Of Jews, Italians, and movie stars

My Italian aunt and uncle owned exactly two books: Myra Breckinridge and Everything But Money.

You could find those two paperbacks on the living room end table next to TV Guide and Reader’s Digest and the bowl of toffee candies.

Myra Breckinridge was, of all things, a 1968 Gore Vidal satirical novel that touched on themes like unconventional sexual practices. Why my puritanical aunt Nini and my uncle Ray owned that book will forever be a huge mystery to me. (Of course, as a kid I used to sneak-read it when everyone else was out of the room.)

The other book, though, was its polar opposite. Everything But Money, by comedian Sam Levenson, was a decidedly G-rated, heartwarming, and hilarious accounting of Levenson’s youth in New York with his seven siblings and Jewish refugee parents in the early 1900s. It’s a lifelong favorite of mine, and I read it again this summer.

Jewish humor appeals to me partially because it turns adversity into comedy. Sometimes it pokes good-hearted fun at the culture, but mainly it’s all about kvetching. I know I’m painting an entire group with a broad brush, but in general I like hanging out with Jewish people because I always have a good time. Had I been born a couple of decades earlier, I probably would have vacationed in the Catskills.

My father loved the satirical songwriters Tom Lehrer and Allan Sherman when we were kids. He’d walk around the house belting out “National Brotherhood Week” and “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh.” Lehrer and Sherman are Jews. Maybe that’s where I learned more about the humor.

But it all started with Sam Levenson.

***

From the 1880s through the 1920s, huge numbers of Jews and Italians emigrated from Europe to the United States during the “New Immigration” period. The Italians were fleeing a politically chaotic country and the Jews were fleeing anti-Semitic laws and organized massacres in Russia. Both groups left behind crushing poverty in hopes of taking advantage of American economic opportunity.

The Jewish population in New York City alone grew from 80,000 in 1880 to 1.5 million in 1920. Many of these immigrants settled on the Lower East Side or in Brooklyn. According to the Jewish Women’s Archive, “They lived in tenement housing and worked alongside other Eastern and Southern European immigrants in the area’s sweatshops and textile factories. . . . Though Jewish immigrants in this period faced difficult conditions in housing and work, their experiences in America were still an improvement over their lives in Eastern Europe. In America, they were able to find jobs, even if those jobs involved harsh conditions and low pay. Immigrants could also move freely across the country and practice Judaism openly, which was not always allowed in their countries of origin.

“The tenements Jewish immigrants lived in when they arrived in US cities were large, crowded apartment buildings built to house the multitude of workers immigrating to the US in the late 19th century. They were characterized by lack of light, air, and sanitation. Families often could not afford an entire apartment to themselves and would take in boarders to help pay the rent. Even with this additional income, in many families, every member had to work, even the littlest children.”

*Jewish family working on garters in New York City tenement, 1912*

It appears from his book that Sam’s life was exactly this. But rather than complain, he treasured it.

***

The first half of Everything But Money is a love letter to Sam’s parents and siblings that roams between poignancy and hilarity. And like much of Jewish humor, it’s playful, satirical, and grounded in reality.

Levenson writes with a chuckling fondness about the ways in which his family dealt pragmatically with their paucity of funds. They couldn’t afford a doctor, for example, so when the kids were sick the best course of action was a decidedly nonmedical one:

Any remedy that made you perspire was good. “Try and perspire, Sammy.”

(My Italian father, by the way, also had a deep affection for the benefits of perspiration!)

And speaking of sickness, Levenson recalls that:

One of the classic stories of that era – one that has survived to this day – was about the mother who bought two live chickens. When she got home she discovered that one of the chickens was sick. She did then what any woman with a mother’s heart would do – she killed the healthy chicken, made chicken soup, and fed it to the sick chicken.

Another workaround involved the kids’ attempts at bringing “nature” into their homes, even in a tenement neighborhood:

Each spring we would write to our congressman for free seeds, which we planted in soil in cheesebox flowerpots. We called it soil but it was really a mixture of broken glass, gravel, decayed wood and mud that we found around construction projects. . . . I came home from school one day with a narcissus bulb that my teacher had given me. I left it on the kitchen table and went out to play. On my return I discovered that a visiting uncle had grated it and was eating it with sardines.

But here’s my favorite passage:

One of Mama’s favorite techniques was comparison – impossible us versus some paragon of elegance. “Does President Coolidge hang his dirty sock on a doorknob? Answer me! Does Rudolph Valentino leave his sneakers on a bed? Answer me! Does Chaim Weizmann chew his tie? Does the Prince of Wales throw newspaper into his mother’s toilet bowl?”

I’d like to use this on my dog.

“Buster, does the Dalai Lama spit out his medicine? Answer me! Does Tom Hanks feel a need to pee on every post? Answer me! Does Kate Middleton bark out the window for no apparent reason?”

This book is steeped in Levenson’s unwavering affection for his family. The overall message is that family love, and an upbringing that emphasizes honor and virtue, are what create happiness, whether one grows up in poverty or in wealth. “A good home,” he writes, “is defined as one in which there are love, acceptance, belonging, high moral standards, good parental example, decent food, clothing, shelter, spiritual guidance, discipline, joint enterprises, a place to bring friends, and respect for authority. Today any child, rich or poor, who lives in such a house is considered a ‘lucky kid.’ I was a ‘lucky kid,’ not in spite of my house but because of it.”

That’s where his comedy came from. A home without material plenty can be rich, instead, with humor. Italian funnywoman Joy Behar, for example, says that she wouldn’t be a comedian today without the lush material gleaned from her tenement life in Brooklyn.

The second half of Everything But Money takes a turn and covers Levenson’s serious didactic takes on education, child discipline, morality, etc. I agree with most of what he says, but the humor isn’t there, except for this gem:

Peaceful coexistence can be as strenuous for a child as for an adult. My little girl, Emily, came home from school one day in a state of near exhaustion: “All day long, sharing, sharing, sharing.”

***

By the way, as a complete digression, my all-time favorite excerpt from a comedian’s book comes from Billy Crystal’s Still Foolin’ ’Em.

“So I’ve tried everything to fall asleep,” Crystal says. “Then I got one of those sound effects machines that creates the experience of being on the beach. My model is called Coney Island. It has waves, weeping Mets fans, and gunfire.”

Billy Crystal is Jewish. I rest my case.

***

The paternal side of my family is Italian. There seem to be commonalities between Jews and Italians – mostly around the importance of family, food, tradition, and ritual. (And lots of loud conversation.) During Sam Levenson’s youth, when New York was the primary immigration hub in the country, Jews and Italians lived meagerly in similar neighborhoods and shared kindred struggles and cultural values.

Recent research may have uncovered a scientific basis to some of these connections. According to the Genetic Literacy Project, a 2000 study found that “most modern Jews are descended on their male side from a core population of approximately 20,000 Jews who migrated from Italy over the first millennium and eventually settled in Eastern Europe.” The paternal lines of Roman Jews, said the study, were similar to those of Ashkenazi Jews. While some experts dispute this, the Genetic Literacy Project notes “an emerging consensus” that “wandering Jewish men, from the Near East, established a mosaic of small Jewish communities – first in Italy.”

Put more colloquially, as comedian Sebastian Maniscalco says, Italians and Jews are “same corporation, different divisions.”

Or, as the old joke goes, Italians are just Jews with sauce.

***

My aunt Nini (real name Maria) and uncle Ray owned a small 1929 Spanish-style stucco house in San Leandro, California, in a neighborhood that was almost exclusively Italian and Portuguese. Their house was magical to me because it had a dining room, a front porch, and, most entrancing of all, a basement. When we were a young family, my father would drive us up from San Jose every other weekend to visit them and my grandparents, who lived two blocks away.

Because my aunt was almost 19 years older than my father, she and my uncle were grandparent-age. They were married when my dad was a toddler. But Nini had a timeless Mediterranean beauty, with a full head of wavy black hair that never fully turned gray. It was rare that I saw her without an apron, yet she always looked glamorous to me – often in a dress and fancy earrings and pearls.

Uncle Ray worked with my grandfather in a poultry market up the street. Aunt Nini – like most 1950s wives, at least in that neighborhood – raised children, kept up the house, and cooked. Boy, could she cook. She rolled out her own homemade pasta in that enchanting basement, and to this day I’ve never had ravioli as delicate and delicious.

Nini was short, but very, very loud, with a voice that could skin a cat. She was a tremendous prude and was constantly admonishing her husband, who had a proclivity for telling dirty jokes even though we kids were around. “Ray! RAY!!” she’d holler, not more than a couple of feet from anyone else in the room. “Stai zitto! Shut up! The ceiling is low!”

Most of the time we didn’t understand the jokes anyway, and “the ceiling is low” was an even bigger puzzle. What she meant was that “children are in the room.” But I’ve always thought that “the ceiling is high” would have made more sense. Wouldn’t the ceiling seem high to children?

I can’t say that my aunt struck me as a particularly warm woman; she was somewhat stern, like my grandmother. But she had a lot to say, sprinkled at times with a tinge of mischief. And she was extremely funny – often unknowingly. She used to tell us, for example, that she was “born dead.”

(I think she was just referring to her needing a few seconds to start breathing after birth.)

When she and Uncle Ray once went to a professional basketball game, her review of it was simply, “All they do is run back and forth, back and forth – those poor fellows.” She had an opinion, too, about the ways in which Italian Americans could misuse the English language. “They sling it,” she told me. I finally figured out that, ironically, she was using “sling” as a verb form of “slang.”

My observation is that Italian humor, unlike Jewish humor, is often inadvertent – at least among amateurs. Comedian Joy Behar, who’s full-blooded Italian (“well, Ancestry says only 92 percent,” she claims, “but what the hell is a Caucasus anyway?”), also describes growing up with Italians who were inadvertently hilarious. Her mother’s friend Caroline, for example, when asked why she didn’t move to Florida in her older years, replied, “Because I am not a water individual.”

Joy’s aunt Rose, like my aunt Nini, would cook huge family meals – soup, salad, antipasto, fritto misto (battered seafood and vegetables), ravioli, and then the main course. One day Rose woke up as if she’d had an epiphany and declared, “No more soup!” Then for years she’d tell the neighbors, “We don’t eat as heavy anymore.”

***

On January 1, 1958, my parents hosted a little party in our San Jose home for my grandparents’ 50^th anniversary. Nini and Ray were there, too, along with their two sons. My father had turned on a wire recorder and surreptitiously set it near the table. (These recorders preceded tape and actually captured the sound on very thin steel wire.) Much of the time, the spool of wire would end up as a snarled, unsalvageable rat’s nest. But a few of ours didn’t, and luckily I had the foresight to take them into Radio Shack in the 1970s and have them transferred to tape.

What a treasure!

The recordings from that day reveal mostly an unintelligible, piercing riot of voices. One of the most prominent voices is actually mine; I was a toddler, obviously sitting near the recorder and asking repeatedly what it was. I must have asked 10 times, with no one paying attention over the din, my voice growing louder and louder until I was screaming in frustration.

“Come fa, Babbo? Come fa, quello lì? COME FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA???”

(“What is that thing over there doing, Daddy?” I spoke only Italian in those days.)

Paula repeatedly asking what that thing was!

I was ignored, of course.

At one point my father read a poem he’d written (in Italian) about his parents’ marriage. It was both poignant and funny. At the end my aunt proclaimed, “That’s so goooood! You should send it in!!”

Where was he supposed to send it?

That line has remained with my siblings and me to this day. “Janine, your handmade card is so creative and beautiful. You should send it in!” Or “Your chicken cacciatore enters the realm of the godlike. You should send it in!”

Maybe that’s what we should be doing this Christmas: telling our loved ones that they’ve done something wonderful, and that they should send it in.

In any case, it was towards the end of the party when Nini really stole the show.

People were talking noisily about amore and kissing, and Ray had been telling a few of his slightly bawdy jokes, when his teenage son Dennis piped up.

“Ma! In 16 years, I haven’t seen you kiss Daddy on the lips yet.”

To which Nini promptly responded:

“What do you think I am, a MOVIE STAR?”

***

COMMENTERS, PLEASE NOTE: WordPress is no longer supporting my particular page type and doesn’t seem to be asking commenters for their names, so everyone is identified as “Anonymous.” If you’re commenting (which I love!), please leave your name if you’d like me to know who you are!

***

Due to popular demand, I am including, at the end of each blog post, the latest random diary entries that I’ve been posting on Facebook for “Throwback Thursday.” These are all taken absolutely verbatim from the lengthy diaries I kept between 1970 and 1987.

December 1, 1975 [age 20]:

“I just wrote a really long letter to [my friend] Jeanne [in South Carolina], and I realize now that everything was ‘I, I, I’ all the way and it was terribly egotistical of me. I’m thinking now that my missing her so much might be just a result of my own selfishness, because she reinforces me all the time with her praise. I DO think of everything in terms of myself (but then again, doesn’t everybody?). I suppose I’ll try to be more humanitarian from now on if I can, and not so selfish. What a terrible revelation about myself! Aak, I can’t stand it! I hope she doesn’t think too badly of me. I’ll have to send an apologetic postcard.”

December 5, 1975 [age 20]:

“[My brother] Marc and [my friends] Joe and Ted came to the dorms today and inspected my ‘Playgirl’ magazine and said it was the grossest thing they’d ever seen. Weird – it’s okay for men to look at these things but not women. Baloney!”

December 10, 1975 [age 20]:

“I’m [my dormmate] Mike’s Secret Santa and today I gave him a note written in anagrams. (Dear future Paula: That means ‘scrambled words.’ I have a feeling my intellect is going to dwindle as the years go by.)”

December 13, 1975 [age 20]:

“Today I went to Berkeley to do research for my Film final, which is getting to be a pain in the neck. I somehow made it up on BART, caught a bus in the freezing, driving winds up to campus, and smiled all the way to the library. God! I want to go to Berkeley instead of San Jose State! Oh, if only I could go! I’d learn so much from the atmosphere alone – absorb it right into myself. I KNOW they’re all brilliant – everyone I heard talking was. Besides, all the guys had curly hair and workshirts.”

December 14, 1975 [age 20]:

“It was so painful writing my Film paper today because while walking by Mom’s chest of drawers I caught my finger on a handle and kept walking while a piece of my finger stayed on the handle.”

December 19, 1975 [age 20]:

“I watched Abraham’s story of ‘The Bible’ on TV and it was so full of faith that it practically made me repent right there.”

December 27, 1975 [age 20]: [WARNING: get out your violins and your eyerolls]

“1975 has been the year of the void. It passed by shrouded in the hypnotic boredom of duty. The first half of the year I worked continuously and the second half I spent much of my time curled up in my [dorm] room trembling at the sounds of passers-by. I’m not sure I’m going to survive this awesome grief for the past. I feel guilty about drinking and I need to start going to Mass again. At any rate, I’ve got a future I’ve got to start thinking about. To teach or not to teach. To be a cop or not to be a cop. I’ve got to make some kind of decision soon. Meanwhile, it’s the old sweet touching of pen to paper for me. Music. Novels. And all I want to do is set forth something into immortality, create some piece of magic that’ll live longer than me. And maybe help someone else live better.”

December 28, 1975 [age 20]:

“A nice, sleepy drive down to L.A. today listening to my cassettes of Bob Dylan and the Byrds. I feel so grotesque, looking at my gorgeous cousins and sister. Sometimes I wonder if I’m really a lady after all.”

What’s my sport?

Now that the Summer Olympics have ended and I’ve gotten my life back, I’ve been asking myself what my sport would be if I were an Olympian.

The assumption is that I would be an elite athlete in the sport, even at my age. (Yes, it would be miraculous.)

To be clear, I’m considering only the Summer Olympics; I’ve already determined that the four-man bobsled would be my sport in the Winter Games. In this event, two members of the team do nothing except push a bobsled for a few feet and then jump into it, put their heads down, and pray! The only problem is that women are not allowed to participate in the four-person bobsled, for no apparent reason. This, as you might imagine, royally frosts me.

Anyway, let’s get down to it.

First of all, I wouldn’t want to choose a sport in which the practices alone would be grueling. Why select a marathon, for example, or even a 10,000-meter race, which involves 25 laps around the track? Why punish yourself repeatedly in grueling dry runs, each time to the point of exhaustion, when instead you could be whizzing down the track working on the 100-meter dash and be done in mere seconds?

So that eliminates most of the road and track races, most of the swimming events, anything involving a bicycle, and of course the ultimate in torture, the triathlon.

Besides, have you seen some of those marathoners? Gaunt! Borderline skeletal! I like to eat large quantities of food – including before, after, and possibly during competitions – so the skin-and-bones look is out for me.

Plus those long races could potentially cause dehydration, which is already a problem with semi-oldsters like me and I’m dizzy enough as it is.

I also want nothing to do with skimpy suits. At my age, no one needs to see most of my body parts. This would knock out diving, beach volleyball, gymnastics, and a good number of the track and field events.

(I was actually appalled at some of the butt-baring and crotch-revealing athletic uniforms for the women this year. Maybe I’m just a prude from the Stone Age, but YIKES! If I had it my way, all competitors would wear the uniforms worn by the male gymnasts. They make everyone look athletic, robust, and dynamic, without revealing every damn thing!)

Any event that could result in drowning would be a no-go for me, too. That would exclude water polo and surfing.

Similarly, I would avoid sports that are potentially dangerous. Comedian Erma Bombeck said she refused to try “skiing or any other sport where there was an ambulance waiting at the bottom of the hill.” So this rules out “breaking” (which, let’s face it, is not really a sport anyway), hockey, climbing, trampoline, rugby, weightlifting, taekwondo, skateboarding, and – obviously – boxing. I don’t want no chin music!

My weak rotator cuff – torn in 2005, and never completely back to normal – can’t stand any overuse, so I’d have to leave out badminton, tennis, basketball, handball, shot put, javelin, and probably volleyball.

Even the seemingly mild contact sports that could involve my being thrown to the ground and breaking every one of my osteoporotic bones should be excised from the list – e.g., judo and wrestling.

I also couldn’t participate in a sport whose scores are based on judgment. I’m too insecure to be judged! So this wipes out gymnastics, diving, and that silly event rhythmic gymnastics.

Anything that involves pinpoint accuracy would not be my cup of tea, either. I’m too nervous, and I can’t compete effectively with shaky limbs. I used to take a beta blocker just to be able to play my drums in front of an audience. (Like any bad-ass rocker!) As a softball pitcher, sometimes I was really good but at other times I’d be a basket case and walk 13 batters in a row while my teammates stood around helplessly, obliged to be ultra-supportive. Anyway, this affliction counts out golf and, of course, shooting and archery.

I’m not big on team sports in the Olympics. I mean, it’s conceivable that a slacker could be carried along by the rest of the team and get a gold medal anyway! So that dispenses with basketball, ping-pong, and rugby.

As far as I’m concerned, mammals with hooves should not be a part of the Olympics, which would keep me from the equestrian events. Besides, who participates in a sport while wearing a blazer?!

Let’s move on to my biggest fear in life: being upside down. There’s actually a word for this – anapodaphobia. I’ve never been able to do a somersault, for example, because of this terror. “Artistic [formerly synchronized] swimming,” therefore, wouldn’t make the cut.

And of course neither would diving or gymnastics. It’s become clear that those two sports are the most obviously problematic, since they involve being upside-down, risking serious injury, and wearing ridiculously skimpy uniforms.

The heptathlon would be eliminated straight away because five of its seven events involve hurdles (too dangerous), high jump (too dangerous), shot put (a torn rotator cuff just waiting in the wings), javelin (same rotator cuff problem), and the 800-meter run (too grueling). But I also have an ideological problem with it. (So what else is new?) Women don’t get to participate in the 10-event decathlon because they’ve been considered just too delicate for the discus throw, the pole vault, and the 1,500-meter race. But they are allowed to participate in those sports as individuals! Go figure! Disgruntled women have been loudly petitioning for a change to these outdated prohibitions for a while now, but the International Olympic Committee (don’t even get me started) claims that it would be unfair to current heptathletes to suddenly throw them into a whole new sport. Well, then – as the petitioners have argued – we could set a date about 12 years in the future so that current heptathletes will be grandfathered in and budding decathletes in the right age range can start training! But noooooooo.

Pole dancing, on the other hand, probably would be just fine with the IOC. Believe it or not, the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle sports section last Sunday featured an article about pole dancing organizations around the world that are pushing to get their “sport” included in the Olympics. Setting aside my traditionalist shock at this, I imagine that pole dancing would involve a skimpy outfit, so I’m ruling it out before it’s even accepted as a bona fide event. God forbid.

It appears that ultimately, then, I’m left with four choices: the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes, the long jump, and fencing.

Not to be too braggadocious, but I was pretty good at all of these things when I was young. I had no endurance whatsoever, but I was quick and had fast reflexes.

My high school actually offered fencing as a Physical Education elective. I chose it and went at it with gusto and learned how to fence like a hyped-up European nobleman.

I think fencing is my Olympics choice. There is very little, if any, chance of an injury – certainly not one that would require a stretcher. A fencer is never upside-down. And the uniform is the very opposite of skimpy. Fencers are swathed shoulder-to-ankles in high-strength polymer materials that must be “able to resist a pressure of 800 Newtons.” I don’t know what that means but it’s right up my alley. They also wear an undergarment made of protective plastron. Again, no clue, but sounds great. And of course gloves. And a mask that looks strong enough to withstand a mishap in outer space.

So that does it. I’m going to be your American fencing champion at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games. If I live that long.

***

September 24, 1975 [age 19]:

“Hello, diary, I have just returned from the most expensive, yet DELICIOUS, dinner at Joshua’s on Stevens Creek. I had missed [my friend] Morris’ birthday and went searching for a book to buy him in three different bookstores and found nothing, and I was hungry at the time so I thought of taking him out to dinner instead. We drove up to Mom’s to get the Diner’s Card. It was a MARVELOUS meal – I had steak, scampi, salad, french bread, rice pilaf, french fried mushrooms, fried zucchini, an artichoke, and two desserts. I’m stuffed to the gills.”

September 28, 1975 [age 19]:

“It’s Sunday and I’m trying to recollect what happened this weekend. Friday I stayed home all day with the worst cramps I’ve ever had, my eyes getting cloudy and me nearly blacking out in my delirium. I read in bed until nightfall, when one of Mom’s codeine painkillers finally knocked my pain. Yesterday I went back to school to go to the library and found a book I’d quoted but had neglected to get the bibliographical information for. For a long time I just sat there listening to Bob Dylan, with a paper waiting to be written. Then I had to write the dumb paper so Mom could type it. I ate dinner [at my parents’ house] and spent the night there and then today I finished the dumb old paper and it took us longer to figure out the correct form and measurements, etc. than to write the entire paper. Dad kept coming by and asking if it was a class in ‘form.’ Joyful that I had it done, I galloped upstairs and read ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and laughed and laughed. Still, I have not gone to church and I’m beginning to feel a bit guilty about that.”

