’  Sister Lorena nods sweetly. I thank them and leave, but when I tell Roberto where we’re going he frowns. “No way, Fred, the shelter’s somewhere in Chinatown.”   I’m thinking, who do I believe, Roberto or Buddha?  I’m thinking Roberto seems a lot more grounded than Sister Lorena’s psychic sidekick.  I’m thinking, forget it, Fred, it’s Chinatown.   I’m about ready to bolt;  the morning is almost gone, the sun is hot, and I should be at work.  But then I look down and there’s Malo, looking right up at me, eye to eye.  Silent Malo.  Brave Malo.  Doesn’t Malo mean bad?  Damn right, he’s bad,  he’s the baddest dog I know.  I tell Roberto I’ll go home, call the shelter and get the address. I’ll come back and take them over there.  Roberto blesses me again. I shoot home for the address, but when I return, ten minutes later, Malo and Roberto are gone.  Lying on the sidewalk is one torn piece of towel, half of Goofy’s bloody face stares up at me.  I drive down the block, a little worried that Roberto gave up on me and carried Malo away, but there’s no sign of them anywhere.   It’s time to move on, but I’m obsessed, I have to know what happened.  I park my car and bang on Sister Lorena’s door. She opens the door and silently motions me to follow her back to the dark kitchen.  Buddha hasn’t moved.  Sister Lorena tells me that Animal Rescue came as soon as I left.  Roberto must have said the right things because they took Malo and Roberto seemed okay when he walked away. I feel relieved, but a little sad that I’ll never see Malo again.  On my way out I turn to Buddha.  “Just so you know, the shelter’s not on Alvarado, it’s in Chinatown.”   We face off -- that’s right, pal, Chinatown.  Buddha takes a sip from his mug and shrugs.  At the door, I thank Sister Lorena and say goodbye.  “So when am I going to do your reading?” she says.  I ask her if she knows what will happen to the dog.  She smiles her mysterious smile.  “Malo will be fine,” says Sister Lorena. Two weeks later I drive by Echo Park Lake and I spot Roberto.  Roberto recognizes me right away, comes striding up to shake my hand.   "C'mon, Fred, I want to show you something."   Roberto guides me toward an ancient, powder blue Dodge parked near the lake that hasn’t run for ages but functions smoothly as their living quarters.  Roberto lives in the back seat and Malo has the front.    I peer in the driver’s side to see Malo resting comfortably under the steering wheel, an I.V. drip attached to his leg, water and food on either side of him.  Roberto shows me where the stitches are, brags about how quickly Malo is recovering, points to all the medicines resting on the dashboard. Roberto reads my mind, knows my concerns.  “Don’t worry, Fred, when I adopted him those people at the shelter put me under a court order to take him back for treatment.  I’m taking real good care of him.” “What about food?”  I ask.  “We get all the food we need from the church and what I make working.   And I always make sure he eats before I do.”   Roberto smiles, proud of his doctoring and proud of his dog. There’s no reason to stay any longer.  I’m sitting in the front seat of the Dodge and it’s time to say goodbye.  Why am I holding back?  I scratch Malo behind the ears and he looks up at me with big brown eyes, tail lightly tapping the accelerator.  My throat feels tight.  He’s bad all right.  They say dogs don’t smile, but they do.

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2008-05-24T16:43:29-07:00

His face is remarkably untouched by the accident. Still, I think he’ll die.

