AMELIA

September 10, 2011 at 7:40pm

Amelia sat on the warm beach, running her fingers through grains of soft sand.  Covering her toes and then stretching them out, the grains slid away, exposing her feet.  Over and over she lifted her feet from beneath the sand while she listened to the young man tell about his experiences in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot.

"We would set the helicopter down and load them.  One particular time we had four Viet Cong cramed together in the copter.  We lifted up, two hundred feet off the ground.  We pushed them out, one at a time." He looked like a normal man dressed in sneakers, jeans, tee shirt and with short neat hair.  When he smiled at her, he looked just like a normal man.

"Fiend," Amelia thought.
*
.
In 1967 every American life was defined by its relationship to the Vietnam war.  Amelia's brother would go into the Merchant Marines to avoid the draft. Her boyfriend, Fred, had been to boot camp and would leave for Vietnam in the fall.  This was the month of June.  Amelia had graduated from high school with her best friend Lily, although she was a year younger than Lily.  Lily was planning to go off to college in Southern Oregon and she wanted Amelia to go to school with her.  Amelia was undecided.  Her parents wanted her to stay and become a partner in their business and Fred wanted Amelia to marry him.  Fred was quite a bit older than Amelia and knew that he was ready for a wife and children.  He knew that he wanted Amelia.  Amelia did not know what she wanted.
*
Amelia had been raised in a beautiful beach house in the Malibu Colony.  Her father and mother ran a successful advertising agency in L. A.  They were commercial artists but Amelia's mother wanted to be a fine artist.  Anne's successful husband would tell her that painting was dead.  But she loved to paint and she wanted to do it well.  She had earned her BFA at University of California the year before.  Since her graduation she looked for painters that knew technique that she did not and took lessons from them and she would "take from them," as she would say.

