Post from the Colonies

Adopting Adela

2008-02-05T08:53:00.000-08:00

As you can probably tell by the total lack of postings, I've been a little preoccupied lately. I'm back now, but Post from the Colonies will be taking an extended vacation, at least for now.

As one door closes, another opens, so they say, and you can follow along with my new adventures in Adopting Adela, as Jose and I begin our journey to adopt a family.

Hope to see you there.

~Lisa xx

Hi, my name is Lisa and I haven’t searched for a long lost friend on Facebook for at least three minutes!

2007-11-27T09:17:00.000-08:00

Jose thought I was too old to be on Facebook and I sort of agreed. He forbade me to add my nieces and nephews as friends as it would be very uncool for them to have their aunt on their list of friends (even a hip aunt like me!). But then people started finding me and before long I started searching for people I knew but had lost touch with. I found my Australian psychologist/guitarist/songwriter friend, Greg, from Grad school, and Sandra who I met on a train to Lake Titicaca and traveled with for almost a month. I have three friends from L.A. who fled the country for quieter (colder) lives in Canada and Germany, and I’ve even met other Manterfields who come from the farther branches of my family tree.

It’s fun to reconnect with people you haven’t seen for a long time. It’s fascinating to see their lives and sometimes depressing when you see how old their other friends are and realize that you’re one of them. It’s also addictive to wrack your brains for people you went to school with or spent a period of your life with some time long ago and add them to your list of friends. I’ve also found people I once knew and decided not to reinstate that connection. People come and go from your life and sometimes you have just let them be.

I did add my nieces and nephews to my friends and if I cramped their style, they were gracious enough to not mention it. From a safe distance (safe for them, rather than me, I suspect) I can watch them grow up and if they’re so inclined, they can check up on their old aunt once in a while, too.

Avoiding the Issue

2007-09-19T12:21:00.000-07:00

Next month, Jose and I are off to Rome for a friend’s wedding. When the invitation arrived, we deliberated for some time whether we ought to go. We already had a trip to England planned for August and, after last Christmas, we’d decided to go somewhere far from LA this December. In the end, we decided we really couldn’t stretch the budget to another European trip, but I whipped out my trusty credit card and booked the thing anyway. It was too good an opportunity to miss.

The thing with flying from L.A. to Rome is that you can’t do it in one shot. The alternatives for connections seemed to be Frankfurt, Paris or Amsterdam, but the cheapest flight I could find was on British Airways via Heathrow. In my opinion, BA has gone down the tubes a bit recently; their fleet is getting old and their service has become shoddy. After flying airlines such as LAN Chile, Virgin or Air France, I’ve come to expect a certain level of comfort and attention on my long-haul flights and BA is just not up to scratch.

The bigger issue, though is the fact that in going via London, we would practically have to fly over my mother’s house and the thought of being in England, being “home,” and not getting to see my Mum was just too much to handle. I considered cutting our time in Italy by a day or two, and making a whistle stop visit to Mum, but in the end, I did the more sensible thing—bought a more expensive flight via Paris, because Paris really is too far to justify hopping over for a day.

So, if anyone has recommendations for ways to while away some time in Rome, I’m all ears. And if anyone is planning a trip to England anytime soon, please look in on my Mum for me. She makes and excellent cup of tea.

Clay

2007-09-16T16:52:00.000-07:00

OK, so I don’t post anything for weeks and then I post twice in one day. I know, but I was compelled to share this gem.

Last night, Jose and I saw a fantastic new play, premiering here on the West Coast. Clay is a one-man show telling the story of a young man from a troubled home, who discovers hip-hop as an outlet for his discontent. The writing was tight, the staging was fantastic and Matt Sax, the show’s writer and star was incredible. He not only portrayed the title character, Clay, but also the entire cast of the show, including Clay’s manipulative father, disturbed mother, scheming stepmother, and fascinating hip-hop mentor, Sir John.

I’m not ordinarily a great fan of hip-hop, but the play helped me to better understand the roots of true hip-hop and to weed out the trash. Matt Sax is an incredible talent and I’ll be keeping an eye open for more of him.

If you find yourself in Culver City with nothing to do, I can highly recommend an evening at the Kirk Douglas Theatre with Clay.

Farewell to Summer

2007-09-16T15:30:00.000-07:00

With Labor Day now behind us, and most of the kids back in school, summer is well and truly over. To be honest, I’m glad to see the back of it. As a beach dweller, I’ve been missing certain luxuries that make life bearable--things such as air-conditioning and a personal parking space.

For most of the year, I can live perfectly happily without either of these things, but come the summer, I miss them dearly. When the temperatures soar (as they did over the Labor Day weekend) and the ocean breeze drops, life without air-conditioning is hell. The obvious solution is to hop in the car and head somewhere cool, like the movies, but that means giving up my valuable parking space. I’m not opposed to a little exercise, but having to walk four blocks with my groceries when what I really want to do is flop on the couch with a Popsicle, is no fun.

But today, normal life resumed and everything was beautiful. The sun shone and a cool refreshing breeze swept off the ocean and through my open windows. My plants seem to be once again flourishing, rather than cowering from the blazing sun, and my cat resumed her spot in the sunny window, rather than flopping, panting in the middle of the living room floor.

But the surest sign of the passing of summer is my desire to once again venture out on my bike. Without having to dodge wandering tourists or drunks on beach cruisers, a long leisurely ride up the bike path to lunch is bliss. It’s now cool enough to sit outside without frying, the path is relatively clear and I am able once again to relax, enjoy the ride and remember why it is I chose Southern California for my home. I don’t know about you, but I’m even looking forward to some rain.

Now that summer’s over, what are you looking forward to most?

My Latest Excuse for Not Posting Recently

2007-07-31T07:45:00.000-07:00

For most of the month of July, I’ve played mother to two teenage boys—my nephew and his friend. It’s a fun game that involves cooking copious amounts of high carbohydrate foods, sifting endless piles of dirty laundry, and planning outings and activities. I’ve adopted an aunt-like liberal view towards independence and self-sufficiency, then coupled it with worrying about them and “having a heart-attack over nothing,” as I was told while riding bikes across the Golden Gate Bridge.

My house has become full of large smelly feet and long hairy legs and the kitchen has a new permanent fixture—the dirty pizza pan. My guest room now has approximately two square feet of visible carpet and my fridge bears a striking resemblance to Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. But for the past few weeks, my house has also been full of laughter. Teenage boys, at least these two, are funny.

We (eventually) laughed at the horrific sunburn my nephew suffered that left him the color of medium-rare roast beef with a horseradish white bow pattern on his stomach, from the string of his shorts. The boys have been elevated from what I suspect is something of a nerdy status in their hometown to movie star repute here. “Oh my God! You’re from England?!” has become the cry of every teenage girl they’ve crossed paths with. “Say something in English!” At which point, the boys pull out their best accents and say things like, “Jumper, rubbish, and tomato (to-mar-to, as opposed to-may-to).”

My favorite entertainment has been the dinner table debate. Jose loves a good discussion and has been known to take a contrary point-of-view just to spark a conversation. His favorite pontification is to claim anything that’s good or successful as American with, “We invented that.” I just roll my eyes and ignore him, but the boys take the bait. I’ve been surprised by how well-read and knowledgeable they are, and on more than one occasion (almost daily in fact), I’ve caught Jose changing the subject (very skillfully I might add) to avoid being proven wrong. It’s been a lot of fun.

I know that as an aunt, I’m not rebelled against as I would be if I were a parent, but I’ve learned a couple of things about 16-year old boys: they have something to say and they want someone to listen; if they’re shown some trust, they’ll act responsibly; if you ask them to help you, they will, even if you have to ask three times; and if there’s something important you really need to communicate to them, send them a message on MySpace.

Before I reach 60, I hope to test out my theories on teenagers. I’ll be certain to blog my findings. And if the Internet is all but obsolete by then, I’ll have my teenagers show me how to set up whatever the latest communication device is then. Assuming I can get them to talk to me.

P.S. I have no photos to post as I haven't had time to take any. As much fun as they are, teenage boys are also very time-consuming. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Waiting for Baby

2007-07-13T11:46:00.000-07:00

The online magazine Divine Caroline recently published my essay Waiting for Baby.

Please take a look.

Sensible Sandals

2007-06-19T18:32:00.000-07:00

Summer is here again and once more it’s time to play one of my favorite games—spot the tourist. Living where I do, a short walk from the beach in a tourist destination like L.A., there’s always a healthy smattering of tourists wandering around. You can always tell them; they wear fewer clothes than the locals, are usually paler and tend to walk with their mouths open gazing at the sights.

I have a knack for guessing where tourists are from. I can’t pinpoint the details of my technique; sometimes it’s clothing or hair color; sometimes it’s a mannerism or a face shape. I can pick out a mid-westerner against a southerner and can always tell a Northern European from their Eastern European cousins. My specialty, of course, is British tourists.

British people have a distinct look that separates them firmly from their continental neighbors and labels them clearly as “not from around here.” Of course, I’d be stereotyping horribly if I said that every British tourist shares the same characteristics, but if you’d like to play “Spot the Brit” in your neighborhood, here’s an example of what to look out for.

Today I passed a couple of older ladies strolling by the marina. From 50 yards off, I pegged them as British. They each had complexions that hadn’t seen the sun for a while and both had practical, no-fuss haircuts. They carried sturdy nylon shoulder bags, undoubtedly with numerous handy pockets for organizing their tourist paraphernalia. They wore comfortable cotton three-quarter-length trousers and loose t-shirts in pretty flowered prints. But the telltale sign, the one that truly defines the British tourist, is the pair of sensible walking sandals. These ladies had those, too.

While Californians are often seen clipping around in flimsy flip-flops or (heaven forbid) bare feet, Brits love to walk, so sensible shoes are essential and if the sun is out (as it always is here in the summer) those sensible shoes have to be sandals.
As I walked by the two old girls, I craned my neck to listen for an accent and verify my assumptions. Sure enough, I heard the soft lilt of a northern accent, probably Lancashire. I smiled to myself at how clever I was and how honed my powers of deduction had become. It pleased me too that they couldn’t apply the same reasoning to me and guess that I too was British.

I’ve lived here for long enough now that to the untrained eye I look like just another American. (I hear a distant roar from everyone I know yelling, “That’s what you think!) But seriously, I have a year-round bronze to my skin and I wear sporty but not slovenly clothes. I have a hairstyle, rather than a haircut, and (let me say it before someone else does) my teeth are relatively straight.

As I walked past the two ladies, I checked myself out just to see how far I’d really come. I had a bad hair day today and I’m due for a haircut, so I’d scraped the rats tails that were my hair back in an Alice band and stuck an extra hair tie in my bag in case of a dire hair emergency. I looked at the bag slung across my shoulder. It was a hip, practical thing that Jose bought me one birthday, but on closer inspection it proved itself to be a sturdy nylon bag with multiple pockets. It went nicely though with the outfit I’d chosen that morning—comfortable three-quarter-length pants and a coordinating t-shirt.

It dawned on me then that perhaps I hadn’t actually evolved at all in my thirteen years here. There was only one way to know for sure. I looked down at my feet, clad today in a pair on Tevas. The shoes were rugged and cool, meant for leaping boulders and wading through rivers. They had natty clip-in straps and vents for draining water. There was no way I could deny it; they were very sensible sandals.

Mind the Gap

2007-06-13T20:14:00.000-07:00

If ever a city needed an inexpensive, efficient system of public transportation, it’s Los Angeles. Our roads are clogged, our air is polluted and while, for many of us, our standard of living is high, for those who commute to work or school, quality of life is the pits. A 20-mile commute from my home to UCLA—a trip that Mapquest says should take 29 minutes, in reality can take as long as 80 minutes and that’s on a normal day. Even a local drive of five or six miles takes 30 minutes or more in many parts of the city. Add to this the frustration of staring at a never-ending line of brake lights and thinking of all the productive ways you could be spending your time. Then there’s the stress of making a left turn or even going through a green light and wondering if the cellphone wielding lead-footed idiot coming the other way will decide to stop today. Pretty soon public transportation seems very appealing.

Having traveled by public transportation in many different cities, I can appreciate a well-planned system. In London, it’s plain foolish to own a car; parking is non-existent, traffic is often at a complete standstill, and the city itself recently implemented tariffs for driving into Central London to further discourage drivers. Between the Tube and the bus system, a person can get within a very short walk of anywhere they might want to go. Mexico City charges its Metro riders the equivalent of two cents for a one-way trip anywhere in the city. That system has the added benefit of roving entertainers and vendors; we bought toothbrushes, chocolate and a map all from the comfort of our seats. Washington D.C., San Francisco, Paris and New York all provide clean, efficient and affordable transportation for their citizens.

And then there’s L.A.

In all fairness, building a new light rail network in a well-established city, especially one covering as wide an area as L.A. is no mean feat. Throw in an earthquake and a couple of dozen skyscrapers with deep foundations and you’ve got yourself a big engineering headache for an underground system.