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Malo

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2009-12-27T03:21:31-08:00

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true I am no Bond girl, let alone a 007, but there was a time in the early 80s when I found myself going undercover, receiving anonymous coded phone calls and taking taxis on my own to unknown destinations just to...have tea with Yasser Arafat. At that time in the early '80s, The South China Morning Post, a venerable Hong Kong newspaper, was my base as a journalist. This necessarily involved spending many an evening in the Foreign Correspondents' Club, at 2 Lower Albert Road in Central, chewing the fat at the bar with other journos. The ceiling fans whirred and the small palm trees dotted around the rooms broke up the brick and walls into something less tangible and more full of possibilities. I sat and listened, drowning in an inevitable cloud of smoke and the chat of long-timers who had been at The Tet Offensive or The My Lai Massacre or some other painfully momentous period of history. I loved the heady atmosphere of those very ancient and much venerated old hands such as the legendary Australian, Richard Hughes, the doughty old author of 'Borrowed Place, Borrowed Time', and photographer Hubert Van Es (who took perhaps the most recognizable image of the fall of Saigon, the helicopter evacuating people from the US Embassy roof) and Claire Hollingworth. Claire, who always seemed to be a very tenacious 105 even then, was especially inspiring and generous with her encouragement to idiot rookies such as myself who hoped just a little bit of her professional magic might somehow rub off. Everyone knew that she was the 'One', the doyenne at the Foreign Correspondents' Club, who had clearly done more in her life than just prop up the bar. In 1939 at the age of 27, and having been a journalist for less than a week, Claire had crossed over in a borrowed consular car from Katowice, Poland to Germany. On the way, she had noticed line upon line of German tanks hidden under tarpaulins. Being a quick-witted girl, she had cabled 'The Daily Telegraph's news desk: "Hitler about to invade Poland". In July 1946, she was only a few hundred feet from the King David hotel, the British administration's HQ, where she were staying when it was blown up, killing 91. She later had the world exclusive on her exposure of Philby as the Third Man in the Philby, Burgess, Maclean espionage because she uncovered his disappearance on a Soviet ship from Beirut to Odessa in January 1963. She went on to open the Daily Telegraph office in Beijing at the end of the Cultural Revolution and later reported on the Tiananmen Square massacre. Every young journalist who met her knew that it was these elusive, unsought for moments that made the more boring reality of being a mere hack on the beat worthwhile. So, you see, Yasser Arafat was all Claire's fault. The FCC scent must have rubbed off on me rather too well. My intention was never to be in the centre of the so-called 'action', or to have anything to do with death, war and mayhem. It was then, and still is, to do a great job in faithfully telling a story to my paper's readers in regular interviews in the Sunday edition. These, as it happened, were with everyone from Jackie Chan to Dame Barbara Cartland, to Kurt Waldheim and David Bowie. It was an eclectic mix. I began to feel like John Fowles' 'Collector' because it seemed these meetings, like passing butterflies whose wings had to be pinned down, were somehow flying at me directed by fate. Their choosing was nothing whatsoever to do with me. They just came onto my radar. After a couple of years or more of repeated Sunday exposure, there was a readership in Hong Kong that showed something passing for solid interest in my pieces which made the work worthwhile, wrapped up as it was with covering less scintillating subjects. The job of getting out the story was always what mattered. Then, one day in the Club, this elegant, well-dressed correspondent from The Far Eastern Economic Review approached me, speaking in that divine brand of highly articulate, better-than-perfect, English that only those from the Sub-Continent can master. We had had till then had only a nodding acquaintance. "I have a story for you", he said. Feigning only mild interest (in case it turned out to be totally lame as in the past had so often been the case) I smiled politely and listened. "But we can't discuss it here.," he said. My voracious readings of Graham Greene as a teenager were about to lead me perilously astray. It was only very gradually that I learned the subject matter, the PLO. After much subterfuge mixed with discussion, it was arranged that I would interview a member of the Organization, a very high level "diplomat", who was coming to Hong Kong. Many other publications were too biased in the debate to be approached to cover the interview, I was told. Problem was, no PLO member was ever supposed to be in that territory, at any time, ever. I must have been witless to engage in the nonsense that followed, secret phone calls, etc. However, it must be said that I interviewed the man responsibly and produced a good front page story that pleased the Editor who felt, as I did, that it should run. It was in no way biased to either side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and I felt somewhat pleased that I had done a good job, despite being the very last person on earth who would claim any proficiency at all in the subject. It was just another interview. But once baited, would I be easily hooked again? At the time, you will remember, Yasser Arafat was distinctly persona non grata and, there are few who would not argue, quite rightly so. However, in April of that year, 1984, in Oslo, Norway, Arafat had suggested in a radical departure from previous policy that he would negotiate with Israel on the Palestine Question. Everyone, including me, was well aware of the hideous acts carried out by the PLO and equally aware of equal and opposite deeds on the part of Ariel Sharon and others in Israel in the war that dated back to 1948 or even longer back to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Having been brought up in London though, with the likes of Oscar-winning actress, Vanessa Redgrave, and others vociferously promoting Free Speech, Arafat and immersed in the merits and demerits of the Palestinian Question, it seemed to me that if the man had something to say, it would have to be reported. Permanently attired in camouflage, 'kuffiyeh' or headdress, and the Five O’clock Stubble when it was anything but cool, Arafat was never called by this name. Rather like members of a mob, his nom de guerre or 'kunya' was 'Abu Ammar' where 'Abu' usually refers to someone's first-born son, meaning 'father of…'. Arafat did not have a son named Ammar; ironically, the nickname here meant "the Builder". Looking back, it is hard to believe what must have gone through my head except I knew that he was to be visiting Malaysia to be received by the King and to speak to a large conference and that I should go. A meeting would be arranged. Arafat's PLO faction had full diplomatic status in Kuala Lumpur, unlike Hong Kong (till 1997 a British territory) and he was to be officially a received as Head of State. No diplomatic or journalistic contraventions there, then. The story was that Malaysia's foreign minister claimed that Israel should recognize the PLO before demanding that it recognize Israel. It was a sweaty day in Kuala Lumpur, as if I did not have reason to sweat enough, and I met with the man and his entourage for tea at their hotel. He spoke not a word of English, and I not a word of Arabic but we muddled through with an interpreter.  Arafat was polite, intense and voluble. He smiled throughout and at the end I was surrounded and escorted out to the street. The story was won, the piece printed and I moved on. Have I had cause to regret going to meet Arafat, you wonder? Yes, most of all because there are very few editors anywhere who regard this brief interview in KL as something worthy of comment on my resume. Few show sympathy with my naive attempt to get at something we call 'truth' even though the resulting story unquestionably offered something solid to a highly controversial debate which rages still now, nearly 23 years later. There are countless friends, too, who are completely appalled that I even considered the idea for more than a few seconds without dismissing it out of hand. And then there are those who consider the act of interviewing him, of being even in the same room as him, as being akin to rampant anti-Semitism or even terrorism. Such a meeting in these days of FISA wiretapping and the "War on Terror" would be unthinkable and completely out of the question under any circumstances whatsoever. In reality, there are also legions of people who do not even care about The Palestinian Question, my meeting with Arafat and more who don't believe me, so the whole exercise was rather pointless. What I had been trying to do was present one side of a complex, twisted and hideous story in a balanced way. Whether that ambition was realized I will never fully know as I will also never know to what precise end my interview had been orchestrated and exactly by whom in the first place. My idealistic intent, now after more than 30 years in this game (and it is always a 'game') is somewhat mitigated and my senses are ever on the alert for spin and manipulation. That makes for a lot less honest reporting in many ways but also for a quieter, less paranoid life. No more Front Pages for me. All of which goes to show something I had always known anyway. If you ever let your ego get in the way of your professionalism, even just the tiniest weeniest bit for more than one split second, it can only be your downfall. Just look at what they did to CBS' poor old Dan Rather, a consummate TV interviewer and infinitely superior journalist who fell prey to the same 'there's a sucker born every minute' scam. Idealism in life is fine but in journalism it is an unquestionable flaw. Even the lowliest reporter must be the medium not the message and only an idiot allows (herself) to be manipulated in the dissemination of propaganda. When the doe-eyed Husain subsequently had the temerity -- bundled as always with oodles of charm -- to issue a serious invitation for me to to go to meet Saddam Hussein (at the time, a US ally with Iraq in its war against Iran) in Baghdad in 1986 or to tarry awhile in Gaddafi's tent with other, exclusively female, reporters in Libya, and then again much more recently to go and visit Arafat in his Gaza compound when he was ill and under siege, you do not need to wonder at my reply. In each case, it was a very firm, unhesitating and uncompromising 'No'.

2008-05-26T17:46:27-07:00

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2008-04-01T12:20:55-07:00

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2008-07-20

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2009-09-24T10:13:57-07:00

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1,891 words.Submitted at 1:19 pm San Francisco time.

2008-04-01

2008-05-12T14:51:59-07:00

It was only very gradually that I learned the subject matter, the PLO.