 Her house faced the sea and was built below the street.  Steep steps descended to a patio  that the house seemed to encircle.  To the left of the patio was a room with sliding glass doors.  Through the sliding glass an easel could be seen d an adjustable drawing table and shelves and shelves of books.  On the drawing table the brushes were stored in various sizes of cans, ready for use.  Anne did just that, walked over to the brushes, lifting one out-a two inch bristle.  She carried it to the easel where a painting of sea gulls was in progress.  The birds were circling above the sea foam as though they would fight for the catch below.
*
Anne had the habit of meeting with her friends once a week to paint.  They would hire a model or sometimes use Amelia as model.  Sometimes they would go and paint scenery.  Once she rented a cabin on the desert and they spent the week painting each other and the desert.  That was fun, four women and Amelia eating, painting and just having fun.  Amelia would often sit by her mom and watch her paint.  Anne struggled with the greens.  "I just can't work the greens," she would say to Amelia as she painted.  Often Anne would use Amelia for her model.  Amelia's arms, legs and back were muscular, her bottom small, her breast firm.  Amelia's shoulders were wide, she had a swimmer's body.  The nose on her face was prominent and Amelia had her father's dark brows and soft brown eyes.  Not like Anne's eyes.  Anne's eyes were a soft blue and she was blond and short and rotund.  Anne had painted both Amelia and Skyler nude from the time they were babies.  Skyler wouldn't pose now, he was too much the man, too much the captain of a  Merchant ship.
*
As she grew older Amelia would attend school four hours a day and then bus to the agency to help out.  Her parents worked too hard.  Her father was middle aged.  His skin looked grayish, and he was a chain smoker.  His left eye was blind and went out to the side.  He had a type A personality.  He drove himself all day and to the night.  While the kids were growing, Amelia's mom worked at home in the studio of the beach house.
*
Now that she had graduated, she had other plans than working with her parents at the agency.  On June 14 she and Fred would leave for the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.  Lily had left for the little town of Ashland, Oregon a week earlier. Fred worked for a silk screen artist and would set up a booth at the festival.  Lily had written Amelia one letter so far about the beauty of Ashland and wouldn't she come?  They could live together off campus.  Rents were cheap in Oregon compared to California.
*
Amelia was giving this deep thought as Fred packed the Ford van that they were driving to Monterey.  They left on Wednesday, by Friday night they had arrived to the booths-already set up.  They laid out their sleeping bags.  The concert began at dusk.  They climbed atop the van and enjoyed Jimmy Hendrix, Janice Joplin and the Mama's and the Papa's.  They awoke Saturday morning, hippies everywhere.  Flower children high on drugs and colourful.  Bead work, pottery, handmade versions of everything normally made in Japan.  They spent some wonderful time with new people, artists and musicians and with kids just  trying to have new experiences beyond the security of their white, middle class homes.
*
Monday morning found Fred and Amelia tired and dirty.  They were ready to return home with stories of the Festival.
At home Amelia cuddled on her parent's big couch in the living room.  The afternoon sun blinded her from the windows that spread across the west wall.  She leaned her back to the light, the sun lit up pages of Colin Fletcher's adventures along the California coast.  One hour and then two slipped by as the sun sank below the Pacific horizon.  Her mom and dad burst into the room, breaking her concentration.  "Hey girl!'  How is our hippy?  They were happy.  Happy to have this girl as their daughter.  "Hippies were a kind of a joke in this family.  Anything political was O. K. by this family.  People had to be aware and politically motivated by what was happening in the world at any given moment.  The time was the present and the "hippy movement" was a reaction to the Vietnam war.  The war was a catalyst to all the social unrest of the time.
*
"There was great music and Fred and I sold a bunch of posters," answered Amelia. "Great!" said her dad as he lit a cigarette.  He inhaled a huge amount of smoke and then blew out a thick cloud in her direction.  "A country is only as good as  it's people."  He had told her this and Amelia had heard him say this often.
*
Amelia walked out and down some steps to the beach front.  She walked along the coastline in the southernly direction.  At about eleven o'clock in the morning, the southern California sun could be hot and that morning the heat was intense.  The sand burned the bottom of her feet as she slipped off her sandals and carried them in her hand.  The salt air blew her hair away from her face.  How she would miss the summer here!  She had decided to break off with Fred and go to Lily's in Ashland.
*
She would miss her friends from the valley.  Those that only came to Malibu during summer vacations.  Other friends that lived in the Colony were going off on journeys, just as she was.  Her friend Tara was going off to nanny some children in Cape Cod.  Jill had left for a trip through Europe with a traveling University.  She longed for the time to stand still or go backward. To the time when whe was ten and she was only expected to fall in to the family routine.
*
Even her mom and dad were planning changes and life would not be the same.  They wanted and needed change now as they were getting older.  With Amelia gone, there would no longer be the need for the big house.  Except for mom and dad and dog Bilbo, the house would actually have too many unused rooms and too much space.
*
They had talked about moving to Paradise Cove for a long time now.  Paradise Cove was a small trailer park set right on the beach.  It had a pier with two barges off shore.  Her dad, Sal, could moor his fishing boat off the pier.  For the sake of Sal's health they would downscale.  They had purchased a small trailer and put the house up for sale.  Eventually, they were planning to move from L.A.  That would be a few years ahead.
*
There had been the happy hours on Sal's motor boat.  Cruising the coast and sometimes boating to Catalina Island.  Was this all to be over?  Would her travels and what lay ahead of her so change her life and take her away from what she had always known as a southern California girl?  The house wouldn't be here for her.  It was for sale now and as soon as it sold she would be visiting her parents in the little trailer at Paradise Cove.  Then they were planning a bigger move, later on.
*
Amelia was too hot and too tired and worn out from thinking and worrying.  The surf was down, exposing the rugged pools.  The half day boat and the all day boat were sidled against the Paradise Cove pier, this she could see from where she stood on the shore.  People had gone in and were eating dinner, while a cool breeze blew over the surface of the sea.  She carried her sandy legs home.
Amelia looked at her watch.  It was 5 o'clock, she could hear her mother in the kitchen and her father had just turned on Walter Cronkite.  She reached for the phone and dialed Lily in Ashland. The phone rang twice and Lily picked up.  "When are you coming, Amelia?  I have been working at the restaurant and you need to get here soon.  It is the Shakespearean season and this cafe serves the actors and is getting very busy!  We need you!"  Amelia's heart sank, "Soon Lily, soon."