The MTA, in its infinite wisdom, opted for a radial system, with a Downtown hub centered at Union Station. This would be fine for a city like Paris or Washington D.C., but L.A. is not a typical city. Between the entertainment and aerospace industries, as well as commercial centers such as Century City and the Wilshire corridor, only a small percentage of commuters actually work in the downtown area. One only needs to spend an hour or so in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 405—a freeway that passes no closer than 10 miles to Downtown—to understand that. Oh, and the Blue Line actually stops 10 blocks short of the hub, forcing commuters going anywhere north of 7th street to change lines!

And let’s not forget the Green Line, the sleek, elevated line designed to provide easy access to Los Angeles International Airport. Except it doesn’t actually go to LAX, but stops about two miles away requiring travelers to take a shuttle bus into the terminal. But hey, it’s better than the nothing we used to have and having commuted to downtown for years by Metro, I’m really hard-pressed to find too much fault.

But now, the MTA has decided to raise its fares. Not just by a quarter or even 50 cents. By 2009, the cost of a daily or weekly pass will more than double and monthly passes will go up to $120! For some bus riders, $120 is the cost of a monthly gym membership or a nice dinner out, but for the majority, it’s a day’s or more likely two days’ pay. What better way, even with the price of gas, to send people scurrying back to their cars.

But Angelenos love their cars and most people I know here wouldn’t even consider taking public transportation. For the most part PT riders are those who have no other option. But there are those of us (like me) who love public transportation, despite its foibles. I’d rather sit on a bus and read my book any day than sit in traffic yelling obscenities at my fellow drivers. And at a time when even our blinkered President is acknowledging that pollution might just be a tinsy problem, I can look down smugly at all the SUV drivers and know I’m doing my bit for the Planet.

Tea Addiction Breeds Dangerous Crackpot (Redux)

2007-05-30T17:44:00.000-07:00

This piece was originally posted on August 22, 2006. The stove was ultimately left behind on the trip to Ireland, but had it been taken along, it would have worked admirably!

Next month Jose and I, along with my mother, will embark on a 10-day bicycle adventure around Southeast Ireland. We have everything we could possibly need--panniers, maps, raingear, first aid kit—but what we don’t have is tea. My mother and I take our tea intravenously, and in the four years or so since Jose and I have been together, he has gradually come to satisfy his own caffeine addiction through the more genteel traditions of tea drinking. The dilemma, therefore: How to get a steaming hot mug of tea in the middle of the Wicklow Mountains? Enter the alcohol stove.

When Jose first handed me instructions on how to make your own alcohol-burning stove out of two Heineken cans and a penny, I dismissed him as a dangerous crackpot. He’s full of good intentions, but the dirty work somehow always falls to me. Yet, somewhere in my subconscious, the idea tapped away at the long-dormant engineer in me, until last weekend I found myself wielding a steak knife and hacking away at a beer can like some lunatic inventor.Within a couple of hours, and without inflicting serious injury on myself or anyone else, I was the proud owner of an alcohol penny stove.

Stepping out into the backyard, armed with a camping kettle, a can of denatured alcohol and my stove, I felt like a pioneer setting out into uncharted territory. Yes, I could have driven to REI, plunked down my credit card and bought a super-lightweight Pocket Rocket, but I am 21st Century Woman, a trailblazer following the lead of those great British explorers: Scott of the Antarctic, Sir Walter Raleigh and Mary Kingsley. I am a rebel.

Admittedly, it was with no small amount of trepidation that I poured in the fuel and struck the first match. In fact, it was with so much trepidation that I had Jose pour in the fuel and strike the first match. Even rebels and trailblazers need a sidekick; Hillary had Tenzing, Lewis had Clark. And after all, I’m a rebel, not a fool.

To my astonishment, it worked and ten minutes later, we were sitting around the dancing blue and orange flames sipping freshly made, piping hot tea. I was so impressed with myself I went on to fix the screen door that had been torn and hadn’t closed since we moved into the place two years ago. And it was with a certain sense of satisfaction that as I pulled the last corner of the replacement screen into place I, 21st Century Woman heard the vacuum cleaner whir into action inside my house, with 21st Century Man at the helm.

Want your own alcohol stove? Click here for instructions.
Thanks to Mark Jurey for his excellent directions.

'Ay up, Lad! Tha' Dun't Se Much Does Tha?

2007-05-24T16:15:00.000-07:00

This post is one of my personal favorites. There have been so many occasions when Jose and I were out doing something that we wish Sid could have been there for. He truly was one in a million.

This piece was originally posted on April 21, 2006.

My husband, Jose is a pretty gregarious sort. He’s witty and interesting and therefore easy to take out in public. So when my mother and Sid, my late stepfather came here for Christmas the first year we were together, I was looking forward to them meeting him, and being suitably impressed.

“Awright, Ozie,” said Sid, shaking Jose’s hand warmly. I had spent the past several months coaching my mother over the phone to get her to pronounce Jose as Ho-say and not Jo-zee. Although I convinced them that the J was pronounced as an h, no amount of cajoling could get either of them to put the emphasis on the second syllable, and the letter h had never been uttered from Sid’s mouth in his life.

The four of us sat around and made conversation. Sid soon made himself feel at home and started in on some of his stories. He told the one about the day he drove home in fog so thick he couldn’t see the front of the car’s hood and ended up driving down the sidewalk. What he actually said was along the lines of “Fog wa’ that thick, I coont see’t end o’t’ bonnet. Nex’ thing I know, I’m on t’ causeway.”

I laughed and my mother gasped in shock, I think more in surprise that he’d survived as long as he had. Jose however, sat there staring blankly at Sid. I caught his eye and grinned, trying to pull him into the conversation, but he just gazed back at me. I frowned. This was no way to make a good impression on your future in-laws. He could at least put in a little effort to join in and endear himself to them. Perhaps, I thought, now he had seen where I descended from, he had changed his mind about our future together. I was slightly worried, but frankly, even more upset with him for being so rude.

It was somewhere in the middle of one of Sid’s stories about his long time friend and cycling partner, Billy, that the penny dropped for me. Jose didn’t understand a single word that Sid was saying. That disassociated frown on his face was in fact a look of concentration. “He may as well have been speaking Chinese,” he said to me later that night.

It was Churchill who once said we are “two nations divided by a common language.” How right he was. After 13 years here my once strong Yorkshire accent has softened considerably. It’s now what most of relatives would describe as “posh” and the rest would say is definitely American. Still, there are times that no matter how hard I try I cannot make myself understood. My greatest challenge seems to be in ordering water in a restaurant. I say war-ta, but what I need to try and say is wodder, or wawder, or something like that. It’s virtually impossible. Another favorite is the old Khakis/car keys, which apparently to my husband’s ears sound exactly the same.

Jacques Chirac allegedly stomped out when it was suggested that a meeting be conducted in the language of business, i.e. English. That’s all well and good if everyone around the table speaks the same version of English, but even in England you only have to travel to the next county to hear English spoken in a different dialect and with words unique to that region.

Perhaps we should all learn sign language, but even that has its issues. It would be all well and good until someone asked for two of something and caused the British delegation to leave in a huff.

In Memory of Sid
July 27, 1932 - March 18, 2004
It were 'ilarious.

Over the Hill or Just Under the Weather Again?

2007-05-14T18:21:00.000-07:00

This post was originally published on November 29, 2005.

With all the recent advances in medical technology, we’re going to be living longer than ever. Great. This means we’ll have twice as many cranky old people to deal with. Don’t get me wrong, I have the greatest respect for the elderly, in fact I think they are one of this country’s most underutilized resources, but boy, they’re not half grumpy sometimes.

My husband just turned 50. Now I realize that 50 is hardly geriatric, but lets face it, it’s one foot in the social security line and the other on a banana peel. And he’s already in practice for waving his cane at the neighborhood kids and yelling, “Get the hell off my lawn, ya dern varmints!”

Out of fear of his impending sulk, I respected his request to not throw an extravagant surprise party complete with full mariachi and a roast. Instead, to celebrate this milestone, we drove around the neighborhood at 20 miles per hour with the left turn signal on. It would have been a perfect night out for him, had it not been Halloween weekend and the local police had not chosen our street to set up their semi-annual sobriety checkpoint. I was driving, so I slowed the car and rolled down my window ready to convince the officer that we were clean and sober. We had both had a glass of wine with dinner some five hours earlier, before seeing Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and then going grocery shopping – another wild Saturday night out. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. They took one look at my husband’s salt and pepper hair and waved us on. In hindsight, perhaps it wasn’t the hair that convinced them that we were of little threat to anyone’s safety. Perhaps it was the beaten, downtrodden, “Oh, shit, I’m almost dead” look my husband has adopted since he reached the half-century mark. Since his birthday, my beloved has developed the following symptoms: delicate stomach, chronic headache, tingling in two fingers of his left hand, insomnia and general muscle and joint pain. He also appears to have shrunk be at least an inch and a half. Psychosomatic? Surely not!

As if he wasn’t feeling sorry enough for himself, he received a very real reminder of his continued demise--a letter from the AARP. This wasn’t his first--the AARP marketing dept are way ahead of the game—but this one offered him a free desktop calculator with big color-coded buttons “so you don’t punch in a wrong number and mess up your checkbook!” He tossed the letter on the kitchen floor and stomped on it, thus reducing his mental age by a factor of 10.

Needless to say, he was feeling pretty down in the dumps about the whole thing. To cheer him up, I pointed out that in only five more birthdays we would be able to eat at Denny’s for half the price. For some strange reason, he wasn’t amused.

Miserable Marvin, Parking Poop

2007-05-03T20:11:00.000-07:00

This was the first ever post on Post from the Colonies. It appeared on October 6, 2005 and was also my first and thus far last foray into poetry. I give you Miserable Marvin, Parking Poop

What ever happened to Lovely Rita, Meter Maid? We seem to be stuck with Miserable Marvin, Parking Poop.

We are fortunate enough to live in one of those beach cities that afford its residents clean air, breathtaking vistas, and one street parking space per ten residents. Please don’t ask why we don’t just park in our garage or driveway – when our tiny beach cottage was built, back in the 30’s, parking here just wasn’t an issue. Couple with this the obsessive cleanliness of our city public works department and we’re left with two days each week, when either one side of the street or the other is out of commission.

My husband and I regularly do the Friday morning shuffle, when, bleary-eyed-- coffee in one hand, newspaper in the other--we realize that one--or both---of our cars is illegally parked. There then ensues a frantic search for our keys and if time permits, a change from robe and slippers to some more appropriate outdoor attire, followed by a mad dash to our cars to perform an elaborate ballet of three-point maneuvers and illegal U-turns before Miserable Marvin appears, right on schedule at exactly 8:00 a.m.

Unfortunately, we don’t always make it. In fact we’ve had so many parking tickets in the three years since we’ve lived here, I’m considering asking the city to erect a statue to us in honor of our philanthropic contributions to the community.

Now, I know that Marvin’s just doing his job and I’m sure it’s a thankless job—I mean, imagine going to work everyday and having NOBODY pleased to see you—but really, does he have to be quite so crabby? When we beg for absolution for our parking sins, we don’t really expect him to wink and say, “Just this once, then, but don’t tell anyone.” I mean, rules are rules--we know that. But he can’t see the slightest humor in seeing two people who look like they’ve just crawled out from under a hedge, flying down the street in their pajamas faster than Linford Christie? He doesn’t crack a smile, not even an apologetic shrug; he just twangs the windshield wiper on top of the ticket and without even making eye contact, climbs into his truck and goes off in search of the next victim.

So, Marvin, this poem is for you:

Ode to Miserable Marvin

Oh Marvin, poor Marvin,
Your lonesome heart is starvin’
For someone who will say,
“Boy, you really made my day.”

But there’s no-one understands
That the City ties your hands,
And the nature of your work,
Is what makes you such a jerk.

Oh, if folks would just obey,
They would have a nicer day.
But the lows to which they stoop,
Are what make you such a poop.

So this law-abiding slob
Says, “Go on and do your job”
And I’ll add without reserve,
“We all get what we deserve.”

Post From the Colonies Takes a Holiday

2007-05-01T21:44:00.000-07:00

Dear Loyal and Beloved Readers,

I've just started work on a new book. As is the way with such things, my mind is filled with character development, themes and plots, not to mention frantic attempts to be witty. As I'm pretty sure none of you wish to hear the ramblings of a dazed and confused writer, I've decided to give PFTC a short break. For the next few weeks I will be rerunning some favorite posts and perhaps giving some of the older ones from the early days the chance for a revival.

Whether you're a long-time follower or a new reader, please feel free to request posts that you particularly enjoyed and I will be happy to accommodate.

I hope you'll enjoy some oldies but goodies and I appreciate you bearing with me during this addled time.