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2008-04-01T12:20:55-07:00

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1723

My Tea With Yasser Arafat

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2009-12-27T03:21:31-08:00

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true <div style="margin: 1ex;"> <div> <div style="margin: 0px; font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; min-height: 14px;"> <div style="line-height: 150%;">   My mother and I are singing together. It is dark and it is cold outside and inside the dining room lights are low and the air is filled with smoke and we are singing together. The stereo is turned up loud enough so we can hear the tape in the next room, but it almost doesn’t matter: we sing over it, adding long silly flourishes to Peggy Lee’s voice, swooping low and holding onto the ends of words just a second too long, tipping back and forth in our chairs for dramatic effect, belting out the chorus so hard our voices break against each other. Sometimes I laugh in the middle of a phrase, a giggle escaping even though I’m trying so hard to keep playing along, and I watch her face, eyes closed, glasses off, waving her cigarette through the air like a wand. This is the sort of moment where she is most recognizable to me, where I can understand how exactly I came to be her daughter. The song winds to its brassy close and we fall back into ourselves. From the next room I hear my own voice on the tape, hesitant and tinny, relaying the names of the last three songs before telling some story to introduce what’s next. I had decided a few years ago to do a special episode of my college radio show, playing only songs my mom liked, so I could tape it and send it to her. I spent weeks hunting down an obscure classical piece and a samba tune and some shitty electronica that was part of the weird MTV habit she’d picked up. She’s kept it by the stereo ever since. Tonight we’ve been sitting at the dining room table talking since getting back from dinner a couple hours before. The conversation is meandering, though not easy. I am trying to explain myself to her, to explain our family to her. She tells me she doesn’t understand and doesn’t want to, but I know, maybe for the first time, that if she’s angry, it’s not because of me. Maybe it never has been. When the AM station switches from staticky talk radio to late-night fusion jazz, she wrinkles her nose distastefully, and it’s then that I put in her tape. Every time a song clicks off, we puzzle for a moment over what might come next, as though it might be an unhappy surprise, and we’re somehow truly delighted when we recognize the opening bars of a song we both know by heart. For a while we keep talking, but the conversation starts to fade in and out as we drop words to pick up a lyric instead. By the third Steely Dan song, we’ve left the old hurts and secrets for another day, smoothing them over by singing together. Tonight I’m surprised by the stories I told on the air that morning, all tender and sometimes funny. I listen to my younger, analog self rattle off things I’d forgotten, embarrassing factoids about my childhood and recitations of stories about her life she’d told me before. Listening to her voice and my own for the first time, I can hear their shared timbres. We sound different enough, I remark to her, that I can’t believe anyone ever mistakes me for her on the phone, my voice pitched lower but also a little sharper. Yet we are still unmistakably of each other, if only because our voices have been aged and weathered by the same fierce affections, the same loving struggle. In our voices, I think, you can hear a little of what we’ve done to each other, what we’ve meant to each other. Watching her face in the half-light, I am so full of love that I never want the tape to end. I want us to rest together in this unburdened ease for long enough to let the damage off. I want every stupid chord of every silly song to carry inside it some sign of my affection and my devotion. I want her to know that I learned all the words from her, that I remember every time we danced in the kitchen, that I see her in my shadow every day. I want to sit at the table singing with her forever. <div style="line-height: 200%;"> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div>

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2008-07-08T15:28:45-07:00

The song winds to its brassy close and we fall back into ourselves.

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2008-05-11T21:13:57-07:00

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1986

The Last Night

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2009-12-27T03:21:31-08:00

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true     My father got it into his head to invite beat poets to read at The University of Kansas. They'd get 300 bucks and a place to stay, and found it a convenient way to pocket a little dough on their drives across the country. Soon the poet Allen Ginsberg arrived at our house.  His entourage included his lover, Peter Orlovsky and Peter’s brother Julius, who, it now seems clear, was autistic, and a few other characters. My brother and I spent hours sharing our walkie-talkies with Julius, playing with him as if he were a strange, large child. He couldn’t talk well, and made chirping noises into the receivers, laughing nervously when we spoke to him from far away. Life magazine had sent a reporter and photographer to our house to record the invasion of the poets for a story on how the East Village freaks would mix with the prairie freaks.  The photographer slept in our attic and snapped pictures all day, following the long hairs around as they scared the locals, performed, and sat stoned out of their minds watching our dryer go round and round. On the second day of the visit, my father took Ginsberg to Kansas City to see the collection of Asian art at the Nelson-Atkins museum. On the way the photographer pulled out a joint and my father, in his pinstriped suit, got stoned for the first time. At the gallery, the security guard turned them away – too freaky. My father loved it. Ginsberg commemorated the voyage with a poem, “Entering Kansas City High,” which dad published in broadsheet form. Later during the visit my father took Ginsberg and his crew, all of them high, to a reception of psychologists and psychiatrists at the Menninger Foundation, a large psychiatric hospital in nearby Topeka. They had to pass my grandmother’s farm on the way. I’m sure she felt them drive by, their insane energy coming close as she pushed her palms against the air to keep it from entering her. They continued towards the hospital, poet energy defeated by farmer. Unleashed among the staid mental health professionals munching Chex Mix and sipping cocktails at the Menninger Foundation, Ginsberg and company suddenly began to disrobe, for no reason other than to shock the establishment. Revealing their hairy chests, red belly buttons and wrinkled homosexual weanies to the crowd was a form of protest against traditional mores, or something – who knew what was going on in those days? The psychotherapists responded with chilling morality and the party ended abruptly. Back at home, the poet held forth in our living room, fully clothed and chanting along to his charming little Indian music box.  One night during Ginsberg’s visit, my bedroom door opened as I was falling asleep. I looked up to see the poet, his curly hair and beard backlit by the soft nightlight. He held a plate of spaghetti and steak. “What are you dreaming?” Ginsberg said, in his strange, impish way. He wasn’t like other adults. He was sweet. He was like me. I liked him. His lips were like a woman’s, reddish and soft. His eyes in the dim light were wide, dark holes. He kneeled on the floor and held the plate out for me to inspect. “Steak,” he said. I’d never had steak. It was what rich people ate. He sat cross-legged with the plate on his lap and cut the steak with my mother’s best silver. “Try some,” he said. I took a bite and chewed, the steak releasing delicious juices into my mouth. I smelled wine on his breath. I felt energy pass from him to me. It was good. He ran his fingers through my crew cut, then took a bite of the spaghetti himself, wiped his beard with a napkin, fed me another bite of steak. I felt his eyes imploring me, but I didn’t know what he wanted. I felt that I was doing something wrong. He was needy and unsatisfied. I was perplexed. Soon he left.  The unsettling memory of our brief exchange stayed with me forever. Nearly 40 years later, after Ginsberg died, I asked one of his friends what she thought of him. “He was a loving, very kind man,” she said. “You’d go into his apartment and see immediately that he was the real deal. It was very simple. He wasn’t a consumer. There were wood and brick bookshelves. His all-important archives. And a Buddhist shrine, with photos of friends. And books -- he loved to talk about poetry and ideas.” She paused. “But I never once had a conversation with him in which he didn’t, inexplicably and without any relation to the subject at hand, veer off into a discussion of his fondness for boys. It was creepy. I could never reconcile these two sides of him.” As a child, I liked him. I liked the way he wore his hair long. The way he almost danced when he spoke. The way he, unlike any other adult, went out of his way to bring me a bite of steak. <o:p> </o:p> A few weeks after Ginsberg left our Kansas home he appeared on the cover of Life, sipping tea from a translucent china cup, smoke curling up around him. “That’s our tea cup,” I cried. “Your father’s tweed jacket,” my mother said. It was rare for a little Kansas town to make the cover of Life. And my father had done it all himself. This was the first time fame had entered our household and I could tell it made my parents feel good, indeed. We were special. We kept that issue of life on our coffee table forever. I loved the excitement of it all, and from that point on this quest for fame passed like a virus through our family. We had done nothing, really, but we liked the attention. My father remained friends with Ginsberg until the poet died. I met Ginsberg several times over the years, at dinner parties. As an adult I found him to be an odd, repellant character. But everyone fawned over him, including my father. Witnessing Ginsberg in action taught me that fame allowed a person free passage. People would overlook your failings in order to be close to your talents, your charisma, the validation that your friendship incurred. For many years after, I’d drop the mention of Ginsberg visiting our house into conversations as a way of establishing my credentials, of making myself be somebody. It was my way, like my father before me, of being bigger than Kansas, more important than the Midwest.