Lily

*
She went to the den where her family ate, sitting in front of the television, watching the 6 o'clock news.  After she set up the T.V. trays everyone dished up their own dinner from the pots and bowls on the stove and kitchen counter.  They got their own silverware and napkins and sat themselves down in front of the news.  They made comment about world events-the murders, the weather conditions, new scientific discoveries and the unrest in other countries and their own country.  There was a lot of news about the war, the casualties.
*
"Thank god Skyler has been accepted in the Merchant Marines," Sal said between inhales from his cigarette.  "No son of mine will die in a senseless war, not as long as I can help it."  Skyler dying seemed impossible and she could only think of him with  pride-a captain on a Merchant Vessel.
*
"Hay, would you watch this commercial, now is that cute, don't you think Sal?"  Anne laughed and the mood lightened.
*
When Amelia broke off with Fred he was angry and hurt.  He didn't want to be friends on any level.  Amelia hurt, too.  She just wasn't ready to marry.  "I know that you are young, Amelia, but my mother was your age when she married dad and they have been happy and have five children." Fred glared at her, she had fallen short of being like his mother.  Amelia had wondered why Fred had made moves on someone so young and now she saw that it was because his dad had married his mother when she was young.  She just couldn't keep it up.  Life was getting too serious too quickly.  She had to end the situation.  The only question to resolve now was whether she would travel by bus or by plane.  Life was beginning to get simple again.
*
Amelia's first memory of Ashland was a post card memory.  A little town too beautiful to be real.  She would always remember looking up north Main Street from the center of town, the Plaza encircled shops and there was the entrance to Lithia Park.  The town seemed to be only a used book store, Perrine's Department store, a Chinese restaurant and a Police Department.  Across the street from where Amelia was standing was the Rolling Pin Restaurant where Lily was working.  It was a quiet and sunny morning with no cars on the street!  The Siskiyou forest bordered one side of town and rolling hills, bordered the other.  The forest and the hills seemed to meet, end to end.  She wandered across the main street, to the restaurant where she would spend the next five summers of her life.
*
For five years Amelia would work in the restaurant during the summers and attend college, working for a teaching degree.  She would become a children's art teacher.  In 1968 Lily would be killed in a swimming accident.  The following year, Fred would die fighting in Vietnam, in the Me Kong Delta.  Her parents would move outside Seattle and she would visit them during her vacations.
*
In the coming years, the town of Ashland would suffer growing pains.  The elderly, that owned the old homes that were crumbling away, would die.  The 80's would bring Californians who had sold their homes in California and reinvested in these homes.  They improved them but then found unemployment and had to become distant landlords through local property managements, relocating where they could find work.  The homes improved but the new, middleclass residents took a position with the native Oregonians that did not set well.
*
For one hundred years Oregon had been pretty much "closed."  Oregonians did not appreciate outsiders.  Especially Californians.  Californians could not understand proverty, or that Oregonians didn't see their world as being a world of poverty.  They knew how to use the land and they were a more religious people, grateful for what they had.  Ever since the gold rush, these two cultures didn't mix.  It wouldn't be until older generations of Oregonians would die and younger people, native Oregonians and transplants from other states would come to be curious about one another and work and live together more effectively.
*
Still laws were passed that kept Ashland frozen in time.  Over a forty year period the land that framed Ashland-the Siskiyous and the rolling Grizzlies, remained undeveloped and beautiful to enjoy.  2011 found Ashland a renewed, beautiful and still a quiet town.  Property values up and even in times that found 15 million Americans out of work, Ashland still maintained businesses that had existed from the 70's through 2011.
*
In 1975 Amelia loved teaching her children in a private school.  The children came from professional homes who could afford a small school where there were not political concerns.  The policies of the school were negotiated between parent and staff.  The parents had a lot of influence on and interest in how the children were taught.  Amelia thoroughly enjoyed working with the parents and the children in a small environment.
*
In 1979 the economy was bad again.  Amelia had been teaching school children for seven years, always living in the same rental that she and Lily had shared.  It was a good time to purchase a home for cheap.  Amelia had a friend that had been widowed and left with three kids to raise.  She lived in a big run down home on Siskiyou Blvd. and Gresham Street.  It needed work.  A paint job. A new roof.  Storm windows and a heating system.  It had a partial foundation.  But it had location.  Zoned commercial.  A fenced backyard.
*
Amelia paid $46,000. She took out a loan to do the needed improvements. Overthe next few years she gutted the upstairs and made a studio for herself with a living area-kitchen and sleeping area.  She built a back porch upstairs,off the master bedroom with steps to the backyard.  Downstairs Amelia created a gallery to exhibit her paintings and photographs along with Anne's paintings.  She and her mother traveled and painted together.
*

