Rain Again
My winter solstice newsletter where I think about so many things that aren't really art but kind of are.
This morning, it’s raining. It’s a pretty rain, and the reason I think that is not just because I spent some of my morning with my coffee under the safety of an awning, watching and hearing it fall, but I am able to think of it as pretty because I don’t have to drive anywhere.
Driving in the rain means I have to pay far more attention to the actual act of driving, of course. I prefer the kind of automotive experience where I can trust my wheels on the road and allow my mind to absorb and appreciate the landscape I’m rolling through, if it’s one I might appreciate.
Because of this rain and my peaceful time with it, I’m starting to think about winter, which is around the time I plan on finishing this newsletter. The winter solstice, or Yule, on the Wheel of the Year.
Right now it’s autumn and I recently traveled to Los Angeles, which was my home for a very long time. It was a small reunion- friends I’ve known since childhood and I met up to attend a museum exhibit on fiber arts and abstraction.
I hadn’t been back to L.A. since 2018. It was Thanksgiving, 2018, so that’s five years, almost to the day. Back then my partner and I had leased an apartment in the small city we live in now, my home town on the Monterey peninsula. It’s called Marina.
I lived here and Kenny stayed in Hollywood for a while as he had some things to wrap up in our old lives- which abruptly shifted when my father had several massive strokes and I moved my life back to where I was raised. On that Thanksgiving eve, I took a plane at six in the morning from San Jose to Burbank and that day and for three days after, we packed and moved completely out of the apartment complex we had been living in for five years. On the last day we rented a truck, packed it all in and together drove to the new space we were slowly developing into a home. He was glad to leave L.A., which I think was more of a crossroads for him than anything else.
I, myself, was so overwhelmed by the years in Los Angeles that by the time my parents needed me, I welcomed the change that came in the form of an obligation I had been dreading and expecting. The ten pound fibroid-ridden uterus inside of me seemed to be a manifestation of frustration and anger I felt in myself and from energies bouncing around that city- on the trains, subways, buses, as well as in the inevitable car traffic, as well as the crowded boulevard I walked along to get to and from home. The heat. My role in this environment. The people suffering on the street where I lived. All of the broken dreams, delusions, change of plans. Life circumstances. Mental illness. Excess, wealth, addiction and poverty. Imbalance swarming around us all and everywhere.
I had been teaching celebrity teens and teens who had celebrity parents. Teens who grew up with celebrities. That was a big lesson. The killing of illusions I carried with me to the city of angels.
Something happens when you are around a lot of teen energy as an adult, if you are receptive to it. Over and over again, with each student (I taught/teach eight teens a day, in a one-to-one setting, four days a week), I was (and still am) met with this familiar vulnerability masked by fresh-skinned identities that hold a sort of terror over the fact that grown-up responsibilities are around the corner. Add to that, an unharnessed and undefined wanting. Loneliness. Rebellion from rules and parental figures co-mingling with a wish to be taken care of, forever. Just all of the stuff we go through during those dramatically shifting times in our lives-
As an empathetic adult, as I believe one must be when working as a teacher, you feel a great deal of compassion for these chaotic and relatively new humans that seem to be raw reflections of who we once were. We have lived life longer and we know what they have in store, what they will need to go through.
Nothing breaks the spell of Hollywood like being a witness to the flaws, trauma, tragedies, innocence and well, humanity of children living in the midst of the entertainment industry. What’s even worse is that as teens, they begin to understand that their very lives may be perceived as one of the most desired types of currency and power in our culture.
Add to that, a daily commute on public transit with countless other service workers you get to know, but don’t really speak to. All of us, college educated or not, sitting quietly twice a day, tired and sharing knowing shrugs, eye-rolls and half-smiles while tolerating the occasional need for public attention from someone on our shared commute who are for one reason or another, unhinged and loud about it. In some way, we get it.
During those years, I recognized myself more in the posture of those not taking up too much space. Reading books, crocheting, staring out the window- I recognized the handbags that seem a little too nice, but not that nice, stuffed with supplies, empty lunch Tupperware, old and reused plastic grocery bags, etc... with their leather handles securely wrapped around the arms of these daily commuters. The handbags, so often given as gifts to those of us who serve others, by those we serve. I had my own collection.
