thank you, fireworks.

I always overshoot hope and go 10 steps beyond reality. My dad agrees to try photoshop on a few pictures he took in Carmel. I'm thrilled to see him take positive interest in something. My headspace immediately plans a photo safari in India for us. We excavate our history and exorcise all demons and Bond.

I need to learn to be thankful for the things that are happening.

I want my soul wide open to manna--every moment able to give thanks.

---

On the 4th of July, we watch fireworks from the O.B. pier. All the fog makes the sky a whitish-grey so it looks like the fireworks are exploding indoors, right under a high ceiling. Different, but lovely.

At the end of the show, while we're still standing in a happy daze, a small boy pipes out, "thank you very much." After a pause, he reiterates (for clarification), "thank you, fireworks!"

People chuckle, of course, but only after the shuffle of shaking blankets and folding lawn chairs can cover up their laughter. Because he is serious.

(&)

As I was walk the Seal Beach shore, a girl about 7 pops out of the waves, wildly flourishing a glowy bit of green, shouting,"I...Found...Seaweed."

She's in danger of toppling over--not from the surf, but from the Wonder. Seaweed. In the ocean. In her hand. It is too much.

---

I want to be like that. I want the capacity for that.

The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

Part Nine.

One morning I returned from my walk in particularly high spirits. I'd toted my walk-man along and found that running was much easier while jammin' to Shania's "Man I feel like a Woman." I popped some focaccia in the toaster and sat down to rest.

Today we'd wage battle against the garage. A rented, full-sized dumpster now sat in the driveway, waiting to be fed.

Our first project was the campaign posters for California State Treasure Ivy Baker-Priest. There were hundreds of them. Across each one stretched Ivy Baker-Priest's smiling portrait, eerily larger-than-scale. A tasteful beehive of pure-white hair, pearls circling a tan-but-not-too-tan neck, a stylish Jackie-O suit, giant brown eyes gleaming hawkishly. Her expression was difficult to pin down, but I think it could be described as hungry. Hungry for California's fiscal well-being, perhaps.

No matter how noble, a human head scaled larger than a human head is unsettling. To add to the weirdness, the stack of posters had fallen and fanned out through the garage, creating a Warholian army of smirking Ivys.

As I planned the most efficient means of her demolition, I listened to the morning hum: the whirring of Mother's hair drier, the rasp of the air vents, the thump of towels in the laundry spin, the light ticking of toaster-wires. The rosemary in the toast perfumed the kitchen. Everything felt rhythmic and warm.

Then I heard a howl from the bedroom. It sounded sort-of like an expletive, but I knew it was not. It was just a howl. After the howl, silence. Too much silence. No whirring, no humming, no thumping. My mother entered the kitchen, curly head half-dry, half dripping. Ratted up, curly tendrils beamed out and extended inches in every direction, her face still red from the shower. She looked like a cartoon sun.

"We blew a fuse."

I nodded absently, my full attention absorbed in a rescuing my fragrant slice of focaccia. I wedged a fork between the still-glowing toaster coils.

"You'll get electrocuted doing that," she observed.

"I won't...that's the problem, right?" I popped the toast out, "cause we blew a fuse?"

She pulled the cord out of the wall absently.

"I should have thought about this," she sighed. "This house is so old. I guess we'll have to call Gus."

"It might just be too hot to work much today," she added as she reached for the phone. "I hope he's around."

----

Gus was my grandpa's handyman. He was, by trade, a barber, but he'd served as a sort of general pal to Grandpa during his last days in Sacramento, and when Grandpa finally abandoned independence and moved to Pasadena, Gus had agreed (for a small fee) to pick up mail, look in on the property, and see to the gardening of 2772 Harkness.

Mother and Gus were not, shall we say, cut of the same cloth. He signed off every conversation with, "Welp, sees ya in church," a strange and untrue colloquialism which rubbed her so completely the wrong way that it took half an hour to regain her inner peace.

Still, he knew about the fuse situation. He was probably the only one who did. And the cool of the morning was definitely not going to be sticking around. Whether or not we would ever see him in church, I hoped to see him at the house, tool-box in hand, asap.

The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

Part Eight.

My mother picked up the vibe the very next time we were in the store. Apron-boy approached us again, this time next to the cantaloupe pyramids, and asked if he could help. With anything.

"No," I said, managing a furtive smile. I even tacked on a "thank you."