Living Room Project

I came to Portland in 1997 as a school bus driver.  I had been driving for Laidlaw Inc. down in Medford, this was a non union company and I was bringing home $100. per week which did not pay for my rental of $400. + a month, much less the needed necessities of this life.

 

At the time there were two cities in the U.S. that needed school bus drivers, Phoenix, Arizona and Portland, Oregon.  This was 1996 and Oregon was experiencing flooding from storms so I called ahead and got a job with the Scottsdale school district.  I sold my car so I wouldn’t have to tow it through the traffic of Southern California that area had grown so.  I needed my car to get from one bus barn to the next as things turned out so, destitute, I continued on to my mom’s in central California.  I did not connect with a driving job in Monterey County but worked in a gift store in Monterey until fall when I returned to Portland Oregon and drove for Portland Public Schools.

 

The first year I drove normal children and the next year I drove the emotionally disturbed at George’s middle School and for Alameda Elementary School.  I loved that job and had a very hard time missing my children when I started driving for TriMet in February 1999.  I drove six years for TriMet when I became insulin dependent I chose not to drive.  In 2005 I left TriMet and struggled three years until the Great Recession when I no longer felt alone in my destitution.  I struggled for two more years until I was put on SSD.

 

When I drove for Portland Public Schools and TriMet I had two gardens at Reed College in their  beautiful community garden.  Such a beautiful garden and such a loss for us to pull most of them out to build dorms.

 

When I left TriMet I moved in with my youngest daughter her boy was 7.  I lived with them four years and gardened in the Brentwood Community Garden.

 

I now am retired and off disability.  I live in St. Francis Apts and grow a little garden in the Terrace of St. Francis.

 

I am an ex TriMet driver, so know how to get around town which I do every day.  I am out and about five hours a day, usually stopping at one of the Libraries in Multnomah County.  I swim at Mt. Scott and belong to the Oregon Zoo and take my walks there.  I take public transportation to Gresham and ride on to Rhododendron where I like to hike and camp.

 

I feel that I live around people that are like me, urban and from out of state and a bit out of the box.   I love living in Portland, Or and I love living downtown southwest.

THE DESERT AND THE DEEP BLUE TREES

THE DESERT AND THE DEEP BLUE TREES

THE DEEP BLUE TREES

The morning sun and the morning breeze blew the evergreens this way and that and round about crashing the needles of the pines and cedars against themselves and onto the windows of the cabin that sat on the top of a hill, at the top of the gravel road in the early summer of   1960.  The winter before the child and her mother had spent in Scottsdale, Arizona a new town at the time with dirt roads and undeveloped subdivisions.  The hospital and the schools were in place but the roads were still dirt and the town was very ugly and poor and when the family had arrived from Pasadena, California their things had been shipped and trucked over the desert in a moving van.  Until the van arrived the mother set the suit cases about the living room for tables and chairs.  Plastic curtains hung at the windows and the yard was dirt or sand, it was hard to tell unless a wind storm came up and the dust and sand would blow in the air separating itself.

Her father had bought her a bowl of water and rocks with four turtles to make her happy.  They were the smallest kind and she could not touch them for fear of salmonella and watched them, not taking her eyes off of them for one second, she feared one would turn on its back and die.  But that was that year.  Every year from now on there would be a change, a move, a change of people or economic status.  But for her father, who had taken an early retirement and was in the process of achieving his dream, they were in the warmth of Arizona and he would not have to suffer the cold anymore.  For her mother it was the beginning of a nightmare. The year-1959 would be spent in this lonely cowboy town.