This commute time, which I experienced for years, was part of what shifted my perceptions and made me aware of my role. That hour and a half, twice a day, was good as it forced me to stay grounded in reality or maybe it was just part of the experiential “prescription” I needed to get over the vampire-like glamor spell so many of us, under the umbrella of pop culture, fall under. Not only is it terrible to energetically bow down to the power of a child that money and celebrity gives them, but it’s a terrible thing for an adult (whether we are aware of this or not and often times, I am not) to feel a sense of power or privilege for being in the realm of said child, or parent, for all parties involved. It’s objectification and delusion and because all of us are getting something out of it, it’s a difficult thing to face and admit being involved in. It’s still hard work, keeping myself in check. I do so want to look back on my life and share my experiences with others and say, “Look at how special I have been to have been a person in this situation…” and for them to reply with, “Wow, you really are special.”
That said, I always tried to keep in mind that living in the heart of Hollywood with a stable source of income was a personal goal I had. The first time I lived there, ten years earlier, I was truly delusional and very quickly lost everything I had before going to school in the midwest.
Because of this accomplishment, which might not seem like much but was to me, I enjoyed our little Hollywood apartment as often as I could remind myself to do so.
In our mid-1970’s built complex there was a good-sized umbrella tree outside our window that had to have been there for years. I watered and removed old leaves and sprayed the Hollywood muck off every now and again. We also made a tiny garden in the small, rectangular bit of earth that fit the length of one of only two windows we had to look out of. (The second window faced the outside wall of the next apartment complex and through it I once heard the gunshot sound from what I later found out was an actual contract killing.) I hung little seashell wind-chimes on the tree in front and did my best to act like I had the apartment of a character in a Pedro Almaldovar film, which wasn’t easy, as Kenny was running a record label and we constantly had promotional t-shirts and flattened cardboard boxes for shipping them stacked ceiling-to-floor. As well, I lacked an art studio and even though I reduced my practice to one art project at a time, my supplies contributed to the lack of interior design charm.
I liked weekends, as I would run errands and sometimes do yoga at Runyon Canyon park (Thanks Daniel Overberger). We had a screen door to let air in and Kenny would work on his music at his desk on Sundays while I took care of this or that. We watched a lot of movies and we could hear the next door neighbor practice singing and playing the piano. We ate a lot of Joe’s pizza and pho. We experienced a kind of comfort I always envisioned but never had. Despite all that we had going against us, we were so cozy.
Gone were any dreams I had about “making it” in that city, as I didn’t have what it took to navigate the art scene the way I needed to. I was disheartened and I loathed the bullshit I saw my friends learning to sling and embrace, for the sake of their art, which was worth it. I was jealous and knew I
should not judge them for it. From where I am now, I understand it as the cost or the rules of the game I chose not to play, which meant I would not reach the goals I once thought I wanted to work toward; at least not within those parameters.
The two days we packed the last of our things into a U-haul and car were tough. Kenny was overwhelmed by it all. His time in L.A. involved a lot of change and loss and similar to my case- work that didn’t seem to pay off the way he had envisioned. He suffered a terrible injury he was still healing from and pulled something while in the midst of our move that shot pain from his leg to lower back. Somehow, and with the help of a very kind and strong friend, we managed to pack it all up and drive to our new home on the central coast of the very same state. Soon after that he had a gig in Mallorca of all places and a chiropractor set everything back into place in his body and with the change of environment and one week on a faraway island, he was on his way to being pain-free.
Now I look back at all the work he did and his personal growth, not to mention our love and partnership, and see how it is all connected to where we are now. His accomplishments then were new, delicate roots that came from stronger ones on the other side of the continent (NYC), where he had already established himself in his industry. I think of the painters, writers, poets, comedians, filmmakers, shop owners, designers, conceptual and performance artists I had the privilege of working with in Los Angeles and am thankful for all that I learned from them and our experiences together. I was a part of a lot of cool things and know that they are all a part of my own foundation.
So yeah, I went back to L.A. recently, this time for a visit.
Upon leaving the airport, I headed on foot for the street. I knew this area well. I went to grad school nearby.
Onto Sepulveda, across from the In & Out I caught a Lyft and then observed the shitty drive I had made so many times, from airport to town. Traffic. Urban oil fields. Old strip malls mixed with tall new buildings that somehow look like AI designed them, filled with pod-like apartments with gray accent walls and signs outside advertising “new ways to live.”
Thankfully my hotel allowed me to check in early and I headed straight for the roof to see the view. I wanted to find out if I had that “feeling” I used to have; the romance for the city, for my past dreams and realities. Nostalgia, such a powerful drug, but it wasn’t there.