October 1, 1975 [age 19]:

“Today was a neat day. I got paid, which is always nice, and then I went to play tennis with Krish [dormmate from India]. I even invited him to eat dinner with us at home tomorrow night. Then supper in the Dining Commons – it was a horrible meal, but I met a bunch of neat kids, including one blond curly-haired Bob Dylan-type New Yorker. He seemed a little conceited to me, though, in his cuteness. Then with Krish and [my roommate] Sally I watched ‘Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex’ with Woody Allen. Had a talk with Paul in our floor lounge to try to find out who’s in charge of our dorm newspaper. [My friend] Carolyn called then, and later [my friend] Morris brought over two bottles of Sambuca and we sat and listened to the ‘Woodstock’ album. He just left and now it’s 11:15 and I have to finish reading ‘Huckleberry Finn’ but I’m kind of smashed.”

October 2, 1975 [age 19]:

“Why why why am I so utterly S-T-R-A-N-G-E? I always yearn for a close relationship and yet when one suddenly seems to be in the offing I totally zap off! ‘Zap off’ is a term I just made up, meaning lose interest.”

October 6, 1975 [age 19]:

“Most of the time I feel like I just stumble through life dreary-eyed and hesitant.”

October 11, 1975 [age 19]:

“I had to get my wisdom teeth out yesterday. They gave me a medication (not pentothal) through a needle in my arm. The nurse said it works gradually and would only relax me, but I’ll still be able to cooperate with the doctor. That scared me. I wanted to be OUT. She kept asking if I was feeling anything. I said no, they increased the dosage, we talked about San Jose State, the doctor walked in, and I woke up all nauseated and disoriented with these nurses hovering over me saying that all four teeth were out. I realized that I HAD been knocked out but then they said what a cooperative patient I’d been. I was thinking, ‘No, I wasn’t even awake, why are you freaking me out like this?’ I was sick as a dog every time they made me turn my face up rather than to the side. Today the lower right side is sore because the roots were curved and broke off and he had to dig to get them out. He made it sound like he had to work really hard so I’m surprised I don’t have a footprint on my neck! Overall, though, the pain isn’t as bad as the pill-taking and gargling rigamarole.”

October 14, 1975 [age 19]:

“At 10:30 I walked home from my film class elated – we had this thrilling lecture on Japanese samurai customs and a live demonstration, then watched a crazy Japanese samurai movie with a lot of laughs thrown in by this cute guy sitting next to me. He offered me his friend’s Mr. Pibb and after I drank it he said, ‘I hope you don’t have any cracks in your skin – this guy has a lot of diseases.’ I got my [wisdom tooth] stitches out at Dr. Follmar’s office and he shook my hand and said goodbye forever. Then I managed to read 300 pages to finish up [Theodore Dreiser’s book] Sister Carrie, and now [my roommate] Sally is sitting on the bed throwing Wheat Thins at me.”

October 19, 1975 [age 19]:

“This has to rank with one of my busier weekends. Yesterday I went to see this International Food Festival at the Fairgrounds. It was free; Mary Pasek dropped by at noon and we drove off to gorge ourselves. I had a Chinese plate and a Pan American turkey sandwich and baklava for dessert, then went home and had a fried chicken dinner. After that, [my roommate] Sally and I had tickets to see B.J. Thomas at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts. The Beau Brummels played first. B.J. was stupendous! I always get enchanted with theaters and lights anyway. Then tonight Ted and I went to see Elton John in Oakland. We had raced up there thinking the concert was at 7:00, but it was at 8:00. Elton was fantastic, and he played the longest time I’ve ever known anyone to play: 3 hours and 45 minutes. There was only a 15-minute intermission in between his ‘short’ set of old songs and his long set of new ones, during which time I waited in a monstrous line to use the women’s bathroom, fearing I wouldn’t be able to find my way back in the dark but arriving 3 or 4 seconds before the lights dimmed again. Gosh, he was great – sang every song you’d want to hear, and then some, including one I REALLY got into, which was the Beatles oldie ‘I Saw Her Standing There.’ The surprising thing is that he WASN’T flashy, he didn’t commercialize himself, and he played so amazingly long! We ate dinner at Sam’s afterwards and got home at 2:30 a.m.”

October 26, 1975 [age 19]:

“I’m getting some kind of growth on my leg, which I should go see the doctor about; my car has strange squeaky sounds, which I should go see the mechanic about; Baron [a family dog] stepped on my glasses and bent the frames, which I should see the optician about; and I should get on the waiting list for the dorm next year, which I should see the administration about. But I know I won’t do any of these! And I’m not even sure if I’ll be in the dorm next semester. I’m not sure if I want to change my major. And I’m not sure what will be happening next year. Sometimes I can’t stand the nebulousness of my life.”

October 28, 1975 [age 19]:

“Ah, now I’ve hit upon one of the keys to my personality – I look at life through a lens, a camera lens. This does not mean that I look at it realistically; I look at life through a distorted frame. No, I’m not even sure I can accurately describe this feeling – okay, I’m never really a part of my surroundings, and that’s why I have a hard time communicating. I’m like a reporter or a movie director watching the play go on through my camera. Everything is like a scene and I just look for the best angles; I must record it, but I can never enter it myself.”

October 30, 1975 [age 19]:

“I contracted a horrible cold today but I still went out to dinner with Carolyn and Mary at Sun ’N Soil Health Foods. There was something neat about eating there – because it seemed like something a collegiate person like me should be doing. It was scary, too, because the elements of hippy-dom and freedom always threaten me, for some reason. But I had a cream cheese and nut sandwich with banana and honey. It was delicious (and cheap!). They also gave me a little cup with various nuts, seeds, and raisins in it. How cute!”

Imperfect and tense

It was almost exactly 30 years ago today that I got my first chance at being published without nepotism involved. And it all came about because of a jackass magazine editor.

In 1994 I was playing drums in a rock cover band and earnestly reading every monthly issue of Modern Drummer magazine, cover to cover. I was becoming increasingly irritated, though, with the almost complete lack of women drummers featured in the magazine – so much so that when I serendipitously met Modern Drummer’s editor at an event I can’t remember, I mentioned to him that it would be nice to read about female drummers once in a while. His response? It would “demean the credibility” of the publication.

Oh no he didn’t!

Not long afterwards, I picked up an issue of Drum! magazine, an up-and-coming competitor to Modern Drummer that I found in a music store. The issue included a column by master drummer Barbara Borden and articles on Kate Schellenbach (Beastie Boys, Luscious Jackson) and percussionist Debra Dobkin. Elated, I wrote a letter to the magazine’s editor, Andy Doerschuk, thanking him for being so inclusive.

“The situation is self-perpetuating,” I wrote. “If women are not acknowledged, they’ll be even more discouraged from getting into the business.” I expressed my gratitude that he helped make drumming so accessible to everyone, and I figured that was the end of it.

A few days later, Andy himself gave me a call. He told me that my letter was so well written that he wanted to give me a writing assignment. I couldn’t believe my ears or my good fortune. (Andy Doerschuk, by the way, is a superb writer who far outclassed all of the Modern Drummer authors put together.)

I ended up writing for Drum! for many years, interviewing drummers ranging from Kate Schellenbach to Pete Escovedo to Sheila E to Dave Abruzzese (Pearl Jam) to Dawn Richardson (4 Non Blondes) to Marky Ramone (the Ramones) to Albert Bouchard (Blue Oyster Cult). I was also privileged to do a cover story on Carter Beauford (Dave Matthews Band). One of the people I interviewed – percussionist Carolyn Brandy – actually called me after her story was published to tell me that I was the only person who ever “got” her. It made me realize that I loved writing about other people, and that everyone has an interesting story.

***

I am now going to shamelessly exhibit one of my many writing flaws: veering off-track and telling tangential stories. I prefer to think of it as my calling card.

On Memorial Day weekend in 1995, Andy called me at the very last minute to ask me to write the Carter Beauford cover story. In two days. The interview had already been done, but the writer was feeling ill and unable to pull it all together. Then the story got a bit strange. Andy casually mentioned that the writer, Mark, had Tourette syndrome and that he hadn’t been allowed to do the interview himself because Carter Beauford is black and Mark would have involuntarily screamed out racist epithets. Andy assured me that Mark was an extremely gentle man and didn’t have a mean or racist bone in his body, but the disease was of course uncontrollable. My assignment involved driving through hideous holiday weekend traffic to the East Bay to pick up the tapes and notes from Mark’s wife, who also had Tourette’s. I was in a panic, trying to assimilate all of this while knowing that I had only two days to transcribe a really long interview, collate Mark’s notes, and write a feature-length story, all while hosting a houseguest that weekend. I picked up the phone to call Mark to make the arrangements.

“Oh, it’s great to talk to you, Paula,” he answered in a very soft, sweet-tempered, sincere voice. “Andy has been so complimentary about you and your work FUCK YOU!”

***

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing writer Anne Lamott onstage at the gorgeous, nearly 100-year-old Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco. Anne’s new book about love (and so much more that that), Somehow, is on the New York Times Best Seller list, and she’s been touring the country to talk about it. My friend Roland had introduced me to her definitive book on writing – Bird by Bird – back in the ’90s, and I was bewitched by her wisdom, her humor, her honesty, and her anxieties. Anne found love – and her unique form of Christianity – late in life and lives with her husband and family in Marin County, California, not far from me.

At the theater, when she was asked about her future plans, Anne declared that she was done with writing novels. “You have to assume that each one takes at least three years,” she said, “and then there’s the possibility of great disappointment.” At times – in my wildest dreams – I’ve considered writing a novel, but I know I don’t have the requisite street smarts. After my three years of toil I’d likely be summarily rejected, with my psyche in ruins.

Writing is torture as it is. Why increase the torture to the power of 10?

***

Two decades have passed since the end of my time writing for Drum! magazine, and although I was recently published in The San Franciscan, mostly I’m just self-publishing this blog. And it’s very hard. I’m not like a great songwriter who arrives at the studio after a long night of whisky and debauchery and cranks out a song in 20 minutes.

Finding a topic that will interest a reader is my toughest task. And sometimes I am waaaaay off on my assessment of that.

My best bets, I’ve learned, are usually 1) tales about my anxiety-ridden life or 2) reverent biographies about historical figures I admire. Both of these are on the easier end of the scale for me. The personal anecdotes almost write themselves because life can be so awkward and amusing. And the biographies are a relief because even though the heavy research can be laborious, I’m writing about real people and events, so I need only be a storyteller. I don’t have to conjure anything out of thin air, which is my Achilles heel. When I’ve occasionally tried my hand at just reflecting on abstract issues, they flop. Most of the time I just don’t have the brainpower to come up with brilliant perspectives and I’m too plumb lazy to think all that hard.

My favorites, though, are the love letters I write – about the beloved people in my life, or about my great passions like San Francisco, sports, train travel, Americana.

My first post, about my beautiful parents, came easily, and in huge waves. To this day I swear that it didn’t come from me. It came from them. Over a very short period of time, inspiration would arrive in the shower, while I was out for walks, or, yes, after waking up at night to pee. It was divine, it came from the heavens, my mother and father practically wrote it, and all I did was feverishly jot it down. I think it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever written. (https://mondaymorningrail.com/2016/05/30/the-courtship-of-paulas-father/)

*My parents, Beverly and Gerald Bocciardi*

Otherwise, it often takes crushing effort to find ideas. If something funny or awesome has just happened to me, like embarrassing myself at the doctor’s office or serendipitously meeting a longtime baseball idol, writing can be a piece of cake. But if I’m feeling stagnant, which is much of the time, I just stare at the computer screen and tear my hair out. Then I decide to fill the hummingbird feeder. Then I realize that my tires need air. Then plucking my eyebrows becomes an emergency.

***

Once I do settle on a topic, though, what is my “process”?

(I always amuse myself with this word. I use it in much the same way I jokingly refer to my financial “portfolio.”)

First of all, I vow, every night, to get up at 6:30 the next morning and write for at least half an hour before breakfast. I’m successful at this only about 40 percent of the time, but I’m immensely proud when I do it – not because the work is good, but simply because I’ve hauled my indifferent butt out of bed.

The first draft is always a horror story. ALWAYS. In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott describes her first drafts as “long and incoherent and hideous.” Exactly.

Finishing that draft can take me anywhere from days to months, depending upon how much research I have to do and how much enthusiasm I have for the topic.

It can be terribly hard. “You sweat blood,” I wrote in my diary at age 18.

I spend another couple of weeks reorganizing everything and making it coherent, shorter, and less hideous. This is probably the least torturous part for me, because the story already has been told – albeit in a muddled, clumsy way – and now I can move the pieces around so that it all flows, makes sense, and creates an impact. (If I could live my life over again, I honestly would be a film editor.) I typically need to delete about 63 percent of what I initially wrote because it’s too unwieldy, superfluous, and dull. “Throw the things out of the plane that keep you flying too low,” Anne advised from the Goldstein stage.

During that time I’ll also tend to the photos. Older photos are often in the public domain. But otherwise I’m very, very mindful of copyright and of not cribbing someone else’s hard work. I subscribe online to “Shutterstock,” a service that I pay for annually and that offers a digital library of professionally shot photos that I’m free to use in a blog. I’m so careful about copyright that when I wrote about meeting ballplayer Shawon Dunston in Frederick, Maryland, pictures of the Frederick baseball field and the team were available on the Frederick News-Post site but I wrote to the paper anyway and purchased them for a nominal amount. In that same blog post I also wanted to include a snapshot of an old San Francisco Chronicle clipping of Shawon that I’d had on my wall for years, but I wasn’t even sure how legal that would be. So I wrote to the Chronicle and bought the original, just in case. That one wasn’t so cheap.

Lastly, I’ll spend up to a week fine-tuning everything, juicing up the language when I can, watching for typos, and weeding out the repeated words. (Of course, five minutes after the blog post is published I’ll notice three flagrant typos and a dozen repeated words.)

***

When I’m finally done, I’m usually flabbergasted that what was once a piece of absolute garbage has come together in a reasonable whole. I often finish up the writing on a weekend day, and by then I’m so sick to death of the entire thing – and yet so excited to publish it – that I can’t wait until Monday morning, which ideally is when one should publish a Monday morning rail. So I tend to hit the “Publish” button a day early. Which I guess is okay, because it gives my readers the option of wasting their Sunday night on it.

And then I have to start the whole self-waterboarding ordeal all over again.

***

I took an Italian class a number of years ago with my friend Maryl, and when asked to speak, we two perfectionists would tie ourselves into pretzels to get every word right, with the correct agreement and the correct ending, and we’d use up five minutes just trying to scratch out one perfectly correct sentence. On the other hand, the woman next to me was terrible at the fine points of grammar and even worse at pronunciation. For example, the word for “I” in Italian is “io,” pronounced “EE-yoh.” But this woman would use the Spanish word “yo.” It drove me bats. Her constant “yo”s would make my jaw grind itself to dust. Yet, this woman would charge ahead and rattle off an entire unsatisfactory paragraph and charm everyone, in the time it would take me to eke out my five perfect words, and she was always smiling and effortless, and our teacher would never correct her on the “yo”s, and the always-incorrect student would merrily sail through class like an eagle in flight while I floundered like a clumsy dodo.

I think I need to stop dreading the writing process. I need to stop hoping for faultless refinement and instead be okay with my own shambling style. Being imperfect is probably perfectly okay.

Anne had thoughts about this, too: “Perfection is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”

***

Here’s one consolation: A good friend of mine used to work at a major American publication that focused on investigative journalism – a longstanding, established magazine with a huge circulation. And my friend told me something that shocked my naïve self: many of the magazine’s established, famous writers were in fact terrible writers. Their names carried them, and got them repeatedly published, but the editors effectively re-wrote all their work.

A travesty of a mockery of a sham!

At least I’m not a part of that ignominy. My work is my own, however flawed.

***

What, then – as one friend asked when I complained about the pain of writing – is the payoff?

Maybe I do it to get attention. If people comment, it gives me a moment of affirmation. I don’t know whether the comments truly offset the weeks and months of tension and labor, but they certainly help.

Or maybe I write to be heard. I know that I use the written word to convey what I struggle to express verbally, for any number of reasons.

In many cases, too, my complaints and anxieties have turned out – often surprisingly to me – to be universal. I’d like to think, then, that I’m providing a public service. Anne says that in these instances “we are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.”

But above all else, I think, this blog has allowed me to leave behind my imperfect love letters. To the great American pastime. To rock and roll. To jazz. To the timeless American railroad. To my beautiful City by the Bay. To everyone and everything helping my clumsy feet to dance.

***

August 13, 1975 [age 19] (with my friend Jeanne, still trying to get from New York to Maine to meet up with her husband Steve):

“[after having left New Jersey at 11 a.m. but gotten stuck on the NY State Thruway for hours] We didn’t even get out of New York until 7:00 last night. We saw a few beautiful minutes of Vermont in the daylight, then stopped to eat about a 19-course dinner. Jeanne called Steve and told him where we were, and he said it would take us 7 more hours. I nearly died. The rest of the way was like a dream, and not necessarily a good one. Dark and foggy and either forests or a void on all sides, neither of us speaking much because we were so tense, eerie ‘Tubular Bells’ on the tape deck. We saw weird monster vehicles and hit terrible dirt roads and spans of fog – once we stopped at a gas station to see if the restroom was open and we heard a low wail – scared us to death. I jumped back in the car and we zoomed off. At FIVE o’clock, as dawn was breaking in Maine, after 18 hours of traveling, we got to the farmhouse that is Steve’s family’s home.”

August 18, 1975 [age 19]:

“I just wish my normal personality was like what I am when I’m drunk.”

August 21, 1975 [age 19] (back with my friend Jeanne in South Carolina):

“After dinner Jeanne took me for a ride on the motorcycle. It took quite a while to get it started – I ended up having to push it to get it going, sweating and straining. There were no foot pedals for me so I had to ride with my feet up in the air, and sometimes one of my feet would scrape the ground on a turn. Also, my leg would get really hot from the muffler. We rode down to the beach for a walk, then stopped at a disco on the way home to have a beer, and then we couldn’t get the darn motorcycle started so we had to push it all the way home!”

September 3, 1975 [age 19]: (after a year off, I’ve returned to San Jose State, and this time I’m staying in the dorms):

“I’m writing this Friday morning from my dorm room – it’s 7:40 a.m. and I don’t have to leave for work till 8:00 and I’m behind in this diary. Well, to put it simply, I wish I could go home, and I probably would were it not for all the people who know that I am here for the first time and who are expecting me to make it on my own. In other words, I can’t lose face. Besides, I’ve made a commitment to myself that I cannot bow out of. I really don’t know what is bothering me, either. I’ve got a very nice roommate. It must be my shy nature that’s inhibiting me – when you’re in a dorm, you’re thrown into all these damned social situations and I can’t function in them. Even at the general dorm meeting tonight I was frightened. Of what? People, I suppose.”

September 4, 1975 [age 19]:

“The facts are: I’m still in the process of moving in [to the San Jose State dorms], still have a bunch of clothes which Mom and I will bring down tonight. It’s embarrassing; everyone else was thoroughly moved in three days ago, but I managed to keep putting it off. I’ve had one class – it’s ‘American Novel’ and it looks like a great teacher, a nice small class, but a terribly rough workload – in fact, I have to read The Scarlet Letter this weekend. My study habits are not starting out on a good foot; in fact, I keep forgetting that I must buy books and that I’m going to school at all! Finally, I had my first meal in the cafeteria and it was HORRIBLE. I miss Mom’s cooking. How will I survive this?”

September 5, 1975 [age 19]:

“Today at school was a bummer. My second class [upper division Philosophy] was horrible – we’re going to have to give three-minute oral presentations in there EVERY DAY, a prospect too horrible to endure, so I’m going to have to drop the damned thing and end up with only 12 units. I had my sophomore-year-acquired anxiety and typical voice shakiness when the instructor called my name, in fact could not even correct him when he asked if ‘Bacardi’ was the correct pronunciation, only nod wrongly in assent. What is WRONG with me?”

Turning a page

Last week I bid farewell to 33 of my books, and the trauma lingers.

Here’s the scenario.

I own 848 books. (I just counted them.) I have a living room bookcase for fiction and poetry; shelves in our guest room for books about sports, travel, and San Francisco; and, lining a wall in the study, built-in bookshelves that hold the rest of my nonfiction collection.

Against another wall in the study is a freestanding bookcase that holds the 109 books I haven’t yet read.

Except for those unopened few, I’ve read every book on my shelves. Cover to cover. Even the Bible, including “the begats.” I don’t believe in displaying books that I haven’t read because in my opinion that would be dishonest showboating.

But let me also come clean about something.

Ever since I moved into my own San Francisco apartment 45 years ago, I’ve meticulously set out on display every one of my books because, in my imagination, all of my visitors – friends, colleagues, prospective love interests – would come through my door and gaze in wonder at the hundreds of books in my library. These visitors would then check out all the titles, appraise my varied interests, come to a deep understanding of who I am as a person, and marvel at what a well-rounded intellectual I am.

There are, however, two problems with this:

I’m not an intellectual.
No one, in 45 years, has ever done this. No one at all has shown one iota of interest in what books I’ve read. Not in my Inner Sunset studio, not in my Lower Pacific Heights flat, not in my Richmond District apartment, not in my Sunset District rental house, and not in my current home. Not once.

(By the way, as proof that I’m not an intellectual, the next book on my reading list is Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards.)

***

My parents taught me to read when I was three years old. (Although that’s commonplace now, it was virtually unheard of when I was a child, back in the Pleistocene Epoch.) My kindergarten teacher would often plop me in a big chair à la Edith Ann and ask me to read to the class if she needed to leave the room. In those days, children learned to read at school in the first grade, so my initial few weeks as a first-grader were extremely taxing for me. I’d come home crying because I was given assignments like coloring a piece of paper that had only a big “B” on it. Yeeks, I was bored out of my skull. So everyone decided that I’d skip ahead and immediately slide right into second grade. I had a few problems at first, especially because as a November baby I was already young to begin with. During my first few days as a newcomer in that class I earned my first “F” from our very mean, Germanic, old, big-boned, buxom despot of a teacher, Mrs. Haller. She scrawled on my paper that I “didn’t know how to follow directions.” Well, for cryin’ out loud, I was only five!

But I ended up okay. I was more immature and naïve than my classmates throughout my school years, but I fell in with the right crowd and held my own, for the most part.