Bloggingly yours,

Lisa

By George! It's Time for Some Action!

2007-04-23T12:11:00.000-07:00

Seen any dragons lately? I thought not. And you probably won’t, thanks in no small way to St. George. Back at the end of the third century, George made a name for himself by ridding a town in what is now Libya of its evil dragon and thus saving the beautiful princess from sacrifice. He upset some people along the way, though and was ultimately beheaded and his noggin paraded all the way to Rome. For his troubles, though, he was made patron Saint of England, the English equivalent to Ireland’s St. Patrick.

It’s all pretty heroic stuff, but do we English laud George like the Irish with St. Patrick? Will we get plastered and dye our rivers red? No, no, no. We English are far more civilized than our Celtic brethren. We celebrate the savior of fair maidens by…doing bugger all. It’s true. You won’t see many flags bearing the red cross of St. George except on the pubs as a means to drum up more business. There won’t be any fiesta where everyone with a cell of English blood gathers to drink tea and eat bangers and mash. Most Americans have never heard of St. George and while most people in England acknowledge the day, there will be no weeklong festivities.

While St. Paddy’s Day in Dublin lasted for five days this year and a reported 13 million pints of Guinness were consumed around the world, the BBC last year reported that “another St. George’s passed with a smattering of minor events and muted celebrations.” It’s enough to make old George turn in his headless grave.

But change is in the air and a campaign has been launched to raise St. George to a suitable level of esteem for a dragon slayer. (If there’s one thing we Brits do well, it’s campaign. If things get far enough along, there may even be a strike, something only the French do better than us.) The Royal Society of St. George want we English to celebrate our patron saint. They want to make St. George’s Day a national holiday in England and even though, I won’t stand to benefit this, another day off might mean my brother gets to finish remodeling his dining room.

So, join me please in my own campaign to celebrate the life of the most famous dragon slayer before Harry Potter came along. Even if there is no English blood coursing through your veins, be English for a day. Pluck a red rose from your neighbor’s garden and wear it in your lapel; make yourself a nice cup of tea; watch Benny Hill; when someone offers you something, don’t say, “Yes,” say “Oooh, if it’s no trouble”; complain about the weather and be sure to spend too long outdoors and get yourself a nice English sunburn.

Whatever you choose, let’s work together to give George his due. Now, join me if you will for a rousing rendition of Jerusalem before I head out to straighten my flag.

“And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s mountains green?...”

A New Lease on Life

2007-04-16T10:52:00.000-07:00

I’ve been feeling a bit down in the dumps lately. I’ve got myself into one of those of doctor cycles where you go to have them look at one thing and they find something else, then the treatment for first ailment aggravates the second or creates a third new set of symptoms requiring a new specialist and a new course of treatment. Before I knew it I had so many potions and lotions I felt like a walking pharmacy. In the end, I ditched them all and the doctors and let my body figure out how to heal itself.

What I need now is a distraction from all this ill health—something to take my mind off things and give me something to work towards. Jose finally came up with the solution—a walking holiday in the U.K.. We have plans to visit my mother in the summer to celebrate her 75th birthday, but beyond a family dinner, no further arrangements have been made. “What if we did a long distance walk?” said Jose. “We’ve been talking about it for years and it might be just the thing.”

I thought about it. I thought about the books we’ve pored over, dreaming about doing the Coast-to-Coast walk from St. Bees in the Lake District to Robin Hood’s Bay on the east coast. It’s a walk of at least two weeks, so probably beyond our current capabilities and available vacation time. Plus, I’m not sure if my mother would be up for it and as the primary purpose of the trip is to spend time with her, we can hardly go without her. If she could survive the grueling trip pedaling herself and her belongings up and down the hills and valleys of Ireland, she can certainly manage seven or eight days of hiking and so can we.

I scanned my books for ideas. The Lake District is my favorite part of the country, but during August it will be packed with tour buses and hordes of old ladies slurping melting ice creams. The same applies to the Cotswolds. We eliminated the Coast-to-Coast for time reasons and similarly the Cleveland Way on the east coast. Finally we settled on the Dales Way. The book said six days; we figure we could add a couple of rest days and stretch it out to eight or nine.

The walk begins in Ilkley and travels through the heart of the Yorkshire Dales, ending in Bowness-in-Windermere in the Lake District. On the way, it passes by Bolton Priory, a 12th century monastery all but destroyed under Henry VIII’s regime, goes through Wharfedale and Dentdale, passes by the three peaks of Whernside, Ingleborough and Pen-y-ghent and stops off in the picturesque villages of Grassington, Kettlewell and Dent. It’s a route through rugged countryside of limestone gorges and wide green valleys dotted with farmhouses and laced with dry stone walls. There are slow meandering rivers to walk by and spry babbling streams to hop. There are the classic feats of Victorian engineering of the Ribblehead and Dent railway viaducts and the vast blue expanse of Lake Windermere to cheer you home. This is James Herriot country, the inspiration for Turner and Wordsworth. It’s a place where the air is clear and crisp and often the only sounds you can hear are the distant bleating of sheep and the steady crunch of your hiking boots on limestone. If ever there was a place to restore one’s spirit, reconnect with nature and tax the old muscles as well, The Yorkshire Dales is it. What’s more a trip like this requires training--weekend hikes in the Santa Monica Mountains, maybe even a practice weekend in the Sequoias. Most of all, it requires planning, which means hours on the phone with my Mum, discussing equipment, accommodations and itineraries. Already I’ve pulled out my guidebook and a pencil and dusted off my hiking boots. I’m off to conquer the Dales Way and it’s given me a new lease on life.

A Birthday to Remember

2007-04-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

April is my favorite month. When I opened my door to get the newspaper last Sunday, I was greeted by a humming bird, hovering over my jasmine and a squirrel, skipping across my lawn. Spring had sprung—I could feel it in the air.

April is also my birthday month. (I’m an Aries—like you needed me to tell you that!) Even though I resent how quickly the years are beginning to stack up, I still love my birthday and have no qualms whatsoever about being the center of attention for a day—or a week. My husband refuses to acknowledge his birthday. Me? Send cards, send flowers, eat cake. If not on my birthday, then when?

This month I will celebrate my 37th birthday. In my dim and distant memory I have a recollection of a book or a movie about a woman named Gillian and what happened when she turned 37. I don’t remember the details; I just recall it wasn’t much of a happy ending. Still, I’m not going to allow that to ruin a perfectly good birthday. Odds of me being diagnosed with some terrible disease between now and next week are pretty slim, especially if I avoid contact with doctors, which I fully intend to do.

Birthday are fun. Periodically my birthday falls on Easter, which, when I was young meant it was during the Easter break so I wasn’t tied to an after-school party or worse, a party held on the weekend and not on my birthday. This was especially tricky as my best friend was one day older than me so our birthday parties sometimes coincided. I’ve had sunny birthdays and birthdays with snow. I’ve even had a birthday when I was too sick and to go out for pizza with my friend. This year I plan to have a good birthday, spent with a good husband and good friends.

My eighth birthday was a good birthday. Even though my friend from America, Michelle refused to eat anything and Jane Eaton won all the games and took all the prizes, we had beanies and weenies to eat and my Mum found a cake shaped like Dougal, my favorite character from my favorite cartoon, Magic Roundabout. My brother, 13 years my senior and so barely involved in my life, arrived home from work just as my party was coming to a close. Back then, he was renowned for his cheapness, especially with his annoying kid sister. Note the time I washed his car and he refused to pay me even 50 pence (about a dollar) until my Dad badgered him into it. But this birthday, he brought me a gift. Not just any gift. He gave me The Complete Adventures of Paddington Bear, illustrated and in hardback.

It had all the stories, beginning with the Browns finding Paddington at the train station illustrated with thick glossy inserts of hand-drawn pencil sketches of the bear from Darkest Peru up to his antics. It was a beautiful book. It still sits on the bookcase in my living room here. One day I’ll read it to my children, but it will have to be handled with the greatest of care. It was a small gesture by my brother, but it has stuck with me for almost 30 years. It wasn’t the only gift he ever gave me, but it’s the one that stands out the most.

I don’t know if he realizes how much that book meant to me. He has five children of his own now, so he’s far too busy to read this blog and find out. He’ll turn 50 this year. It will be the perfect opportunity to send the rudest, most insulting card possible to poke fun at him. Our middle brother will have begun his quest already and it would be un-sisterly of me to let the opportunity pass. But I’d like to give him something that would mean as much to him as his gift did to me. He’s 6,000 miles away now so I see him for one or two days each year. I couldn’t begin to guess what such a gift might be.

Mad As Hell Club

2007-04-02T09:24:00.000-07:00

Got something you're mad about? Of course you do. And you're not the only one. The Mad As Hell Club publishes essays, art, cartoons, and photographs presenting ideas they feel deeply about, along with some possible solutions to the problems that confront us. You're bound to find someone there who's just as mad as you. If not, you can always check out my essay, Forgetting Where We Came From.

If they published that, they must be mad!

Capital Idea for a Trip

2007-03-27T09:52:00.000-07:00

Jose and I just celebrated our third wedding anniversary in our standard manner with a long weekend trip away. This year, after much less deliberation than usual, we settled on Washington D.C. as neither of us had ever been. Jose at first had some reservations. For himself, he wanted to see all the things he’d learned about in history classes, but he was afraid that none of it would mean much to me. In some ways he was right. Kennedy’s gravesite, or as I renamed it, Kennedyland, was one such example. Unlike my husband, I don’t remember exactly where I was when J.F.K. was assassinated, mainly because I hadn’t yet been born. So, taking a tram--yes, honestly an actual Universal Studios-type tram-- through the cemetery to see the eternal flame was not my idea of a good or even an appropriate day out. Nor was standing in line at the National Archives amongst masses of unruly children who had taken the concept of freedom just a little too far, just to see a faded piece of 250-year old paper known as the Declaration of Independence. For my husband, a big deal. For me, not worth it. I mean 250 years? Please. Big whoop-di-do. My brother’s lived in houses older than that. Never mind that off to the side was a copy of the Magna Carta, the 700-year old document on which the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights was based. It was, of course largely ignored by the throng of tourists. Glimpsing the White House from two blocks away because it’s now completely fenced in? No big deal. Looking down the reflecting pool from the Lincoln Memorial and seeing the Washington Memorial reflected in the water, just like Forrest Gump did? Big deal.

What impressed me the most about Washington, or D.C. as we hip persons in the know call it, is that the entire history of this country is squeezed into just a few square miles. From Kennedy’s gravesite you have a clear view of the Lincoln and Washington Memorials, the Capitol Building, even the White House if you squint. On that scrappy bit of faded paper that announced, “Enough! We’re starting a new country and this is how we’re going to do it,” I saw the optimism and idealism of a great country struggling to find itself. I saw that same outlook etched into the monuments of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and reinforced in the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the memorials of the Korean War and the Vietnam War, I saw solemn reminders of those ideals gone awry. But I saw the Emancipation agreement and I stood on the steps of Lincoln’s Memorial and looked out like MLK did when he delivered his famed civil rights speech to 200,000 people and it gave me hope that this country, even though at times it may slip, will continue to find ways to live the values on which it was built.

Happy Mothering Sunday

2007-03-16T10:35:00.000-07:00

This coming Sunday is Mother’s Day in the U.K.. Formerly known as Mothering Sunday, it’s the day when we offspring shower our mothers with flowers, chocolates, and cards that tells her what a wonderful mother she is.

My middle brother’s traditional Mother’s Day gift is a bag of compost. Not your typical gift, in fact it could even be construed as offensive. But not so. My mother is an avid gardener so my brother driving to the garden center, lugging a huge bag of muck home and dumping it in my mother’s potting shed for her means she doesn’t have to do it herself. It’s a perfect and considerate gift from a perfect and considerate son. As for me, I’ll be calling my mother this Sunday to wish her a happy Mother’s Day and to apologize for sending her nothing.

It’s not that I don’t care; it’s just that when it’s Mother’s Day for my Mum, it’s not Mother’s Day for me here in the U.S.. My calendar doesn’t have it clearly printed to remind me, and the card stores are full of St. Patrick’s Day and Easter cards. There’s not a Dear Loving Mother card to be seen. To further throw me off the scent, Mothering Sunday doesn’t fall at the same time each year. While Thanksgiving is always the fourth Thursday in November and Christmas is always December 25th, and Mother’s Day in the U.S. is the second Sunday in May, Mothering Sunday falls on the middle Sunday between Lent and Easter, and as you know, that changes from year to year.

If this all sounds like a lot of weak excuses for forgetting to send my Mum a Mother’s Day card—again—it is. Even telling myself that it’s better this way because my Mum gets two Mother’s Days, the U.K. one in March and the U.S. one in May, it’s a weak argument. Come Sunday, her mantelpiece will only hold two cards--one from each of my brothers-- and in her potting shed will be a new a bag of dirt.