As we left the store, she snickered. "Oh, to be 16 again. My mother used to laugh every time she took me for ice cream. 'I like to go with you,' she'd say, 'you order a small and get a double scoop just for being young and pretty.'"

"It's nothing to write home about," I said, grinning as I loaded the brown bags of fizzy soda into our trunk.

"Mmm," she smiled, thoughts far away. I wondered if the ice-cream story carried some sort of expectation: what good daughters do. How did this translate to the modern era? Perhaps my smile ought to procure us a double-slab of salmon teriyaki? Shoot, I would have been game, if I'd known how. That salmon was a miracle.

----

Mother waited each night for Dad to call. When I asked her why she didn't just pick up the phone and call him, she said, "I'm old-fashioned."

I was aware of this. I mean, we called her "mother," per her request/insistence. "Mom," for her, evoked a frazzled woman perpetually-swathed in stonewashed denim. When motherhood was new for her, she'd imagined referring to Dad as Papa. But that was one dream which my father emphatically squelched.

The phone thing still puzzled me, though. The weirdest part--he did call, always when she wanted, as if he could see us sitting there waiting. They conferred each night, Mother twisting the spiral-cord around her hand like a teenager. I never listened in on these conversations; they never interested me. My AP English class required Crime and Punishment and The Grapes of Wrath. The Russian nicknames alone demanded my full attention.

One night as she stared at the rotary dial, she laughed a little throaty laugh, the laugh of remembering something. I momentarily abandoned Rodya.

"In high school, I'd curl up underneath this table and talk to Marilyn every single night. At least an hour."

Marilyn was her high-school best friend. They'd both sustained long-running crushes, and had both given these boys a numeric "code" to preserve decorum. As she described it, I saw her, 16, curled up against the stately, carved legs, same cord twisted through same fingers, reporting on 'number 13' and the way he'd smiled at her between Chemistry and Concert Choir.

"Why didn't you go into your room?" I asked.

"It was comfortable down there." She smiled again and kicked the table leg gently. The phone rang, startling us both. She let it ring twice more, then picked up the receiver gently.

"Hello?" she answered in a tone reserved for strangers. Then, "Hello, dear." And the mash-up of the day, from the rat in the garage to the business of listing the house, began in detail. I turned back to Dostoevsky.

---

These reports on our circadian rhythm seemed to hold Dad's genuine attention. I didn't find much to be interested in: I woke up, walked to the park, and then shred something. Reports brought home from the state. Electricity bills from the 1950s.

During work hours, I sat on the floor of the back indoor porch, wedged between the fold-down ironing board and the washer-drier combo. One morning Mother gave me a box of pink Weinstock's credit slips.

Small, trim, the width of a shoebox but twice as long. This was Olive's box. I'd never met my grandmother; she died a year before I was born. The job should have taken ten minutes. Make sure a blank, signed check wasn't wedged between the receipts, and get on with it.

Two hours later, I was still cross-legged on the linoleum. The descriptions of purchase, credit slips ranging from '47 to' 79, read like a frivolous summer novel. She'd been a fashion plate, no question: Trim tweed suit, contrast-trim jacket, size 6. Red leather shoes, side buckle, size 7 narrow. A hat's description read: "feathery felt. Baby blue color with netting, grosgrain ribbon, jeweled bauble." I was lost in it.

I loved that Olive Reynolds Steinkamp bought it all on credit. We didn't buy anything on credit. Mother was not the kind seduced by style. She wore one blue button down skirt with a t-shirt tucked in to the waistband. It was utilitarian, it suited her service to her dad, to us. But I still bugged her about it. I thought she should have some fun getting dressed. She brushed off my concerns. When we went shopping, one thing mattered to her: Modesty. Just as fast as I picked something out, she'd deem it "on the make." An impossibly old-fashioned term. I hated it.

I felt accused. Of growing up. Of wanting to be pretty. Sometimes the outfits were ridiculous, were sluttish. I wanted to see what I'd look like if I dressed like the girls who got the attention. But sometimes I just thought something was jaunty, or I liked the way I filled it out, or it felt like me. These were real fights. The way all mothers and daughters have real fights. Tears, emotional blood baths, the dressing-room floor awash in taboo tank tops and too-short-skirts.