Meanwhile, my love for reading never waned – through the Golden Books period, the Scholastic Book Club era, the Junior Classics epoch, and on into adulthood.

***

A few years ago, as my collection was growing and I began to insist on strewing more bookcases around the house, Julie suggested that she move her desk out of our study and hire someone to line that wall with bookshelves. Although she never said it, I think she was panicking that we have very little room in our small house, that my bookcases would take over and create a very unpleasing aesthetic, and that this was an emergency situation. So, in a desperate move, she gave up her half of the study. I now have beautiful mahogany floor-to-ceiling bookshelves complete with lights.

*Note my prized photo of me with John Densmore (drummer for The Doors)*

(These are not, by the way, staged books stacked alongside vintage vases and bronze lamps – a trend called “bookshelf wealth,” according to a recent New York Times article. I’m looking at the shelves now and all I can see are books, an old radio, a jar of coins, a broken Thunderbird model, and my grandfather’s 8mm movie cameras.)

Julie, meanwhile, now does all of her computer work while slouched on our living room sofa. She still believes that she got the better end of the deal and that it was all worth it.

***

Although I am really, truly, desperately trying to stop acquiring so many new books, I recently started to panic when I realized that my “unread” shelves were packed in so tightly that soon there would be no room to handle any new additions. So I boxed up the 33 unread books that I deemed expendable and drove to Potrero Hill last week to donate them to the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. I chose volumes that I’ve carried with me from place to place throughout my life even though I’ve always known full well I would never read them. They included torn, ancient works about Victorian manners and a huge collection of mediocre Reader’s Digest poetry.

Nevertheless, I had a sense of unease about it, hoping I’d have no regrets. After all, those books will have left me behind silently, without ever uttering a word.

***

I still can’t part with any of the books I’ve already finished. It may be silly, but I feel that they are pieces of me. They’re the chapters of my life: 1930s children’s books handed down by my father; cheap, well-worn volumes I carried home like treasures from used bookstores near college; Beat Generation literature I gobbled up in City Lights bookstore, just before I decided to move to San Francisco; works that moved me to visit places I’d never been, try food I’d never tried, listen to music I’d never heard; and books I’ve read on beaches or on trains, or while drinking coffee and eating sunflower seeds on foggy Sunday mornings.

I’ve kept a list since 1973 of every book I’ve read. Flipping through those lists re-creates, for me, the stages of my life, the changes, the evolution.

(Or devolution, as the case may be. As I mentioned, my next book will be Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards.)

Why else am I reluctant to get rid of books? I guess I’m loath to toss out the work of artists who labored over their writing. It’s agony, sometimes, to write. How could I so cavalierly disrespect an author?

Or maybe it’s something entirely different. Maybe I’m thinking about “someday.”

Someday I’ll be bedridden with a terrible disease and will have nothing to do but read my unopened 109 books. So obviously I must keep them! Of course, in my diseased and weakened state, there’s no way I’ll be able to lift my multiple 4-pound (I weighed them) Autobiography of Mark Twain volumes, or even balance them on my withered chest. But keep them I will, because what if I have a sudden hankering to pore over one of Twain’s letters?

Then, when I’ve run though all those unread volumes but am still confined to bed, I may want to re-read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. You never know.

***

So what happens next? Even now that I’ve relinquished my 33 volumes, I don’t have enough space on my shelves because I continue to discover – and then buy – new books. It’s an addiction I can’t quit!

People also will continue to gift me books, which I welcome because I love surprises – especially ones that contradict my innate tendency to make immediate, unreasonable judgments. My friend Julie R. gave me The Warmth of Other Suns a few years ago, and I was dismayed. I dreaded having to read it. I didn’t know what it was about, but I did know that it was a 640-page nonfiction work penned by an academic. GROAN! I threw a massive internal fit. Well, it turns out that the book follows three families during the Great Migration of black Americans out of the South during the last century. It’s beautiful, riveting, nerve-racking, powerful, emotional, and all-around intoxicating. I mean, an absolute page-turner! One of my all-time favorite books, despite my lunatic misgivings.

I will say that I’m starting to download books occasionally on my Kindle now, even though for years I swore I’d never commit such blasphemy. I limit those purchases to works that I think wouldn’t impress my nonexistent imaginary visitor who has absolutely no interest in my bookshelves.

I suppose I could also just go to the library and check out books. I do, after all, have a library card. We have a small branch library just 6 lovely, walkable blocks away, and I’ve been in there only once or twice. A travesty. Okay, a visit to that place is now on my nonexistent list of New Year’s resolutions.

***

May 13, 1975 [age 19]:

“I can’t breathe. It has gone from cold, rainy days to sweltering hot 90-degree weather in a couple of days and I simply can’t breathe. My nose is totally plugged from hay fever. I’m sore from head to toe from softball yesterday. I’m a physical wreck, as usual. It isn’t even the things I was born with that are bothering me today, like my long nose and fat legs. No, it’s the fact that I don’t really know enough to wear makeup or cut my hair or wear feminine clothes. I took one good look at myself in the mirror this evening and could’ve killed myself right there on the spot.”

May 15, 1975 [age 19]:

“Yesterday our country bombed three Cambodian boats in retaliation for their seizure of our merchant marine vessel – it was the right move to make after all but it scared the living daylights out of me. Just the day before, [my friend] Joe got official notice from the army that his classification had been changed from a ‘holding’ status to 1-A and that he should go down to fill out papers or something. And when I thought of the possibilities of more war, and the fact that Joe could go, all young and innocent and in love with the Moody Blues and sportscars, and be shot up by some man he never even met – I could never shoot Joe! But then at night we rescued our Americans and the Cambodian army gave up and we’re out of danger. I never want to go through another war – never see [my friends] Ted or Joe or Morris or [my brother] Marc die for nothing.”

May 19, 1975 [age 19]:

“Today is my half-birthday. I never really believed that I’d live this long. But I’ve got so very much living to do – ‘all that hitchhikin’, all that railroadin’, all that comin’ back to America’ (Kerouac). I should also think about falling in love, too, but I’ve been busy.”

May 23, 1975 [age 19]:

“When [at work] we were told that due to cutbacks we might not all be hired again next year, I tore my hair and decided to really have a good time at the Chicago/Beach Boys [‘Day on the Green’] concert tomorrow. We’re going to go in Frank’s van. So all afternoon and night I whizzed around, paid my fees at State, got my [allergy] shot, ate my free coupon’s worth of Bumbleberry Pie in Eastridge, and bought a boda bag and a bottle of wine and a small bottle of Tequila Sunrise. Then Ted and Joe and I drove to Togo’s to buy sandwiches, planning to go miniature golfing afterwards. After we’d waited in line they ran out of bread, so we cursed and walked to a corner store which by luck made sandwiches. We made the poor guy make 16 sandwiches.”

May 24, 1975 [age 19]:

“Day on the Green: Chicago/Beach Boys/Bob Seger/Commander Cody/New Riders of the Purple Sage. It was SCORCHING – everyone was out in their bathing suits or bare chests and even in my traditional jeans and t-shirt I got sunburned. Joe and Ted and Frank and I were always clapping and moving and standing up. Of course, we’d been taking glubs out of our boda bags and we love music anyway and the Beach Boys were so astoundingly good in person that they stole the show. [Name omitted] gave Joe and me about 9 joints. One of them was supposed to be Acapulco Gold, the good stuff, but it must not have been from Acapulco because after smoking two I was still waiting for whatever it is that’s supposed to happen. I wanted to be down on the lawn instead of in the stands. Where we were sitting, there weren’t very many enthusiasts, except for a small group of teenyboppers. At one point Bruce even fell asleep with his head bent forward! That was incomprehensible to me! By the way, I’m writing this on Sunday, and I was paranoid all morning that I’d smell like pot at Church.”

June 14, 1975 [age 19]:

“This summer I’m going to spend revamping my entire body.”

June 19, 1975 [age 19]:

“I spent hours getting my [very long] hair cut off yesterday. I really like it short because one, it’s a change, and two, it’s easy to wash, and three, it’s a big heavy load off my head, and four, if I go to the beach now I won’t have to worry about how to wear it in the water. My major worry is my inability when it comes to rolling it up. I hate it when I allow my petty apprehensions to control myself so much. But I got an awful lot of compliments today and it made me happy. It’s like a weight has been lifted off of me. I ran downstairs and told Mom and Dad, ‘You know, my introversion and everything, now I think it was all because of my HAIR! Something oppressive’s been removed. I’m ecstatic!’ Well, the exaggeration is apparent, but it’s partly true and I feel free now. This morning I bounced into [my allergist’s] office carefree as blazes. It was gray and cloudy, windy and drizzly, but my spirits soared (and I bought a new pen!).”

June 23, 1975 [age 19]:

“I’m so excited! I called [my East Coast friend] Jeanne today and we made plans for me to go visit her in July for about a month! I will fly into Washington rather than South Carolina; doing that, we could travel wildly up the coast towards Maine, where we’ll meet [her husband] Steve and then buzz back down to S.C. to folic at the beach. Before then, I have a list of frantic preparations to do, including working on my car and learning how to wash clothes, roll my hair, and dance.”

July 18, 1975 [age 19]:

“I’ve bought a movie camera! I really need to document my trip to the East Coast this summer, when I’m sure I’ll be sitting in a bar in New York drinking tequila. I decided on the Bolex 350, which I bought at San Jose Camera. You can even take indoor pictures without movie lights! It was a very big decision, made with trembling hand and voice.”

Smoke and mirrors

“If someone wants my bra, they can have it,” a woman in the waiting room announced.

I looked up. She’d been fussing with a set of lockers where those of us waiting for mammograms had been instructed to put our clothes and personal items, and she’d given up. “I can’t figure out how to lock it, so I’m just leaving it wide open,” she declared.

This week I had three medical appointments. All of them were routine, but I was royally stressed out the entire week.

Don’t get me wrong. Medical issues don’t scare me, I have a fairly high pain tolerance, and I’m not unduly fazed by the physical vagaries of aging. But appointments these days require the ability to navigate technology, rapid-fire instructions, mazelike offices, and complicated parking lots. Those are the things that scare me.

As I often joke, if someone were to tell me, “Paula, you have three months to live, and during that time you’re going to go through multiple rounds of traumatic medical treatments,” my response would be, “Well, that’s fine, but oh my God, WHERE AM I GOING TO PARK?”

Appointments involve, for me, a host of challenging and frightening steps. First, as a “pre-check-in,” I’m asked to fill out lengthy online questionnaires that, for reasons unknown, I then have to repeat when I get to the office. These involve recalling the dates of my childhood surgeries, all of my relatives’ health issues, and the exact day my period stopped. I don’t remember any of that.

(A few months ago I panicked at a questionnaire and forgot my address. Moments like that are particularly alarming to me because my father, his only sibling, and his mother all died of Alzheimer’s. It’s constantly on my mind – so much so that I participate in an ongoing UC San Francisco study called the Brain Health Registry, in which every few months I take mental acuity tests and answer other questions about my lifestyle including diet, alcohol use, social life, etc. I was asked to designate a “study partner,” and I chose Julie, of course, who herself participates by answering questions about me every six months. Despite my existential dread she continues to insist that, while I remain convinced that I’m slowly losing my mind, in actual fact I haven’t shown clear-cut evidence of that. “No,” she repeats every time I nag about it, “I’m reporting to UCSF that as of today, at least, you still seem to have all your marbles.”)

The day before the appointment I need to remember whether I am allowed to eat, drink, take my statin, or wear deodorant. So I post signs to myself around the house in enormous black Sharpie lettering.

Then comes the horror of all urban horrors: I have to navigate my way to the offices (scattered all over the city) and decide where on earth I’m going to park and, more dauntingly, how the parking lot works when inevitably I can’t find a spot on the street.

(Last year, for one particular parking lot, I typed up a long Word document as soon as I got home, instructing my future self about how to use the payment machines because it nearly took a degree in advanced physics to figure them out. But when I arrived at the same lot recently, those machines were gone and new ones had taken their place, with even more complex instructions! Upon exit I flapped, twirled, and waved my ticket around in front of the “Scan Your Ticket” rectangle for a solid 10 minutes while cars waiting to leave were piling up behind me, until I gave up and slapped the ticket drunkenly near a different rectangle until the gate finally opened, prompting a roar of applause from the backed-up cars. Well, it wasn’t exactly applause, but that’s how I chose to imagine it.)

Needless to say, by the time I arrive at the office I am usually bathed in sweat and anxiety. (And yet they won’t let me wear deodorant!)

Once safely inside, I’m shuttled from one check-in line to another before being hustled down the hall by a 23-year-old auctioneer who barks instructions at all of us uncomprehending oldsters. When she’s done with her rapid-fire spiel I just want to cry out, “Huh?” But instead I’m fighting hard to remember which way the gown is supposed to face, which clothes I have to take off, where the lockers are, how they function, and in which direction I will need to head for the next room, where someone is inevitably waiting for me while snickering.

And do I keep my socks on? I never know the answer to that one.

After the appointment comes what is often my biggest challenge: finding my way out of the exam room through a labyrinthine tangle of hallways back to the waiting room and out the door. Usually I circle the area, ask no fewer than 14 people how to get out of there, retrace my steps twice, and then accidentally find the exit. Once finally out the door, I breathe in a bracing gulp of San Francisco air, make a grateful sign of the cross, drive home, and immediately reward myself with a shot of liquor, time of day notwithstanding.

Anyway, back to Friday. There I was in the mammogram waiting room, puzzling over the locker situation and what to do with my clothes. There were about 16 lockers and eventually I chose locker number 4, successfully stuffing my belongs inside and locking the door on only the second try. Now, what else did I need to remember? Oh, yes – which locker was it?? “Number 4, number 4, don’t forget number 4,” I repeated silently. I was mastering this! (Unlike the hapless woman with the hanging bra.)

Except she wasn’t hapless. She was a tall, lithe, sophisticated woman 10 or 15 years my junior. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and I assumed that that evening she’d be doing an academic book reading in front of an appreciative highbrow audience.

The third woman in the waiting room was actually repeating “locker 6,” “locker 6,” “locker 6” out loud, and she looked to be cosmopolitan as well. She had the pampered skin of a successful woman who probably went to the spa on a weekly basis. I figured she had to hail from Marin County.

“By the way, did you figure out how to park?” I asked her.

“Oh, that’s the only thing I didn’t have to worry about. I walked here because I live in the Marina,” she said.

Well, I was close.

The elegant author lady piped up and said that she takes cell phone photos every time she parks anywhere. She photographs street signs, parking lot positions, the angle of her car, everything. Otherwise, she claimed, she’d be doomed.

The Marina lady then proceeded to tell us about the time she forgot her locker number when she was at Disneyland, of all places. Not only had she forgotten the number, but she’d forgotten the location of the entire building.

After a few minutes, all of us were comparing notes about our inanities. It began to dawn on me that perhaps I’m not the only person in the world who dreads going to medical offices, gas stations, salad bars, City Hall, and grocery checkout lines for fear of embarrassing myself. Perhaps I’m not singularly inept. Perhaps I’m not losing my head while everyone around me is keeping theirs.

We’re all human beings, aren’t we? Maybe we need to not be so self-critical. We’re all bozos on this bus.

“You know,” I told the author lady, “I always feel that I’m a bumbling fool while people like you seem to have it all together.”

“It’s all smoke and mirrors, my friend,” she answered. “All smoke and mirrors.”

***

NOTE RE COMMENTS: Apparently WordPress is no longer asking commenters for their names, so everyone is being listed as “Anonymous.” If you’re commenting (which I love!), please leave your name if you’d like me to know who you are!

***

March 22, 1975 [age 19]:

“These two days have been both crazy and quiet, fun and disaster. [I was the maid of honor in my friend Robin’s wedding.] Friday night I drove down to Carmel with Robin and Guy. I’d had a small dinner at home, and we stopped in Gilroy to get some junk – cracker jacks, cookies, peanuts, pies, shoestring potatoes. But when we arrived they had dinner waiting for us! I could have puked! Lasagna, chicken, salad, and cheese pie. That night Robin rolled my hair and said she’d call me in the morning. Well, I woke from a dream at 6:30 a.m. thinking I was hearing a voice calling “Paula, PAULA!” and I rushed out into the hall like a fool, and no one was there. In the afternoon I took a long hot bath and I brought the shower curtain smashing down on my head. An hour before the wedding I was alone with Robin and her mother in the church dressing room where we beautified ourselves. I had my long royal blue dress on and a cross that Robin had given me and my hair tied back – I actually looked nicer than I’ve ever looked! I was nervous but managed to not flub up the ring-giving or the bouquet-passing. It was a short but moving ceremony that made me cry. At 8:00 I went upstairs to help get Robin ready to go, in the meanwhile going to the bathroom and discovering to my horror that the ties on my dress had been six inches submerged in the toilet.”

March 28, 1975 [age 19]:

“San Francisco again, this time with [my brother] Marc. We did an awful lot of driving around looking for parking lots. Also, on the way up there, we had an urge to suddenly turn off the freeway and look for a doughnut place proclaimed by Bruce Bishop to be heavenly. I liked the plain fried ones. In San Francisco we chased around City Lights and a few more record stores and bookstores and then went off to the Exploratorium. I wanted to go get lox and bagels afterwards, but Marc said he wasn’t hungry and couldn’t eat more than ‘one lock.’ That sent me into hysterics.”

April 2, 1975 [age 19]:

“Dr. Egbert [my allergist] informed me today that I have to start getting shots twice a week because I am allergic to dust, some trees, ragweed, bagweed, schmagweed, and every single kind of grass.”

April 3, 1975 [age 19]:

“The skies rained gray today and my [great aunt] Nella was buried. I was teary-eyed and wracked. I thought of all of our neglect of old people – damn damn damn we NEGLECT them so! I saw how our realities are so different – I’m hung up on Kerouac and the Byrds and I guzzle beer and write journals and they watch death grab their friends as they wearily dwell on remembrances.”

April 5, 1975 [age 19]:

“Coming out of Church tonight I saw [my friend and neighbor] Ted for a moment, and when I made as if to say goodbye he hesitated. Earlier during the Kiss of Peace I’d turned and seen him two rows behind, and I touched his hand with a smile big as the sky. So he hesitated outside and asked, ‘Why don’t we ever DO anything anymore?’ School, work, school, work. I want so much and try so hard to hold on to everyone but people go by the wayside sometimes. ‘Wait till summer,’ I promised, ‘just wait till summer.’ ”

April 9, 1975 [age 19]:

“Mom is having terrible trouble with her arm – they shot cortisone in her and took x-rays and still don’t know what it is. What if it’s cancer? Mom is the person I love the most in this world, and if she were to die I just couldn’t, I wouldn’t, I don’t even know, I couldn’t survive. I’d fall apart. I mean, I would be absolutely devastated if Dad or Marc or Janine died, of course, but Mom – I just couldn’t take it emotionally or physically. I pray every night that her smoking won’t cripple or blacken her lungs beyond repair.”

April 10, 1975 [age 19]:

“A couple of projects I’ve been working on lately: 1) Getting a BankAmericard. They sent me back a note saying that I had insufficient credit information to warrant their issuing me a card. Chevron had also rejected me. I turned to Mom in despair and asked how the heck I could ever START credit when they all say no because I haven’t started yet?! 2) Sending inquiries out to 13 firms recommended by the Library of Congress in search of Jack Kerouac’s spoken recordings. 3) Oh, yes, and getting rid of my athlete’s foot and my corn, succeeding only with the former.”

April 12, 1975 [age 19]:

“I saw three movies today in between a million other things. I had zwieback and coffee for breakfast, listened to a record for [my brother] Marc to see if there any scratches on it, cleaned the inside of my car, drove to the Pruneyard to see ‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’ (alternating between laughing and crying), which was a great movie but I almost hit a kid in the parking lot, came home, washed the outside of the car, looked through a book of poems and songs to get ideas for my journal, washed my hair, listened to one of my vacation cassettes, read Tom Wolfe, ate dinner, and went to church. Then Ted drove us all to Blossom Hill to see ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ and my very first complete X-rated movie, ‘Emmanuel.’ All night long I had second thoughts about seeing that one, especially because I’d be with four guys, but I really wanted to see ‘The Owl and the Pussycat,’ which was first, and I knew that if I were too grossed out by the X-movie I could leave and slink into another theater. But I didn’t leave. I might even see another one sometime.”

April 14, 1975 [age 19]:

“I accompanied Elba Galindez to Round Table Pizza today where we sat for an hour, jabbering. Elba was in my 2^nd period science class [where I was a high school teacher’s aide] before she transferred to Campbell High School, where she was so racially ostracized that she moved back into this area last week. Her tales of her short sojourn at the upperclass white school made me hate all the distrust in the world. But her stories about her life in New York, San Francisco, Puerto Rico, and San Jose were so interesting that I just sat there enthralled, popping a million questions at her. And what stories could I tell? What do I do besides read and write and work? What great places have I been to besides San Franciso only 50 miles away?”

April 15, 1975 [age 19]:

“These are my fantasies lately: [My friend and neighbor] Ted and I roaring across the country this summer in a big old bus like the Merry Pranksters had, painted vivid red and orange, eating all kinds of bulk cheap foods, playing cards, burning across the night in frenzied excitement, lying in one sleeping bag as we did at Clear Lake last year, me playing with his hair in the nighttime breeze, buzzing into the East on a warm sunny morning, drinking rum in a New York City bar, and ending back here in Frisco holding hands and eating chocolate down by the water.”

April 16, 1975 [age 19]:

“GREAT NEWS TODAY! Mr Ledesma has nearly solved all of my problems! He told me that it is almost a certainty that they will hire me again part-time next year [as a high school teacher’s aide]; all I need do is clear it with Mr. Peters [the vice-principal] tomorrow and I’ll be set. I can quit Rexall [Drugstore] now and live in the dorms next semester and work here part time. Even if I work only three hours a day, I’ll be getting about $150 a month. And this summer I can be FREE and finally go visit Jeanne on the East Coast and see more of this beautiful country. Oh, please, Mr. Peters, say yes! Can you imagine, world?????”

Identity crisis

So it’s come to this: People can no longer tell Julie and me apart.

I let my gray hair grow out during the pandemic, and Julie (my spouse) lost quite a bit of weight. These seemingly minor changes have apparently turned us into identical twins.

Neighbors we’ve known for years have begun commenting on my amazing diet(!).

Others simply refuse to use our names for fear they’ll have gotten us confused.

Our neighbor Mary Clare – one of the few who can tell us apart – says that all the young people on our block think we oldsters are indistinguishable from one another.

Julie doesn’t mind this one bit, although you’d think she would because she’s almost seven years younger than me.

I, however, am distraught about it. I feel invisible enough as it is, but this new slap in the face is particularly painful. I feel like I’ve lost my identity.