In this view of the hills I gazed out upon, I no longer saw glamor or magic, I simply saw a whole world that could care less about the best of what I had to offer. In the sprawl below and beyond, I saw all that I knew. The Hollywood sign- a tiny spec of “whatever.” That’s fine.
I went back to the room, texted my old friends from back home, now living in L.A. and visiting from D.C., and that is what drew excitement out of me, as they were at the Farmer’s Market having drinks and I could walk there and join them on that warm, sunny afternoon.
WINTER
My mom had a big stroke last spring. She thought she was having that or a heart attack almost every day, and I was there to hear about it, bring her to the hospital or look on the internet for her when she thought something like eating blueberries from Peru might cause her body to fail in one way or another. It was just constant fear and the doctor of course confirmed some of the medical issues. I mean, she’s old.
It took a few years after my dad died for her to truly get into the thick of her fears and regrets. She refused any kind of socializing- except spending time with me. Of course, I have work and my own life to lead, but still made myself available to her, day or night. The weekends being the time I could take her around to gather her groceries, clothes and whatever trinkets she might fancy.
At the start of the pandemic I got a call while teaching over Zoom that she had passed out and fallen in the parking lot of the local grocery store. They had called the ambulance. By the time I got there I heard that she was severely dehydrated, something that often happens to the elderly because as we age, we apparently lose the ability to recognize that we are thirsty and forget to drink water- bonkers. She told me that she got dizzy. This is something I heard every day. She’s been terrified of feeling dizzy and passing out since I can remember.
This was the start of a new kind of isolation for her.
Mind you, this is when we didn’t understand what Covid-19 was. This is when people at the local donut/bagel shop next to the afore-mentioned grocery store, where she’d spent her mornings silently sitting, began wearing handmade masks. It’s when the tables were first spread out. Six-feet of distance. It’s right before they became a “takeout only” establishment.
Her fall in the parking lot was the moment she decided to never walk alone, again. Never choosing to learn how to drive, walking was all she did, both before and after my dad/her husband’s death.
Of course there were solutions offered to her. Her doctor suggested she walk around her neighborhood, where she knew those around her. I constantly offered to get her a cell phone with simple buttons, so she could have freedom and use a local bus service, meant for those older and with disabilities, and she refused all of it. We even chose to live in an apartment so very close by so she could come visit but she wouldn’t, unless I drove her over. Her reason being, “I don’t know why, I just don’t feel good walking in that direction.”
That statement just one of many mind-fucks. Toxic habits she and I jumped right back into after so many years of separation. Like an emotional and energetic vampire, both of which she certainly is, she seemed to have a compulsion toward draining everyone, and I kind of think that she kept herself away from people because somewhere deep inside she understood her behavior affected people in this way. I, her daughter, was used to it- or she was used to draining me. It doesn’t hurt that I look a lot like her deceased husband, who was her match in emotional and mental abuse.
From my perspective, the stroke that forced her to move into an assisted care facility is perhaps the best thing that has happened to her, like, ever.
It’s a totally new environment, and everyone is her age and many are worse off, physically and mentally, than her. In this space, I see her parroting many of my social behaviors, and I think this is good. As well, she listens to music from a tiny CD playing boombox I got her and she laughs all the time and perceives herself to be a bit of a “spiritual helper” to her facility-mates. She is forced to live with others from so many different life experiences and financial backgrounds, including the nurses and CNA’s- people who are paid to pretend like they care about the way her poop looks and how many poops she’s had that day. (I can’t tell you how often I received a call from mom’s land-line “push a picture to call Linda” phone, with her in a panic, stating that she needed me to come over and investigate the nature of her bowel movement, settled in the bottom of her toilet bowl.
It’s been so much.
I know a lot of this is about getting old, which is, in my mind, why I chose to cater to her whims. I know she has some serious regrets about choices she’s made and I know that she lost the person who has been her decision-maker for nearly fifty years. I’m the only one around for her and I faced the fact that, for whatever reason, I would not be able to live life in peace without helping her at the later part of hers. It feels like the work to heal something generational, but you know, maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome.
So this winter I will not be worried about the old lady freezing to death. It took me four years of her not using the perfectly good heater in her terribly insulated home (she was afraid of carbon monoxide poisoning) to convince her to at least use a heating pad.
My brother and I used to blow steam out of our mouths in that mobile home in the mornings, while we got ready for school. We didn’t realize that our parents should have taken care of that and kept us warm. Instead I remember pretending that I had a phantom cigarette in my hand and mouth while eating my breakfast of “shit on a shingle,” or hot rice cooked with cinnamon and condensed milk.