But she and her mother were home again in the mountain cabin that had been purchased when she was six and where she attended school in the second grade.  Her mother, calm away from her father, no more screaming unhappiness and no more throwing up on her part from listening to the fighting and no more watching her father cry.

She sat close to her mother on the living room love seat with the sun heating the couch, the intense morning sun piercing through the window from the south East, its light made them a yellow light, her mother, herself and the story book resting on her mother’s lap.  The bright page showed a huge hairy giant with jagged teeth and a small boy, a small slingshot in one hand, ready to release a stone.  This was the David with the Giant story, her favorite story, the one that she had her mother read to her, over and over from the old book with edges worn and pages torn from her brothers and sisters little fingers, all older than herself.

After her mother was done reading, she said, “Shall I make breakfast now honey?”  The girl always ate hot oatmeal with a huge clump of brown sugar on top, which would begin to melt before she could pour cold milk around the sides, cooling the oatmeal so that she could slowly spoon it to her mouth.  It would be too hot to eat but cool soon enough.  Her mother, on the other hand, would always eat toast with jelly in place of butter.  For lunch she would hope for a hamburger and she knew that in the afternoon both of them would find something sweet, a candy bar or cookies to tie them over til’ dinner.  She didn’t know what her mother would eat for lunch but she knew for sure about the sweets during the day.  At night they would eat eggs and toast together, her mom would drink coffee and she would drink milk.

After breakfast her mother would wash the dishes and then visit a neighbors or go to work  at the mountain club, checking in tourists or making a room ready for occupancy making sure a girl cleaned it and that the repair man did his job before the next guest.  The mountain club was a short walk from the cabin.  It was a big building with a restaurant and a recreation room.  On Saturday evenings dances were held, polkas.  They were always there, dancing and enjoying the music and the people.

After breakfasts she would leave the cabin, follow the gravel road and cut through properties to another road that would bring her to Rosie’s horse stable where about twelve horses were corralled to be used for trail rides  She loved the smell of the stables and the sight of the horses in the heat of the morning when the flies would land on the noses and the eyes of the horses and their flanks, the tails swishing one side and then the other.  She stood by the corral of one horse for a long time.  The horse was tall and red, about seventeen hands and they called that horse, Diablo, and she would ride it.  Rosie told her not to ride the horse, but she did and she considered the horse hers.  I am going to tell my son not to let you ride him; he is too strong and wild.  Rosie worked the restaurant down at the club.  “O.K. Rosie,” she would tell the woman, but she knew that Rick, Rosie’s son wouldn’t remember and that she would ride the horse.

The sun was getting hot but near the trees there was coolness. The girl stopped watching the horses and touching their smelly hides and soft noses.  She wandered toward the mountain club after stopping home and changing into her swim suit.  Her mother was at the gate and waved at her as she walked by.  Her mother looked pretty all fixed up in a cotton dress that gathered at the waist and had a full skirt.  Her hair was curled and she wore earrings and lipstick.  She slashed a wide smile and warmed her entire face.  “Are you swimming honey?”  The voice was a beautiful soprano and so familiar and lovely.”Do you have money, came her mother’s voice again. “The girl nodded yes and walked through the main gate.  She walked past the picnic area and the shuffleboard courts and to the pool, she laid down her towel and slowly lowered herself into what felt like cold water but would feel warm later.  The pool was full of kids mostly; she loved to swim, swimming for over an hour.  She missed swimming with her father and brother.  They always had swum together, her mother lounging by the side of the pool only taking a dip to cool down.  They played their games, each taking turns diving down under the water and swimming through the others spread legs.  Then they would hold to the side of the pool, holding their noses and going under to stay as long as they could to see who would win, the winner coming up, lungs bursting and eyes bugging like frogs.