***

It’s nothing new, this complaint that we become invisible in society as we get older. And most of the time I can deal with it. I’m unseen at the grocery store, a phantom on my morning walk with Buster (he gets all the attention!), one of a gray herd in line at the colonoscopy center.

That’s not a huge turnabout for me. I was never whistled at on the street anyway.

But every so often I’d get a respectful compliment in unexpected places. I have to admit that I miss that – being noticed.

Heck, someone at my workplace – whom I didn’t know well – was once overheard saying that I was “smoldering.” Now I’m just a pile of dry kindling.

***

A few weeks ago, when Julie and I were both in line for a crab sandwich at the ballpark, the vendor insisted that we had to be sisters. We corrected her but it didn’t matter – she continued to repeat it as if she didn’t believe us. I mean, did she not see my Italian nose?!

Maybe as we age we just become shriveled, interchangeable apple dolls.

(By the way, this “sister” thing has been happening to me for decades. Once in the 1980s I was at the beach with my girlfriend Cynthia and someone asked us if we were sisters. Why this is so important to strangers is beyond me – never mind that I was pale and blue-eyed and she was an olive-skinned Latina!)

***

Like all of us, I suppose, I once thought that I would be immune to the endowments of old age. I was young, lean, and athletic, without a malady in the world. And my body held up for a long time. But my rude awakening has finally come. Recently I tried on half a dozen pairs of nice pants I’d bought only about five years ago. After all, I still weigh the same. But for the most part, I couldn’t even button them! Only one of them fit, and I had to donate the rest. What on earth had happened? I guess the bulky items had shifted, and my waist had suddenly expanded. I flew into a rage.

***

This melancholy of mine, though, is not just about looks. It’s more about being recognized as a human being with a meaningful history and valuable ideas.

I have to say, throughout my life I’ve always been interested in other people no matter what their age.

Don’t get me wrong. Like nearly everyone else, I was a selfish young person. When I go through my diaries today, I want to apologize to every person I’ve ever met.

But I was nonetheless curious about others. As a child I couldn’t get enough of the stories my relatives on both sides would tell. I peppered them with questions. I laughed at their tales, which I always found hilarious. I made sure to interview my parents as they got older.

But I have no children, and no one seems to care what my story is or what I have to add. No one wants to interview me.

Now I know what my mother meant when, in her later years, she would lament that “It’s as if I’m not here.”

***

Mindful of my half-full glass, I’ll admit that sometimes being visibly “of a certain age” can offer an advantage. Not long ago I left a Giants ballgame alone and decided to walk as far as possible towards home. I felt good and strong and practically youthful as I covered almost 4 miles before giving in and boarding a jam-packed Muni Metro train at Castro station. Almost immediately a young man gave me his seat. I was actually happy to park my stiffening back, and of course I was grateful to him. But it also meant that my age was strikingly apparent.

***

Last week, though, brought the ultimate indignity.

Julie needed to use my desktop computer. It’s set so that when it’s in “sleep” mode, it uses facial recognition to wake up. I need to be sitting in front of my webcam or else it doesn’t turn on.

Julie plopped down in front of the computer and it immediately came to life.

“Good morning, Paula!” it announced cheerily.

***

March 18, 1975 [age 19]:

“This is gonna make you, the reader – myself in future times – laugh, but the main event of today was getting my eyebrows plucked. A new look begins. I went up to [my hairdresser neighbor] Mrs. Rosales’ house and had her perform the operation. O, the pain was horrible! My eyes were swollen with irritation and tears. [Her daughter] Susan put lipstick on me before I left, which I quickly wiped off as soon as I got home. But I think it’s all made a big impression on me. Soon I’ll learn to roll my hair and maybe put on a little bit of makeup and wear sexier clothes. I have only 6 months left of teenagerhood and I need to learn how to be an adult – their tricks, their games, their crazy ways.”

March 19, 1975 [age 19]:

“I had seven pancakes, an egg, and hot chocolate at Uncle John’s [Pancake House] this morning. They were having their usual Wednesday morning 79-cent all-you-can-eat special. I wanted some biscuits as a side dish but they wouldn’t allow it in the 79 cents.”

March 20, 1975 [age 19]:

“I keep telling myself that there are countless things I’ve got to think about – countless ways I could change my personality, countless goals to create. But I haven’t had a moment to spare since last summer. Not one moment to spend outside on the balcony with a beer and a star, pondering myself and my link with the future. In fact, I even wrote on my things-to-do list: ‘Think about yourself!’ because otherwise I’d forget.”

Awkward!

It’s been a while since something mortifying happened to me, so I should have known that I was due.

I’ve suffered through a long litany of embarrassing moments in my life, some of which have been chronicled on this blog – for example, when:

I demanded that a stranger fix my window (https://mondaymorningrail.com/2016/06/20/broken-windows-and-empty-hallways/), I stood naked in my doorway fearing a fake earthquake (https://mondaymorningrail.com/2016/08/15/shakin-all-over/), my bathing suit slipped off at a waterpark (https://mondaymorningrail.com/2017/07/10/oops/), and I had to visit a repair shop with an X-rated videotape stuck in my VCR (https://mondaymorningrail.com/2019/07/28/devil-with-the-blue-dress/).

Believe me, those are mere flecks of paint in my immense masterpiece of embarrassing moments.

But onward I teeter through life, continuing to add to the gallery.

A few days ago, I was preparing to ice my lower lower back – part of my routine after exercising because I have sciatica, SI joint syndrome, facet syndrome, and/or any of a number of lower lower back issues that no doctor has been able to definitively diagnose. It’s a relatively minor scourge, but I do feel some pain when I exercise, so I ice afterwards even though it likely doesn’t provide one iota of help.

While I’m icing, I listen to music through gigantic over-the-ear headphones. That day I was listening to the Psychedelic Furs.

(I’ve been going through my CD collection alphabetically and ripping my favorite “primo” tunes to my computer and iPhone, employing a complex method of rating and analysis that would bore you to tears. Obviously I am up to the “P”s. I know, I know, I could just drag myself into this millennium and use Spotify or some other streaming service, but I want to curate my own collections, thank you very much.)

So this is the routine: I don the headphones, crank up the music, stand by the side of the bed, pull my sweatpants down to my knees, hold the ice pack on my lower lower back, lean forward, and slowly fall facedown onto the bed.

This is undoubtedly an impractical regimen. For instance, I could lie down and then grab the ice pack to place it on my back.

But whatever works.

In this particular instance, I had gone through the routine and was just about to fall forward onto the bed.

(I’ve reenacted the fateful moment in the photo below.)

But then, in between the seductive post-punk marimba notes of the Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way” (a 5-star primo song if ever there was one), I thought I may have heard something. So I looked to my left.

Our housepainter was standing in the doorway.

He’d been working on the rear of our house, but he’d come up the back stairs with a question. I guess I hadn’t heard him knock, what with my tunes cranked up louder than a Liberace suit.

So he decided to just let himself inside, and that door is, oh, about 2-1/2 feet from my bedroom door, and it looks directly in.

So there I was, pants down, bent forward over the bed, wearing huge headphones, seemingly clutching my backside, and grooving to something he couldn’t hear.

Did he think I was engaged in some kind of weird solo sex game?

I can’t even imagine what he must have been thinking, and I’ll never know because I can never look him in the face again. But he backed slowly down the stairs while cupping his hand over his eyes as if he were looking into the sun.

Maybe it was the glare off of my white butt.

January 21, 1975 [age 19]:

“I love working with Mr. Nash [as a high school teacher’s aide], who gives hilarious lectures. About half of the time I’m busy setting up or helping with labs. The only thing is, Mr. Nash gives very nebulous directions and it’s really a challenge just to be able to do what he wants done. Many a time I’ve screwed up. Last week he sent me to the supply room for a pressure cooker, and with my acute knowledge of practical things, I had no idea what a pressure cooker was. So I rummaged around in the supply room for an interminable time pretending I knew what I was looking for until I realized that I was getting nowhere. Finally I started dragging random things out and holding them up so Mr. Nash could see me through the window and nod his head when I finally held up an actual pressure cooker!”

RIP, Donald N. Nash, 1947-2015

January 27, 1975 [age 19]:

“After all my classes [as a high school teacher’s aide] are over, I have about half an hour to wait before I am allowed to go home. Sometimes I play chess with Alan [a math teacher], but usually I sit around and talk. Julie Miyahara [a remedial English teacher] comes in from next door and we often talk about education. I have found that the best teachers are the ones who doubt themselves the most, who CARE enough to wonder if they really ARE good. Time and again Julie walks wearily in, frustrated, saying, ‘Oh, Paula, are we really teaching them anything at all?’ I get worried when people turn to me and I don’t know what to say, so I pretend I know what I’m talking about and I discourse on the evils of sight reading and the similar ‘innovative’ educational practices that emerged during the experimental age of the 60s. And I do it all with my usual pained expression.”

February 2, 1975 [age 19]:

“I’m sitting here thinking about the future and right now I have some tentative plans which will undoubtedly dissolve away. I’ve been accepted back into San Jose State for next semester, and I believe that I’ll continue with my current major [law enforcement]. I really don’t know what I want to do and it’s a terrible feeling. I’ve always ‘known’ I’d do police work but now I have these disturbing doubts, and I’m groping while everyone else seems to have found their way. I’ve regressed. All I can hear are Bobby Dylan’s words, ‘Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.’ Next semester I will NOT be at home, but whether in the dorms or in an apartment I don’t know. It will probably be a disaster, but maybe I can learn how to be social. Then two years of school, then a year’s or a summer’s travel, then I’ll live in San Francisco. I will get a job near the Wharf or North Beach or Chinatown, preferably in a bookstore, with long-haired intellectuals in an old building with a basement and ancient rickety stairs.”

February 6, 1975 [age 19]:

“The Chevron/Standard company sent me no credit card today but a rejection slip saying that they didn’t have sufficient information to guarantee my good credit. And I have two jobs! I think Dad is going to write a letter to them or something, but anyway, I’m tired of all the hassles on my shoulders, and the world bugs me.”

Booth Phobia

Are you perchance, dear reader, afraid of buttons? If so, you likely have koumpounophobia. Perhaps you’re frightened unnaturally by peanut butter, in which case your condition may be arachibutyrophobia. Or you may suffer from octophobia: fear of the figure 8. Some folks are clinically afraid of gravity. Or ferns. Or the color purple. Or, believe it or not, knees.

My fears – and believe me, I have multitudes – tend not to be established phobias. This blog has already chronicled two of them: my stresses related to gas stations and to salad bars. (See https://mondaymorningrail.com/2016/09/19/panic-at-the-pump/.)

But I’d like to talk about a third condition of mine: “Booth Phobia.”

Right off the bat, I have to admit that I neither coined the term “Booth Phobia” nor identified the condition. Those credits go to my friend Maryl, who recently confessed to the affliction when she told me about a book fair she once attended. After she wandered – at her peril, as it turned out – into a booth inhabited by a children’s book author, the author insisted on showing every page of her book about cats to an entrapped Maryl, who could only stand by, painfully feigning interest, while the woman leafed through the book at a snail’s pace, accompanying each dramatic turn of the page with a long explanation of her creative process and the backstory of each illustrated cat.

Oy!

At any rate, as I was listening to this story I realized that I, too, suffer from Booth Phobia. In San Francisco we’re blessed with some terrific farmers’ markets as well as (before the pandemic, at least) any excuse for a street fair. What’s odd is that I absolutely love the idea of these events and want desperately to attend them and come away with a raft of sophisticated purchases. But once I arrive, I’m paralyzed with fear of approaching any of the booths.

I think it’s all about performance anxiety, which is something I have in spades.

For example, I began my adult recreational softball career at first base, which is the position I’d played throughout grammar and high school. I was comfortable there and good enough to be nicknamed “Stretch” in the 8th grade by an enthusiastic nun. But early in my Parks and Rec days, my team’s pitcher left one night in the middle of a game to use the bathroom. And she never returned. Ever again. (True story.) So the coach, faced with the task of replacing her mid-inning(!), hollered at me to abandon first base and take the mound, and from that point on I was the pitcher. Unfortunately my wildly successful debut as the team’s ace hurler did not necessarily extend to all of my starts. In that first game I’d had no time to fear that I would stink up the joint; the role was thrust upon me and it was an emergency situation. But my successive games were unpredictable because of my crippling performance anxiety. After all, when you’re a pitcher, all eyes are upon you. So I would famously make a visit to the bathroom before each game, sick with worry that I would cost us half a dozen runs on my helter-skelter walks. Which did happen once or twice. At the end of the season I received “The Pepto-Bismol Award” from my oh-so-funny teammates.

Later, during my early years playing drums in a rock band, my performance anxiety was so bad that my feet would shake like a rattlesnake. One helpful friend who worked for the San Francisco Symphony told me that some of the musicians would take a pill called Inderal before their concerts. Inderal is a beta-blocker that effectively slows one’s heart rate. Well, that revelation was all I needed to hear. I begged my doctor for a prescription and started popping those things like a corner junkie.

Anyway, the point is that my Booth Phobia is related.

As you all know, the artists at street fairs and the farmers (or their representatives) at farmers’ markets usually occupy their booths alongside their wares. And I’m deathly afraid of talking to these people.

The fears are two-fold: 1) that I will hurt their feelings if I don’t buy something, and 2) that I will demonstrate my stupidity by asking a clumsy question.

If – out of the corner of my eye – I see some art that interests me at a street fair, for example, there is no way that I will enter the kiosk and take my time looking around at the paintings. Typically there’s a hungry-looking artist sitting inside amongst his watercolors, and I can’t fathom the thought of assessing his stuff and then strolling out, as if his life’s work is lousy and meaningless. Can’t do it. Instead, I quickly breeze by the perimeter, cast a sidelong glance at the art, and go inside only if I am taken by something so strongly that I can’t possibly leave without buying it. And if I walk in and have some serious second thoughts, well, I buy the painting anyway.

Think about it. We aren’t normally forced to directly convey to painters, or jewelers, or photographers, or authors our judgment of their creations, except at a street or craft fair. We look at, and purchase, their work in galleries or bookstores or other places where the artists are not present. But in these booths, they can see our reactions and sense our judgment. I assume it must be an awkward situation for them, too. And I don’t want to be a cause of their pain!

As far as farmers’ markets go, I simply don’t know how to tell a good peach from a bad one. All I know is that anything at a farmers’ market tastes better than the same thing at Safeway. Beyond that, I feel hopelessly ignorant. So if I do screw up the courage to buy something, I will simply shove the first vegetables I see into a bag because I have no idea what I’m doing. I just don’t know how to talk with farmers about the peculiarities of their cucumbers!

At least at Safeway no one watches me ignorantly squeeze the produce, so no one can cast judgment on my choices. But at farmers’ markets I sense uneasily that the people in line behind me are all manored ladies in vests and visors, with styled hair and fancy totes, staring at me because I have no idea how to purchase escarole.

***

At the end of my conversation with Maryl, she brought up another source of anxiety: her fear of getting her own drink at a fast food-type venue. Of course, I suddenly realized that I share the same fear and never can figure how the whole process works. I guess that will have to wait for another blog.

For now, though, I would love to hear from you, dear readers, about your own non-clinical phobias. Please don’t hesitate to share them in your comments.

***

August 2, 1973 [age 17]:

“I keep wondering if I’ll ever get over Pat Sears. Aw, I guess it’s a common error for immature people like me to think someone is the perfect match in the world, which I suppose isn’t so, but is easy to believe. He is the only person I have ever fallen for. I remember last Thursday Barb said, ‘Oh, Paula, now don’t worry. Someone, someday, is going to love you for what you say, what you do, how you talk – love every breath of you.’ If only she is right!”

August 9, 1973 [age 17]:

“It’s time for my vanity to show through as I give a brief rundown of my current physical condition. My beloved new [wire-rimmed] glasses – my pride and joy – have probably helped a bit, at least to make me appear older. The progress of my diet is up in the air, right now. At this time of the month I usually gain any number of pounds. The thing is, I have been on the brink of ‘this time of the month’ for three weeks now. All weighings are thus invalid for a while. My face looks quite the same – awful. Those vitamin C pills have not done a great amount of good, but perhaps they’ve spared me from a few colds. My ‘tan’ – well, I’m browner than usual but I have a 2” strip across my stomach which is much darker than the rest of me and which looks utterly absurd. The cause of this phenomenon is unknown.”

August 11, 1973 [age 17]:

“One of my many strange quirks is that I simply cannot eat by myself without reading something. Yesterday I dragged out my old term papers, scrapbooks and such and really marveled at their development, especially at the things I wrote in the 3rd grade. It so amazes me how rapidly we progress – at a geometric rate, I’m sure, if it could be calculated mathematically. Even my freshman year in high school produced some terribly ignorant stuff (though now that I think of it, I was only 12 or 13 then). I hate my work. It’s terrible. When will my intellectual maturity come, or – horror of horrors – has it already? I wonder how stupid I am right now.”

August 26, 1973 [age 17]:

“I have a new literary hero. His name is Thomas Wolfe; Look Homeward, Angel was divine, and as soon as I can scrape up the energy I will have to read the terribly lengthy sequel, Of Time and the River, and then on to every other word that he has ever written. Walk Whitman lives in my eyes as the greatest poet of all time. There have been so many heroes in my life: Jimmy Davenport [SF Giants] and Jimmy Taylor [Green Bay Packers] in the world of sports, Spencer Tracy in acting, Paul Simon in music, and in politics Abe Lincoln, U.S. Grant, and Eisenhower.”

September 10, 1973 [age 17]:

“I felt a little rush of ecstasy this morning when B. Dalton’s [bookstore] called to say that The Human Comedy was in, a joy that waned a little when I saw its price ($6.95!). But, I merrily drove over to Eastridge [mall] to get it. I don’t know why books make me so happy – maybe so that I can know what others think about life so that I can quote them.”

September 14, 1973 [age 17]:

“Another wasted day, or so it seems, vacuuming the rooms we always vacuum on Fridays, reading Of Time and the River with love and awe, hungrily paging through books on photography at the public library, desperately scribbling down words of frustration to add to my journal collection of broken dreams, wearily trudging off to work, only to finally return home to devour whatever dinner lies in wait, read with tired, heavy eyes more words of absolute beauty by Mr. Wolfe, and drift reluctantly off to sleep. My life is horrible, unceasing monotony. Someday I’d like to get drunk and thrown in jail.”

October 1, 1973 [age 17]:

“All that happened today was that [my brother] Marc and I snuck out in the truck to pick up Bruce. Mom was gone, and it was 2:00 so we knew Dad wouldn’t be home. But just as we drove off down Suncrest we both screamed in terror because there was Dad coming up the hill! Later, while I was at work, Marc was yelled at, at dinner, but I, thank goodness, missed it. And I guess all had been forgotten by the time I got home. Mamma mia.”

October 6, 1973 [age 17]:

“I still pray at night. I’ve discovered that most of the things I pray for in earnest come true. I’ve always had a problem, though, in that I never know if I should pray for such a selfish thing as falling in love, so I never really do, except perhaps a hasty mention in passing.”

Typos on trial

I’d never imagined I’d be a party to any kind of court case. But there I was, in a San Francisco courtroom, clutching a McDonald’s bag that I’d found in the restroom and suing a newspaper owner over a bunch of typos.

Intrigued?

It had all started on Thursday, January 28, 1982, when – according to my diary – I’d spent a good portion of the day entering a “Spot-the-Blooper” contest in the Sunset Independent, a now-defunct local newspaper covering San Francisco’s Sunset District, the largest neighborhood in the City (about 80,000 people). The contest’s rules stated that entrants should look for errors over four issues of the paper and submit a list of them on a postcard. The winner who found the most errors would get $1 per “blooper.”

Well, I loved reading my Sunset Independent with great fervor every week, and I already knew that it was always absolutely fraught with mistakes. I also happened to be making my living as a freelance proofreader at the time. So I figured I had this contest in the bag.

I found 359 errors.

Imagine my excitement. In those days I made so little money that I couldn’t even afford cheddar cheese.

Diary entry, January 29: “I found so many mistakes yesterday that I had to type it all up on paper and it took me 5 hours, taking time out for dinner.”

I sent in my entry. But on February 11, before heading off to work, I opened that week’s issue of the Independent and could not believe my eyes. The paper declared the winner to be a man who had found 41 typos.

I was, to put it mildly, royally incensed.

February 11: “Today was Sandy’s going-away luncheon at ICS. We went to MacArthur Park, and I had grilled gulf shrimp and tons of their ‘onion strings’ and two glasses of wine. I was fairly useless afterwards, so I came home and drank a bunch of rum so I could call the Sunset Independent. They were really nervous and hemmed and hawed and said the contest judge wasn’t there and would call back on Friday, but I never got a call. So on Pam’s advice I’m going to write them a letter. It ain’t the money with me, it’s the principle.”

Pam Pecora was a friend of mine who had finished law school a few months before, and she was my go-to source for legal advice. So I proceeded to angrily pen a scathing letter to the newspaper, demanding that without a reasonable explanation within a week I would either go to court or pursue my case with the Consumer Fraud unit of the District Attorney’s Office.

The paper then employed an odd strategy.

February 18: “Today we got the new Sunset Independent. And oh how they must have scurried around after getting my letter yesterday, ’cause they PRINTED IT along with a stupid ‘explanation’ that said many of my bloopers had to do with spacing, whereas in fact maybe 3 of my 359 did. Amazingly ludicrous. I tried calling the editor again, but she rudely wouldn’t answer my questions. All she kept saying was that it was the judges’ decision. Finally she said, ‘They didn’t agree with some of your errors.’ I said, ‘So, in other words, they didn’t agree with even 41 of my errors.’ All she said was, ‘I don’t know, it’s all in a file somewhere, and I don’t want to dig it out.’ Boy, was I burning and churning.”

Apparently I burned and churned for only a couple of hours before calling the Consumer Fraud people and asking them to send me a complaint form. It arrived two days later. Imagine a government agency responding so quickly today. Two days! That hardly gave them time to get it into a mailbox!

At any rate, I filled out the form forthwith, and on March 4 a representative from the Consumer Fraud unit telephoned me. (By the way, I’m going to call the editor Laura Silva rather than her real name, for reasons I will make clear later on.)

March 4: “Well, hey, Consumer Fraud called, and the woman there – named Sydney – told me that I have an open-and-shut case, even in the opinion of the D.A.’s men there. She tried twice to talk sense into Laura Silva, the Independent’s editor, but she said Silva was rude and a real ‘schmoo.’ ”

“The D.A.’s men”? I think I’d been watching a little too much Karl Malden in “The Streets of San Francisco.”