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2009-10-07

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2009-10-07T07:54:25-07:00

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2009-05-15T15:46:00-07:00

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2008-06-13T00:03:13-07:00

At the gallery, the security guard turned them away – too freaky.

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2009-05-15T15:46:00-07:00

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2008-06-13T00:03:13-07:00

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1202

The Beat Poet

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2009-12-27T03:21:31-08:00

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true I never used to have outrageous tales to tell about my bad dates, because before I was married and divorced, I drifted happily from one long-term boyfriend to another. Each relationship--or “storia,” as they call them in Italian—ended, but we remained amicable friends. I speak fondly of my ex-boyfriends; my ex-husband, however, is another story. It’s a sorry tale: I walked in on him entwined with someone else while we were still newlyweds, he left me (taking all the furniture and financial assets with him), destroyed my trust in men and my own judgment, and, timing-wise, ruined my chances of buying my own house or having my own children.  My friends were sympathetic, but eventually I got tired of hearing myself repeat that miserable tale, so I started looked for a new man, and a happier ending. I tried online dating, browsing the Man Catalogues on the Internet, thinking that with one click I could get that witty psychologist who loved skiing and Italo Calvino delivered right to my door. I signed up for everything: Match.com, Nerve, the Right Stuff--for Ivy League types—and even Eharmony, until I found out it was run by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family (I kept wondering why I always matched up with policemen from Novato—I must’ve checked “occasional recreational drug use” or something, and they sent me right to the cops). From the beginning, I had spectacularly bad luck: the plastic surgeon who mentioned that if he just trimmed a little cartilage off the sides of my nose and lengthened the tip, I’d be pretty; the physicist who didn’t show up, then later called saying the police had stopped him, mistaking him for a murder suspect; the “sexy, outdoorsy” chap who turned out to be Dick Cheney’s doppelganger. They were bad dates, but I laughed later on, recounting them at dinner parties and over lunch. That made going on blind dates a lot easier: No matter how disastrous, I’d end up with a good story—in fact, the worse, the better, as far as the retelling was concerned.  I never lost hope that I’d meet the right guy, but in the meantime, I amused my friends. My married pals came to depend on me not only for the vicarious thrill of dating, but to make their own domestic dramas and disappointments pale by comparison. There was the screenwriter, for instance, who spoke Italian, loved to cook, and invited me on a second date to his place for dinner. When I walked into his apartment, the stench was so overwhelming I had to immediately crack a window. The living room had filthy white carpet with a runway of black where he’d tromped from kitchen to bedroom. The couch was shiny with grease. He cooked a great penne in vodka sauce, but I lost my appetite looking at all the crusty dishes in the sink. I excused myself to go to the bathroom and, well, I’ve been in nicer bathrooms in bus stations in Morocco. I ate and ran. Then there was the art director, who was all charm and intelligence and creative inspiration when we met for drinks. He asked me out again, on a drive to the country for lunch. On the way up, he described how unfair his divorce had been, and it emerged that his wife had a temporary restraining order against him. Slowly and sickeningly, it dawned on me that I was in the car with a guy who’d been so crazy or violent that his ex had to resort to a court order to keep him away. It also turned out he really wasn’t working as an art director any more, and he’d somehow lost his job as a substitute teacher, too. Finally, he pulled over to the side of the road and broke into tears, telling me about the night he had to stay in Atascadero, which is not a nice hotel in Carmel. It’s the California hospital for mentally disordered criminals.  I very, very gently suggested that maybe we ought to just turn around and go back to the city. Two weeks later, I was participating in a reading with some well-known Bay Area writers, including Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, and Dorothy Allison. Right in the middle of the reading, there was a pounding on the window from a man standing outside. It was my criminally insane friend, trying to get my attention. I pretended I didn’t know him—who’s stalking Dave Eggers?-- and didn’t so much as glance when security took him away. Finally, back home, I met a guy who seemed normal and nice. He, like me, was from Colorado, liked to ski and ride bicycles, and he was a chef. He invited me out on a long ride, where I learned that he used his bike so much because he wasn’t allowed to drive, for some reason. It was a gorgeous day, ending up at my favorite bistro. I love eating with a chef-- even if he did forget his wallet. After he drank several glasses of wine, he bicycled back with me to my house, gallantly, since it was after dark, and we opened another bottle. Then he wanted another. I was rather shocked at his alcohol consumption, but I’m not about to regulate anyone. He was getting sloppy, I was losing patience with him fast, and wanted him gone. I suggested he’d better go home, and went to the kitchen. When I returned, there he was on my couch, with his clothes off. It wasn’t time for him to take his clothes off, not remotely so. Things were going in the opposite direction. I asked him why the hell he had his pants off, and he explained that he’s just one of those people who likes to be naked. Then he let loose with a small eruption and an apologetic smile, and asked for paper towels. I got him some, anything to get out of the room, and came back to find him, pants on again, thank God, wiping something off the couch. After he left, I went to inspect, and initially thought it was chocolate. It was not. When I retold the tale of that last bad date to my friends, they weren’t so amused. The story had crossed a line from hilarious to pathetic.  Suddenly I wasn’t laughing any more about the fact that I hadn’t been in a good relationship in almost ten years, that my love life had become a joke. I didn’t like being the character I had become in my own stories. In each tale, I was a fun-loving, outdoorsy gal who likes Haruki Murakami, hiking, and anything Italian, who mysteriously ends up being the hapless bystander on a bad date, suffering in the company of one of the many clueless, damaged, shallow, narcissistic single males over 40 who populate our major coastal cities. When it came down to it, I was always the victim--particularly in the Big Story of my divorce, betrayal, heartbreak, and subsequent financial ruin at the hands of my ex-husband. What if, asked a wise friend who was neither laughing nor sympathizing with my stories, you told that story differently? What if you told it as if you were accountable for what happened to your marriage? I tried it—for laughs—and mentioned the choices I had made, the red flags I’d ignored, the fact that I’d brushed aside my ex-husband’s ambivalence because I was determined to get married and have children. I told the story that way, and surprisingly, it was a relief. Blame did not fall down upon my head. I saw I’d made mistakes, to be sure, and the great thing about mistakes is that if you recognize them, you don’t have to repeat them. I don’t have to marry that guy again. Nor do I have to be afraid of a new relationship, constantly choosing inappropriate men to date so I’ll have an excuse to avoid what had become my greatest fear. Did I really think RealMan4U was going to a viable partner--or yet another character in a story that proved it was ridiculous for me to be in a relationship? Until now, the tales I’ve told about my marriage and dates have made it impossible for me to have a different, happier ending.  So I’m no longer out there dating to amuse my friends with a worst-case scenario story. Now I’d like to tell them something boring over lunch: You know what? I met a nice guy who really likes me.