She got out of the pool to lie on the towel to dry off in the hot summer sun, listened to the screaming and yelling of the swimmers and began to feel her hunger, it was 2 p.m.  She got up, went to the little snack store and bought a candy bar-that was enough, she skipped the hamburger.  After her suit dried she slipped her clothing over it and walked out the front gate of the mountain club, her mother wasn’t there and she imagined that she was checking a new vacationer into one of the little cabins very close to the lodge.

Both her mother and father valued life by how much fun there was to be had.  There was the mountain cabin with the activities at the mountain club.  There was ice skating, her dad was the president of an ice skating club.  They were a musical family and their home was filled with music and singing and her father was an artist and taught the children to sketch and paint and to appreciate the fine arts.  The parents were older, her mother’s second family and her father’s first, although he was forty-five when she was born.  But they were not college educated although his brother was and also her sister.  College was not held out to them but show business was and they both thought about their children getting into the business.

The little girl walked home and when she came into the cabin’s living room there were a large pair of boots neatly placed by the side of the rocking chair with a sock in each one.  She became very still and tried to feel if anyone was in the cabin.  It was very quiet and still.  She didn’t call out for her mother or ask if anyone was home.  She quietly left the room and leaving through the kitchen, she went outside.

On another day when she came home, it was late afternoon and she entered the living room and a strange man was prostrate on the couch with his head on her mother’s lap, her hand stroking his hair.  She came around to the side and stared at each of them.  “This is completely wrong,” she thought to herself.  She just simply looked at the two of them in disbelief.

He never returned to the cabin.  The girl caught sight of him from the kitchen window driving a city truck, he was with another man.  He looked at her that was all.

A bit later, in a conversation with her brother, he mentioned something about her father.  “He is dating now.  A woman gave him a beautiful big ring and he is wearing it.”  She thought of the boots and the man lying on her mother’s lap and said absolutely nothing.

As an adult she had asked her mother about the man.  “Who was the man you were with that afternoon when I was a little girl?”  “There was no man,” Her mother replied.

GARDENING

When May rolls back the water color sky of winter
The canopy of the northwest sky that shrouds and blankets
In all discomfort, keeping the cold close to earth.

When sunny days attempt to visit now as spring makes an effort
The gardens and the animals know long before us, we who live
In false heat and comfort, wait for darkness to lift it's heavy veil,
The light to enter, the birds to sing, we are nearer as the mornings
Grow nearer and nearer and lighter with light.

I lay here in my winter garden, a blue plastic tarp strung
Over my head, rope stretched to post, the candy cane design
Patterned around and around between tarp and post.
A brown tarp under my body stretched
I write this poem, aware of nature and happy!

Rain won't stop!  I want to pound in the metal posts deeper and deeper.
Rain falls from the sky without promise of blue patches or fluffy clouds or sun.
Still I'm dry and fairly warm though I could be warmer, fresh air surrounds me.
The fragrant community garden!  Is that grape that I smell in the damp, wet air?
If only the winds would hold still and I could perceive the fragrance.

From sage and lavender the witches yarrow conjures up the dream
Of my garden which in disarray before me confuses me and hides its essence.
So much to do!  I lay my head on my grass purse to watch the rain.

Takilma, Or. March Sky 1970

On waking alone in the forest
I felt the patterns of the sky
and I was among the stars
eternal and alone.

I wanted you with my heart and my mind
and you came.
I was there with the fire
realizing the security of being alive
and I felt happy with creation
knowing my place.

12

The children were lined up against the brick wall in the basement of the Lutheran Church on 18th Street, in Santa Monica, California.  1962.  The school nurses were weighing and measuring the children and the kids were stripped down with shoes off.  One little girl stepped  up to the scale and was weighed and then height was measured.  Then the nurse asked her to step to the side and to touch her toes, which she obediently did.  She felt the nurse's finger travel up her spine from her pelvis tail to the base of her head.  "Look at this," the nurse called the attention of her fellow nurse.

The scoliosis would change her life.  She had always thought of her body as perfect but now, as they left the doctor's office, her mother was sobbing and saying that god was punishing her for her sins.  "Why would god punish me for my mother's sins?"  This is what the girl thought.