March 8: “I talked to Sydney again. She said she’d had a message from Laura Silva (the famous editor), and when she called her back, Laura only repeated that she didn’t want to talk to me anymore. So why had Laura left a message to call her? She must really be nuts. Anyway, I guess her latest excuse for my not winning is that I didn’t send my entry in on a postcard. First of all, can you see me writing 14 pages on a postcard? Secondly, the second issue of the paper stated that we could send in letters! It looks, anyway, as if I’ll be going to small claims court.”

Sydney had done all she could for me. Typo fraud was just beyond her purview. So I called the Small Claims Legal Advisor at the San Francisco Municipal Court and girded my loins for battle.

The first thing I resolved to do was find an expert witness. Because I’d been in the publishing biz for a few years, I had a squad of word nerds around me. I decided on Kathy Reigstad, a production editor and former colleague of mine from my days at Harper & Row. As it turned out, she’d gone to law school for about a year and had always fantasized about being in court, so she was ecstatic at the prospect. Her role was to determine how many of my “bloopers” were legitimate errors. I would sue for that number of dollars in addition to – per the guidance of the Small Claims Legal Advisor – punitive damages of $100. I could soon be rolling in it!

The next thing I had to do, according to the Advisor, was determine who was in fact the owner of the newspaper. To accomplish this, he suggested that I go down to City Hall and attempt to look it up in the Fictitious Names Index. Instead, I enlisted the help of my girlfriend Cynthia, who came up with the ruse of calling the paper’s office pretending to be a journalism student doing a project on newspaper ownership. The office clerk who answered the phone bought it, and he told her that Laura Silva was indeed the owner.

Check.

All I had to do now was wait for Kathy’s evaluation, then send a letter to the Independent with a demand for the exact amount.

A week later, Kathy called me down to the Harper & Row offices to go over my entry, and we came up with 249 valid errors. That sounded fair to me. So I sent the newspaper a certified letter and, as soon as the receipt came back to me, I went down and filed the small claims case. Cynthia served the warrant. My day in court would be April 28 at 8:15 a.m. Things were moving quickly.

April 13: “I’m sitting here tonight watching ‘People’s Court,’ one of my favorite new shows. It’s interesting to me to hear the variety of situations in which people shaft each other, and to hear the judge’s assessment of right and wrong in each case, I am especially getting more and more interested now that my own case is coming. And I am starting to realize that it is easy to sue, and that as they say on the show, it’s much better to go to court than to take the law into your own hands; maybe more of us can strike back at the myriad of people who rip us off.”

Obviously I was feeling righteous about the situation. But as the trial approached, I got more and more jittery.

April 27: “Tomorrow morning’s court date looms larger and larger, and it’s practically consuming me. My stomach was ulcerous – burning all day, in fear of my having to speak in court.”

Kathy Reigstad and I arrived in Small Claims Court (Dept. 1 of City Hall, at the time) extremely early on the 28th. I was so extraordinarily nervous that when I emerged from the women’s room I absent-mindedly picked up a stranger’s McDonald’s bag and carried it with me into the courtroom!

As you might expect, the bailiff smelled that breakfast sausage sandwich and handed me a mild reprimand. I scurried back to return it to the restroom.

Kathy amused me with her asides as we were waiting. “I don’t know if this is the right time to tell you,” she said, “but when I had to be in moot court in law school I cried.” Meanwhile we were trying to determine which person was Laura Silva. When a really gorgeous woman walked in, Kathy turned to me to pronounce, “We’re dead.”

But it wasn’t her. The real Laura came in and sat right next to me, not knowing that her tormenter was at her shoulder.

Our case was the first one called, which terrified me because I’d wanted to watch for awhile and get some tips from other people’s presentations. But no.

And true to form, I blundered right from the get-go.

“I started clambering onto the wrong chair in the beginning, saying, ‘Is that right, Your Honor?’ and he motioned me to stand in front of him, with a smile.”

I presented my side somewhat shakily and at lightning speed, ignoring both the speech I’d spent typing up until midnight the night before and my reams of documentation. Then came Silva’s turn, and the judge seemed to partially take my side from the very beginning. Silva wasn’t as respectful (i.e., scared) as I was, often finishing her responses snidely with, ‘Is that it? Am I through?’ And the judge even seemed sympathetic to some of my more questionable corrections. For example, he demanded to know whether she would count “proofread” and “proof read” in the same paragraph to be an error. She said no, along with this doozy: “That first one is two words. The letters are just squished together. You can see a line between them.”

“That’s the PROOFREADER’S red line!” he answered, with more than a little exasperation.

Another gem involved her misspelling the name of Fanning’s Bookstore. Silva claimed that she was under no obligation to spell the name of the bookstore correctly, especially since she had no time to look up the name in the Fictitious Names Index.

I told her that I had simply called Mr. Fanning and asked him for the correct spelling!

Finally, when the judge looked at Kathy’s carefully enumerated list of errors, he told Silva, “Paula’s list contains 49 spelling errors alone, which by itself beats the 41 that the winner had.”

“Well, uh huh, that’s true,” Silva admitted.

For crying out loud, why had this woman ever thought it was justifiable to declare someone else the winner? All she had to do was declare me the winner with 42 typos and I would never have felt cheated or taken her to court. Now she was spending her time defending her ridiculous excuses. What a waste! None of it made any sense to me!

The judge concluded by telling us that he would commission a third party to scrutinize my entry, and that we would get the decision in the mail.

As I walked out of the courtroom past the gallery, still a bit wobbly, a young guy about my age took my hands in both of his and said, “That was a very nice presentation.”

“I tell you, that sweet gesture made my whole day happy.”

A couple of weeks later, the judgment arrived.

May 12: “On the way out the door at 2:00 this afternoon, I found my court judgment in the mail, a piddling $80 victory. I’m glad I won, but it sure would’ve been nice to get more money for all the work I put in. And I feel a little sheepish calling up people like Mom and telling them that I only got 80 bucks.”

The cherry on top was that Silva waited so long to send me my check that her time limit expired and I had to lean on her with another letter. But she eventually coughed up the dough.

So that was it. Justice had prevailed, although it seemed like only partial justice. I still have my lengthy list of bloopers, and even with the mellowing of age, I still maintain that I had a couple hundred valid entries. Who was this “third party” who came up with such a cockamamie count? Obviously not an English major!

***

So where are these dramatist personae today?

As far as I can tell, Kathy Reigstad lives in the Pacific Northwest and still works as a copy editor, including for Harper Collins Publishers in New York. She was a dedicated, kind, competent editor and delightful human being.

Sydney Fairbairn, the earnest young woman from Consumer Fraud, is an attorney in Marin County.

My friend Pam Pecora Hansen is an attorney in the San Francisco D.A.’s Office.

Laura Silva, as it turns out, owns a large shop in my neighborhood! Oy! I have never stepped foot in her store, even though there’s some great stuff in there. But I’m too afraid that if I bought anything she would recognize the name on my credit card, even after so much time has passed, and I shudder at the thought.

She may well be a lovely person. After all, it’s been nearly 40 years, and we’re all different people from what we were half a lifetime ago.

On the other hand, maybe she’s still a schmoo.

***

2/9/73 [age 17]:
“Two learning experiences, one quite in contrast to the other. This morning I took Mary to school early in order that she be able to attend a History class. I went along to her class for lack of anything better to do and because I simply LOVE learning! The program was actually quite interesting. (Judy asked today what class I was reading Walden for. I answered that I was doing it for fun. ‘God, I NEVER do that!’ she replied.) And the other experience? Well, yesterday I was propositioned in the Student Union. I rudely turned the guy down. He must’ve been hard up.”

3/9/73 [age 17]:
“Mom and Dad went out tonight so I naturally went in the sewing room to listen to four records at ear-splitting volume. My tastes are not limited; Tony Bennett and Barbra Streisand hold as much appeal for me as do Neil Diamond or Johnny Rivers or the Four Tops. My sole material desire in the world is to own a stereo with four speakers at the very least. I know the quality of every radio station around; I can sing the words to almost every song that was ever written. It’s kind of ironic that I am so wanting in musical talent, and I have the worst voice this side of the Rockies.”

2/19/73 [age 17]:
“Dad had to go to a basketball game tonight, so we’re not going to Clearlake until tomorrow. Instead, Jeanne took me to a ballet at Flint Center, “Swan Lake,” with Rudolph Nuryvev [sic]. I guess it was okay, but my mind wandered all over the place. It was so boring!”

2/20/73 [age 17]:
“On my break today all I did was eat. So much for my diet. I had three pieces of pizza, a tuna sandwich, some French fries, and a glass of root beer.”

2/22/73 [age 17]:
“I had a dream that I was in an elevator and the doors never closed and it started going up and down, faster and faster, never stopping. I grew dizzy, became disoriented. It was awful. I’ve tried to analyze what it all means – maybe the elevator is my world, for I am helplessly confined by something beyond my control. Alone, scared, out of place, confused. I woke up with my heart pounding like crazy and I was gasping for breath. I tell you, one of the most glorious feelings in the world is waking up from a horrible nightmare and realizing you are still alive.”

2/25/73 [age 17]:
“I’m slowly recovering from a bash on the head [my sister] Janine gave me with a pot while we were drying the dishes. It was accidental, I think. I’ve finally decided to make some attempt at learning to cook, or at least to make preparations for my eventual independence, so I’ve bought myself a little notebook in which I shall observe different dinners and write them out. Eventually, I shall also include other domestic chores, such as washing, repairs, etc.”

2/28/73 [age 17]:
“I’m still trying to get over the shock, but Mr. Jordahl from Rexall Drugs by Lucky’s called today about an interview; I went down and without any real questions he hired me (it’s advantageous that he knows Mom). The pay is really raunchy – $1.55 an hour – but I’ve accomplished the one thing I wanted to do: no more Clear Lake. I don’t know what I’ll do when they [my family] go away for the weekend, or how in the world I’ll get to work (in the dark? with no car?). We’ll solve that problem when we come to it. Maybe they’ll pawn me off on somebody or I’ll have a friend come over, which’ll be really nice. O, blissful freedom!”

Yours sincerely, pruning away

My new nose-hair trimmer has arrived.

Yes, let the shame begin.

For some reason, over the past year or so I’ve convinced myself that among the many unpleasantries of aging is the sudden growth of a miniature forest in one’s nostrils. I swear I can now see hairs growing out of my nose in full force, and I worry that I’ve unknowingly sported them for many years. But Julie insists that she has yet to see a hair descending from either of my nostrils.

Maybe they’re a complete figment of my imagination. Or maybe the only way another person could spot the hairs would be to come within an inch of my face and peer at an upward angle directly into my nose – as I do when I nervously check the mirror every morning.

Still, my resolve to vanquish the hairs has persisted. It took many months, but eventually I screwed up the courage to do some major research on nose hair trimmers. After all, I’d always assumed that this was “a guy thing” – like ear hair, which, thankfully, I have yet to claim.

Anyway, I clandestinely made my purchase (no one needed to know, really), settling on the ConairMan NE150NSCS Cordless Nose and Ear Hair Trimmer. The “ConairMAN” model name only increased my humiliation. But I overlooked that. I like Conair hair dryers, so I figured they know what they’re doing over there.

***

Let me digress for a moment with a somewhat-related story. Back around 1988, I read a “Dear Abby” or “Ask Ann Landers” letter from a mother of a minor-league baseball player. (Or maybe he was in college – I can’t remember and I’ve looked fruitlessly for this old column online.) This woman said that while her son and his teammates sat on the dugout bench, to pass the time they would reach over and pull out each other’s nose hairs. She was concerned about this practice because she had heard that it could kill you. I’m not sure why this was an etiquette question, although I suppose it certainly could be considered rude to indiscriminately yank out someone else’s bodily hairs. Anyway, either Abby or Ann did some calling around and found out that, indeed, pulling out one’s nose hairs could be truly dangerous, potentially leading to infections like meningitis.

This particular column has really stuck with me. First of all, since then I’ve been terrified of absent-mindedly pulling out one of my nose hairs and then dying a few weeks later of a raging brain infection. But I also continue to find it hard to fathom that men would sit around and entertain themselves by pulling out nostril hairs. Not to mention how adept and precise one would have to be to expertly clamp one’s fingers around another person’s solitary nose hair!

***

I have to admit that, a time or two, I’ve disregarded the advice column and recklessly pulled out a nose hair via tweezers. But then recently I decided to research whether tweezers were at least safer than a ballplayer’s unsanitary fingers. Not really. It turns out that no less of an icon than Dr. Mehmet Oz has warned about meddling around in that area of the face he calls “the triangle of death.” Using tweezers in and around the nose apparently can cause infections that might travel to your brain and lead to a hideous condition called “cavernous sinus thrombosis,” which is in many cases fatal.

Yikes. It was time to try out the trimmer.

I was quite nervous and scared about turning that thing on for the first time, fearing that I would slice the insides of my nostrils to ribbons. After all, the way it works is that the batteries power a bunch of tiny blades that spin around and carve off the hairs. The instructions were that the user should stick the trimmer in NO MORE THAN 1/4” (this seemed to be very important, and it struck the fear of God in me) and then move it around in circles. I tried this many times and just couldn’t see or feel any results. It could be that I didn’t have a nose hair problem in the first place. But I couldn’t be sure. I felt unsettled.

So I did what any tech-savvy retiree does these days: I turned to YouTube.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a number of YouTube videos address the proper way to use a nose hair trimmer. I was drawn to one young man in particular because he was very handsome, had an accent that seemed to be a cross between Wisconsonian and Middle Eastern, and spoke in an incredibly precise and earnest way. So I decided to give his video a try. And I’m glad I did, because I learned two important things from his demonstration:

I need to be much better about measurements. It turns out that I had completely miscalculated what 1/4 of an inch is. Perhaps out of an abundance of fear, I probably put the trimmer only about 1/50th of an inch up my nose. That just ain’t going to do anything.

“Moving it around in circles” means moving the trimmer all around the inside walls of your nostril. It does not mean putting it in one position and twirling it like a top, which is what I was doing.

This was such crucial information!

Amusingly, the fellow in the video took great pains to tell his viewers that he would have no need to show us how to use the trimmer in the left nostril after he’d already given us the instructions for the right. This made sense. “I only showed you how to trim one of my nostrils, because the process for trimming the hairs inside of the other nostril is identical,” he says, very deliberately. “Obviously I would be doing the exact same thing with the other nostril, but you don’t need to see it again.”

True. I don’t.

Nevertheless, I could watch this guy for days. He’s just so darned cute and caring!

***

Okay, that was settled. The video couldn’t have been more clear. Sure enough, when I tried it again, the trimmer snapped and crackled and made a lot of noises, so apparently it was doing its job inside my nose. It gave me a sense of satisfaction, and I prided myself on my good grooming.

I did, however, slather Neosporin all around the insides of both nostrils when I was done. You just can’t be too careful about cavernous sinus thrombosis.

***

7/21/72 [age 16]:

“We happened to drive by a recent accident on Piedmont Road a few days ago and it scared me a little. Dad called later and told us that Mark Teresi had been killed and I am still wondering about death. I believe that death comes upon perfection of this level. Essentially, we have the potential to be perfect beings; we are but a perfect mind (or soul – I am not yet certain what the mind or the soul are, or if they are one and the same) clothed in physical bodies. When we manifest that potential perfection, we no longer need our bodies to exist in the next conscious level. At the funeral mass today Father Prindeville’s sermon said that God took Mark because He wanted him for Himself – because he had proven himself in this life. That MUST be right. I hope I am not coming close to perfection! I’m afraid. In fact, a few weeks ago I told [my sister] Janine I thought I’d die in two years. But now I realize how far from perfect I am.”

7/20/72 [age 16]:

“Today was Jeanne’s last day at home for a month, so I rode down to her house and together we rode to Barb’s vegetable stand (which was a mistake, because the roads were too dangerous). On the way back, both of my tires went flat in San Ysidro. Upon returning, I was exhausted but I knew she wanted one last tennis match, so we did. (Me, 6-4, 7-5.) At 6:15 we walked back to her house and had pizza for dinner. I didn’t realize that that was all we were having! I had only three pieces, thinking it was merely an appetizer!”

7/23/72 [age 16]:

“For some very strange reason, I have been proclaiming to the walls, ‘I love you’ lately. Yes, just walking into my room, smiling, and shouting out the phrase. Now, I am surely going crazy. The love in my heart grows by leaps and bounds, and I don’t know for whom. Perhaps, it is for humanity in general. The world is beautiful when you love. Last night, [my neighbor] Ted . . . and I went to see [the spaghetti western film] ‘Duck, You Sucker’ and I loved it. But Ted, he BEGGED me to come and he’s so nice and I love him, brotherly, but I don’t know how to express it.”

A long, strange trip

Dear readers, my writing has been stuck lately. I know that my next blog needs to be – no, is going to be – about my great love for San Francisco. But I can’t seem to do the topic justice and I’ve been mentally flogging myself about it for weeks. Basically, I suck and I stink. So I’ve decided to put the grand opus away for a while and concentrate instead on a little ditty about the zaniest commute day I ever had.

***

It was the winter of 1979, in the waning days of the old green San Francisco streetcars. Fresh out of college, I’d just taken a job at Harper & Row Publishers down on the Embarcadero. Every evening after work I’d catch the 42 bus out near the railroad tracks across from Pier 23, get off at the former Transbay Terminal, and take the N-Judah streetcar outbound to my apartment in the Inner Sunset. The trip was never a short one, and it was rarely without incident. But on this December night in particular, what a long strange trip it was.

In those days, the 42-bus driver had a number of quirks. Most annoyingly, he whistled – continually – “As Time Goes By,” the lovely tune that Sam sings in Casablanca. The problem was that he whistled the first three lines and then stopped, without ever getting to the resolving line. Sans lyrics, what we heard was:

You must remember this:
A kiss is still a kiss.
A sigh is just a sigh . . . .

And then nothing. Crickets. A few seconds later he started over. It drove me absolutely mad.

“The fundamental things apply!” I wanted to scream at him. “As time goes by, you irksome twit! Stop persecuting me!”

This guy also had the well-deserved reputation for driving, well, a tad rapidly. But breakneck speed was really the lesser of his foibles. What was worse was his habit of trying to stop on a dime at every corner, throwing his passengers into a severe panic and into the aisles.

On that particular day I was wearing my platform shoes for the first time ever, no easy challenge for feet accustomed to years of sneakers. I twisted my ankle about 742 times that day. It was in a most crippled state, then, that I hobbled tentatively onto the bus and, unable to find a seat, grabbed the pole directly in front of the sideways seats up front. Big mistake. The driver took off like a madman. I clutched the pole in fear of my life at the first two corners but lost my balance at the third. In a dizzying display of clumsiness I spun 180 degrees around the pole and tumbled backwards across the laps of three teenage boys. They were polite (albeit stunned), but I was mortified – so mortified, in fact, that I became confused, lost my composure, and simply got off the bus then and there.

I made the long walk up Battery Street and across Market to the Transbay Terminal in about half an hour, record time considering that I fell off my shoes every 50 feet. The usual throngs of people were waiting at the streetcar turnaround, and I planted myself in the exact spot where I’d calculated that the doors would open when the N-Judah pulled up. That way, I’d be strategically positioned to shove my way through the front doors and do a swan dive into an empty seat.

But then came disaster. Rain. The old streetcars’ nemesis. For some reason – perhaps wet tracks? – the entire system would often become disabled by the mere suggestion of water. Those stubborn, breakdown-prone streetcars would simply refuse to move in inclement weather. They’d back up along Market Street, about 25 of ’em, and hundreds of pathetic commuters would be stranded. The Municipal Railway (Muni) would then send out its regular buses, after an interminable wait, and because the buses couldn’t go through the Duboce tunnel, they would discharge the hapless commuters at the Van Ness stop to wait again. I’m not sure what good that did at all.

Sure enough, the buses arrived about an hour later and deposited us at Van Ness. By then the system had gotten started again, though, so the next 12 streetcars that came by passed us without slowing down, crammed to the hilt with people they’d picked up all along Market.

After I finally made it onto an N-Judah streetcar with a few inches of available room, and as we were plodding our way through the tunnel, the alarm bells suddenly screamed and we slammed to a halt.

“All right, is someone stuck in the doors or are you just playing around?” our driver yelled, infuriated. “Someone better answer me” (then a pause) “or we’re not moving at all! Is someone stuck in the goddam doors?”

“No,” came the meek response from all of us standing jammed and exhausted in the car. I myself was immobilized with depression at the thought of “not moving at all.”

“You get paid enough!” came one passenger’s rather puzzling retort.

“I don’t get paid enough to take your abuse!”

“Well, turn the heat off then!” (Another frustration-induced non sequitur.)

“The heat’s not on!” yelled the driver. He tried to re-start the streetcar but it wouldn’t budge. “Thanks a lot, buddy!” he shouted at the argumentative passenger, whom he apparently blamed for his constant mechanical trials and never-ending series of breakdowns.

Someone standing behind me told everyone that it had happened to him once, getting stuck in the tunnel. “What a horrible feeling,” he droned, “watching the headlight from another streetcar rush up on you from behind and thinking, ‘We’re gonna be hit. . . . We’re gonna be hit . . . . We’re gonna be hit . . . .’ ”

In unison, everyone anxiously whipped around to size up the situation behind us.

Meanwhile, the driver got out and worked on the door, along with a bunch of Muni men from all the other streetcars who were now stopped as far as the eye could see in both directions.

At one point something fell on the tracks, maybe a huge piece of metal, and it clanged and echoed in the dark.

“What was that?” someone asked, and a droll commuter in the back cracked, “Maybe one of the driver’s eyelashes fell out.”

Once the door was finally fixed they still couldn’t get the car going, so another streetcar came up on the tracks behind us to push us in traditional Muni fashion – by slamming mercilessly into our rear. Wham! (we’d lurch a foot). Whack! (another foot).

Unbelievably enough, when we emerged from the tunnel and the streetcar gained power again and it seemed that we would all get home after all, the back doors suddenly started banging open and closed repeatedly, rapid-fire, as if possessed. The streetcar couldn’t move, of course. We all groaned.

I’d gotten off work three hours earlier and still hadn’t made the 5 miles home across town yet. People all over the city were getting ready for bed and I was still stuck on the N-Judah. I eased my way resignedly towards the front and got out into the chilly December night. And walked home.

***

4/23/72 [age 16]:

“God, give us peace here, not simply the superficial absence of war, but genuine unequivocable [sic] harmony and unity. Give Ireland back to the Irish and Vietnam back to the Vietnamese. Let Cubans and Russians and East Germans have their freedom, and, in turn, let Americans come to know and appreciate what freedom is (as yet they do not). Free us from environmental pollution and the curse of overpopulation. Is it possible that the starving can have food, and the naked can have clothes, and the homeless can have shelter? Deprive me – I am too well off for my own good.