2008-06-14T12:56:00-07:00

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2008-05-29T10:58:17-07:00

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55.175

2009-08-21

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2009-07-23T12:43:55-07:00

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2009-05-15T15:41:00-07:00

2008-05-29

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2008-06-10T12:51:11-07:00

I never lost hope that I'd meet the right guy, but in the meantime, I amused my friends.

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2009-05-15T15:41:00-07:00

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false entry

2008-05-29T10:58:17-07:00

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2419

My Not-So-Funny Love Life

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2009-12-10T22:21:31-08:00

622

true

true Where to begin. I think it began in a hill-top town in Northern Spain, driving back one wintery afternoon to Barcelona. And a dream. In this dream a woman, dressed in white, stands with her face turned away from me. I have had this dream many times, and have never seen the woman’s face. She wears a long veil, and blue sky surrounds her. Then, very slowly, she turns toward me and, just as I am about to see her face, the dream ends. I have a fear that, if I see her face, I’ll die. So on this day I had had the dream, woken to it. The wind was beginning to lift, maybe a storm coming, and we decided to return to Barcelona. We left the hill-top town and began the zig-zag descent through the pine forest, little bits of debris blowing across the road. Suddenly, as we rounded a bend, a tree fell across the road just one car in front of us. Conscious of our proximity to the bend, I got out to ask the driver in front if she would pull over. But at that moment, as I stood by the driver’s window, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that the figure from the dream was addressing me: Stand back. Now. I didn’t hear it. I felt it. And as I stepped backwards a second tree fell, right in front of me, its topmost branches hitting the place where I had stood, moments earlier, catching the wing mirror of the car. And so it was that  I felt a peculiar affinity with the Woman in White, as I came to thnk of her. So. Later. I was in Liverpool, England. Had had a meeting, quite stressful, successful, but tiring, and I longed to walk on a beach. Just this. Well, Liverpool is a port and I realised that if I followed the dock road North then I would, eventually, come to a beach. As I meandered the pot-holed road, seemingly for miles, I noticed a sign: Another Place by Antony Gormley. Antony Gormley is an installation artist, big things, usually metal. I wondered what he’d done, so I followed the signs and I came to a beach: Crosby Beach at the end of the dock road, where sentinel windmills fanned the air. At first I wondered if the windmills might be it, the installation. I parked the car, got out. And suddenly, quite suddenly, I had this overwhelming sensation that I had been born, in this place, very close to where I now stood. Now I knew nothing of my birth, having been adopted as a very small child. Only that I was born in Liverpool. Two fat old ladies walked along the path toward an ice-cream van. ‘Is there a maternity hospital near here?’ I asked. Yes, they said, there used to be, and pointed to a very large old house, turn of the last century, about five hundred yards away. It was a convent. An order of Augustinian sisters. Once a hospital, now a guest house. The door behind reception was on the latch; I went in. And immediately I was filled with this same sense of belonging, of recognition. The large rectangular stained glass window above the staircase was familiar to me, from dreams. I poked about, found the chapel with the grille dividing the guest house from the convent proper. Found the baptismal font. Two sisters appeared, white, veiled: can we help you? (Too polite, far too polite, to mention my trespass). ‘I was wondering,’ I ventured, ‘if I might have been born here…’ Well, said the sister who had addressed me, if I had been born in this part of Liverpool before, and she mentioned a date, then yes, there was nowhere else…What was my name? She would look up the record. Well, I said, I had been adopted as a child and my name was now changed… Did I know the original name? Yes, Marie Therese Horne. The sisters’ arms raised in unison as though surrendering some kind of truce: ‘Sister Marie Therese!’ They exclaimed. ‘Is there a Sister Marie Therese?’ I asked. ‘Yes.’ Not much was forthcoming. I looked behind me to see if the sister might be standing there now. No-one. ‘Could I meet her?’ ‘No, she’s died, ten years ago … We know who you are……..’ I was a foundling, they told me, abandoned at birth. Sister Marie Therese was the midwife who had delivered me, took charge of me when my mother left, and gave me her own name. ‘But aren’t there lot’s of little Sister Marie Therese’s?’ I asked. No, just you. It was an ordinary hospital, not a Catholic mother and baby home for disgraced women. I think they were a little bit hurt. They showed me the room where I was born, now an office; the tree my mother would have looked at as she gave birth – an extraordinary detail! Where my diapers were kept, the bottles stored, astonishing. ‘Oh how we loved you!’ she said. And Sister Marie Therese had prayed for me, every day, for the rest of her life. About the time she died, was about the time I started having the dream, of the Woman in White. I’d had another dream, all my life, a fragment really. Of being in a pram and a woman with long blonde hair bending down to me, and of rows of glass-houses full of tomatoes. I always imagined she was my mother. I asked the sisters if there was a garden. Partly to see if the dreamscape continued, and partly to get out, I needed air. They could see this, knew this, and they kindly took me outside. And there they were, the rows of glass houses from my earliest dreams, row upon row of them, now derelict, now broken, a baby’s view from a sister’s shoulder. And I realised, at last, that the woman in the dream, with the flag of white blonde hair – was not my mother. It wasn’t hair, it was the veil; this is what I remembered bending toward me in the pram, blocking out the light, framing the beloved, forgotten face. A nun’s veil. Starched white cotton,  I have always been comforted by cotton sheets. A little picture was emerging of those missing months, that part of my life that was unaccounted for, before memory, simply unknown. I was sister Marie Therese’s baby. Finally I turned to go back into the house. And there, life size, surrounded by pots of red geraniums, was a white plaster statue of Our Lady, little bits of moss adhering to her gown, the side of her nose, her enigmatic, gentle smile. I’ve never had the dream since, the dreams. I’ve never been back. I visited the grave of Sister Marie Therese, Canoness of the Augustinian Order. One of the sisters sent me a photograph of her: austere, beautiful, very tall. Kind. In magic, they say, you must never forget your name.