As if this isn’t enough, my mother won’t say a word about it! She won’t grumble or drop thinly veiled hints about what good sons she has. She won’t complain about me to her friends and she won’t cut me out of her will. That’s the main problem with my Mum—she’s not normal.

My other friends have mothers who have refused to speak to them for months because they didn’t call for two weeks. They have mothers who pit one sibling against another or spend family holidays lamenting that their own offspring could never compare to the neighbors’ perfect kids. Not my Mum. She never sticks her nose into my business. She never tells me how she would run my life if she were me. She likes my husband and she waits patiently and silently for grandchildren from me. We can take her on vacation with us and she doesn’t complain about the food, the weather or the locals. She’s never embarrassed me by causing a scene in a restaurant or demanding to speak to the manager in a store. You see, she just not right!

I didn’t actually forget it was Mother’s Day, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this now with two days left to go. I did however forget until it was too late to do much about it. The only way to have a card arrive in time would have been to send it via Global Express Mail. At a cost of $25.25 it would have been worth it. But my mother is British; she’s fed a family of five for a week on $25.25. That kind of frivolous wastefulness is just so…well, American. I could have sent her flowers, but she’s leaving on Sunday afternoon to go on a trip to the coast with her seniors dancing club (understand that although my mother will be 75 this year, she’s about as senior as me—maybe less so (see October 26 posting below)). Anyway, sending flowers would be another waste if she’s not going to be there and we’ve already been over the whole wastefulness thing.

So, what can a lowly writer do, impeded by incomplete calendars and overpriced courier services? All I can do is write. Write here about how wonderful my mother is, how I wouldn’t swap her for any other mother in the world, about how fortunate I am to have her as a role model for how to live and that if I could clone her, I wouldn’t just be able to retire to that island in the Indian Ocean, I’d be able to buy it. And of course, I’d take my Mum with me.

So, here’s to my Mum and all the other wonderful mothers out there who can only wish they were as fabulous as mine.

HAPPY MOTHERING SUNDAY

Technologically Incompetent

2007-03-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

All this new fangled stuff seems so easy. Push a button and the world knows you've posted on your blog. In theory.
This post serves as a test for my new handy dandy "Subscribe" button. If you are a subscriber to this blog and received an e-mail announcement of this post, please let me know so I don't have to try and figure out why not. Thank you so very much.
If you're not a subscriber, what are you waiting for? :-)

Dropping Out

2007-03-08T12:16:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about society lately. Not how to fix it—I’ve already spent plenty of time on that with no solution. I’ve been thinking about leaving it.

My neighbor came by today to tell me he’s leaving. He’s quit his job, sold his car and possessions and is heading to South America, via the Virgin Islands. He’s going to travel for four months or so, then make his way back home to Australia to figure out what to do next. He’s just one of what seems like a long string of acquaintances who are throwing in the towel and checking out of the rat race. George is quitting his well-paying aerospace job to housesit and write screenplays in Australia. Charky just quit an already alternative lifestyle living on a boat and holding down a job in advertising to live on an island off the coast of Panama and run the local (possibly only) restaurant there. I’m not sure if the state of the world is getting to people (or maybe the state of L.A.) or if the people I know are just hitting that mid-life crisis age, but there’s definitely something in the air lately.

Jose and I have been watching The Good Life lately. It was a hugely popular ‘70’s British sit-com that made it to the states renamed as Good Neighbors. Tom Good hits 40 and decides he’s had it with the rat race. He and his long-suffering wife Barbara decide to turn to self-sufficiency. He quits his job as a cereal box toy designer and they turn their upscale suburban London home and garden into a smallholding, complete with pigs, chickens, and a goat named Gertrude. If you’ve never seen it, it’s worth watching. It’s an absolutely charming story and of course hysterical, but for me, it got me thinking. Could I do it? More to the point, could we do it? Jose and I together?

We currently live without many of the 21st century essentials such as television and a microwave. In the summer months at least 50% of the vegetables we consume come from the garden. We both commute to work most days by bicycle, rendering our cars dust collectors for most of the week.

Recently, we tried an experiment based on a yearlong trial we read about in the paper. During the month of January, we bought nothing new, except for essentials such as food, medicine and health-related items like soap and toilet paper. There were days when it was hard, especially early in the month while my mother was visiting and he kept dragging me into shops where temptation loomed. I didn’t succumb and now one month later, I haven’t regretted not buying these things, in fact I can barely remember what they were. By the end of the month, I was no less content with my life than I had been at the beginning. I was no worse off for not buying those things.

Going without new running gear and books I could borrow from the library is a far cry from living off the land, but I wonder, could I do it? What would we eat? A person can’t live on vegetables and eggs forever and I am certainly one of those people who would become a strict vegetarian if I had to butcher my own dinner.

Still, the exodus of my peers has started the shift of cogs in my brain and started me thinking about what’s I really important. The constant quest to pay off the bills and start saving for a house seem so futile when I see a million dollar price tag on a shoebox no bigger than the one we rent. But when I think about squirreling away money to run away with my husband and travel the world, or sell up and sail away in a boat, my attitude changes completely. In fact, my biggest obstacle is what to do with my cat.

And what about this whole self-sufficiency lark? Imagine a simple life without electricity bills, with fresh pesticide-free meals on the table. Imagine not caring what the neighbors think because they’re heading off into traffic and you’re headed into your garden to plant zucchini. Gives a person a warm fuzzy feeling, doesn’t it? Or is it just me?

Weather or Not

2007-03-05T11:06:00.000-08:00

Hooray for global-warming! Finally, chronic wallflowers like myself have something to talk about at parties! I mean, take the weather yesterday. It was blazing in the morning, what Jose would call earthquake weather--hot, dry and still, as if it was waiting for something to happen. I know I wasn’t the only one who felt it. Everyone out on the beach path seemed a little more tense than usual. But by the time we turned our bikes around to head home, the wind had turned around too, unfortunately not in our favor. Underneath the stifling warmth was the occasional waft of cool air, as if the seasonal weather was trying to fight it’s way through the oppressive dryness. By the time we got home it was chilly and windy. Weird weather. I’m telling this story to you and I’ll probably tell it to several other people before the day’s up. The weather is a hot topic of conversation right now.

When I first came here, I would use the weather as a means to start a conversation with someone I didn’t know. The weather is a traditional British icebreaker. Phrases such as, “Lovely day for the time of year,” and, "Looks a bit like rain today,” could be used with passersby as a polite extension to the basic hello, which can come across as curt or unfriendly if it isn’t quickly followed by a remark.

“‘Morning.”
“'Ow do.”
“Turned nice.”
“Weatherman got it wrong again.”

This would be a typical exchange between two Yorkshiremen whose paths had crossed on a typical morning. It’s not exactly a conversation, but it’s friendlier than your basic nod of the head-type greeting.

I can’t say I was ever specifically taught to do this—it’s one of those unwritten rules of etiquette—but I learned it at an early age, carried it into adulthood and brought it with me when I immigrated. It’s tricky to use in Southern California. Until the rains hit, assuming they do, there isn’t much one can say, except, “Nice day again.” But after a while, people begin to stare at me as if I am deranged. Of course it’s a nice day again, that is why most of us live here. Finally, someone explained to me that it’s considered almost rude to talk about the weather—a sure sign that you have nothing to talk about. I thought that was the whole point. I do have nothing to talk about with people I don’t know. The weather is a nice safe topic, general and not too personal.

British people, as a general rule don’t ask personal questions. At least that’s the way I was brought up. So with the weather eliminated from my repertoire of small talk, I have no option but to stand in a corner at parties, clutching my drink and grinning inanely until someone takes a chance and comes over to interrogate me. Even if I’m too British to ask questions, I’m perfectly happy to answer them.

But now, there’s lots to talk about—spring on the East Coast in January, snow in Santa Monica—every day there’s a new weather phenomenon to use as a springboard for a conversation. No more need to pry into a person’s professional or marital status—always dangerous areas if you ask me—now I can jaw all day about rising sea levels, melting ice caps and even about Polar Bears being added to the endangered species list. Hoorah!! What’s more, everyone’s doing it! People in line at the grocery store are talking about the recent cold front that swept through the state and killed off our lettuce plants. Fellow runners are griping about the heat, or the cold, or the rain, or the lack thereof. The weather is finally becoming a socially acceptable topic of conversation. Before you know it, people will be getting out of their SUVs to commune with their fellow man about shrinking lakes and erratic weather patterns. Thank goodness they’re only talking, though. If people actually start doing something about it, there’ll be nothing to talk about. And where will that leave me? Alone in the corner with my slowly melting ice cubes.

Of course, if we don’t act, there’ll be no-one to talk to anyway, but that’s a different conversation all together.

And the Winner is...Kimberly-Clark Corporation for Kleenex

2007-02-22T17:54:00.000-08:00

I’ve been busy lately, hence the lack of recent blog postings. However, when I received an e-mail of complaint from my Canadian reader, I knew I could no longer disappoint my public, even if my public consists of one loyal friend.

I wish I could say I’ve been out there trying to save the world, but my reasons are far less heroic. Jose and I have been trying to see as many of the Oscar nominees as we can--the movies, that is, not the nominees themselves. That would truly be exhausting. As it is, we’re drained, emotionally, financially and in the square posterior department. And boy, have we been using up the Kleenex. This year’s nominations have lead us on an emotional rollercoaster ride through death and destruction, torture and deceit, and the general unpleasantness of life and people.

We started out with The Departed, a movie that I wanted to leave in the first ten minutes. I see enough cold-hearted cruelty in the daily newspaper without forking over hard-earned cash to see it acted out. I was glad I stuck it out, though, no matter how weak-kneed I felt by the end. It’s always satisfying to walk out of movie and say, “I didn’t see that coming!”

We made it through Babel, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Queen, and Notes on a Scandal. We sat through An Inconvenient Truth and made it all the way to The Last King of Scotland. And that’s where we stopped. We still owe ourselves Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Children, Blood Diamond and United 93, but frankly we can’t take it any more. We spent most of Pan’s Labyrinth peering out from behind our jackets hoping the things we thought could happen wouldn’t happen and not being surprised or particularly pleased when they did. We left An Inconvenient Truth wondering if we ought to end it all there and then rather than waiting for the predicted Apocalypse. We finally decided to take a break and enjoy a fun fantasy movie. We chose Bridge to Terabithia. Well, that was a bundle of laughs. We used most of our popcorn napkins to mop up the gallons of tears we shed. Thank goodness for Little Miss Sunshine and Dreamgirls, which at least provided some entertainment and humor amongst the tragic deaths and tales of life’s injustices.

It’s not that I don’t take the subject matters of the other movies seriously. I do. I hope An Inconvenient Truth wins Best Documentary Feature, if that’s what it takes to wake up our politicians and our society. I’m rooting for Jennifer Hudson to take home the Best Supporting Actress trophy, because I think her performance was outstanding and she deserves it. It would be kind of an ironic twist considering the role she played, plus what a snub to American Idol.

Not all my Oscar picks are based on vendetta. I’m rooting for Forest Whitaker to take home Best Actor for his stellar portrayal of Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin and I’ll be cheering for The Queen for Best Picture because it was just as good the second time I saw it and it was a truly beautiful movie. I think I may be backing a three-legged horse there, but if Babel wins I’m boycotting the Oscars from here forward. And on that subject, if I hear Babel mispronounced as ‘babble’ one more time… I only went to Sunday school once and we did Jonah and the Whale that day, but for the record, Babel, (pronounced Bay-b’l, according to Merriam-Webster’s and The Oxford English Dictionary) was the place where God jinxed us all and made us speak different languages so we couldn’t communicate and build a tower to heaven. If it was pronounced Ba-b’l, as in to talk unintelligently, it would have been spelled babble. I may not be able to watch the ceremony for that reason alone (that and the fact that we don’t own a TV.)

So now we have that cleared up, here are my picks for the Biggie awards:

Best Actor: Forest Whitaker, because he was brilliant and I like him (and he was in truth the only Best Actor nominee I actually got to see in action)

Best Actress: Helen Mirren, because she did an incredible job of taking the audience on the emotional journey of a truly stoic woman and she didn’t yell once.

Best Supporting Actor: Alan Arkin because he was a sport and I haven’t seen Little Children or Blood Diamond.

Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson, for all reasons listed earlier and she made me laugh, which this year was a blessing.

Best Directing: United 93, because I don’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to directing but my gut tells me this one’s a winner.

Best Picture: I want it to be The Queen because I'm biased towards nice old English ladies, or maybe The Departed because I apparently have a soft spot for cold-blooded Irish Mafiosi, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Babel is going to win just to aggravate me.

So, there you have it. I wouldn’t recommend laying down too much money based on these tips. I pick my Oscar favorites by a method similar to the one I use for picking horses and greyhounds, but every now and then, the one with the shiny coat or the spotted jersey wins.