“Let the unemployed find work, if they so deserve. Give strength to victims of mental disease and fatal illnesses, like cancer and leukemia, and physical handicaps, and to those who love them. Help the unfortunate victims of broken homes. Let the blind see and the deaf hear and the dumb speak and the lame walk and the ignorant be made wise. Comfort the broken-hearted; they, too, suffer. Enlighten students to the values of education (I know without it I would be totally lost). Let the young take care of the old, and the old appreciate the young. Restore to the populace a real sense of moral value. Keep good people as they are, and convert the bad to good. Let the innocent be safe from the guilty.

“Bless my relatives and friends. Give [my younger sister] Janine the ability to withstand my persecutions, release the clutches of hay fever from [my brother] Marc, help Mom stop smoking, and get that stupid job off Dad’s back. Ease Grampy’s asthma, let Nonna at least remember who she is, and help Auntie Jackie lose weight so she is not so fat.

“And for me – may the coming of college be a ‘finding’ and not a ‘losing,’ may I retain my mental and physical health, and perhaps (can I ask this?) may I gain a little bit of common sense and knowhow? Let me accomplish something while I am here.”

4/19/72 [age 16]: [Ed.’s note: Even after the girls were finally allowed to wear pants at our high school during our senior year, my parents didn’t allow me to wear them except, I think, during finals week. And maybe on Fridays – I can’t remember.]

“On our field trip to San Francisco today, Jeanne and I changed our clothes twice in the course of the day. I snuck a pair of Levi’s out of the house around [my brother] Marc’s waist. When we got to school we rushed to the restroom to change into our Levi’s and barely made it to the bus on time. We ran the 150 in 10 seconds. In SF we went to Golden Gate Park and just sat down on a grassy hill and ate our lunches. Soon we had only 20 minutes left and we still had to change into our dresses [for a play we were about to see]. We were looking for a restroom but they charge admission to get in the museum, we found out. Some guy said the restrooms were way over there behind the pillars. We had four minutes left before the bus took off so we sped over there, changed, in a flash, and sped back. Embarrassment. Everyone was on the bus already. Then we went to the play, ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.’ It was well-done, but BORING. I almost fell asleep. Finally, the play ended at 4:35. Joe Turner and Mark Anhier had cut out of the play and weren’t there. Mr. Vierra went on a wild goose chase with the police all over Golden Gate Park but didn’t find them. They eventually got suspended. Anyway, eventually I came home in my dress with no idea how I was going to sneak my Levi’s back into the house. Jeanne said she’d hold them for me and I could smuggle them home with my gym clothes Friday. However, Thursday was Mom’s washing day, and noting the missing pants, she figured the whole thing out.”

4/24/72 [age 16]:

“Joe – as you know, he’s my lab partner in Physiology. (I can’t stand Physiology right now; we’re cutting up the stupid mink and I’ll never be able to memorize all those muscles.) He got suspended Thursday. He’s always talking to me in English. On the bus going to that memorable field trip Jeanne told me she thought he liked me. Would I go to the Senior Ball if he asked me? Ha, I’m sure Mom and Dad would never let me go with that ‘hood.’ ”

4/26/72 [age 16]:

“I MUST relate my bike-riding experiences! First I went to Jeanne’s at 10:15 (my chain slipped off once and my hands got all black; her mother sprayed some stuff on them to take the grease off). She had to take her little brother to Eastridge to pick up a friend, so I drove with her out there. (She’s a good driver – nice and smooth.) Then we came back and her mother wanted her to go water some garden at Noble School, so we bike rode over there and we played tetherball for awhile. Then we rode to the library and then down to the drugstore because I had to pick up some prints. I wanted to eat, but Jeanne wasn’t hungry, so since she wanted to go the Flea Market and had never been there, we went. I wanted to eat there, but she STILL was not hungry. Then we rode back to Jeanne’s to eat lunch; I called home, and Jeanne discovered she had lost her mom’s keys at Noble. So we drove back over there, looked, walked to the library, looked, drove to the drugstore and looked, but they were nowhere to be found. This was after we ate lunch of hot dogs and potato chips and cupcakes and Oreos. We rode back and she suggested we play tennis (I swear, she is a tennis fanatic) and I won, as usual. (It’s just my consistency; she is a better player.) Then she drove me and the bike home. Don’t we do thrilling things?”

5/1/72 [age 16]:

“Jeanne and I had pizza and chicken TV dinners for dinner. Afterwards I sat on the couch and she sat on the steps and played my guitar. (She’s darn good, too.) Then we established the fact that neither of us is arrogant.”

5/8/72 [age 16]:

“Today Nixon made a critical speech about how we were going to back off North Vietnam ports and then withdraw only when they release our American POWs, etc. I don’t know what will come of all this. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be atom-bombed.”

5/18/72 [age 16]:

“I went to the CSF Life Membership Ceremony tonight. They read our names and we had to walk up on stage (I was so afraid I was going to trip) and Mr. Bailey named our college and our major. That was embarrassing – everyone thinks Law Enforcement is so wierd [sic]. Then (I’m such a klutz) the people to the right of me would move down and I’d stand there oblivious, with a big space between us until the girl on my left nudged me. I did that THREE TIMES!! Good grief. How dumb.”

5/23/72 [age 16]:

“Last night I got a really cute blue bodyshirt. It’s not really too tight, but I like it. It makes me look more feminine. I’m changing. I always hated more feminine styles but I’m coming to like them more and more. A new image is what I need; I wish I had done it sooner. I can’t go on being a tomboy forever.”

5/26/72 [age 16]:

“Today was Senior Picnic. Well, Jeanne and Robin and I didn’t want to go. So we got this wild idea to stay in Mr. Healy’s room and we brought food like gobs and we played Risk and talked. Everyone thinks we’re wierd [sic]. We are. I had potato chips and onion dip and a tuna sandwich and an egg salad sandwich and a deviled egg and two chicken legs and about twenty cookies and a big piece of cake.”

Devil with the blue dress

This, my friends, is just a quick little tale about the one and only time I rented an “adult movie” – an effort that, as per my usual bumbling ways, ended disastrously.

I’d had only a couple of encounters with off-color films, and they’d been innocent enough. When we were teenagers, my brother and I and a couple of our friends snuck into a drive-in to see a movie called Please Don’t Eat My Mother. I know what you’re thinking, but it turned out to be a tame little flick that didn’t even live up to its salacious name. As I recall, it was a comedy about a strangely sexy carnivorous houseplant. And although there was some nudity, I don’t remember any hanky-panky involved. Or maybe I just didn’t understand what I was seeing. Unfortunately, we were busted when my mother found the ticket stub in my brother’s pants pocket. Dang! We should have done our own laundry!

Later, when I was a resident at San Francisco State and chair of the dorm film program, a couple of good-looking, charming fellow movie buffs coaxed me into giving them a private showing of one of the 16mm prints I’d rented for the film program from a major Los Angeles distributor. (It was an Italian neorealist movie called The Bicycle Thief.) The guys noted that the movie was preceded by trailers (previews), including one for Fellini’s Amarcord. I locked up the print when we were done, but using some subterfuge that I never figured out, they later snuck into the A/V room, took the film to their room, cut out their favorite trailers, inserted some choice pornography, and returned the altered print to its shelf. I innocently sent the film back to the distribution house, at which point all hell broke loose and eventually the FBI got involved. A couple of federal agents came to the dorm to interview our dorm advisor and me. By then I’d told the advisor about my suspicions (this means you, Kevin Henry!), and he believed me from the get-go. The FBI guys seemed to believe me, too, because the nervous young dupe girl sitting in the hot seat did not appear to be an Amarcord-slicing, porn-inserting swindler. I was off the hook, and I don’t know what became of the investigation. (Are you still out there free as a bird, Kevin Henry?)

The incident at hand, however, happened in the early 1990s when I decided to rent a steamy little video that I will call, for the purposes of this tale, Lex Baldwin and His Peccadilloes. Lex Baldwin was the real-life leading man, and his co-stars were an assortment of men and women, all involved in a variety of scenarios in every conceivable configuration. The film had been recommended to me by my hairdresser. (I have no idea how on earth we came to have that conversation.)

In those days, of course, there was no streaming video and there were no DVDs. We had to rent videotapes from the Blockbuster chain or a local video store, watch the tapes on a videocassette recorder (VCR), and bring the tapes back like library books to avoid incurring overdue charges. I had never been assessed a late fee on anything in my entire life so I knew that that wasn’t going to happen.

Except that the tape got stuck in my VCR.

***

“Oh, no, nonononono!” I screeched, partly out of terror of the tape’s late fees (or, even worse, the total replacement fee) but also because of what I knew would be my impending humiliation and disgrace. I clawed frantically at the machine. But not only was the video jammed, the VCR would not even power on. I pushed every button 26 times. I tried sticking a screwdriver through the flimsy little tape door, to absolutely no avail. Then I decided to pry off the whole casing, but the “Do not attempt to remove the back of the VCR because of the possibility of electrocution” sticker dissuaded me. Finally I gave up, letting the machine sit overnight in hopes that the components would cool down. Sigh. No luck.

stuck videotape_abc news 2 — My biggest fear

Today, someone in a similar predicament might very well simply throw away the entire kit and caboodle. Buy a new VCR, pay for the tape replacement. But that was not remotely an option for me in those days. I had no money whatsoever – certainly not enough to buy a new VCR, which would have cost me $400 or so (almost $800 in today’s dollars). I mean, around that time I was actually trying to figure out whether, to save money, I should stop my Chronicle delivery, which was costing me all of 10 cents a day.

I couldn’t very well discuss my plight with my mother, my usual go-to person who always knew what to do about everything from appliance repair to wardrobe malfunctions to food spoilage questions. No, this was far too delicate a matter.

So I called my friend Kay.

“OhmyGod, Kay,” I blurted as soon as she picked up, “I-got-an-X-rated-movie-stuck-in-my-VCR-and-I-don’t-know-what-to-do!” I was in a wheezing panic.

“Paula, calm down and let’s brainstorm,” she said. “Isn’t there a repair shop somewhere that could get the tape out without ruining it?”

“Well, there’s that electronics place out in the avenues, but I just know it must be run by a nice little old Irishman. How will I be able to show my face, Kay??”

“Paula, your worst fear is not going to be realized. There will be no little old Irishman. It’s going to be okay, and they won’t care! This probably happens all the time!”

I wasn’t listening. “I know, I’ll invent a story to make the situation more respectable. I’ll say I was watching it with my husband. I’ll say it was HIS fault! HE wanted to rent the movie!”

“Oh, brother,” she said. “I’m not sure why that is more respectable, but OK, I’m with ya.”

“And listen,” I continued. “I think I should look sophisticated and proper. Kay, you have a ring that looks like a wedding ring, don’t you? Can I borrow that? I’ll wear a simple blue dress and pumps.”

Kay did an eyeroll over the phone but nonetheless humored me as she hung up to go find her gold band. After rushing to her place to borrow it, dashing down to Macy’s to buy some pumps with high heels (my heels were way too low and clunky to be considered sophisticated), and calling Kay another 52 times for reassurance, I knew that it was finally time to pay a visit to the electronics shop.

Blue dress photo with copyright — The “My Husband Did It” ensemble, except that I didn’t wear the hat

When I pushed open the glass doors to the shop, carrying my disabled VCR – the proof of my sins – under my arm, I didn’t see anyone behind the counter at first. I clomped unsteadily towards the back of the store in my new high heels. It felt like it took me three hours to get there. I was relieved, at least, not to see a little old Irishman. However, much to my horror, as I approached the counter up popped a petite young Asian woman! Or a girl, even! She didn’t look to be much older than 16. I was awash in shame and mortification. “Oh, no,” I thought, “I’m going to ruin this poor young woman if she finds out what kind of tape is in that VCR!”

But there was no getting around it. When she asked what she could do for me, I launched into my long story about how my-husband-rented-the-tape-and-somehow-it-got-stuck-and-I-don’t-really-know-what-the-tape-is-so-please-just-fix-it,” etcetera. And then she said, “Well, let me get the owner,” and out came a little old Irish man.

Of course.

Then I commenced to relate the whole story about my husband again.

Unfazed, the Irishman told me that the VCR would be fixed in three days. I could practically hear the late fees adding up. Ka-chink! But I had no choice. I whirled around on my heels to leave and did a face plant onto the showroom floor.

For crying out loud, how many indignities would I have to suffer for my wickedness???!!!

Three days later I went back to pick up the machine. Once again I donned my outfit – dress, ring, heels, the entire ensemble. It was a different young woman at the counter, and I breathed a momentary sigh of relief that she wouldn’t recognize me as the raging degenerate with the X-rated movie. She went into the back room to retrieve the VCR and when she brought it out, Lex Baldwin and His Peccadilloes, with its title in gargantuan letters, was taped to the top of the VCR. Oh, I am a wretched disgrace.

It cost me about $100 to fix the VCR. A veritable fortune for me in those days.

The next day I clomped into the video rental place in my now-wrinkly dress to return Lex Baldwin and I launched once again into my well-worn husband story.

The manager waived the fees.

***

2/7/72 [age 16]:

“When she was young and went to school
Some asked her what they’d taught her.
‘I just recall one thing,’ she said,
‘That I was principal’s daughter.’ ”

2/2/72 [age 16]:

THINGS I LOVE:

12-STRING GUITARS
HAIR (blond)
AMERICA [the band]
MR. BARISICH
SKIING
HAIR (Robert Redford’s)
Hearing the net go “swoosh” when somebody makes a basket
MY 10-SPEED
FRIENDS (they’re wonderful)
MUSIC
PAT SEARS
DOGS (all but ours)
LINUS
BLUE
Having a perfectly clear face (I don’t remember when I last had it but maybe sometime in the near future . . . ?)
NEIL DIAMOND
LEVI’S
GOD
DAYDREAMING
THE POLICE DEPARTMENT
PIZZA & LICORICE & HAMBURGERS & OREOS & EATING IN GENERAL
Staying home and turning up the record player so loud they can hear it in Alviso and my eardrums become so immune I can hardly hear the rest of the day
MICROPHONES
ARGUING
READING WALT WHITMAN
ROOT BEER
Jumping off the high dive into the deep pool and feeling really wierd [sic] on the way down
MR. ADAMS
AIRPLANES
BODY SHIRTS
GOATS
THE SANTA CLARA COUNTY FAIR
Riding the waves at Santa Cruz on an innertube and getting wiped out
WATERBEDS
CAMAROS
TULIPS
SAN FRANCISCO
“ALL IN THE FAMILY”
THE WORD “SENSUOUS”
All those wonderful times we have where the great kids on our block all get together and have one huge gigantic waterfight and we all sit around and drink lemonade and play pinochle afterwards
HELIUM BALLOONS
BEING SIXTEEN
CUTTING CLASS
LIFE

2/3/72 [age 16]:

“Once in the eighth grade we had this graduation swim party and once again I demonstrated my complete lack of sense. The water at Rock Canyon was freezing cold and something happened to my jaw. It kind of locked. I guess the nerves tightened up because of the cold. I could open my mouth, but only up to a certain point. Then if I opened it farther it popped and hurt like crazy. I guess I’m a physical freak. Anyway, it was pretty miserable and I got one of the kids who wasn’t swimming to call my teacher over. Sister Anne Maureen. She knew a lot about science so I assumed she knew about diseases. So I ask her, ‘Do you think I have lockjaw?’ I don’t know how she kept from bursting out in hysterics, but she said, ‘I really doubt it.’ And I said, ‘Well, I stepped on a nail about a year ago.’ Pure stupidity, I swear.”

2/8/72 [age 16]:

“My idea of heaven – I run away to a place on the beach. I adore the beach, but my parents hate it so I never get to go. There wouldn’t be any parents there. The temperature would always be a comfortable 82 degrees. I would have an AM-FM radio with a really loud volume. I’d have a stereo with ten speakers all over the house. I’d also have my bike and a lifetime supply of root beer, hamburgers, and onion rings. Add a couple people I like and – presto – Utopia.”

The lonely neurotic

This past week, Julie had to fly off to Denver on business. She doesn’t love traveling by air or staying alone in hotels, so she was dreading the entire trip. I, however, was eagerly looking on the bright side. For one thing, I was going to have multiple days free of political jabber and, in fact, free of any news whatsoever except for my morning Chronicle read. Julie, you see – the woman who moved to California 22 years ago with not a scintilla of interest in politics – has now become a journalistic junkie, whereas I am so roiled by national and world events that even the slightest passing glimpse of the news gives me agita. One evening I fell asleep while she was listening to cable news on headphones, and the next morning I awoke to a 1,000-word e-mail message from her – a series of bullet points, no less! – summarizing the previous day’s political revelations, accompanied by a succinct legal analysis of each incident. My heartburn erupted.

More importantly, Julie’s absence for a prolonged period of time also means that I can clean out all of our expired food. Oh, the rapture! Our cupboards, refrigerator, and freezer are always filled with food that we’ve forgotten we have, or that we bought for one exotic recipe years ago, or that we purchased after one too many wine-tastings, if you know what I mean. Julie never wants to get rid of it but I can’t stand to have solidified fig preserves cluttering up my space! So when she is gone I gleefully throw open the cupboards, take out our stepstool, and start TOSSING, baby!

My time of uninterrupted organizational bliss was about to begin.

MONDAY

After dropping Julie off at the airport, I stop at the UPS Store to pick up a couple of parcels. The guy behind the counter says I have seven packages. I’m rather surprised. By my calculations, all I am expecting are printer ink and some orange shoelaces. Maybe Julie has bought me a raft of presents! He hands me the packages and I start hefting them out to the car. I can’t wait to tear into them. When I glance down, though, I see that they’re all for someone else. Dejectedly I trudge back into the store. The guy apologizes and says he thought I was another woman. I’m kind of excited to think that I have a doppelganger in West Portal.

I then race home, eager to get started on the kitchen. My rule is that the expiration dates on the bottles, jars, and packages must have come and gone. I spot about 11 expired bottles of assorted vinegar varieties. Can vinegar even go bad? It’s already so bad. Then again, we bought these bottles when we lived in a different house. It’s been more than 12 years! Surely they must be riddled with sediment at the very least. Can sediment kill us? It’s certainly possible. I throw out the vinegar.

I throw away half-used bars of Ghirardelli Cooking Chocolate from 2009. Out goes the stoneground mustard that is so desiccated it has become colored pebbles. With an athletic hook shot, I toss the foil-wrapped beige-colored thing from the freezer that cannot be identified. I take the rubbery Triscuits and sink a fade-away jumper into the trash.

I empty dozens of jars and haul many bags of recycling down to the garage. I’m so lucky that tonight is garbage night.

My rotator cuff starts to burn from all the “kitchen basketball” heroics. I down a bunch of Advil.

Buster sleeps for part of the night in the foyer, right by the front door, waiting for Julie to come home. I don’t think he usually does that when I’m gone. He obviously likes her better. Why am I so unlikable?

TUESDAY

As per my usual morning routine, I go downstairs and exercise on the elliptical. Thankfully I’m on a roll and I’ve been able to work out for a full 30 minutes regularly for about a year without tearing any muscles or snapping any bones. As usual, I listen to one of my CDs and fantasize that I am asked to play drums for the performer when the regular drummer has a sudden but nonfatal bowel emergency. Today I am listening to Hitsville USA, which is a box set of the Motown singles. I notice that the main Motown drummers (Benny Benjamin and Uriel Jones, members of the Funk Brothers) would often start a song (like “My Girl” and the sublime “This Old Heart of Mine”) with the same fill: one hit on the high tom, some 16th notes on the snare, and then one bass drum BOOM before the song starts. But they never finish the fill with a crash. Why? Everyone crashes at the end of a fill! When I get back upstairs I obsessively comb the Internet looking for an answer. This takes hours. Finally, I watch a video and find out that in those days the singers and musicians all recorded together in one room and the drummers were afraid that if they crashed, especially going into the start of a song, the sound would bleed into the other mics. Ah. Now I can relax.

I go in to take a shower and start worrying about what could happen if someone broke in. Buster is a prize-winning barker but I don’t think he would deter a marauder. I start hearing voices. It sounds like someone is begging for his life! Why would a criminal be begging for his life? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Or does Buster have him cornered? I shut off the water to listen. Nothing.

In the kitchen I see some purple bloodstains on the counter. Is someone in the house? Aren’t bloodstains red? Wait a minute, that’s where I inadvertently smashed a blueberry with my elbow.

In the afternoons I like to lie out in our backyard and read for a while. I’m beginning to have an unsightly farmer’s tan. Right now I’m continuing to make my way through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I really enjoy it and I think Dave Eggers is brilliant. Many people reviled this work as an overblown exercise in self-indulgence. They are clearly misguided. I, for one, love stream-of-consciousness. Give me the hearty Thomas Wolfe or William Faulkner any day rather than, say, that insufferable Henry James. Gad. When you read that guy’s prose it’s as if you can actually hear the delicate tinkling of teacups.

It’s about 43 degrees outside with a blustery northwest wind (welcome, summer!), so I last only a few minutes. After I come inside I realize that Julie’s dad has called but the downstairs phone was malfunctioning and I could not hear the ringer. It is a beige 1970s wall model that I cherish. I decide to look at it and the entire phone clatters off the wall and falls on the floor with a bunch of electrical things hanging out of it. I’m horrified. I leave it on the dining room table for Julie to fix.

I decide to spend the latter part of the day watching all the documentaries that are piled up on my DVR. I can’t believe Julie has no interest in watching docuseries about the Kennedys or the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Tonight I choose HBO’s The Searcher, about Elvis Presley. Gosh, I never knew how much his manager Colonel Tom Parker screwed him by insisting he take time off from music to take on movie roles in Hollywood. And wasn’t he a handsome guy? Those lips!

Buster spends another couple of hours in the foyer at bedtime, waiting for Julie. He finally saunters back to the bedroom, where he sees our cute little stuffed Giants mascot Lou Seal. He eyes it warily and smashes up against me, far away from that terrifying seal.

WEDNESDAY

In the middle of the night I am startled awake by a robocaller. I cuss heartily. I decide that I should change our answering machine greeting to simply state that I already know I owe the IRS and have debilitating credit card debt and could use a vigorous carpet cleaning.

In the morning I wake up with lower back pain because I have had to sleep curled around Buster like a paper clip. The bed is 76 inches wide. Buster has somehow taken up 70 inches.

I down more Advil.

The Chronicle points out that Southwest Airlines keeps having to make emergency landings. Julie is flying Southwest. What if she gets sucked out of an airplane?