2008-06-11T23:06:09-07:00

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2008-05-27T01:44:44-07:00

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2008-08-01

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2009-09-24T10:21:29-07:00

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2008-07-08T23:32:54-07:00

In magic, they say, you must never forget your name.

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2008-05-27T01:44:44-07:00

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Another Place

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2009-12-27T03:21:31-08:00

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true It turns out that breast cancer, like, say, tomato, is an umbrella term harboring a myriad of varietals. So when you sit, say in a circle of women in a breast cancer support group, while you know that each one -young old heavy thin buxom rural urban single married widowed blonde bald bloated  - is at their own personal milepost in the pathogenesis of this disease, what you don’t necessarily know, as all eyes circle the circle for who’s next who’s next,  is  that  not everyone started with the same packet of seeds.  I’ve come to understand this phenomenon after holding my seat amongst this rotating roster of women for the last thirteen years. These are the breast cancers I have seen:  There’s the kind that gobbles you up fast, like the one that gobbled up Beth’s best friend Bonnie and David’s research assistant Marcy and Judy’s cousin Jony and Craig’s wife Sheryl and Samuel’s math tutor Amy. Lump found, life upended, torturous treatment endured, and then despite the best that modern medicine has to offer, a rapid spiral downward with metastasis beyond rescue. Young daughters and sons are left behind, partners scramble to fill in the voids of motherhood and wifehood, the best that friends and sisters and brothers can do is make donations and run 5k races, struggling math students need to find new tutors. There’s the kind found early: yanked out blasted up with heat and poison, and other than living under the omnipresent premonition of recurrence (every ache every itch every sneeze an inflated worry), you are set free to live out your days, wizened up a little perhaps, toughened maybe, but now statistically equally vulnerable to the careening truck or drunk driver as to the rogue, irreverent cells. That’s Rose, the graphic designer who left chilly Iowa for the more seasonable North Carolina, that’s Mary Jo the retired high school librarian, that's Patti who tapes the trials at the law school and sings in the group Too Much Yang.  There’s the kind that look like the above kind but do in fact come back (I suppose I must admit to myself that it’s the same kind just further down the road), most often with a vengeance: the slithering vagrant little cells nesting in the bones or the liver or the brain: that’s Karen, divorced during diagnosis and in recurrence remarried to true love, in the bones; that’s Lucy, transplanted from the English countryside to Iowa, in the liver, that’s Vivian, always dressed to the nines, in the brain. I first met these three sitting in the support group chairs thirteen years ago, and I saw each of them in the chemo chairs, towards the end of their lives, each one clawing at something to lengthen their diminishing days, Karen sure that the treatment up at Mayo was better than Iowa’s, Lucy, eking out a book of poetry, Vivian stuck in well-dressed disbelief, and I saw their eyes toward the end. And all their eyes were the same: pure terror with a cataract layer of prayer. Then there’s the kind that I’ve got. Neither going away nor venturing out much past its original neighborhood. Kind of liking to hang around, a constant companion.  Holding its own calling itself cancer making itself present, there to see and feel every day. How’s the cancer today, like how’s the garden today, is it spreading out or yielding back, is it responding to amendments, is it darker, flakier redder itchier flatter bumpier? It’s taken up residence in my skin like the existential question etched on the heart it covers: are we living or dying, is the light red or is it green, how don’t we all do both all the time, what the hell matters, who do we love, can we love? This kind of cancer keeps me hopscotching back and forth between the world of the blithely well and the crumblingly ill, a part-time member of both, a straddler of worlds, a little like a ghost. This can, on a good day, make for some interesting insights.  Here’s what I don’t like about having this kind of cancer: I don’t like taking three fat pink pills each morning and three fat pink pills each night. That reminds me of which world I’m really in. I don’t like knowing that I’ve lost my hair twice and that when the six fat pink pills every day stop working that I’ll have to lose it again. And be sickly again. I don’t like dragging my circle of family and friends through the high drama of I’m dying I’m not dying I’m dying again. I don’t like not knowing what to do with all the vases I have from all the flowers I get. I don’t like having a swollen distended arm, a "complication" of cancer treatment - like a bag of sand on my left side. It is painful, limiting and disfiguring. I don’t like lacking the discipline needed to tame it. Here’s what I like about having this kind of cancer: people are very kind to me, kinder and more forgiving I suspect than they would be if I was just a regular no cancer girl. And so I’ve learned kindness. And it’s kindness that’s gotten me through.  It doesn’t hurt very much this cancer, nothing that a little Motrin won’t tame. I get a lot of flowers. On a good day I kind of feel at home with the imbalance in the body and swing some cloth over the swollen arm and get to be told that I look elegant.  I get to think about what elegance is. I like how cancer catapulted me from the walks of the worried well to the walks of those with something to really worry about. And in that vaulting it’s taught me to worry less. It’s taught me that we all walk in lockstep with our own demise, and when we hit our stride, it’s really just an exhausting and invigorating – brisk- wind –off- the- river-and- into-the-face-walk on an icy snowy brilliantly blinding winter’s day in your very own neighborhood park.