So, I’m off to see something mindless and entertaining. Perhaps I’ll see Oscar nominee Eddie Murphy in his newest movie, Norbit. Then again, maybe not.

Too Cool to Drool

2006-11-07T19:42:00.000-08:00

After 13 years living on the fringe of Tinseltown’s luminosity, I find myself somewhat jaded. I’m seldom starstruck and get little thrill from star sightings. Plus I’m usually not sufficiently connected with the world around me to actually notice someone famous if the walked right past me. I think I once saw Robert DeNiro in a restaurant on La Brea (Bob, if you’re reading this, please confirm) and I did once meet Jack Lemmon and Sophia Loren, which was pretty cool. So when the Black Pearl sailed into our sleepy marina recently I was more irked that my bicycle commute was diverted for the base camp than I was excited about the prospect of bumping into recently crowned mega star and super hunk, Johnny Depp. Sadly, not everyone shared my nonchalance.

For the next two weeks, I dealt with increasing security along my bike route, as word got out and lookie-loos gathered, until finally I had no other option but to dice with death out on the busier than usual streets in order to get to work. Even my morning run became an obstacle course of hopeful fans out at six o’clock in the morning, hoping for a chance sighting of their idol. The parking lot at my office was full everyday with the cars of tourists peering over the sea wall in the hopes of spotting the famous ship sliding back into port at the end of the day’s shooting. I found myself amused at the sight of hordes of extras clad in their pirate garb boarding the high speed motor boat usual reserved for tourist thrill rides, while adolescent girls yelled flirtations. It was all too much.

But as the days passed and the fervor mounted, I found myself craning my neck as I rode by on the off-chance of spotting Johnny or what’s his name, the other one. I diverted my run down along the beach in case I got to see the Black Pearl sailing out beyond the Palos Verdes Peninsula for a day of shooting. And while I wasn’t willing to wait in line for three hours for the chance of an autograph, I found myself wanting to be the one to make the first or closest or most random Johnny sighting. I wanted the glory.

On the afternoon of the day that filming was scheduled to wrap and we all looked forward to resuming our pre-Jack Sparrow lives, Jody (my boss) came flying into the office. “He’s coming!” she squealed. Word had been passed through a complex underground system of communication that the launch used to ferry the stars back and forth between base camp and the ship was on it’s way—with Johnny on board. Mayhem ensued as my co-workers scrambled for a look.

I’m told that from the upstairs balcony the girls had a clear shot of Johnny. I’m told that Janeen (voted #1 fan, by far) called out his name. I’m told that he looked right at her and waved. I’m guessing she was overcome and probably almost fainted, but I couldn’t say for sure. I wasn’t there. As the one voted too cool to drool over Johnny, I got to hold down the fort. While my cohorts were flirting and waving and snapping pictures, I was answering phones and dealing with crotchety customers. It was my own doing. I’d perpetuated the myth of my disinterest and I was paying the price.

So when friends and family back home ask, “Do you ever see movie stars in L.A.?” I still can’t reply, “Oh yes. All the time.”

Daisy, Daisy, give me your color-coded plan, (complete with maps and twenty seven checklists) do.

2006-10-26T12:35:00.000-07:00

Last month, my husband and I embarked on a bicycle trip around Ireland with my seventy-five year-old mother. Not only am I fortunate enough to have a husband willing to take his mother-in-law on vacation with us, I’m also lucky that I have a mother capable of being taken.

The trip itself boiled down to eleven days in Ireland, five of which were ultimately spent on actual bona fide cycling, four on biking to or from airports/train stations/bus stops, and two actually relaxing and enjoying a proper vacation. This short trip, however, took approximately three months to plan!

We’ve already established that I’m a planner-type. Well, guess which parent I got it from? I speak to my mother by phone every week, to see how she is and catch up on family news. For three months, the only topic of conversation was the trip. Shall we go to the south-east coast where it’s likely to rain less, but might not be as pretty, or the stunning Ring of Kerry where it’s windy, hilly and rains like the devil? How many pairs of shorts should we take? What kind of shoes for the evening? Will a U.S. tool kit fit a U.K. bike? Every week we made another decision about one thing and changed our minds about something else.

We decided to end the trip with a few days at my Mum’s to recuperate and catch up with the rest of my family and friends. After hours of discussing how to get back from Dublin to Sheffield—the train was too much of an unknown with bikes, the ferries too slow and expensive, my brothers too unable to commit--we decided to fly. I booked the tickets and everyone seemed satisfied, until we realized we had no idea how to get from the airport to my Mum’s with three people and three bikes, loaded with three weeks worth (even though it was only a two-week trip) of gear and souvenirs.

All the time my husband watched from the couch without comment, but with an amused grin on his face. For sport, he bought us each a full set of maps of the area we had finally decided to visit and planned to entertain himself by watching us haggle over routes and ultimately directions.

Alas, poor soul, I am my mother’s daughter and his plan resulted in two heads plotting our sweet revenge via the hilliest possible routes.

More antics from the Emerald Isle coming soon.

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

2006-10-25T12:26:00.000-07:00

So, you know how you promise to call someone and then you never quite get around to it due to circumstances beyond your control, and then by the time you do get around to it, it's been so long that you no longer want to face it? Turns out that blogging is a little like that, too.

I was shocked (shocked I tell you) to see that it's been two months since I last had anything to say. In that time I've done a couple of triathlons, finished my novel (writing, not reading, although I've finished one or two of those, too) and spent a couple of weeks pedalling my bike around Ireland. I also washed my bedroom curtains, put up my Halloween decorations and made a color-coded chart for all the writing I could be doing. Anyway, after all that I finally have something to say ("About time," I hear you say.)

So tomorrow (yes, honestly, tomorrow) I will begin my tales of high adventure on two wheels on the Emerald Isle. I promise.

Happy Birthday

2006-10-16T12:46:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday, dear blo-og,
Happy Birthday to you.

Today my blog is one year old. One whole year of incessant pontificating. Watch out, I'm not done yet!

Tea Addiction Breeds Dangerous Crackpot

2006-08-22T11:46:00.000-07:00

Next month Jose and I, along with my mother, will embark on a 10-day bicycle adventure around Southeast Ireland. We have everything we could possibly need--panniers, maps, raingear, first aid kit—but what we don’t have is tea. My mother and I take our tea intravenously, and in the four years or so since Jose and I have been together, he has gradually come to satisfy his own caffeine addiction through the more genteel traditions of tea drinking. The dilemma, therefore: How to get a steaming hot mug of tea in the middle of the Wicklow Mountains? Enter the alcohol stove.

When Jose first handed me instructions on how to make your own alcohol-burning stove out of two Heineken cans and a penny, I dismissed him as a dangerous crackpot. He’s full of good intentions, but the dirty work somehow always falls to me. Yet, somewhere in my subconscious, the idea tapped away at the long-dormant engineer in me, until last weekend I found myself wielding a steak knife and hacking away at a beer can like some lunatic inventor.Within a couple of hours, and without inflicting serious injury on myself or anyone else, I was the proud owner of an alcohol penny stove.

Stepping out into the backyard, armed with a camping kettle, a can of denatured alcohol and my stove, I felt like a pioneer setting out into uncharted territory. Yes, I could have driven to REI, plunked down my credit card and bought a super-lightweight Pocket Rocket, but I am 21st Century Woman, a trailblazer following the lead of those great British explorers: Scott of the Antarctic, Sir Walter Raleigh and Mary Kingsley. I am a rebel.

Admittedly, it was with no small amount of trepidation that I poured in the fuel and struck the first match. In fact, it was with so much trepidation that I had Jose pour in the fuel and strike the first match. Even rebels and trailblazers need a sidekick; Hillary had Tenzing, Lewis had Clark. And after all, I’m a rebel, not a fool.

To my astonishment, it worked and ten minutes later, we were sitting around the dancing blue and orange flames sipping freshly made, piping hot tea. I was so impressed with myself I went on to fix the screen door that had been torn and hadn’t closed since we moved into the place two years ago. And it was with a certain sense of satisfaction that as I pulled the last corner of the replacement screen into place I, 21st Century Woman heard the vacuum cleaner whir into action inside my house, with 21st Century Man at the helm.

Want your own alcohol stove? Click here for instructions.
Thanks to Mark Jurey for his excellent directions.

Sundays with Grandma

2006-08-08T09:43:00.000-07:00

Grandma Baker was a card shark. Not the beady-eyed, chain-smoking type. She was the very English, permanent-waved, twin-set and pearls, crocheting variety – a kind of card shuffling Miss Marple. She visited us by bus every other Sunday afternoon and brought with her one, sometimes two, small white paper bags of candy: humbugs, butterscotch or, on a good day, chewing nuts. While my Dad snoozed in his armchair or watched some old black and white war movie and my mother cleared the dishes from lunch and started preparing for dinner, Grandma and I munched on candies and played cards.

She taught me all the games she knew: Rummy, Brag, Beggar my Neighbor, Pontoon, German Whist, Cribbage. We started with the simplest and worked our way up. She had infinite patience while I learned new rules, forgot them again and struggled with holding all my cards in my seven-year-old fingers without literally showing my hand. Occasionally I’d try to cheat, though never successfully. Grandma’s gimlet eyes would never let that kind of thing go by unchecked.

At first I was frustrated, the games were too difficult and I hated to keep losing. Grandma would help me by dropping hints. “Are you sure you want to do that?” when I gave away a two in Rummy, and “Have another look at that,” when I threw out a trump card in Whist. As I improved, though, she was less gracious. She would merely smile furtively and say, “Thank you very much, dear girl,” as she picked up my mistakenly discarded winning card. I would inwardly kick myself and outwardly demand to play something “more fun”, like Monopoly or Mousetrap. But Grandma’s frail frame belied her toughness. She had lived through two world wars; in an industrial Northern English city, she’d seen the Blitz up close. She had taught my mother and her siblings to be resilient and she wanted to pass it on to me. So we played on, or we played nothing.

The standard coming-of-age benchmark in our family was growing as tall as Grandma. At 4’ 11” it didn’t take long. My two older brothers had accomplished that before I was born and my older cousins more recently. As I neared that much sought after prize, my card-playing abilities grew also and I began to win as many games as I lost. The cards flew, the matchstick markers raced around the cribbage board recording our victories, and my father’s peaceful Sunday afternoons were shattered by the cheers of triumph and the groans of defeat. I would wait by the window for Grandma’s arrival, the card table already set up and the cards, cribbage board and snacks ready to go. I would take her coat, make her a cup of tea (in one of the “good china” tea cups, with a saucer) and the games would begin. Breaks were permitted for teatime and duties of nature, but the last game would not come to its resounding close until almost 9 o’ clock, when victor and vanquished would walk to the bus stop arm-in-arm and I would see Grandma safely on her way home.

It’s been almost 20 years since Grandma left us for the great Whist Drive in the sky. I can barely remember how to play most of those games and these days it’s hard to find someone willing to turn off the TV for long enough to run off a couple of rounds of Thirteen Card Brag, even if they did know how. But I need to remember. I need to pass on the resilience to my children and one day, my grandchildren. I need to teach them the valuable lessons that their great-great-grandmother taught me: Sharing knowledge takes the patience and perseverance of both teacher and student, but the rewards for both are limitless; no matter how great you become, you can’t win every game and sometimes you just have to play for fun; and even if you inadvertently lay down your trump card, it doesn’t mean that all is lost and you should just move on to something easier. Oh, yes, and 4’ 11” is tall enough to hang up your own coat and help put dishes away, unless you happen to be 84.

Sports Announcement

2006-07-05T18:25:00.000-07:00

Due to the pitiful thrashing taken by and subsequesnt booting from the World Cup of the England team last Saturday, there will be no further discussion of sports on this blog. Thank you for indulging me for the short time it lasted. Until 2010...

Awakening the Patriot Within

2006-06-29T18:19:00.000-07:00

It’s been 20 years since I last stood in the driving rain/snow/wind/sleet in a football ground and cheered on my home team, Sheffield Wednesday. Whether due to their sorry demise or my relocation to California, I haven’t followed the team, or football at all, in years. But last week, I nudged my husband’s Stars and Stripes down to the lower flagpole holder on our front porch and hung my brand new England flag (still with the folds in it) proudly in the premier position. I will be donning my England shirt for all to see and hoping no one spots it and decides to launch into a play-by-play analysis with me. The truth is, the only England team members I could name, if pressed, are Sven-Goran Eriksson and Crouch, because he’s six foot seven and has a funny name. Oh, and Becks, of course, but you’d have to be from Mars to be unaware of him.