Impossibly, delightfully, the box smelled of Chanel No. 5. The smell of beauty. The smell of elegance; the smell of a woman who buys "jeweled baubles" on credit. The indoor porch swelled with the scent, it pulsed against the heat. I curled further back into my corner, leaned against the warm dryer, and breathed in deep.

steinbeck-sweet thursday

"Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hungers gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the bastard Time. The end of life is now not so terribly far away--you can see it the way you see the finish line when you come into the stretch--and your mind says, "Have I worked enough? Have I eaten enough? Have I loved enough?" All of these, of course, are the foundation of man's greatest curse, and perhaps his greatest glory. "What has my life meant so far, and what can it mean in the time left to me?" And now we're coming to that wicked, poisoned dart: "What have I contributed in the Great Ledger? What am I worth?" And this isn't vanity or ambition. Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man. If he ignores the debt it poisons him, and if he tries to make payments the debt only increases, and the quality of his gift is the measure of the man."

The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

Part Seven.

I didn't do too much driving after the Music Man fiasco. I was frightened, and rightfully so. And as time wore on, we grew lazy. At the beginning of the summer, we'd held abstract pow-wows to discuss enrichment activities for my Sacramento experience. My mother suggested I attend a church group and meet some nice people. Do you want to? I had asked. She just sort of shrugged.

We dropped it, decided that we already knew plenty of nice people. Woozy satisfaction settled over us. Besides, every moment was occupied. We were so docile in our daily labor. It was as if 2772’s ubiquitous dust was laced with laudanum.

-----

I did, however, drive to the grocery store.

And this grocery store was not just your average Safeway. No, no, no. Not in Land Park.

This was Taylor's Meat Market. Trim, tidy, polished cement floors, high wood-beam ceilings, wicker baskets. Mysteriously perfect temperature. Pristine pyramids of eggplant, shelves of freshly baked rosemary focaccia, slabs of teriyaki salmon, fancy fizzy exculsive sodas--not sold in any other grocery store in the state.

How, money-wise, were we able to shop here? I can tell you: we ate like birds.

We liked this phrase, and would often work it into suppertime conversation. It got to be ridiculous, actually. One of us would snicker and then, in mock-reverence, exclaim, "my dear, my goodness, you eat like a bird," and we'd both sit back in satisfied semi-emptiness.

My mother and I have always shared a voracious emotional appetite. Enough white cake (butter-cream frosted) will spackle any gash in the soul. Perhaps this sounds overly psychological? Simply put, we adore food. We find it immensely comforting. We're also consistently on a diet.

Our summer solution was to eat little bits of very delicious food. I did most of the shopping. We subsisted on salmon and focaccia, mostly. Oh, and fizzy sodas. Lots of those.

It was the third time I'd done the shopping. I was standing between the fresh-scrubbed yellow squash and a stack of drum-tight watermelon, wicker basked on my arm, when I was startled by a deep voice:

"Do you need any help with that? With anything? Any help finding...anything?"

"No, I'm good," I replied, flipping back my hair (it fell nearly to my waist). I looked up to find, walking away from me, the most handsome grocery-boy I'd ever seen.

He smiled over his shoulder. "Okay," he said, and returned to the check-out.

I recognized my egregious error. I did need help. I must. I floundered for a way that I (or that matter, anyone) might need assistance in the squash aisle. A different type of girl would simply have asked him to pick the ripest watermelon. This never occurred to me. I considered the implications of knocking over the entire squash display...perhaps he'd be charmed by a display of gamine clumsiness. No. Too risky.

He smiled at me, quite intentionally, from his spot at register #2. My eyes hit the floor and remained there throughout the rest of my shopping trip.

I could think of nothing to say. I was the most self-sufficient grocery-shopper in all of Sacramento. But in my defense, I wasn't exactly in the habit of seeing too many people my age. Especially not dark-haired, strong-shouldered, I'm-wearing-a-green-apron-and-still-looking-manly people my age.

gmap love

I know I don't write much about my current life. This is intentional.

However, one thing I do want you to know is I am running a 1/2 marathon in about 1/2 a month.

I've done my first 9 mile run. Did that a week ago. T'was fun.

I've often tried to nail down what it is I love about running. It is so different from most everything else I do. I am not inherently an active person. I am not the type of girl who can, say, catch a kickball. In fact, I've been know to let a male teammate sprint across the entire kickball field in order to catch a pop-fly that was headed directly for me. (Buy hey, he wanted to. I didn't ask him to run in front of me, he just appeared there. And then he dropped it.)