2009-05-15T15:44:00-07:00

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2008-05-27T06:42:27-07:00

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2008-07-25

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2009-09-24T10:18:27-07:00

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2009-05-15T15:44:00-07:00

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2008-06-10T15:58:17-07:00

not everyone started with the same packet of seeds

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2009-05-15T15:44:00-07:00

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2008-05-27T06:42:27-07:00

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A Walk

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2009-12-15T01:21:32-08:00

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true   I tried to weigh my boobs today. I got the idea from a heavy friend of mine who recently had a breast reduction in which three pounds of tissue removed from each breast. While her breasts did rival the size of small watermelons, I never thought they were so large as to be able to sacrifice six total pounds of flesh. Chronic back pain is what made her surgery necessary, not cosmetic, and the improvement in her relief and appearance was noticeable. My honkers are nowhere near as honkin’ as hers. However, as a curious and relatively well-endowed person myself, I wondered where my mammary meat weighed in. First, I fished out the kitchen scale, the one I use to measure food portions for all my useless dieting. I flopped my right boob on it and strained to read the display (I’d made sure the shades were drawn, so the neighbors didn’t think I was opening some bizarre sex/butcher shop), but I couldn’t get a good reading. The best results for the right boob fluctuated anywhere between a low of eleven ounces and a high of one pound, four ounces. And as if my life weren’t imbalanced enough, the left weighed in slightly heavier. But as a former scientist, I am meticulous in my calculations and found the kitchen scale results inconclusive. Another measuring method would have to be devised. I also made a mental note to get a hobby and seek referrals for a therapist. So, next, I tried the “bathrobe belt test.” I’d used this method before when I wanted to find out how much my hair weighed. I was trying to lose weight at the time and felt that my long, thick, and heavy hair shouldn’t be included in my total body weight. Why should some skinny soccer mom with a pageboy cut gain an extra advantage on the scale just because she’s got less of a mop on her head? So I braided my hair, tied the bathrobe belt around the end, slung belt over the shower curtain rod, and stepped on the scale while pulling on the belt, thus taking the weight off my hair. The method worked well, revealing that my hair weighed approximately one pound. Therefore, as far as I was concerned, I could honestly subtract one pound from every scale I stepped on for the rest of my life—even if I cut my hair (my body, my rules). The bathrobe belt worked well for my hair, but proved more difficult to execute in terms of calculating the weight of my boobs. First, they were harder to lasso than my hair (they’re not as long, I’m happy to report). And second, such an absurdly spent afternoon was making me paranoid about being caught. Had I been found, the scene would look something like a bosom suicide, and such mortification would’ve forced me to put the terrycloth noose around my neck instead. Such pressure is never beneficial while performing a sensitive experiment, and that nervousness hindered my ability to harness my headlights with the bathrobe belt. Nevertheless, I eventually perfected my booby trap, and the results somewhat matched that of the kitchen scale—they averaged about a pound a piece. And, again, Lefty was alpha. Then I remembered the meatloaf. I had exactly one pound of raw hamburger in the refrigerator that I would use later for dinner. I removed it from the fridge and threw it onto a plate. From that, I sculpted a meat breast, complete with nipple, and held it near Lefty for comparison. Due to a higher density, the beef bosom was a little smaller than Lefty but was close enough. My conclusion was that each of my breasts did indeed weigh approximately one pound each, give or take a few ounces, and, honestly, I was surprised. My breasts are large enough to have endured mockery as a teen and gawkery as an adult. I figured that two-thirds of a lifetime of trauma and self-consciousness alone was worth at least two pounds each. Even now, at thirty-five, I slouch to lessen the noticeability of my chest. It doesn’t help that I have nipples that rarely stay flat. Many a trip to a restaurant bathroom has lasted longer than necessary because of trying to tamp down these two little bugs that refuse to squash. They’re like bad dogs that won’t lie down. They’re like environmental activists that refuse to be silent. Bras help restrain them a little (the nipples, not the activists), but bras are only part of another nagging problem: I can’t seem to find any that are comfortable for longer than a commercial break. Either the lace is too scratchy, or the cups will fit Lefty but not Righty, as if playing favorites. Then there’s my “Laurel and Hardy” bra. When I put it on, the material of the cups always wrinkles, giving each breast the appearance of having been freshly clawed. But when I straighten out one cup, the other one unfailingly wrinkles. So, back and forth, I strive for seamlessness but only become increasingly frustrated, much like when one is trying to flatten Saran Wrap that keeps clinging to itself. Bra construction, in general, is medieval. Underwires are either the work of the devil or were inspired by the Spanish Inquisition. The straps bury themselves into my back flab over the course of the day, leaving achy, red grooves like lashes from a whip. But my favorite part of bra ownership is that each of these Lycra torture devices costs as much as my cable bill. I understand that no one is forcing me to where a bra. Liberating myself and letting the boulders roll free is an option, but I’m not that brave. Going braless would only attract more attention, because when left to their own devices, my girls thrash about like two squirrels in a cage match. There’s just no way I’m going to submit the unsuspecting public to a sight so disturbing. Even with a bra, they jiggle uncontrollably, like two caffeinated lap dogs. And I don’t dare jog for fear of knocking myself out cold. But perhaps I’m being too hard on my lovelies. It hasn’t been all back ache and cat calls. I’ve never had to worry about filling out a prom dress (or getting a date for one). I’ve never been mistaken for a boy. I have cleavage that you could file your taxes in. And they’ve gotten me lots of free drinks. They certainly didn’t complain when I threw them on a kitchen scale, hung them from a curtain rod, and recreated their likenesses in ground beef. I also know women who’ve lost theirs to cancer, which provides me with much-needed perspective. So maybe I should give my boobs a break and appreciate them more. Let’s face it, I’m getting older, and my girls have already started venturing south like Canadian Geese. Eventually my belly button will be more familiar with them than my face, and nature will deflate them as they become biologically useless. But for now, they’re hanging in there, so to speak, and I’m grateful to have had them at all.

2008-06-17T15:59:18-07:00

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2008-06-03T14:37:46-07:00

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2008-07-04T02:47:52-07:00

But when I straighten out one cup, the other one unfailingly wrinkles.