There’s something about the World Cup that brings out the patriotism in we Brits and somehow being 6,000 miles away from home only exacerbates that. I’m not the only one who’s caught the bug. In recent weeks, I’ve seen fabulous Mexico shirts depicting the Aztec sun god, and Brazilian yellow and green on cars, shirts and faces; my favorite Peruvian restaurant is showing all the games--in exuberant Spanish; and I get my World Cup updates and predictions from my Trinidadian friend in Canada, who is beside himself that his team got as far as they did. Interestingly enough, I’ve seen no evidence of fanatical support for the U.S. team. I’m sure this is partly due to the tepid interest in the sport in this country, and to the somewhat low odds of the U.S. coming home with the cup. And people here are, well, here. They’re immune to the surges of patriotism we transplants feel when our country is playing. We all know the fever that’s gripping our homeland now and we want somehow to be a part of it.

Two World Cups ago, I found myself in Ecuador, a country that all but closes down when their team is playing and where houses with dirt floors and a cooking fire have a small portable TV to watch the game on. There, I shuffled into the British Embassy in Quito with several dozen other ex-pats to watch the England-Romania game—the one where Romania scored in the closing minutes, thus eliminating England. There’s no need to elaborate on the new words I learned that day. It seems that no matter where in the world we find ourselves, when the home team is playing, we all remember where we’re from.

Even though the U.S. Oath of Citizenship requires a declaration to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty” and to “bear true faith and allegiance [to the United States],” I’m wondering: does that apply to football?

Where in the World is Lisa Manterfield?

2006-06-21T11:20:00.000-07:00

The British are obsessed with maps. My mother has a cupboard full of well-worn Ordnance Survey maps of Britain’s premier hiking spots and my brothers can debate for days about the relative merits of various routes from one side of town to the other. I myself have a shelf full of maps. I have Tanzania, Ireland, Hong Kong—all places I’ve considered visiting, but never actually been. A guidebook means nothing if you can’t see that the ocean is to the west and the ruins you want to visit are 40 miles to the northeast. In my opinion, you don’t get a true feel for a city until you see it laid out to scale.

When I first came to Los Angeles, my luggage arrived safely, but my sense of direction was held up in Immigration. Everywhere I turned there was gray concrete, honking cars and vast freeways spanning lane after speeding lane. It took some time to find my bearings and learn how to navigate my way around this vast metropolis.
“Get yourself a Thomas Brothers’,” someone advised.
“A what?”
“It’s a map book.”
“Lovely.” Or should I say, “Cool.”

Well, off I trotted to find this oracle of urban travel, but at four times my hourly pay rate, it hardly seemed worth it. A generous colleague stepped in and gave me his outdated edition: a pale blue ’85 and I happily explored the farthest edges of the giant fold-out map.

Then the age of the Internet came and Mapquest and Yahoo Maps became my new travel aids. They offered turn-by-turn directions, a choice of shortest or fastest routes, routes avoiding highways or elementary schools, even routes with maximum hot beverage outlets. Okay, maybe that was just my fantasy, but these electronic co-pilots were quick and simple to use and if the corners of my directions got battered or I spilled my Earl Grey on them, I simply printed another. So when my old Thomas Brothers’ got lost in a move, I didn’t bother to replace it and I never really missed it.

Then one day last June, I went to Irvine. Not by choice, of course. As a South Bay dweller, any trip involving a freeway requires a wilderness survival kit and a packed lunch. But, my job required it, so I tapped into Mapquest and printed my directions: 405 south, go 37.4 miles, exit. I didn’t really need such simple directions, but I took them just in case.
As I’d traveled so far south--beyond the Orange Curtain--I thought I might as well make an afternoon of it, so I took a side-trip. However, my usually keen sense of direction went awry. There seemed to be identical grand Mediterranean-style houses whichever way I turned; the parks, unfenced, with their carved wooden name signs and baseball diamonds had apparently been manufactured by the same company and shipped, ready-assembled to each neighborhood. Every corner looked the same to me and my beloved Pacific Ocean, trustily used for westward orientation, was nowhere to be seen.

I was lost.

I plucked up the tea-stained directions from the floor of my car and squinted at the postage stamp-sized “End” map, but the names of the streets flying by matched nothing I could see on the paper.

I was really lost.

The kindness of strangers never ceases to amaze me. Even in these hurried times of self-absorption and appalling manners, it still exists. At a gas station, a lovely gentleman with a heavy accent pointed me in the right direction and I reached my destination unscathed. The next day, I drove to my local bookstore--without the aid of Mapquest--and laid down my $34.95, thankfully no longer a half-day’s pay. The 2005 Thomas Guide, with its ultra-modern color scheme even came with a CD-Rom--something I had no intention of using.

It takes me longer to plan my trips these days, but that’s half the fun. There are pages to flip back and forth to and route options to decide upon. I may have to memorize a series of turns and maneuvers, and there are no clearly written directions to follow, but I have an advantage over a clinical, logical algorithm; I have creativity and insight. I know that the light at Westwood only ever lets three cars through, so should not be considered if arrival time is an issue. And I know that Santa Monica Boulevard is under construction and should be avoided at all costs. I also know that when I get a whim to go home from The Valley via the mountain roads, there will be green patches, brown squiggles and blue expanses aplenty. It may be neither the shortest nor the fastest route, but with the windows rolled down and the sun setting ahead of us, for the Brothers Thomas and me, it’s nirvana.

Mean People Suck!

2006-05-04T18:12:00.000-07:00

A couple of months of ago, we had a very exciting event here in Redondo Beach. The Amgen Tour of California bike race ran its final stage around loops of our neighborhood and finished just blocks away from our house. The police notification we received announced the streets that would be closed around us. There were plenty. My husband and I were delighted. It’s rare to be able to ride your bike car-free around here. We headed out early to take full advantage of the clear course before the race started.

We spent the day riding from point-to-point on the course being sure to stop at the bottom of the PV hill to see the riders climb as well as at the bottom to feel them whoosh by on their descent. In between lunch at the pier and coffee at a corner café on the course we took in the sprint section and of course the Finish Line.

At said Finish Line the mood was festive. Excitement crackled in the air as my husband and I edged towards the course in hopes of glimpsing the winners fly by. The crowd cheered, waved their banners and tinkled their cowbells. It reminded me of an alpine downhill ski race. I wanted to be part of it so set off to find the source of the cowbells. By that time, the crowd behind us had thickened. I searched along the line of people blocking my way back to the expo and the cowbells until I found a friendly looking female face.

“Excuse me,” I said in my most affable polite voice and indicated the two-inch gap between her and her husband, “would you mind if I squeezed through?”
“No,” she said. “We’ve had twenty people a minute trying to get past and we’re not moving any more.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I was so unprepared for her response that I failed to have any smart-ass comeback ready. Instead I wished her a nice day and moved to the gentleman next to her, who was happy to take the half step needed to make room for me to pass.

But the woman had already ruined my day. I was far too indignant to go looking for a cowbell. How could she have been so hostile after I’d been so polite and reasonable? If twenty people per minute had come through, why didn’t she just make a bigger gap so that she wouldn’t have to move each time? It all seemed so logical to me, but not to this woman. Here was a woman who was so angry, so close to the end of her rope that in that split second she decided she wasn’t going to take it any more and she wasn’t going to move for me. I was glad that she wasn’t behind the wheel of an oversized SUV barreling towards a yellow light and I wasn’t in my Honda Civic preparing to make a left.

If I could have one superhero power, it wouldn’t be the ability to fly or to scale tall buildings. I’d wish for an automatic invisible force field that I could flip open at the first sign of malice. I could protect my happy days from mean people and deflect their spite right back onto them. Childish, I know, but at least my feelings wouldn’t be hurt.

Ey Up, Lad. Tha’ dunt se much, do tha’?

2006-04-21T15:38:00.000-07:00

My husband, Jose is a pretty gregarious sort. He’s witty and interesting and therefore easy to take out in public. So when my mother and Sid, my late stepfather came here for Christmas the first year we were together, I was looking forward to them meeting him, and being suitably impressed.

“Awright, Ozie,” said Sid, shaking Jose’s hand warmly. I had spent the past several months coaching my mother over the phone to get her to pronounce Jose as Ho-say and not Jo-zee. Although I convinced them that the J was pronounced as an h, no amount of cajoling could get either of them to put the emphasis on the second syllable, and the letter h had never been uttered from Sid’s mouth in his life.

The four of us sat around and made conversation. Sid soon made himself feel at home and started in on some of his stories. He told the one about the day he drove home in fog so thick he couldn’t see the front of the car’s hood and ended up driving down the sidewalk. What he actually said was along the lines of “Fog wa’ that thick, I coont see’t end o’t’ bonnet. Nex’ thing I know, I’m on t’ causeway.”

I laughed and my mother gasped in shock, I think more in surprise that he’d survived as long as he had. Jose however, sat there staring blankly at Sid. I caught his eye and grinned, trying to pull him into the conversation, but he just gazed back at me. I frowned. This was no way to make a good impression on your future in-laws. He could at least put in a little effort to join in and endear himself to them. Perhaps, I thought, now he had seen where I descended from, he had changed his mind about our future together. I was slightly worried, but frankly, even more upset with him for being so rude.

It was somewhere in the middle of one of Sid’s stories about his long time friend and cycling partner, Billy, that the penny dropped for me. Jose didn’t understand a single word that Sid was saying. That disassociated frown on his face was in fact a look of concentration. “He may as well have been speaking Chinese,” he said to me later that night.

It was Churchill who once said we are “two nations divided by a common language.” How right he was. After 13 years here my once strong Yorkshire accent has softened considerably. It’s now what most of relatives would describe as “posh” and the rest would say is definitely American. Still, there are times that no matter how hard I try I cannot make myself understood. My greatest challenge seems to be in ordering water in a restaurant. I say war-ta, but what I need to try and say is wodder, or wawder, or something like that. It’s virtually impossible. Another favorite is the old Khakis/car keys, which apparently to my husband’s ears sound exactly the same.

Jacques Chirac allegedly stomped out when it was suggested that a meeting be conducted in the language of business, i.e. English. That’s all well and good if everyone around the table speaks the same version of English, but even in England you only have to travel to the next county to hear English spoken in a different dialect and with words unique to that region.

Perhaps we should all learn sign language, but even that has its issues. It would be all well and good until someone asked for two of something and caused the British delegation to leave in a huff.

In Memory of Sid
July 27, 1932 - March 18, 2004
It were 'ilarious.

Do Not Call

2006-04-11T18:37:00.000-07:00

“Have you every wondered why God allows suffering?” asked the woman who introduced herself to me as Ingrid. In light of the state of the world today, I have wondered often, but at that exact moment my more pressing concern was why God allows telemarketers. Ingrid was my third that day and I’m still not sure what she was selling.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has been my most frequent caller to-date—he of course was a recording (not that I’m sure I would be able to tell the difference). He didn’t call me on this particular day, but Yellow Pages did. They wanted to verify my listing information and as a valued customer, offer me a free business ad for month, after which $29.99 would miraculously appear on my phone bill each month until I spent half a day on the phone trying to get through to the right department to cancel it.

Equally appreciative of my business were National Geographic, who expressed their thanks for my renewed subscription by selling me a series of DVDs which will undoubtedly show up in my mail box from this day forward, ‘til death do us part at which point my next of kin will get to deal with trying to make them stop. Somewhere out in List Company land, my name is flagged with an “S” for sucker. I’m pretty sure that I signed myself up for the business ad and the DVDs, so perhaps I only have myself to blame.

My weakness for telemarketers is a two-fold issue: Firstly, I’m British and rudeness--or assertiveness of any kind for that matter--does not flow freely through my veins. My second issue is that I’ve been there. During a dark (I think it’s safe to say the darkest) period of my life, I found myself between jobs, between husbands and consequently between roofs over my head, so in a fit of desperation, I took a job as a telemarketer. My particular line was long-distance phone service--the nemesis of all quiet family dinners. For several months I sat in a three by two kiosk in a huge windowless room on the corner of Hollywood and Vine and tried to convince East Coasters that they couldn’t live without these services. Needless to say, while the top salesman regularly went home with several thousand dollars in his pocket, I soon adapted to life on minimum wage.

While location dictated that most of my co-workers were actors and musicians who worked the morning shift to keep their afternoons free for auditions and mailing out of headshots, many of them were single parents or students, just trying to keep food on the table and gas in the car. For some, it was the first of two or three jobs they would go to that day.

So, when one of these people calls me in the comfort of my own home it’s hard for me to take affront with them personally. On the other hand, there’s nothing more aggravating than having a crucial scene in a novel or a pleasant dinner at home interrupted by the breath-free monotony of a sales script.

After trying the tactic of waiting for a break in the monologue to jump in and say “No, thank you,” I soon realized it wasn’t going to work. I did once try just hanging up, but I felt so awful afterwards I didn’t try it again. However, as a former insider, I do know of one Achilles heel in the telemarketer’s role—the customer status flag.

The job of the telemarketer is two-fold: to make the sale and to create a viable list of live ones. After every call, the status is noted: hang up, answering machine, call back later, not interested. All these denote a live body and keep the recipient firmly on the list. The only status that would prevent another call is “I” for Irate. This is reserved for those dreaded customers who yell “Don’t call again,” interspersed with various expletives and culminating with a solid slamming down of the phone.