I don't know why running has stuck, but I've been a fairly dedicated runner for at least 4 years now. I like that it's a solitary activity. I like sprinting the last block. I like the second wind around mile 3. I like the excuse to listen to cheesy/overly intense/downright bizarre music. (It's "motivation"--don't judge) I like the fact that, while running, I'm forced to be extremely present.

And I like gmaps pedometer. This is the greatest toy ever. When I finish an especially grueling run, I come home, plunk my laptop onto the carpet, and track my milage while I stretch. It is the most satisfying feeling in the world. I only wish someone could hack into real life and make those little red markers pop up at each mile.

mi thik aahe.

Indians drink hot tea on hot days

cool their insides; sweat it out.

They put bits of curry powder

in baby bottles, so the spice feels

constant and normal.

I don't know if these things are true.

I know how to offer a hot meal.

I know how to ask how the day is.

Marathi is a clicking language of

perfect-fitting syllables

sanded rosewood inlaid in smooth carvings,

the backgammon board my Uncle sent,

the side table with the elephant

faces carved onto the legs.

(Those elephant eyes,

glassy and stuck,

met mine as a child.

Pleaded with me

to take that tabletop off their backs.

I didn't pity them.)

I don't know the Marathi word

for love or god or rain

or tin roof.

My aunt, alone in boarding school

lies in bed, listens, shivers

through Monsoon season-

she calls that the loneliest sound.

I saw the Indian trains in a movie.

The director cranked the colors,

to over-saturate.

People found it very beautiful.

My father, four, toe-headed

is lifted to the upper berth,

waves money out slotted windows to buy chapati.

Waves goodbye. His parents

walk back to their house where the

bamboo fans move across the high ceilings.

Would you like a hot meal?

How are you? I am fine.

This is all I ever imagine them saying

to one another.

My grandma's sari gapes against

places that were once curved--

she is too sad to eat in this country.

The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

Part Six.

One morning I returned from the park to find my mother holding an oversized, poster-ish piece of mail and grinning.

"The Music Circus is in town!" she trilled, "And they're putting on The Music Man!"

(The Music Man was a Lee family favorite; the VHS often played on repeat in the summer. I watched it not for the plot, period costumes or score (all of which are, indeed, excellent), but in order to memorize the entire movie. Jenny and I would compete, harshly judging the other's speed and accuracy: "Weeeeelll you got trouble my friends, that's right I said trouble right here in River City why sure I'm a billard player always mighty proud to say I'm always mighty proud to say it...I consider that the hours I spend with a cue in my hand are golden..."

(...this could continue...)

(...the Psalms proved themselves an impossible challenge, but The Music Man libretto in its entirety is cozily lodged in my frontal lobe. I honestly don't know what to do with that, neurologically or spiritually.))

This particularly performance came from my mother's favorite local theater. The company traveled in a circus tent, plunking down in the Sacramento area only in the summertime. The closing show was this evening. She suggested we drive into the city to pick up tickets and make a day of it.

The thought of doing something outside of 2772 Harkness St. filled me with such divine and soaring joy, I barely had emotion left to react to her next mood-boosting overture: handing me the keys to the car.

(My license was only a few weeks old. I'd passed the test on the first try, a detail which my family liked to brag about. When congratulated on this accomplishment, I feigned modesty, replying, "oh, well, I'm just a kinda good test taker." Secretly, I suspected I did indeed possess a strikingly-above-average set of navigational skills.)

Without a twinge of fear, I bounded to the driver's seat. My mother, considerably less buoyant, buckled her seatbelt methodically and loudly. If a seat belt could clear its throat, hers did.

I really was decent behind the wheel, but I knew nothing about Sacramento's downtown labyrinth of abrupt one-way streets and furtive trolly tracks. Having learned to drive in the suburbs, I believed whole-heartedly that a two-way street had the moral responsibility to remaining a two-way street.

I held firm that belief. So firm, in fact, that I didn't pay much attention to the many, many yellow signs indicating various warnings and notes and tidbits that might be of interest to a driver, tidbits like "Lane Ends, Merge Left," "Trolly Tracks Begin," and "One Way."

We were coasting down an oddly deserted avenue when I heard an unrecognizably deep horn, looked over at my mother's blanching, slack-jawed face, and took sudden deep interest in the signs I'd been ignoring. I was headed against traffic on a one-way street which looked to be merging with the trolly line oh, say 100 ft.