All the child could do was wait to see what this would mean.  She heard slivers of conversations.  Her mother said that the doctor wanted to put a rod up her spine but her father had the x-rays examined by doctors that worked in the hospital where he worked as a book keeper and the answer was no.  The most beautiful no that she had ever heard.

She was taken from Lutheran School and put in Emerson Jr. High where they had a special physical education program.  The children would lay down on mats and pretend that they were trees and that their arms were branches reaching deep beneath the surface of the ground for nourishment and  water.  It was here that she met Janie Mansfield, daughter of.  They were rolie polie fat girls and they sat at recess eating chocolate cake with thick icing.  Janie told her about living with her mother.  And she would point to a teacher who ate bananas at recess and say,  "It's just like she is sucking  a cock."

They moved from Santa Monica back to Hollywood.  The Lutheran School was just for punishment anyway.  Although she liked it after all, even though she called it The Dungeon, she had even started going through Confirmation and thought that she would become a Lutheran.  But she had to go to her Principle and say that they were moving and that she would be leaving instead.

At ten, when she moved to Hollywood, she attended Hollywood Professional School where she did well.  She entered as a fourth grader and the class was split into two classes, fourth and fifth. She worked through both grades that year and was put in study hall to make up time, for some reason, but it made her mother angry that she was made to sit with nothing to do for a certain amount of time.  She was then placed in a progressive school.  She was tested and placed as a fifth grader and near the end of the year went to the new school on Franklin and Highland.  So in the seventh grade when she horsed around in front of the progressive school and was expelled, her mother really couldn't put her back a grade, when she returned to her school, after Emerson, she was automatically restored to what she could do grade level wise.



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The child slipped out the door of her apartment and remembered to lock up.  The apartment was empty, she wasn't lonely though, she was just on the loose.  She would walk to the Broadway Hollywood from her apartment and the walk was 2 1/2 miles, one way.  She walked it with her mother, they would walk it together when her mom was off work.  This was her mom's exercise.
Not swimming, playing tennis, horseback riding or bicycling.  Just walking.  Walking long distances.
She walked passed the Grauman's Chinese theatre without walking  to the side to  put her shoes in the place of the actor's shoes.  Or to place her hand's in place of the actor's hands, because it was dangerous for a child to go to a secluded place in Hollywood, and many children were found dead around the city and in the Hollywood Hills.  There were many little shops and restaurants along the way.  And one day something happened when she was just looking at the merchandise in one of the shops.  She slipped something off a shelf into her purse and left the store without paying for it.  It was so easy and so unexpected that she could do that and not be detected.  She continued shop lifting that entire year.  All of her Christmas presents or any other present she gave was shop lifted.

Usually she was alone when she did this but one day she was with her best friend and they entered an open market on Hollywood Boulevard.  She slipped a package of Hostess Cupcakes under her jacket and they left the market.  Her friend didn't even know what she had done.

A man started yelling at them.  A huge man with a foreign accent.  They ran as fast as they could with him shouting, "Come back, come back and pay for that.  You didn't pay for that."  He ran very fast for a man that was so very fat and caught up with the little girls.  "You go right back to the store," he said as he turned them around and marched them down the street.  It took them a while to arrive at the store, they had run a couple of blocks.  She put the cupcakes on the counter and got in her purse for the 13 cents.  "Now look at you, you had the money the whole while!  Why do you steal when you have money?"  He just kept going on.

As they left the market her friend said to her;  "I was going to runaway to desert you, but I changed my mind.  The 12 year old never stole anything again,  that was the end of her criminal life.

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The twelfth was a rough year.  Before scientists discovered teenage temporal growth, everyone thought that a teenager was just like an adult.  That their actions were deliberate. She was very troubled, she would sob for hours and in her sleep cut her sheets and her doll's hair.  She would only remember this because her grandmother was visiting one time and was aware of what was happening.  "I was just dusting her things and her diary fell open on the floor and in it she had written that she hated god!"  My poor mom was in hot water with her mother again.

After her grandma went home  she and her mother packed up and followed her on the Southern Pacific, again.  Her grandma had gotten rid of a renter.  (She rented the upstairs of her house)  And she sat in her mother's old bedroom thinking how really wonderful it was to look out over Morningside, the neighborhood where her mom grew up.   But they didn't stay and  returned to California.