Now, getting irate with every telemarketer who calls me is only going to give me wrinkles, so my new tactic is this: calmly and politely explain to the caller that I am not irate, yet, but I will be if I get another call from them or anyone else, so if they would kindly mark me as irate, we can all just get on with our lives, without one another.

That’s my plan and I think it’s a good one, providing I can get a word in edgewise. Of course, I could always just put myself on the “Do Not Call” list, but then what would I have to write about?

My Christmas Epiphany

2006-01-11T08:03:00.000-08:00

Every year, the holidays seem to bring at least one unwanted gift. I’ve had a set of garish plastic dishes that were too big to fit in my kitchen cabinets; I regularly receive “girlie” gifts of compacts and pretty beaded pins from an aunt who has clearly never noticed that the daughter she never had grew up to be a no-frills pragmatist; I get a wine bottle opener and a set of glasses from someone every year without fail. Fortunately, I break glasses often and need replacements, but I’m good for openers for a while.

This Christmas, though, I got a gift I really didn’t want. It didn’t come wrapped in pretty shiny paper; it wasn’t left under the tree for me to find on Christmas morning. It was delivered to me on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) as a full-blown slap in the face. It was the gift of realization that my beloved family is flawed.

I always thought of the Dysfunctional Family as being a purely American invention, designed originally to generate sit-com humor and later adopted into the lifestyles of those people to whom drama seems to gravitate. I’ve listened often with furrowed brow to other people’s tales of siblings who haven’t spoken for years, mothers who pry into the most personal details of their children’s lives, and in-laws who just can’t seem to get along. I would shake my head and wonder why other people’s families just couldn’t be as perfect as mine.

My mother has never stuck her nose into my personal business and made helpful suggestions as to how I ought to conduct my life. She was always there in the unlikely event I actually came seeking advice; otherwise she just let me make my own mistakes, knowing I would come out the wiser for it in the end. I have two older brothers, both very different, but each with their own set of positive attributes—generosity, humor, and intelligence. They both married women who at first appeared to be completely wrong for them, but who have proven over 20-year marriages to be ideal mates. Between them they have produced eight nieces and nephews for me to spend my hard earned cash on. It’s the perfect extended family unit--except that my sisters-in-law despise one another. No one in the family can actually remember, or maybe ever knew what happened, if anything, between these two women to cause such vehement dislike for one another, but their jealously and stubbornness has slowly worn a deep rift between my two brothers, left cousins who rarely see one another and frequently puts my mother and me on the defense of one side or the other. It also means that, assuming there have been no weddings or funerals that year, we get together as a family once every 12-18 months on my return visits home.

This year, my eldest brother had been the one to suggest we get together on New Year’s Eve. I thought at first it was a sign that he had finally decided it was time to let bygones be bygones.
“No,” he said, when I hinted at this, “I just thought you’d want us to see us all together.”

I did. I wanted us to sit around the table and chat and laugh like the loving family we were. There’d be jokes and funny stories of our childhood shenanigans. My sisters-in-law would fight, of course, but it would be over who would wash the dishes and who would dry and put them away while my mother warmed her toes by the fire. There would be games of Mille Bornes or Monopoly with the adults and older children, and Ludo and Hungry Hippos for the little ones. With the warm farewells there would be hugs and pledges to “do this more often” and my sister-in-law would promise to send the other her fabulous trifle recipe the second she stepped in the door.

That was what I wanted, but judging by the reactions of each couple to the invitation, I knew it wouldn’t be what I’d get. Instead, there were four hours of strained politeness, shallow chitchat restricted to safe topics. My nieces and nephews had clearly all been told to be on their best behavior under pain of death, so instead of the usual pack of wild but amusing savages, we had a bunch of sullen mutes each plugged into their own iPod, Portable DVD player, book, or combination thereof. My sisters-in-law took turns in the kitchen being ever so helpful (which they were) but each securing some one-on-one time with my mother and me so as not to risk being outdone by the other. I exchanged a dozen or so words of small talk with each of my brothers, who in turn exchanged about two with each other. I have no idea how my brothers are doing; if they’re healthy, if their jobs are going well, if they’re content with the current political state of affairs or if they think their country is going to the dogs. I did, however learn the five-day weather forecast and the pros and cons of all the routes from Shrewsbury to Sheffield.

I had wanted us all to just get along—and we did.
It was awful.

I realize that by Dysfunctional Family standards, mine is pretty tame, but as the baby of the family it’s a sad revelation to realize the older siblings you once emulated are not the role-models you thought and that, in fact you have become the sensible, mature voice of reason.

I am toying with two possible options for next year’s holidays. The first is to set up a boxing ring on my mother’s back lawn, tell each of the brothers and sisters-in-law everything the others had ever told me and let them go at it. Instead of spending days shopping, cleaning and preparing a gourmet meal, my mother and I would have beer and hot dogs ringside and watch them scrap it out. The second option is to retreat with my husband to a mountain inn or a remote tropical island where I can lay on the beach and think warm fuzzy thoughts about the perfect family I was naive enough to think I had.

Over the Hill or Just Under the Weather?

2005-11-29T09:49:00.000-08:00

With all the recent advances in medical technology, we’re going to be living longer than ever. Great. This means we’ll have twice as many cranky old people to deal with. Don’t get me wrong, I have the greatest respect for the elderly, in fact I think they are one of this country’s most underutilized resources, but boy, they’re not half grumpy sometimes.

My husband just turned 50. Now I realize that 50 is hardly geriatric, but lets face it, it’s one foot in the social security line and the other on a banana peel. And he’s already in practice for waving his cane at the neighborhood kids and yelling, “Get the hell off my lawn, ya dern varmints!”

Out of fear of his impending sulk, I respected his request to not throw an extravagant surprise party complete with full mariachi and a roast. Instead, to celebrate this milestone, we drove around the neighborhood at 20 miles per hour with the left turn signal on. It would have been a perfect night out for him, had it not been Halloween weekend and the local police had not chosen our street to set up their semi-annual sobriety checkpoint. I was driving, so I slowed the car and rolled down my window ready to convince the officer that we were clean and sober. We had both had a glass of wine with dinner some five hours earlier, before seeing Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and then going grocery shopping – another wild Saturday night out. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. They took one look at my husband’s salt and pepper hair and waved us on. In hindsight, perhaps it wasn’t the hair that convinced them that we were of little threat to anyone’s safety. Perhaps it was the beaten, downtrodden, “Oh, shit, I’m almost dead” look my husband has adopted since he reached the half-century mark. Since his birthday, my beloved has developed the following symptoms: delicate stomach, chronic headache, tingling in two fingers of his left hand, insomnia and general muscle and joint pain. He also appears to have shrunk be at least an inch and a half. Psychosomatic? Surely not!

As if he wasn’t feeling sorry enough for himself, he received a very real reminder of his continued demise--a letter from the AARP. This wasn’t his first--the AARP marketing dept are way ahead of the game—but this one offered him a free desktop calculator with big color-coded buttons “so you don’t punch in a wrong number and mess up your checkbook!” He tossed the letter on the kitchen floor and stomped on it, thus reducing his mental age by a factor of 10.

Needless to say, he was feeling pretty down in the dumps about the whole thing. To cheer him up, I pointed out that in only five more birthdays we would be able to eat at Denny’s for half the price. For some strange reason, he wasn’t amused.

Welcome to America...Now Bugger off Home!

2005-11-22T18:20:00.000-08:00

I first came to this country in the summer of 1990 and it’s a miracle I didn’t turn around and go right back home. It wasn’t because of the people I met on the plane and it certainly wasn’t because of the kind shuttle van driver and the Disneyland Hotel employees who helped me find the hotel I was actually supposed to be staying at—some off-the-beaten-path hole-in-the-wall. No, my first impression of the United States--and the one that almost got me back on the plane—came from the folks in airport immigration.

Picture this: you’re young, free and single, living the carefree, but ultimately unfulfilling life of the singleton, when one day, you meet the person of your dreams. They’re adventurous and fun-loving, they’re wealthy and gregarious; they’re the most popular person around and everyone wants to be them or be around them. Perfect. So, you take the plunge. Then they say, “I want to take you home to meet my folks.” No problem, you think. So, you pull up outside your prospective in-laws’ beautiful home and you think, wow, this is the life for me, but then, out they come. They’re stony-faced and appear to be in foul moods and you can already tell they’re not going to like you. But, you put on your best smile to make sure they understand what a good, kind person you are and you eagerly await being welcomed into their home as one of the family, so they can get to know you and realize what a perfect match you are for their beloved offspring. But instead, they keep you out on the sidewalk and begin their interrogation.

“Why do you want to date my son?”
“How long do you plan on dating him?”
“How do you plan to spend your time with him?”
“Do you have any contagious diseases?”
“Do you have any plants, snails or other living things?”

And all through the interrogation, they fix you with a steely gaze, just waiting for that twitch of the eye that tells them you’re lying, just looking for a reason to say, “No. We don’t think you’re suitable for our son. Go back to your life of misery.”

Now, even if you do pass the test and they allow you in to their home, do you really want to go after all that? What if the whole family’s that way? What if your fabulous boyfriend, Mr. Wonderful himself, turns out to be the same kind of unpleasant xenophobe as his parents? Hmm, perhaps there’s a reason he’s single after all. So, you turn and run back to your home.

At 20 years old, my Mr. Wonderful was a country 6,000 miles away from my home. It had everything I was looking for--opportunity, a carefree spirit, and lots and lots of sunshine--but my own person in-laws-from-hell, the INS inquisitors, were terrifying. Now, I’m a fine upstanding citizen and while I admit that I’m not exactly saving lives and changing the world here, I think I’m a valuable addition to society as a whole. I can hold a conversation using words of more than two syllables, I work hard and pay my taxes—on time, even; I’m kind to children and small animals and help old ladies across the street—well, what I mean is that I don’t actually aim for them, which by Los Angeles’ standards is the same thing--so why wouldn’t they want me here?

You never get a second chance to make a first impression and my first impression was grim. Thankfully, I stuck it out long enough to learn that most of the people in my newly adopted family were much more pleasant. So, come on INS, what does a smile or a kind word really cost? Foreigners are people, too, you know. And you never know, you might be scaring away the next great brain surgeon, the next budding California Governor, or even your very own Ms. Wonderful.

Barbarism Takes a Holiday

2005-11-05T12:29:00.000-08:00

Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.

November 5th is Guy Fawkes Night, or Bonfire Night as we called it. It’s a cross between Thanksgiving and 4th of July, in which we Brits--in order to show our gratitude for our Government not being blown to smithereens by a bunch of 17th century ne’er-do-gooders--stuff our faces, set off fireworks and burn the traitors in effigy. After Christmas, it was my favorite holiday of the year.

The month of October would be spent gathering bits of wood, old furniture, sticks, and piles of newspaper for my Dad to use in the construction of the Bonfire. Mum had started baking several days beforehand, so by the evening of the 5th we would have a small mountain of parkin—a kind of oaty ginger cake—and a large tray of dark, chewy Bonfire toffee. Made from brown sugar, black treacle (molasses) and butter, it was more of a weapon than a confection and could simultaneously clog an artery and gum your mouth shut with one utterly delicious morsel. There would be roasted chestnuts to throw from hand to hand until they were cool enough to peel and eat; and there would be potatoes, wrapped in foil to be put in the middle of the fire to bake and eat with butter and salt at the end of the night.

My role in the preparations was to make the “Guy”. This involved acquiring a pair of my Dad’s old work pants and one of my brother’s threadbare sweatshirts—assuming my Mum could persuade the old miser to part with it—and stuffing them with newspaper to make a man-sized doll. Add a paper bag head and a pair of old socks and voila—a source of income. Tradition requires kids to sit their Guy out on the street and hit up passing neighbors with “Penny for the Guy” requests. We seldom got much, but the more resourceful kids would invest two pence in the bus fare into town where they could make a small fortune out on the High Street. Once the Guy had earned his keep, his final role was to sit on top of the bonfire, like the angel on a Christmas tree and wait until the flames licked high enough to melt his nylon trousers and burn slowly through his newspaper stuffing. We’re a sadistic lot, we Brits.

When Bonfire Night finally arrived, I would anxiously wait for my Dad to get home, wondering if I’d been good enough this year to get any fireworks. For the entire previous month I had been eyeing the selection boxes of fireworks in the local newsagent’s store. Rockets, Roman Candles, Bangers, Catherine Wheels and sparklers all crammed into bright yellow boxes. I was pretty much always good enough for a basic box and a couple of packets of sparklers. Fireworks aren’t illegal in the U.K., in fact the British encourage their children to nail Catherine Wheels to the fence post in a 10 foot square back yard, or shoot rockets out of old milk bottles in a neighborhood with at least a couple of dozen other houses within a 100 foot radius. It keeps the local hospitals in business.