The shock of silence inside our car was shattered simultaneously, two screams a perfect third apart in pitch. We sounded almost like two Music Circus chorus members in a desperate last-minute rehearsal. And then from out of my mother came a line of soaring soprano recitative:

"Turn the car around turn it around turn into this yes this driveway This One There Right There sweet mother of God."

In this way, generally, I was instructed to swing into a miraculous parking lot, where I hit the brakes and countered half-heartedly, "I was turning, I know, I know, I know, I'm doing it, looking, I'm turning now."

"No no no...park the car Christy, just Park It."

I knew I would not be driving much for the rest of the summer. I might not be driving much, ever. I also knew that this episode was a story which, rightfully, trumped my quick conquest of the Pasadena DMV.

We traded seats.

I eyed my mother's face--unreadable. My hands were still shaking. After a few moments of ticklish silence, she patted my knee slightly.

"I can't believe I didn't warn you about the streets down here. They're just crazy. I remember having so much trouble learning how to drive downtown." She squeezed my leg and put both hands back on the wheel.

"I'm so, so sorry," my voice convulsed, relief and embarrassment and sweat all dripping down into my eyes. "I'm really, really, really sorry."

----

The show was great. Top notch community theater.

in the valley of dry bones

ezekiel 37

In the name of your own strength

you excavate.

in daylight--

bravery in your breadth and depth

and density.

Revisit all the sacred sites

without a hint of reverence.

Your head, your waking heart

resists the tug to bow--

remains erect.

Plow ahead

until all is pulled

scattered and brushed off

numbered and glassed.

Separate it all, create logical patterns.

Neat descriptions of each dead artifact--

you wrote the text yourself

(full of common sense).

And by twilight

brush off hands,

wash the deep chalky clay

out from underneath fingernails-

not a damned spot left.

Yet every night in darkness

all these dry bones coalesce:

behold a shaking.

the forms you snapped apart

methodically, your mouth set

in morning's harsh light,

now reclaim their improbable shape,

the unlikely truth of things--

dancing, full of breath and life.

The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

Part Five.

The only part of the day which belonged to me was my morning run. The name was a bit deceptive--having never been athletic, running meant little more than sprinting a block or so, then a side cramp clamping down, slowing me to a weak limp. So I mostly walked. I didn't mind that too much. The neighborhood was beautiful. Giant leafy trees spread over the quiet streets.

Land Park itself was quiet in the mornings, just a few fellow runners and some zealous families lined up for the zoo. Most of the time I didn't even venture into the real park...the duck pond, fairy paths, carnival and gardens, all held wonderful childhood memories, but I was doing plenty of reminiscing as we cleaned. I found an empty baseball diamond with flimsy wood bleachers at the edge of the park.

This is where I spent every morning, Monday-Friday. My walks became a bee-line for the deserted diamond, where I would sit down quietly, staring intently at the empty field, as if absorbed in a game no one else could see. It was there I let my mind run, a good 20 minutes of just breathing in the quiet morning air.

As a younger child, my mother had strictly enforced summer quiet time. She provided a bevy of religious paraphernalia: The Picture Bible (a graphic novel rendition of the Old Testament with the stories creatively edited down to speed for young children), several volumes of religious poetry, the Bible itself, our memorization work (we each had passages from the Psalms we were required to learn) or the opportunity to journal. Wednesdays were the day...we set aside a half-hour, each crawled into our own corner with one of the selected items of devotion, and commenced communing.

Jenny, being older and scary when ill-pleased, usually secured The Picture Bible. While she reveled in the debauchery of Sodom and the badassery of King David, I was left with the hard stuff--shoving the uneven poetry of Psalms into my brain. I tried to set the lines to the rhythm of the sugarless spearmint Trident I chomped, but often I would lose my way, the words wandering out of focus, refusing to stay in the order the Psalmist had strung them, slipping together into a puddle of helpful hills, stalking pestilence, piercing arrows and a feathered god.

That was my sense of what good people did -- "devotions." Therefore, the cool peace of my leafy Sacramento mornings didn't really resemble devotion to me. Still I think that term was somewhere in my mornings, as I counted the grass blades on the field, as I asked what the day would be about, as I asked for some sort of strength and knowledge that I was doing something worthwhile.

Sacramento summer is a tease--every single morning is crisp and perfect, as if the sun is deliberating kindness over cruelty. But by 8:15 the dead flat heat creaks down, the city a giant cheese sandwich inside a Panini press.