You might have been wondering why I didn’t force my mother to live with Kenny and I over these past few years, but hopefully the previous paragraphs lead you to understand that in order for me to survive while taking care of this “karmic work,” I need to return to the world that I have made, with the rules I have worked hard to define. I have a difficult time sticking to them when around people who knew me as compliant and serving in my life, not just within my role as a teacher to the often priviledged.
It’s good news that my blood pressure seems to have normalized since mom’s stroke. I spew off gratitude lists to myself on my drives to and from school, where I acknowledge my freedom from daily interactions with someone who tells me things like “I have hormones now. My body makes me feel like I want to have sex, but I don’t want to have sex. Check on the internet if it’s because I’ve been eating hard-boiled eggs.”
I love watching the nurses and aides at her home, expertly reacting to the totally bonkers questions she and her peers ask. They seem to know exactly what to say and have no emotional attachment, so the questions just float away- until another one bubbles up and pops out of a wrinkly old mouth and another feigned smile forms on the face of a nurse or CMT that says, “Your makeup looks so pretty today, Rosa,” and it squashes any unreasonable concern or complaint from my mother. Experts at distraction. Goddess bless them.
Since she’s been in her new living environment, she rarely mentions having the symptoms of dizziness and all the other things that led us to the ER so often before. Everything feels so delicately balanced and I fear the rug being pulled out from under this situation that is so good and needed. I’m trying to ensure I’ve provided enough proverbial safety nets while also fighting this super Capricorn-like behavior by simultaneously reminding myself to trust. Trust, trust, trust…
BODY MIND (and hooey?)
I am almost done with a book called “On our Best Behavior” by Elise Loehnen where she investigates the Seven Deadly Sins and the patriarchy. One thing that struck me, now that I’m closer to the end of it, is a section where she mentions the fact that social isolation leads to strokes and heart disease and I thought of my mom and how things have gone for her.
As well, I think of my reaction to my dad’s first heart attack, back in 1995. I understood all the terrible things he was doing to his body, but more than all that I felt as though his way of perceiving life gave him a literal broken heart. I was in the midst of reading some Carolyn Myss’ book, Anatomy of the Spirit, about our bodies and our perceptions, back then. As well, my life was helped as a teenager by Louise Hay’s words about behaviors, thoughts and biology in her very 1980’s “self-help” book, You Can Heal Your Life, which I now know is a continuation of things Florence Scovel Shinn, an artist and illustrator who found her path as a metaphysical writer of such books as, The Game of Life and How to Play it, published in 1925. Affirmations- that kind of thing. You may think it’s a lot of hoo-haw, and I totally understand and respect that, but in Loehnen’s book the information on perceiving life in a certain way and body-health is something charted and noted by medical professionals. In observing my mom, and previously my dad, it makes sense to me.
RAIN AGAIN
It was late November when I started writing this and I am here, once again, at my table, drinking morning coffee and watching the rain fall. I don’t have to drive anywhere today.
I think I paid my dues, as for the past few days I drove through windy mountain roads with sheets of water falling on my windshield. I saw a young man crawl out of the passenger window of his van, tipped on its side, causing a line of angry commuters, opposite my destination/direction. Halted and late for work. He seemed safe but almost was not.
Another thing to be grateful for. Not just to be able to be at home with good health, comforts and a “vehicle” for self-expression (laptop), but because of the storm so close to our solstice, and wrapping up this bit of writing, to have been forced into a place of consideration for other perspectives on what it means to experience this coziness.
For the northern hemisphere of this planet, the solstice is the winter and going forward more light comes. The day with the longest night. Bring it inside if you are lucky enough to have shelter- into the sparkly lights and fire crackles in a furnace or on Youtube. Or maybe it’s better and braver to be outside, watching the sun set and embracing the cold and the dark. Rejecting the illusion of safety. Either way-
Blessed Yule.
Yes, I know what you mean --"so many things that aren't art but kind of are." Your life in SoCal weirdly reminds me of graduate school, and all the students I taught who would come to me during office hours freaking out (and also the times I myself was freaking out); not to mention the anger/disillusionment I came away with during and after a long pause in my studies (returned home for 6 years to care for my mother) and finally returning to complete my degree. Anyway. . . I hope you are feeling more "at home" here in Central Cal, and that you have a lovely, peaceful holiday season. Great meeting up w/artists at the club!