This morning while exercising I worry that I could have a heart attack like Sheryl Sandberg’s husband did while he was working out in a hotel gym. What if I keel over and die right here in the garage? I’m not wearing pants!

I am going to the Giants day game today against the Reds. And I have a huge decision to make. Do I leave the door to the backyard open for Buster? I am afraid that he might encounter a coyote or start eating landscape bark. After an agonizing three hours I finally settle on leaving the door closed. After all, finding a small pile of poop in the house is much preferable to Buster’s being devoured by wild animals or choking to death on mulch.

For this ballgame I am bravely attempting something new: I’ve resolved to find the crab sandwiches! I am filled with excitement and anxiety. Normally I sit in the same general area: sections 310-314, between home plate and first base, on the top level because that’s where the cheapest seats are. I keep a spreadsheet on the specific seats I’ve gotten over the last 5 years. The spreadsheet rates the seats according to the following criteria, among others:

How long am I in the sun? (I prefer that it be half the game.)
Do I have to look through that infernal Plexiglas wall?
Are the season-ticket holders around me obnoxious or friendly?
How close are the bathrooms?

The problem is, some of my favorite food items near those sections have, over the last few years, disappeared. So I am left primarily with my old standby: the “Sports Meal,” which consists of a hot dog, popcorn, and a beer. However, I really really really love AT&T Park’s crab sandwiches. They’re on buttered, crisp toasted sourdough with some kind of herb sprinkled on them. Heavenly! But, unless you are sitting in the luxurious Club-level seats, you can get them only on the opposite side of the stadium, near the bleachers.

Julie has told me not to worry. She says that I should try to find the Marina Gate, which will likely be the nearest entrance to the precious sandwiches. Then I can “just trot upstairs and find the crab.” I obsess about the whole procedure all the way to the game on Muni. Sure enough, I can’t find the Marina Gate. But I adopt a new tactic: ask for help. Ask repeatedly. I get there early enough that all of the Giants personnel are still eager to assist. So I ask about the gate, I ask how to get upstairs, I ask where the crab is (that gentleman is so happy to help me out that he escorts me directly to the sandwiches!), and I ask how on earth I can then get back around the entire stadium to section 311. It all goes off somewhat without a hitch. I carry my sandwich delicately all the way around the ballpark, more than once narrowly avoiding having it knocked out of my hand by clueless frat boys, and make my way to my tried-and-true vendor where I buy my Sierra Nevada beer. My stress levels ease as I get to my seat. I then sit there and smugly scorn all the people who have a hard time figuring out on which side of the section to enter while trying to find their seats. Dolts.

Buster is still alive when I get home.

I decide to watch more documentaries, but they are starting to get tedious.

At some point in the evening our landline rings and the phone identifies the caller as my nephew Alec. What?? No one under 40 uses the telephone anymore! Someone must have died!!

(No, thank goodness.)

THURSDAY

The Chronicle runs a long article detailing how scores of people are dying from carbon monoxide poisoning because they don’t realize that they’ve left the engines of their keyless cars running in the garage. I immediately become convinced that I will easily make the same mistake and that I have very little time to live before I die of carbon monoxide poisoning myself.

While exercising I tell myself for the 50th time that I really should let my hair go grey. But I don’t have a young face. I have furrows in my brow the size of the Marianas Trench. If I go grey, that guy at the UPS Store might start mistaking me for Mel Brooks.

I go to Safeway to replenish our stock of expired food. I buy 11 replacement bottles of vinegar. Julie will never know what I’ve done. I have successfully covered all my tracks.

I spend some time continuing to work on my long-running project to finish scanning and naming (using a very strict naming protocol, of course) my parents’ and grandparents’ old photos. I’m also continuing to get my Super 8 films digitized, including my two-hour movie (with soundtrack and narration!) of my three-month 1980 round-the-country trip with a girlfriend in a VW van. It’s an epic and Oscar-worthy film. The thing is, who is going to care about any of this when I’m gone, which will be soon because I will imminently be murdered in the shower, suffer a massive heart attack while exercising, or asphyxiate myself with our keyless car? No one will care about your silly digitized photos and movies, Paula. They will just be summarily deleted.

Like me!

Thank goodness Julie is coming home today. Being alone, even with freshly organized cupboards and brand-new vinegar, isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

Meanwhile, I’ve still got my next blog hanging over my head. I’m letting down my legions of fans. Maybe I should write about the time I got an X-rated videotape stuck in my VCR. No, that would sully my pristine reputation.

Buster has developed a sudden fear of uncarpeted stairs. Good grief, where is he getting all of his strange neuroses?

Julie’s plane is late but she finally lands around dinnertime. Hallelujah! Buster and I pick her up. The “Human Anti-Anxiety Pill” has arrived!

***

As soon as we walk in the door, she heads to the kitchen for a snack. “Hey, you rearranged the cupboards!” she announces. “And have you heard about today’s chaos in Washington?”

Strangely, I feel a wash of serenity.

***

11/19/70 [Ed.’s note: I was a couple of years younger than others in my class]:

“Today was a great day! They sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me in Spanish and we went through the whole age routine. At lunch, everyone got me ‘Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour’ album. During Geometry, someone wrote ‘Happy Birthday’ on the board and I went through the whole age bit again. Tonight I got a Glen Campbell song book from Mom & Dad, 5 dollars from Zia, Grammy, and Auntie Jackie, a belt from Marc, a guitar strap from Jan, ‘Oh, Happy Day’ record from Colleen, and personalized stickers from Barb. It was all very happy, except now I realize I’ll never be 14 again. Never!”

11/6/70:

“Tonight, [my sister] Jan discovered that [our tiny pet frog] Toby wasn’t in his cage. I love that frog. We’ve had him for a year and a half. I feel like crying. We looked all over for him and finally found the poor little guy all dried and shriveled up under the T.V.”

10/19/70:

“Tonight at 6:00 we went to the Blanchettes for dinner. We had barbecued bonito. It doesn’t sound too good, but by that time I was so starving I would have eaten anything. We had a little game of football and Butch and I were the best. Then Butch and I went into his mom’s room to watch T.V. Once he called me “honey.” How romantic! I wish I was clever or humorous or something. But I’m such a complete dud, I swear. We watched interesting things like bullfights.”

10/7/70: [Ed.’s note: I think Eddie Ryan was just a guy who went to our school]

“[My brother] Marc and I have a thing going when we walk to school every day. We have to see ten landmarks: 1) “Whistle-’em-up” the crossing lady (she told us to whistle when we want to cross), 2) A pet, 3) “Hawkins” written on sidewalk, 4) “Rhonda Kelly was here” on sidewalk, 5) Piedmont Hills bus, 6) little bus, 7) Boys’ P.E. bus, 8) Girls’ P.E. bus, 9) A motorcycle, and 10) Eddie Ryan. That’s the hardest one.”

10/4/70:
“You know, I really want a bike for Christmas. But Dad thinks it’s too dangerous. To him, everything is too dangerous. But Mom said she’d rather wait and give us a Honda. So now I want a Honda. You don’t need a license except for the streets. Like Bronson –the feel of the wind on your face. Groovy!”

Tibby is king!

I have been lazy of late, dear readers, for no particular reason, and I know that it’s high time I got back on the blogging horse. I’m working on a more dignified piece right now, but in the meantime, just to sate your appetite for my literary pearls, I’ve decided to present to you the official minutes of the Tibby Club of America. And I will reward you with more substantive content in the days to come.

The Bocciardi kids founded two groundbreaking organizations in the 1960s. One of those – The Fishing Club – has already been covered here on Monday Morning Rail. The other was dedicated to my grandmother’s dog. Luckily, in both cases I appointed myself the recorder of the meeting minutes, and the historic proposals and decisions we made as members of these clubs are now saved for posterity.

As a bit of background, my mother’s parents lived in La Crescenta, California, which is in the southern part of the state near Los Angeles. At some point when we were kids, my grandmother acquired a cute little Lhasa Apso puppy whom she named Tibby, presumably because that breed of dog originated in Tibet (and was in fact not introduced to the United States until the 1930s).

Tibby was an adorable but completely spoiled little white bundle of hair. Now that Julie and I have a Lhasa Apso of our own, we’re quite familiar with the breed’s extreme stubbornness, tendency to bark maniacally at perceived dangers (their name in Tibetan means “Bark Lion Sentinel”), mischievous ability to outsmart their owners, and marked distrust of strangers and children, with whom they can be quite snippy.

Luckily, Tibby was a fairly chill little dude. His worst trait came about only because my grandparents fed him “people food,” a practice that was frequently evidenced by Tibby’s walking around with an orange beard after slurping Ragu-drenched spaghetti out of his bowl. (These grandparents weren’t the Italian side, hence the dubious sauce.) However, when the family sat down to dinner, Tibby would expect additional tidbits and would beg and yap ceaselessly in a voice so shrill that it could cause serious tinnitus. He would then be banished to the backyard, where he would continue to yip, all the while pawing and scratching incessantly at the sliding glass door until we went nearly insane.

Otherwise, though, he was very good with children, and he put up with our constant mauling in a manner that was both aloof and patient. We absolutely worshipped him.

1965_05_Janine, Marc, Agnes (Hansen) and Frank Steger, Jackie Gross, Dad, Mom, Carla Gross, Kathie Gross, Ron Gross, Tibby — Adults in back: My grandmother Agnes (holding Tibby), grandfather Frank, aunt Jackie, Dad, and mom. Standing kids: My sister Janine, brother Marc, and cousins Kathy and Carla. Kneeling teenager is my cousin Ronnie, whom we’d just as soon forget.

When the first meeting of the ambitiously named “Tibby Club of America” was convened at our house in San Jose, I had just turned 12, my brother Marc (obviously the money guy) was 10, and my sister Janine was 7. Occasionally our grandparents drove up to visit from SoCal, bringing Tibby and sometimes the two other people present for the club meetings: our first cousins Carla (12) and Kathy (10), the two daughters of our beloved hippie aunt Jackie who lived just a few blocks from my grandparents.

This is an abridged version of the complete minutes of the Tibby Club. If I were to include the full documents, you’d all be snoring. My comments are bracketed in italics.

***

TIBBY CLUB OF AMERICA

Minutes

The meeting came to order at 8:25 p.m., Friday, November 24, 1967. Kathy Gross, Janine, Marc, and Paula Bocciardi attended.

The President, Marc Bocciardi, said that the four slips of paper in front of us may be wrote on about a suggestion [sic] after you call time out.

We all called time out and wrote our suggestions. Then we all called time in after putting our suggestions in the bandage box located behind Paula, the Great.

Marc then proceeded to write down the Tibby motto.

Paula voted that we read the suggestions. Marc took them out and the first one was Janine’s. It said, “My thing is this – we should feed Tibby every day except once in a while.” Everyone voted on it.

The next suggestion was Janine’s. It said, “Do the Tibby sulut [sic] every day.” Everyone almost voted it in. Then Janine got a demerit for talking about how Marc once said, “Dear Grammy and Grumpy.”

Next was Paula’s. It said, “We should have an itiation [sic; initiation] for Kathy and other new members.” Everyone voted for it.

Kathy got a demerit of salivaing [drooling on] her knee. Paula said Kathy should say to Grampy, “Grampy, damn it.” The inititon [sic again!; initiation] was decided to be a tickle torture.

Paula said, “Wall – damn it” after Jan fell and Paula made a loud poop [fart].

Next was Janine’s. It said, “I love Tibby . . . I love Tibby.”

Next was Kathy’s. It said, “I don’t love Tibby.” Kathy almost got a demerit for it.

Next was Marc’s. It said, “I think we should all five of us (Kathy and Carla, Marc, Jan, and Paula) should contribute 10¢ for Tibby’s birthday present and 10¢ for his Christmas present.” We all voted for it.

Then Janine said, “I think that we should play with Tibby more often.” We all voted for it.

Then I read this, and the meeting was adjourned at 9:04 p.m.

Signed,
Paula Bocciardi
Minute Man

***

Minutes

The meeting started Saturday, November 25, 1967 at 8:10 a.m. Marc, Paula, Jan Bocciardi and Kathy Gross were present.

Marc, the President, passed out suggestion slips. Everyone called time out and wrote down their suggestions. We all called time in.

Then we decided to collect the 20¢ for Tibby’s presents. Everyone contributed 20¢ except Kathy and Marc. Marc had done it the previous night.

1965_05_Felicia Morrow, Agnes (Hansen) Steger, Tibby, Janine, Marc-2 — Neighborhood friend Felicia, my grandmother Agnes (with Tibby), Janine, and Marc

Then Marc read the first suggestions. It was Paula’s and Marc’s and Kathy’s. They said, “We should give Tibby a final salute and have a salute every meeting and a final playing with.” Everyone voted for the first and third, everyone except Paula for the second.

Next was NOBODY. It said NOTHING. [It appears that I had left blank spaces where someone later filled in the “nobody” and “nothing.” The handwriting was clearly my brother’s.]

The meeting adjourned at 8:26 a.m.

***

Minutes

The meeting came to order at 7:31 p.m. on Saturday, November 25, 1967. Kathy Gross, Paula, Jan, and Marc attended.

Kathy suggested that we read the promotion. Then Paula said to Kathy, “You stink.” Then it was decided that Kathy and Janine were to be promoted. Kathy was promoted to first class and swore (an oath, that is). Janine was promoted to first class and swore.

We discussed swearing.

Marc suggested we read the suggestions. The first one – Jan read. It was Marc’s. He said that we should have a crown [for Tibby]. Suggestion was overruled.

Then Kathy read Jan’s. It said that we should comb, brush, feed, and give water to Tibby everyday.

Then Marc read Kathy’s. It said that Carla should send up her membership and that we should care for Tibby better. The first part was voted for by everyone.

Paula moved that we should adjourn the meeting and give the Tibby salute. We all voted on it.

The meeting adjourned at 7:55.

Signed,
Paula Bocciardi
Co-Chairman
(Minute Man)

***

Minutes [these are written by my brother]

I had to write the minutes because Paula got mad and threw the orig. ones in the wastebasket.

President, Marc

The meeting came to order at 3:57 p.m. on Thursday, December 21, 1967. Kathy and Carla Gross and Marc, Paula, and Janine Bocciardi were present.

We wrote our suggestions.

The first one read, “Let’s give Carla her Initiation Tickle Torture.” Everyone but Carla voted for it.

The next one said, “let’s have a party.” Everyone voted for it. The next said, “We should give Marc demerits when he needs them.” Everyone voted for it.

The next said, “let’s make a Tibby song.” It was overruled.

The next one said, “we should have interest on dues.” [Guess whose suggestion THAT was?] It was overrruled. The meeting was adjourned at 4:31 p.m.

President,
Marc

1969_06 Marc, Tibby, Paula, Janine-2 — Marc, Paula (with Tibby), Janine

***

Minutes

P.R. – Marc (President)
M.M. – Paula (Minute Man)
1st class Jan – Janine

The meeting came to order at 10:05 a.m. PAT (Paula’s alarm clock time) on Sunday, June 30, 1968. Then Paula read the minutes of the last meeting. After Marc passed out the suggestion slips, we wrote them down and put them in a jacks bag.

The first Marc read’s [sic] was 1st class Jan’s. It said, “We should take turns reading these.” That was voted in. Then Jan read her own, which said that we should sell Tibby badges for 5¢ apiece [and] that she could make some – Marc’s idea. Then she read Marc’s which said the same, but also 5¢ for folders, money to Tibby fund. We voted that in.

Marc read Paula’s, which said we should have a Tibby scroll. Jan read Paula’s, which said she’ll make a Pig crown for Uncle Dave.

Then Paula read Jan’s, which said, “I think every day we should give Tibby rewards because he’s KING. First-class Jan.”

Then Marc read Paula’s, which said not to go too far or Mom or Dad will get mad.

Janine then left to go to the bathroom.

The meeting was adjourned at 10:35 a.m. PAT.

***

12/13 and 12/14, 1971 [the hard life of a teenager]:

“Mrs. Moore gave me a tutoring assignment today. I was really happy about it until she told me it was in Algebra. Yecch! My worst, most hated, dumbest subject! Yecch! First period P.E. has (glory of all glories) BASKETBALL IN THE GYM. And do you know what I got stuck with? Huh? FENCING!! That’s right! I’m so sore I can’t move.”

12/5/71:

“I was very busy today and did not go to church. Dad had a cold, Mom had a stomach pain; yet I could have walked. I should have. Somehow I know that I am a good person, and perhaps those religious standards made me that way. Yet there are all these new voices proclaiming that we do not have to go to Mass. I hate to think that they are right, and that all my Masses and all my Confessions were for nothing!”

12/7/71:

“Tonight, I went with Mary Pasek to my first P.A.L. [at the time, sort of like little junior police officers] meeting. We got a thing for our parents to sign saying that if we are killed or seriously injured, the Police Department is not liable. We are binded to risk our lives for policemen. The rigidness of conduct and the very strict inspection scared us into a panic. However, it scared me INTO P.A.L. because I have found that I have a certain desire for very authoritative procedures. We MUST have black shoes and a pen.”

11/26/71:

“I watched the Baltimore Bullitts [sic] beat the Atlanta Hawks today, 105-118. Pete Maravich is the only reason I watched. I used to like ‘Pistol Pete’ a couple years ago when he played college ball. I can’t say he’s too much of a shooter, but he sure can handle that ball. I used to think he was cute. YICK!”

11/30/71:
“Boy, did we see a tear-jerking movie tonight. The movie was “Brian’s Song” about Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers of the Chicago Bears. Brian died of cancer. I cried the last half hour and 15 minutes AFTER that movie!”

11/23/71:

“Today I was notified that I am going to be Editor-in-Chief for the next issue of our [school] paper. SWELL. I had to fork out an editorial today. I also got my senior pictures taken. At first I was really scared, but it didn’t take too long, thank goodness. One thing I am afraid of is Driver’s Training. I’m getting it sometime this quarter. Boy, I am so scared. Thank goodness tomorrow is the last day of this week. Yay, Thanksgiving! Food!”

11/21/71:

“What did I do today? I went to Church, finished selling my box of candy bars, vacuumed my room (there were 26,962 pieces of confetti on the rug), wrote thank-you notes, got Mom to let me wear pants once a week, made up a schedule for wearing my clothes, and took a BBGO (Big Bath and General Overhaul).”

The high cost of Slurpees

In 1971, when I was 15, the allowance allotted to me by my parents was a meager $5 – PER MONTH! Under that kind of economic pressure I finally came to the conclusion that I should pitch a $3 increase, and I wrote them a letter in my best teenage legalese and accounting-speak. On a light note this week, I am reproducing the letter here, verbatim. Maybe Congress can use it as a model in the forthcoming budget negotiations.

From the desk of Miss Paula Rae Bocciardi on this day, July 1, in the year A.D. 1971 to Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Raymond Bocciardi:

A request for a raise in allowance to increase my previous income of $5 monthly. The underlying are reasons why $5 is too small a sum.

Presents – counting up all gifts, we have Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Marc’s birthday, Janine’s birthday, Beverly’s birthday, Gerald’s birthday, Colleen’s birthday, Beverly’s Christmas present, Gerald’s Christmas present, Marc’s Christmas present, Jan’s Christmas present, Carla’s Christmas present, Kathy’s Christmas present (this year), Colleen’s Christmas present, Mary Blasi’s Christmas present, and let’s assume 1 assorted birthday party, even though there were 2 last year. These total 18. Assuming $3 are spent on each on an average, a sum of $48 is spent per annum, or $4 per month. This leaves only $1 per month.

Food – rather than spend $.10 a day for hot bread, I suffer at “B” period [break]. But a $.10 root beer at lunch is absolutely necessary, since its absence will cause withdrawal symptoms known only to root beer addicts, such as falling asleep 5th period, a certain listlessness in 6th period, and a tendency to get hit in the eye with the ball in P.E. Also I develop kleptomaniac symptoms in G.A.A. [Girls Athletic Association]. Now, assuming that I get a root beer only 120 school days, the total is $12.00, or $1 per month, leaving me totally broke. Bankrupt. Caput.

Slurpees – after hot hours of tennis I can take one of two alternatives: a) buy a Slurpee, or b) watch everyone else gurgle and slurp theirs and die of 1) jealousy, and 2) extreme thirst and dehydration. Obviously, step a) is the only possible choice. Considering 24 days of tennis, Slurpee cost would be $4.80, or $.40 monthly, leaving me $.40 in the hole.

Other costs – necessities such as $.50 for G.A.A., money for gifts, and G.A.A. parties in which I seem to be the only one to chip. School presents many new and fascination [sic] expenses every week. So far, $2.00 in the hole.

“Luxuries” – things which I don’t have to get, but should. Film and developing are quite costly. Occasionally I get invited somewhere and must buy something to keep myself from starving. $3.00 in the hole.

Entertainment – since I have the unique ability to attract only little boys and wierdos [sic], and lack for dates and/or good* (*clean) fun with the opposite sex, and don’t enjoy or believe in turning on, and don’t drive, I turn to music. Once a half-year I might like a record. A far-fetched thought, I know. I haven’t gotten one in months and months, unless counted is the $1.97 1932 Glen Campbell record I got where he sounds 12 at the most and howls as he sings “Those Lonesome Lonely Jailhouse Bluuuues.” YECCH!

Other income – none. The Gallos have no work to offer. Since I am only 15 I cannot get a decent job. I can’t babysit. I’d destroy the babies.

Bank – I should think ahead. The $130 I have saved for 10 years won’t go too far in college. Birthday money should go to the bank, but is always needed to put me out of the hole.

All in all, we can conclude that a raise is desperately needed. I have been proven to be very resourceful in times of crisis and butt operations. [Ed.’s note: I believe this referred to a procedure my father had done at the hospital. We’ll leave it at that.] I was uncomplaining. I have helped more and thoroughly destroyed the house, but that is unimportant. I have a $1 raise already, but now that the causes are understood, perhaps sometime in the near future the remaining $2 in the hole monthly will be considered.

Thank you and sincerely yours,
Miss Paula Rae Bocciardi

My parents caved. I got the full $3 raise.

***

5/10/71:

“Softball was wierd [sic] today. Mom and Dad came for the first time and watched the other team get 10 runs in the first inning. We made about 15 errors (me not included). But after that we held them scoreless. I got a home run. Soon we had only 10 minutes left and we were up. The score was 10-8. All we needed was 3 runs. All of a sudden it was 13-10. What a comeback, man! Right on!”