So, what is this Guy Fawkes Night all about, really?

Well, in 1605, a group of young men conspired to blow up the Houses of Parliament and Mr. Guy Fawkes was their fearless leader. Unfortunately for them, they were caught and Fawkes was charged with treason and sentenced to death. The favored method of execution at the time, of course, was to be hung, drawn and quartered—a most unpleasant way to go.
Although, as a kid, I understood the reason for the commemoration of the event, it wasn’t until years later that I fully understood the significance of the celebration and its traditions. In fact, it wasn’t until I first explained it to one of my American friends that it dawned on me what a barbaric holiday it really is. There we were burning this “Guy” in effigy, dancing round the fire like the pagans we all are at heart, stuffing our faces and risking life and limb setting off fireworks.

It’s a cruel celebration of a man’s brutal death – but it’s still my second favorite holiday.

Bah, Pumpkin!

2005-11-01T11:08:00.000-08:00

For the first time in a long time, we were home for Halloween and actually living in a place that gets trick-or-treaters. We had the usual array of fairies, superheroes and unidentifiable creatures. We also had a boy dressed as a golf course and a dog dressed as Zorro. The nice children took one piece of candy and said “Thank you,” while the rest took great handfuls and trudged on to their next unsuspecting victim in silence. The Halloween equivalent of Scrooge who resides within me was tempted to call the bluff of some of the visitors by requesting a “trick” rather than just handing over the “treats”. But I feared the eggs and toilet paper and anyway, that’s just one step away from sitting on the porch with a shotgun yelling, “Get the hell off my lawn, ya damn varmints!” and I really don’t want to go there.

Instead, that same Scrooge sat on the couch and bemoaned the commercialism of the whole thing and grumbled about how “very American” it is to go door-to-door expecting to be given something and how when I was a kid you dressed up as one of two potentially scary things, a ghost (holes cut into the least flowery bed sheet you could find), or a witch (black cardboard pointy hat and whatever black clothes you could find). If you went trick or treating it was for pocket change, not candy and you could expect to be sent packing from most homes. Still, you’d better have a couple of good tricks up your sleeve because there was always someone who would go for the trick option. As it turns out, the whole trick-or-treating thing has its roots in the good old UK.

In Celtic times the poor would go door-to-door begging for “Soul cakes” to eat in return for prayers for the safe passage of the souls of the donors’ loved ones. October being the Celtic New Year, it was thought that the souls of the dead roamed the earth looking for living bodies to possess and the Celts dressed in ghoulish costumes to ward away these evil spirits (something a fairy, a golf course, or a purple dinosaur is unlikely to do—well, the purple dinosaur, maybe). Likewise the carved lanterns stemmed from the legend of a man named Jack who tricked the devil up a tree and was thus denied access to either heaven or hell. He was however given a single ember to light his way, which for some unexplained reason, he kept in a turnip and hence, our childhood Jack-o-lanterns were carved from turnips. No battery operated plastic pumpkins for us.

If you’ve ever tried to cook turnip (I can recommend it mashed together with potatoes and butter) you know how hard the damn things are to cut. Try carving one! To hollow out a turnip, you have to start with a very sharp and dangerous knife. Of course, we did them ourselves, I mean, whose parent has the time to sit and carve a turnip? We would work down in layers of about ¾ inch, by cutting a circular disc, then carving it into squares and cutting the squares out one at a time. We would proceed like this until our turnips were largely hollow, assuming your arm could hold up for that long. Then came the actual carving bit. There was no room for elaborate designs on a turnip. Just cutting out anything that remotely resembled triangular eyeholes was a feat. Still, the glorious reward of turnip carving was the smell of slow-roasting turnip as your candle burnt down to the bottom.

And that’s the spirit of Halloween (no pun intended) that I’m mourning the death of. It’s that no-stress, no expectations commemoration of an ancient tradition. It’s not the competition to get the most elaborate costume; it’s not trying to outdo all your neighbors with the giant animatronic spiders and realistic life-size witches; it’s not even competing with friends to get the biggest quantity or most sought-after candy. It’s about throwing on a sheet and being allowed out after dark. It’s about risking losing a finger carving a turnip and burning the stump on a real candle. It’s about overlooking the fact that ghosts, in general, seldom come with tiny roses printed on them.

Perhaps next year the Halloween Scrooge should just lock the door, turn out the lights and pretend to not be home.

Bah, Humbug!

Gobble, Gobble, Gobble! The Pilgrim Equivalent of Bah, Humbug?

2005-10-17T19:58:00.000-07:00

“Do they have Thanksgiving in England?”

Somebody asks me that every year. Usually a firm, “don’t waste my time you nitwit” stare is enough to jolt their brain cells to life, but occasionally it takes a further prod.

“Well, let’s see now,” I say, “what is Thanksgiving a celebration of?”

“It’s when the Indians and Pilgrims…Ah.”

It’s only one step above those people who ask me if we celebrate the Fourth of July over there. I mean, really.

So, Thanksgiving is a relatively new experience for me. It has no long-held traditions, no “well this is how my mother used to do it”, in fact, no real appeal for me at all—except for the turkey. But it’s such a giant hassle. Even though it’s still more than a month away, the question has been going around for weeks now.

“What are you guys doing for Thanksgiving?”

There’s always the family obligation, my husband’s, not mine, but that means facing the freeways and my sister-in-law’s cooking. There’s the annual invitation to my friend’s house. The food will be better, but there’s three times the freeway to get there, and really who wants to face traffic on that day of the year? We had an interesting invitation this year to go for sushi. Trouble is, our friend has yet to find a place that’s open (and I secretly hope she doesn’t for the sake of the poor stiffs who would have to work.)

Of course, there’s always the option to host Thanksgiving here. I love to cook, but it’s a week-long endeavor involving piles of magazines and cookbooks and hard (or sometimes impossible) to find ingredients, like plum jam, chipotle chilies, or barley. Every pot and dish in the house is called into service and the dish washing—my husband’s duty—takes another week to finish. Add to that the fact that my in-laws are Hispanic. When I did Christmas last year, every one of them came late. I was expecting it, of course. After three years together, I know better than to think and event will actually happen on time. What I didn’t plan for was them arriving in a trickle between 3:00 and 7:00. We had dinner—the dinner I’d spent three days making—in three separate shifts, which meant I was cooking, serving and cleaning up pretty much all day.

My first Thanksgiving in this country involved tamales and enchiladas before going to a movie on my own—hardly traditional, but perhaps my best one yet. I had my first true Thanksgiving the following year. I looked forward to the turkey, but couldn’t believe my ears when I was asked to make the green bean casserole. “You want me to do what?” Two cans of anemic green beans and two cans of gray mushroom soup, sprinkled with a tub of deep-fried onion flavored…? What are those things made from anyway? Then the hostess took a perfectly delicious vegetable like a yam--delicious slow baked or steamed with a sprinkle of salt and a blob of butter--and what do she do? Mixes it with its weight in sugar and butter and bakes it with marshmallows!! Marshmallows!! I ask you! Fortunately for me, a relatively healthy eater, my hostess that year included beets on the menu. I didn’t think beets went especially well with turkey, but I do like them, so I took a couple of slices. Well, they weren’t beets were they? No, apparently cranberry sauce, that delicious salsa of soft, tart berries, comes in jelly form, canned and sliceable! Who knew?

So, it’s easy to see why I have little enthusiasm for this particular holiday. Between you and me, I’d rather spend the four days in bed, with a good book, a good man and a cheese and pickle sandwich.

Happy Turkey Day to you all!

Saved by the bell?

2005-10-16T19:09:00.000-07:00

Like everyone else these days, I’m a busy person. I have a career as well as a job that actually pays my bills; I have a husband with various needs, and a family of in-laws with assorted other needs; I have a cat and garden, a car that needs some maintenance and a body that needs a little more maintenance than the car. I also have friends with whom I fortunately, with only a few exceptions, enjoy spending time and whom I had always assumed enjoyed spending time with me. It seems that lately though, that is no longer the case.

Don’t get me wrong, my friends still call me, we still plan to meet for lunch, or coffee, or sometimes a drink. They still share their secrets with me and they still appear to be concerned with my welfare, but it seems to me they’re just waiting for something better or more interesting to come along, and more frequently than not that distraction is provided by their cellular telephones.

So, there I am, pouring out my heart about the latest cruel blow life has dealt, or passing on the juiciest bit of gossip I’ve picked up in long time, or even listening intently as they do the same to me, when suddenly it happens. From the depths of their purse/backpack/pocket comes the tinkling sound of their ringing cellphone. It grows steadily louder until the moment it is freed from its confines by my friend, the caller’s identity checked and the little earpiece thing flipped open.

“Hello?” says my friend, and I wait to see what terrible tragedy has transpired. “Oh, hi!” they chirp and I breathe a sigh of relief. “Yes, I’m just having lunch with Lisa.”
I wave, assuming the caller knows who I am. And then the conversation from my end goes something like this:
“Oh, yeah, I called you about this weekend. Can you go?...Yeah…Yeah, I think she’ll be there…Did I tell you what happened?…” And so it continues.
And there I sit, picking at my lettuce trying not to listen in on the conversation that’s taking place 18 inches from me ear, and wondering when I became so boring and insignificant.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a cellphonaphobe. They’re lifesavers, sometimes literally. Most of my girlfriends have children and I understand that when you have kids, you’ve got to answer your phone, even if it’s just to help your little one find the remote control (I have sat through the other end of that conversation, by the way!) But when you take a call from one of your other friends, one of your interesting friends, I’ve got to tell you, that’s just rude. You’re telling me my time is of no value to you, and that you are far more busy and important than I am. You’re also telling me that what your other friend has to say is far important than what I have to say. If that’s the case, then do me a favor, just don’t call me, OK? Call your other friend and go have her spend her money on lunch, and then I can just call you in the middle of it and we can visit that way. It’s much cheaper for me and will take up far less of my valuable time.

I know, that would just be anti-social and miserly, but, please, with our ludicrously busy lives the way we are, we get so little time for one-on-one interaction any more, and I actually do like you. So when we do finally get the chance to get together, do me a favor, make it all about me. It’s only an hour and I promise that I’ll make it all about you. Then when we’re done with our time together, you can call your other friend from the car, while you’re hurtling back to work, or on your way to get your kid from judo, you know, some time when you could really do some damage.

Well, if that’s the only other option, I guess I could sacrifice some of my time…maybe.

Miserable Marvin, Parking Poop

2005-10-06T11:23:00.000-07:00

What ever happened to Lovely Rita, Meter Maid? We seem to be stuck with Miserable Marvin, Parking Poop.

We are fortunate enough to live in one of those beach cities that afford its residents clean air, breathtaking vistas, and one street parking space per ten residents. Please don’t ask why we don’t just park in our garage or driveway – when our tiny beach cottage was built, back in the 30’s, parking here just wasn’t an issue. Couple with this the obsessive cleanliness of our city public works department and we’re left with two days each week, when either one side of the street or the other is out of commission.

My husband and I regularly do the Friday morning shuffle, when, bleary-eyed-- coffee in one hand, newspaper in the other--we realize that one--or both---of our cars is illegally parked. There then ensues a frantic search for our keys and if time permits, a change from robe and slippers to some more appropriate outdoor attire, followed by a mad dash to our cars to perform an elaborate ballet of three-point maneuvers and illegal U-turns before Miserable Marvin appears, right on schedule at exactly 8:00 a.m.

Unfortunately, we don’t always make it. In fact we’ve had so many parking tickets in the three years since we’ve lived here, I’m considering asking the city to erect a statue to us in honor of our philanthropic contributions to the community.

Now, I know that Marvin’s just doing his job and I’m sure it’s a thankless job—I mean, imagine going to work everyday and having NOBODY pleased to see you—but really, does he have to be quite so crabby? When we beg for absolution for our parking sins, we don’t really expect him to wink and say, “Just this once, then, but don’t tell anyone.” I mean, rules are rules--we know that. But he can’t see the slightest humor in seeing two people who look like they’ve just crawled out from under a hedge, flying down the street in their pajamas faster than Linford Christie? He doesn’t crack a smile, not even an apologetic shrug; he just twangs the windshield wiper on top of the ticket and without even making eye contact, climbs into his truck and goes off in search of the next victim.

So, Marvin, this poem is for you:

Ode to Miserable Marvin

Oh Marvin, poor Marvin,
Your lonesome heart is starvin’
For someone who will say,
“Boy, you really made my day.”

But there’s no-one understands
That the City ties your hands,
And the nature of your work,
Is what makes you such a jerk.

Oh, if folks would just obey,
They would have a nicer day.
But the lows to which they stoop,
Are what make you such a poop.

So this law-abiding slob
Says, “Go on and do your job”
And I’ll add without reserve,
“We all get what we deserve.”