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2008-06-03T14:37:46-07:00

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4515

The Heavy on My Boobs

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2009-12-27T03:21:32-08:00

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true  In the late 1990’s I was in my mid-forties living in New York City. I was living off lower 5th Avenue and had the option of crossing to 6th Avenue anywhere between 11th and 26th Streets in order to reach my office. Occasionally I would take 19th Street where there was a karate school which had a large window facing the street and I would stop for a minute or two and watch the students and wonder if I was too old to give this a try. I had attended a few martial arts classes when I lived in London in the 1970’s at the height of Bruce Lee’s popularity, but schools were few in number and when I moved from the neighborhood I gave up the sport. Sometimes I avoided 19th street so as to not inflame my procrastination, but one day I entered the Dojo, enrolled in the program and was given a brief introductory class and a uniform with a white belt. I chose the 7.30 am class schedule because that was the class I had observed on my morning walk and it contained only a handful of students. I anticipated that this class would provide a greater level of interface with the instructor as well as test my discipline, since I was not used to doing much more than drink coffee and smoke a cigarette at that time of the day. I was the oldest in my class and the first few weeks proved painful as my muscles stretched and joints cracked, and I often was unable to attend due to soreness. My body began to adjust and soon I was training three or four times each week as well as attending an occasional weekend class. The classes were one hour long and provided a great cardiovascular workout in addition to toning muscle and learning the karate techniques. Upon completing 50 classes you were promoted to the next belt level following an informal test of skills. Some students took two or even three classes in a day in order to speed their climb up the belt rankings. Many dropped out however, and I was told that only a small percentage of students were successful in achieving black belt status, and only a small fraction of those continued with their training. As time passed I moved through the belt rankings from white to blue to green then yellow and red. At this time I signed on for advanced classes which included grappling and sparring. My Sensei was one of those individuals who find their passion early in life, work at constantly trying to perfect their skills and then teach others. I connected with him the way one might with a great teacher in college and much of my enthusiasm for training was as a result of his teaching. It was not all plain sailing, and I missed several months of training as the result of a cracked rib and a pulled hamstring and it was then that I realized how this sport had become an integral part of my life. For some time I had insisted that if my wife and I went out in the evening during the week that it be early enough so as to be home and in bed by 10pm. I was drinking less, losing weight and felt pride in my ability to train and fight with men 20 years younger and break five wooden boards with one punch or kick. Outside of the classes themselves, I attended tournaments the school was involved in as well as several events where students were tested in order to receive their black belt, a tough combination of  technique, wood-breaking and fighting that left little margin for error. One bright September morning I left the Dojo following my class and began walking towards 6th Avenue. As I approached I saw a crowd of people on the corner and thought there must have been a car accident or some type of police activity, however as I drew closer I could see they were all looking upwards, and facing south down 6th Avenue. The first plane had just struck the World Trade Center and within seconds of reaching the corner I was staring also as the second plane hit. There were dozens if not hundreds of people gathered on the four corners of 19th and 6th Avenue and a woman beside me started to cry. In a state of shock I continued walking to my office. I worked for a small company with six employees and we sat in front of the television and watched the images in silence and later I went to the rooftop of the building where I watched the towers fall. Trying to describe the rest of that day and the days following has been an elusive endeavor for me. All routine had been broken but I continued training at The Dojo although less often than before. The teacher who had inspired me moved to another school outside Manhattan.  An almost undetected feeling of doubt began to creep into my life; doubt in my abilities and of the future. The discomfort grew over the ensuing months as my wife and I saw our savings disappear as the stock market continued to fall. We had recently finished renovating our new apartment and had taken on a significant amount of debt and were concerned that real estate values would fall. I started drinking more frequently and my work suffered. The time passed and I eventually earned my brown belt but I was only training once a week despite the fact that I would probably be scheduled for the next black belt test. Gradually the goal of a black belt, which had propelled me through the early years of training, had become unimportant. I had become depressed and lethargic and the prize no longer seemed appropriate; I did not feel I deserved. I finally stopped going to classes and told my instructor I was injured. Later that year we moved to an apartment even closer to the Dojo but I never returned. Compared to the escape that alcohol provided, most other activities seemed of little consequence if not impossible undertakings. I eventually left my job which afforded me more time for self-criticism, and the contemplation of what a mess my life was. It was not long before I was forced to check-in for the first of two stays in rehab. I live in the country now, have been sober for two years and have spent considerable time reflecting on those darker days. I see now that much of what I sought was in order to help define who I wanted to be and how I wanted to be seen by others. My life in New York had become a race to achieve: more money, more stuff and, as a result, more status. I believe that life has a way of telling us when we are off track, and sometimes if we push too hard it will push us back. I now try to live the martial arts way: with discipline, non-aggression and integrity. I will never master the skills but, as in the Dojo on 19th Street, it’s all about the journey.

2008-05-15T06:40:19-07:00

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2008-04-02T02:35:15-07:00

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51.1897

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2009-08-19T17:49:27-07:00

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2008-04-01

2008-04-29T12:34:58-07:00

An almost undetected feeling of doubt began to creep into my life

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2008-04-02T02:35:15-07:00

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1383

Losing My Dojo

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2009-12-27T03:21:33-08:00

true

true My family is not particularly demonstrative when it comes to showing love – no pats on the back, good-bye kisses, or hugs are given out. In fact, the one time that my father kissed me once I reached adulthood was when I left for college. I’ll never forget it…<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> The car was packed and it was almost time to go. My father took me aside and said, “Now honey, you are going to a great big, scary college. And I won’t be there to protect you. I want you to know that it’s okay to fight back if you need to.”<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> A little bemused by this line of thought, I asked him what he meant. My father then began to show me all kinds of defensive moves – places where I should kick, hit, or use my knee, should I be attacked. I remember thinking that he was a little paranoid because what are the odds of my ever being attacked? I mean, really … didn’t I learn in Sunday school that God loved everyone? So, didn’t that mean that there was goodness in all humankind? <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> I hugged my dad and he gave me the never-to-forget kiss on the cheek, something revered as out of the ordinary. Then I drove to <st1:city w:st="on">Austin</st1:city>, settled into my dorm, and began life as a freshman at the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Texas</st1:placename></st1:place>. <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> I was a good student. In fact, I decided that I should graduate early and threw myself into 21 hours of study each semester, often closing out the library as the last person in the stacks. It was on one of these nights that I found myself walking home alone and heard the sound of footsteps behind me. <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Young and naïve, I turned to see from where the steps were coming. That hesitation gave my assailant the opportunity he needed to pounce on me. He knocked me to the ground, grabbed my hair and used it to pull my head back. This caused me to arch my back, providing my chest buttons at his fingertips. These, he ripped apart to unveil my bra. Soon he had ripped that off too and was slobbering all over me.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> At first, I was so surprised that I lay there in somewhat of a stupor. What happened to everyone being a good person as I had thought? Then I felt him begin to push my skirt up and stupid as I was, I knew what was about to happen. Something inside of me clicked on, and I pushed my knee into his groin and rammed both of my elbows into his chest, just like my father had shown me to do. I screamed, “God may love you, but I sure don’t.”<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> My assailant rolled over and looked at me stupefied. Such an out-of-place cry must have amused him because he began to laugh. It was just enough time for me to break and run. He did not even follow. I suppose he is still laughing.       I learned a valuable lesson that night worth more than the Bachelor of Science that I earned from the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Texas</st1:placename></st1:place> – God may love us all, but that doesn’t make anyone lovable, trustworthy, or even a good person. <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> I am no longer naïve. <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p>  <o:p></o:p>

2008-06-14T07:56:00-07:00

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2008-06-03T15:37:14-07:00

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45.6667

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356

2009-06-06T18:28:52-07:00

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2009-05-15T15:49:00-07:00

2008-06-03

153

2008-07-15T21:37:43-07:00

Young and naïve, I turned to see from where the steps were coming.

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2009-05-15T15:49:00-07:00

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1419

false entry

2008-06-03T15:37:14-07:00

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1675

Assault on Campus

false

2009-12-27T03:21:35-08:00

139

true