FIRST DATE

MAY-MALIBU, CALIFORNIA

Malibu in the month of May is as beautiful as Malibu is beautiful year round. Each month has a warm, bright sameness.  December, January, and February may have a cool feel of summer gone, or maybe a grey tint in the atmosphere, but the season differences actually play more in nature, the arrival of the Monarch butterfly, their cocoons on the eucalyptus trees and then the emergence of thousands of new butterflies.  The dead jelly fish that wash ashore by the tide or the purple slugs that do the same and that the scientists come out and harvest at low tide on a sunny afternoon.  These are the noticeable changes as the year passes.

The young woman bent over the flower garden reaching for more dried blossoms to deadhead from the red geranium bush.  There were pink and dark pink and red bushes.  They were lush.  Their dark green leaves filled in and pushed the flowers up and together.  The leaves were varied greens, soft and impossible not to stroke and pull.  Nasturtium grew prolific beneath the geraniums and covered the ground until they met grass.  The grass grew to the patio’s cement.  She stood up and took in the salty breeze while looking at the horizon, the blue and pink  horizon with the pier off to one side and moored boats bobbing with the sway of the water.  It was afternoon light and a summer’s heat was turning cool as a blue porsche pulled up in front of the trailer that belonged to the girl’s mother.

A tall, handsome man stepped out of the porsche, walked around the front of the car and up the step, “My name is Tom.  I am Gary’s friend.”  Gary worked around the trailer park which everyone called-the cove.  Garry lived in a trailer with his wife and two kids.  They were in their early twenties.  “Oh sure, I know Gary, the young woman said.”  He had helped her mom with repairs on the trailer a few times.  “I am Candy.”

“Well, I wondered if you’d like to go to a movie? I am actually a projectionist in a movie theater in Santa Monica-but I have the night off and a good movie is playing tonight, I think that you would enjoy seeing it.”  “Sure,” she answered.  Her heart was racing.  This would be her first date.  She had turned 15 last week and that was the magic age to be allowed to-go out.  “Well, I will be back for you about 6-o.k.?”

Six came and she and her mother were waiting inside.  Her mother had a pot of hot coffee on and was moving around the kitchen, a little woman in a little kitchen.  Candy was sitting at the bar between the kitchen and living room.  “Do I look nervous?” she asked her mom.  “You look great, honey.”  She was wearing her new jeans with a purple velour top and expensive sandals.  It wasn’t an extremely warm evening but still not cold.  She looked beautiful because she was young, she was untouched and she had the innocent trust and happiness of a young person just beginning to be aware of her attraction to the opposite sex.  There came a knock on the door and Tom came in and made pleasentries with the mother.  He shared information about his family, his sisters. His mother had passed away two years before and his father left, in a divorce.  “If you will give me your driver’s license please, I will jot down information about you."  Candy’s mom requested.  He reached in his wallet and  handed the license to the mother.  Candy began to feel odd.  She hadn’t seen this coming.  Both Tom and her mother looked at her with smiles on their faces.  So, with business taken care of, the couple left the trailer on their date, her first date. It was a pleasant date and they planned for another soon.

The following day her mother told her that she didn’t want her to go out with boys her own age.  That she was afraid that her daughter would be with a gang of drunken kids on Highway 101 and get in a fatal accident.  Someone could get killed and likely it would be her.  She thought this over.  There were no teenagers living in the cove only a younger boy and an older one that was away in the service, overseas.  The valley kids came over in the summer and on Holidays but it was like they existed in separate castes.  So Candy gave this new rule no more thought.

“And Candy,” her mother added, “if you become pregnant, don’t be afraid, just come home and we will take care of it.”  (Many mothers in this culture and in this era-the sixties- were putting their girls on birth control.)  But this mother was older and torn about what to do.

Tom and Candy dated over a period of two years.  Tom would marry and divorce another woman during this time.  Candy would date many men until she would marry at twenty and stay married for twenty years, raising children until the divorce.

At age 83 Candy died napping under a warm California sun, slightly inebriated.