April-May 1971:

“We went to Coyote [Reservoir] to fish and have a little picnic. We caught about 76 crappie – the best we’ve ever done, not counting Clear Lake. They are small, but plentiful. It would have been perfect except as usual my hay fever started acting up around lunchtime. Hay fever is one thing I simply cannot stand. I don’t mind all the work I’ve had done on my teeth, or my operations, or even having to wear glasses. But hay fever is terrible. I sure wish we could have shots for it. But for some reason good ole Doc Williams won’t give us the shots. Let me tell you, I’d suffer any amount of pain. And I had taken a [Ornade prescription antihistamine] pill in the morning! Those babies are strong, too, boy.”

5/27/71:

“Marc [my brother], Ted, and I have a dirty book storehouse in Rudy’s poolroom. We’ve only got two books, but they’ve got loads of Playboys to read. I’ve read one of the books so far. It was called ‘Retribution.’ Some name, huh?”

Paula’s poetry pastiche

It came to mind recently that although I’ve filled many drawers and shelves with diaries, journals, notes, correspondence, and more than a few published articles, I never seemed to be very prolific as a poet. In fact, after much searching for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been able to unearth only the following six works, all written in my childhood. And now I know why no one encouraged me to pursue the poetic arts any further.

***

This first gem is actually one of three songs I wrote as a youngster, all of which have specific melodies. Because I’m unable to reproduce the tunes here, I thought I’d figure out their closest approximation. After all, they must have sounded like some nursery rhyme or popular children’s song at the time, correct? But I gave up after spending a couple of hours online, listening to at least 50 classic children’s songs. None sounded familiar.

Believe it or not, I then tried singing the songs (sans lyrics) into the Shazam app, hoping that somehow the melodies would be recognizable. Uh, no.

Finally I did what I often do in these situations – I called my sister Janine. But she could not pinpoint my musical influences, either. These must have been original melodies I came up with! I was obviously a genius!

1957_xx_Paula 042 — *As you can see, if you look closely at the newsprint, I was reading Shakespeare at an early age.*

As for this first song and its lyrics, neither Janine nor I could imagine how I came up with the idea of three men in a bottle. Our best guess is that I was influenced by the literature I was reading at the time: “Run-a-Dub Dub, Three Men in a Tub.” Which makes a lot more sense than three men squeezing into a bottle – full of whisky, no less. My father used to drink whisky “highballs,” a classic cocktail, so maybe that’s what was on my mind.

Anyway, here’s the song, any mistakes included.

THE THREE MEN (age 8)

[a nursery rhyme with a lilting melody]

Three men went out in a bottle to sea
And it was full of the drink wiskey,
But when they got there they all drowned
I think the bottle has not been found
So please, unless you’re less than 1 pound
Don’t try to sail, unless what you’re in is round.

***

I tried songwriting again the following year, and I’ve wrestled with whether I should publish it, because it deals with my brother Marc accidentally walking in on my sister when she was taking a shower. It seems a little odd that I would write about this incident, but I did.

JANINE TOOK A SHOWER THIS MORNING (age 9)

[belt this one out with gusto]

Janine took a shower this morning.
She got water all over the floor,
She got soap all over the soapdish,
And she forgot to close the door!

Marc walked into the shower
And he saw her standing there.
He looked at her in amazement
’Cause he’d never seen her bare!

***

My final tune is a bit of a cross between a folk song and a wartime march.

We had just moved into our new house in East San Jose, and at the end of our street stood an orchard followed by rolling hills. I couldn’t stop wondering what lay beyond those hills (answer: more hills). This became an obsession, so I composed a song about it.

My sister nailed my style and influences when she reminded me that when I wrote the song I was squarely in the middle of my “New Christy Minstrels period.” I was quite enamored with large groups of folk singers.

And I will add that my appending the “boys” to the end of each line is reminiscent of those World War I and II songs about soldiers leaving for, or coming back from, battle.

Obviously I liked mixing my styles, so I will call this song a “pastiche.”

WHAT’S ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL, BOYS? (age 10)

[sing this song in a rousing manner]

What’s on the other side of the hill, boys?
What’s on the other side of the hill?
What’s on the other side of the hill, boys?
What’s on the other side of the hill?

Do you know?
We will go,
And we’ll see,
You and me.
Yes, we will
Climb that hill
And we’ll look dowwwwwwn.

Will it be a town, will it be the sea, will it be the woods, what will it be, what will it be?

What’s on the other side of the hill, boys?
What’s on the other side of the hill?
What’s on the other side of the hill, boys?
What’s on the other side of the hill?

1969_04-06_Paula, Mom, Janine 1(b) — *What IS on the other side of that hill in the background?*

***

Although I was done writing songs, I did continue to churn out a few poems. This one was a Catholic school assignment. I was already in the seventh grade, so the real travesty was that I still had to go to bed at 9:00!!

UNTITLED (age 11)

Over and over my dad has said,
“Paula, it is time for bed!”
How I dread the hour of nine
When I begin to beg and whine,

“But Dad, please, just a little more?”
And that’s when he gets really sore.
So I, not making one more peep,
Go up to bed, and fall asleep.

***

I wrote this poem on the eve of my starting “Driver’s Training,” which in those days was a short high school course that involved hands-on experience behind the wheel. My course was taught by football coach Ron “No Neck” Locicero. He took us up in the East San Jose foothills and was actually very kind, even though he was forced to use his extra set of brakes liberally when I was behind the wheel.

The poem was published in the January 14, 1972, edition of our high school newspaper The Legend. Of course, it wasn’t difficult to get my own works into print, since I was the editor of said paper.

FUTURE DRIVER’S LAMENT (age 16)

O Horror of Horrors! I grieve in sorrow;
I wish I never could see tomorrow,
For when 3:30 comes I start Driver’s Training.
What if it’s windy? What if it’s raining?
What if I make a jillion mistakes
And he always has to slam on the brakes?
Everyone knows I’m the world’s biggest clutz –
The whole Driver’s Training Department is nuts!
They decided to risk it and hand me the wheel.
It seems they don’t value their automobile.
What if I step on the pedal too hard
And we end up in somebody else’s backyard?
I’m so absent-minded I just may forget
That I’m driving a car, and I’ll daydream, I bet!
I’m no big speed demon, the world will soon see.
Ten miles an hour is the limit for me.
Oh, no, I don’t panic, just go in a coma.
They may have to revive me with some strong aroma.
I don’t want to look like a stupid old fool
Nor be laughing-stock every day I’m at school.
They said, “Don’t be scared, Paula, you’ll do all right.”
But I have to drive at 5:30 at night!
The world will be dark. Is it like being blind?
What if I hit some poor guy from behind?
“It’s only 9 days – they go pretty fast.”
Oh sure, but I do hope my teacher can last.
My friends have no mercy. This whole bit they’ve seen.
Don’t they know what it’s like to be only sixteen?
“What about college? You won’t want to hike!”
You’re right, but I’d rather stick with my bike.
I guess I’ll live through it. I just hope I don’t kill
Some innocent soul. I keep thinking I will.
Yikes! Here comes the teacher! My heart beats no more.
Oh, what did I ever get into this for?
There’s just one thing to do. I look at the sky
And plead with Him, “God, oh, I’m too young to die!”

***

I didn’t even remember the following poem until my sister – who actually recalled most of the first stanza! – pointed out that she had once tried to set it to music. An accomplished banjo and guitar player by the time she was 12, she apparently wrote a melody for this poem “using a lot of minor chords.” Unfortunately she doesn’t remember the tune, but she claims that it was truly terrible, which I strongly doubt.

As for my influences at the time, I would have to say that they were a mixture of William Shakespeare, John Dunne, and whoever wrote “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

UNTITLED (age 17)

This cool, tranquil, weightless night
A star begins to die
In quiet, pulsing, choking gasps.
And I must say goodbye.

In young, confused and awkward grief
I watch the lonely light
The sky gives up its ghost; the star
Plunges out of sight.

If time would just dissolve this knot
I’ve never overcome –
But I, in muted silence, stand
Embarrassed, frightened, dumb.

O God! If man is so supreme
Then why am I so weak
That those whom I adore the most
Have yet to hear me speak?

I cannot catch my tortured breath
Or cool my heated head;
I cannot purge my heavy heart
Of all I’ve left unsaid.

I love you, friend, though through it all
I gave you not a sign.
If all you saw were pleading eyes
’Twas not your fault, but mine.

Could this be any more overwrought?? Then again, I guess that’s what being 17 is all about, isn’t it? ℘

1964_11-19_Paula, Janine(b) — *The two collaborators. My little sister Janine played a mean guitar!*

***

7/18/71:

“Monday night I had my first driving lesson [with my parents]. I don’t want to make a complete fool of myself, with my uncoordination and absentmindedness and stuff. I get so nervous. So we took the truck. I was scared to death. I jerked on the brakes a little. It’s hard to know how far down to push them or the accelerator. And sometimes I forgot to change the gear shift. I think I got up to about 9 M.P.H. but was scared. I thought about 4 M.P.H. was a safe speed.”

***

Finally, as a reminder, our band, “Hotter Than Helga,” will be playing in Fairfax at 19 Broadway on Thursday night, September 14. (I play drums.) If you like alt/country/rock/Americana music, come out and have a listen!!

Busted!

I’m calling this my “By Popular Demand” post because I’ve gotten repeated requests for a few specific items. First, people who read my last blog are wondering about the brushes with the law that I mentioned briefly. Second, friends who are not on Facebook are asking me to repeat my weekly diary entries so that they can see them as well. Finally, the non-Facebook people also continually ask me when my band will be playing. So I’ll cover all three requests in this week’s post.

***

PART ONE

My first scrape involving law enforcement involved, as usual, my friend Jeanne who had wire-rimmed glasses and the intense disapproval of my parents. (I’m beginning to see why!) I was visiting Jeanne in August 1975 and we’d just come back to North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, after a trip up to Maine to meet her new husband Steve’s family (see “Return to Triangle Acres”).

For whatever idiotic notion, we decided to head over to a nearby private beach on Steve’s decrepit motorcycle. And this was, according to my diary, after I’d already donned my nightgown and “put on my curlers and retainers.” So I threw off the curlers and retainers, we grabbed a bottle of rum (never a good idea) and packed a knapsack, and we took off. Along the way we purchased some Cokes and napkins, and my diary says that “we had to use the napkins to sop up some of the gas which kept spilling out of the tank.” Again, never a good thing.

Leaving the motorcycle up off the road, we walked down to the beach in the balmy moonlight. The white sandy dunes were, of course, beautiful, and we proceeded to alternately drink rum and Cokes and then take plunges into the warm Atlantic waters (we had bathing suits on under our regular clothes). Once again, not a good idea. Luckily, neither of us drowned, and we spent hours making ill-informed forays into philosophy, all the while slamming down liquor as if there were no tomorrow.

Eventually we passed out on the beach, and a few hours later we awoke, shivering, both of us heavily encrusted with wet sand. It was time to go home, we thought, and off we trundled towards the poor excuse of a motorcycle that was waiting for us. A hideous idea. Anyway, as we approached we saw, squinting through drunken eyelids, that the bike was surrounded by police cars and a group of clean-cut men, many of whom were in uniform. Someone asked Jeanne for her license and registration, which she cheerfully handed over, but we knew that the bike itself was an illegal mess. It had no brake light, no license plate, and lots of duct tape everywhere. Oy. One of the local police officers said that the infractions amounted to a $66 ticket and he began to write it up.

Another of the officers – with a rather rough bedside manner – asked me for my license, but I wasn’t carrying one and explained to him that, since I wasn’t driving, I didn’t have it with me. “Well, show it to me anyway!” he barked nonsensically.

Then for some reason the police cars both drove off and we were never issued the ticket.

Still, a group of men remained, and one of them – not in any kind of uniform – sort of took us under his wing as we stood there perplexed, still reeking, I’m sure, of spirits. He explained that the local officers could not ticket or arrest us because we and the motorcycle were on private property. But he pointed out that they were parked just across the beach line on the public road and would surely nab us, if we dared to start the bike and venture home, for not only the vehicle infractions but also for trespassing, sleeping on a beach, and of course driving while intoxicated.

Then he asked us if we were “holding.” I had no idea what that meant. But Jeanne said yes, she had a lid (an ounce of marijuana, for any of you under 55). This was news to me.

Then the man pulled out his badge and flashlight and identified himself as a state SLED (South Carolina Law Enforcement Division) officer.

I just about died.

As luck would have it, though, he had much, much bigger fish to fry. He explained that we had actually stumbled into the middle of an enormous statewide drug stakeout whose mission was to break up a network of heroin dealers. To prove it, he shined his flashlight up into the hills surrounding the beach, and about 50 flashlights blinked back.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, sympathetically. “Let me take you up into the trailer park across the road, and you can sleep off your intoxication in the lounge chairs by the side of the pool. By the time you sober up, those cops will be gone. They’re not going to sit there all night waiting to nab you.” I could tell that there was some tension between the city and state officers, and he was happy to thwart the efforts of what he thought were clumsy local goons. I myself was happy to take advantage of that, so I thanked him until the cows came home.

Jeanne and I climbed into his Volkswagen – really, another stupid move because he could have been an axe murderer – and sure enough he took us to the trailer park and helped us find lounge chairs. And he watched over us all night.

At sunrise he woke us up and told us we had to get moving because the residents were starting to rise. So we dragged our sand-encrusted carcasses to the bike, started it up, and got home safely.

Then, of course, we went out to breakfast and, according to my diary, “had a beer to settle our stomachs.”

Youth: Reckless, dumb, and lucky.

***

On Friday, November 22, 1985, I had just turned 30 a few days earlier and was driving over to my friend Ellen’s house on 21st Avenue in San Francisco’s Richmond District, ostensibly to pick her up to go to dinner at Speckmann’s, a German restaurant that I’d heard served great spaetzle. Sampling that spaetzle was my one and only fervent birthday wish. When I got to Ellen’s, though, I found myself ushered into a surprise party. All of us had a great time, and I remember that at one point we all donned streamers to mimic Bruce Springsteen’s then-ubiquitous headband as we danced much of the night away to Springsteen tapes. After most of the guests said their goodnights, the few of us remaining were still full of residual energy. So at 3:00 in the morning we came up with the brilliant idea of playing “knee football” on the hardwood floors (ouch!), using a birthday balloon as the football. Three guys and three gals. As we were scuffling around on our knees, laughing loudly and hysterically, we looked up and saw flashlight beams coming through the slatted doors that we had closed to shut off the living room. Two police officers were out in the hallway; we’d never heard their robust knocking at the front door. Uh oh. They admonished us to be quiet, and after they left, still wanting to play, we came up with the idea of “silent knee football.” The idea was that we would no utter no sounds at all, so as not to disturb any neighbors. As my diary says, that “made the whole game even more fun. I must say that I was the star of the game, making most of our touchdowns. Boy did we all have bruised knees the next day.”

By the time she was 30, my mother had three kids. I, on the other hand, was single and playing Silent Knee Football.

** *

I’ve been pulled over three times while driving. The first two instances happened with Julie behind the wheel. In 2001 we were in my new T-Bird on Route 66 – or should I say, accidentally well off of Route 66 – going a tad over the limit as we sped past an Oklahoma police officer who just happened to be sitting by the side of the highway with a radar gun. When he asked us where we were headed, we told him the truth, that we were dreadfully lost going north trying to go west, and we admitted that we had absolutely no excuse for flying along as fast as we were (except gosh, in that car it really feels like you’re just CRAWLING if you’re going 80). We were so polite and deferential and confused that he pointed us in the right direction and let us go.

Much more recently, we had just left Safeway and were driving TWO BLOCKS to our local meat market, Guerra’s. I reminded Julie, who was driving, that she needed to put on her seatbelt, but she insisted that there was no need for that as we were going to be in the car only 90 seconds, and I retorted back that people had been known to die in low-speed collisions not far from home. Of course she refused, and of course we then saw the flashing lights. I was almost smug about it. The female officer told Julie that she was in violation of the seatbelt law and that “people have been known to die in low-speed collisions not far from home,” at which point I smacked Julie on the shoulder and said, “See?! What did I just say?” and thanked the officer. She let us off.

The only time in my life I’ve been personally pulled over was in the late 1980s when some of my workmates and I piled into my Corolla to attend a wedding in Chinatown. I was driving all of us down Oak Street, and it was one of those situations in which I had to keep flying through yellow lights in order to beat the red. As a side note, for reasons I cannot recall, my girlfriend Adair’s wisdom teeth, which she had just had removed, were in one of the front seat cupholders. I swear to this day that I was already in the intersections when the lights turned yellow, but we were driving at a fast enough clip that my friend Leon Acord – possibly the funniest human being who ever lived – began screaming dramatically and then grabbed the teeth and hurled them into the air as though all the passengers were losing their teeth from the ultrasonic speed.

Of course, then came the flashing light.

The officer pulled me over and asked me for my license and registration. The license was in my purse, which was in the trunk of the Toyota, so I got out and wobbled to the back of the car in my dress and high heels (yes, I know that I’m not normally associated with purses, dresses, and heels, but I was going to a wedding, for crying out loud). I cannot possibly replicate in words how my hands were shaking, but let’s just say that it took me about four hours to get my license out of its little plastic holder. I think the officer was starting to feel sorry for me. I pleaded with him that the lights had all been yellow, and he said he wasn’t so sure about that. “Besides,” he continued, “what on earth were those things flying through the air?” “Teeth,” I answered.

By the time I got through explaining why the wisdom teeth were in the car in the first place, he was probably weary. So he let me go.

***

One experience with the law, though, caused me great mortification twice – 10 years apart. Yes, the same offense.

In 1975 I was living in the dorms at San Jose State and working towards my (first) degree in law enforcement. One Saturday night in December, a friend of my brother’s called me up and wanted to know if I wanted to go see a movie. I don’t think either of us thought it was a date, but we were both feeling kind of gloomy and thought it would be nice to get together. I will call him “Rusty,” after my childhood crush Rusty Hamer from the “Make Room for Daddy” TV show. (Truth be told, there was some resemblance between the two lads.)

Warning: This anecdote carries a PG rating, so please tear your small children away from this blog immediately.

Anyway, after the movie Rusty and I decided to drive to Santa Cruz. This was what young people always did in those days if we were feeling shiftless and wanted to seek out some form of adventure. No matter what we were doing, or what time of day, “Hey, let’s go over the hill!” was always cause for excitement.

Long story short, the two us ended up on a deserted dirt road in Scotts Valley and let’s just say that Rusty ended up on one of the bases. I don’t know all of the distinctions between the bases, but I can say with certainty that he did not get a home run or even a triple. I think he ended up only on second base, and nothing below the waist was involved. So it was fairly innocent. But we had a lovely time, and he was just cute as a button. A lovable, freckle-faced cad.

As luck would have it, though, just as we were about to leave the scene of the crime we saw the telltale flashing red light in the rearview mirror. I frantically threw my shirt on backwards.

It was a patrol officer, and he admonished us for parking on private property. We were trespassing, technically. After sitting in his police car and taking what seemed like forever to make sure we weren’t wanted anywhere, he jotted down our names and addresses and employer’s addresses and said that we were now going to be put on the Scotts Valley “list” of offenders, that we’d now be “on file,” and that if we were ever caught again we’d be in a heap of trouble.

I was mortified.

Now, at the time I was working part-time as a teacher’s aide in San Jose at James Lick High School, which is part of the same school district for which my father was working as principal of Piedmont Hills High School.

On Monday, I was at work when I was summoned to the office of Lick’s vice-principal, Russ Phillips, who was a giant of a man, an ex-football coach with a huge square head and heavy, oversized rings on his fingers. I was absolutely sure that the Scotts Valley Police Department had called Mr. Phillips to tell him that he had an immoral employee working for him. I was also sure that he was going to fire me and then call Dad. I was about to bring shame down on my entire extended Italian family and on all devotees of the Catholic faith.

“Principal’s Daughter Caught Canoodling in Scotts Valley,” the San Jose Mercury-News headline would read the next day. Or so I imagined.

I panicked and started to sniffle as I headed to Mr. Phillips’ office.

Luckily, he wanted only to ask me something about my payroll form.

And my father, bless his soul, never knew about Rusty and me. On top of everything, he never really liked Rusty much, either.

***

A decade or so later, this incident actually was a factor in influencing the course of my career. I was a freelance editor at the time, after having gotten a second degree in English. I’d all but given up on a career in law enforcement because police departments were requiring perfect vision among their recruits and I wore contacts, but times started changing and two local departments had no such requirement: Fairfax in Marin County and Fremont in Alameda County. So I applied to both and began working to build up my legendary herculean strength.

Fairfax, like most departments, had a physical skills requirement, and the one possible impediment to my getting past that test was The Wall. We had to perform other tasks like dragging a heavy mannequin or stepping rapidly through tires while wearing a heavy weight belt, and I was able to do those easily. The Wall, though, was a different story. It was taller than we were and we had to leap up, grab the top of the wall, and hoist ourselves over it using sheer upper-body strength. In general, men are taller and their upper-body strength is much greater than women’s. All of the other women at the test site failed; they just weren’t able to pull themselves over that thing. I was the last hope for my gender. I went flying towards that wall, leaped up with every ounce of momentum I had, grabbed the wall, and flung myself over. It was all adrenaline, I think.

I was secretly happy, I have to admit, because all of the other women had been effectively eliminated, which greatly increased my chances of getting the one open position. Or so I thought. Then they allowed the women to all try again, with some help, and a couple of them made it. I was furious. Damned liberal Fairfax!!

I didn’t get the job, but it’s interesting that a couple of years after that, my parents in Clearlake met their new police chief, who just happened to have arrived there from Fairfax. Upon hearing their last name, he remembered me and apologized to them for my not having been picked. He said the department brass had been impressed with me (it must have been my domination of the wall!), but they already had had someone picked out before testing had even started – a guy who was a police cadet serving in that department. I guess that made me feel a little better.

Then came Fremont. It was a much larger and seemingly more professional department. There was no physical agility test, for some reason, but there was a written test and a grueling oral exam. After both of those, I was #1 on the recruitment list. All that was left was the lie detector test.

So I found myself sitting in a little room, wired up to the polygraph, with a kindly young officer. It was the last question, and it was an odd one: “Have you ever committed rape, child molestation, or indecent exposure?”

I said no, and the polygraph needle started jumping all over the place.

“That’s odd,” he said. “Let me try again.”

Same result. That needle was flying.

He turned off the machine. “Okay,” he said, “I’m quite sure that you have not committed rape or child molestation. Tell me what’s going on with the indecent exposure thing.”

I was – of course! – mortified. I knew I was thinking about Rusty and that night in Scotts Valley with my shirt off! But I didn’t want to tell the officer. My heart started hammering and I completely lost focus, to the extent that I neglected to mention that Rusty and I had been out in public, which was of course what triggered the “indecent exposure” fear in my head.

Instead, all I said to the officer was, “Well, one time I was with a guy and we had our shirts off.”

There was a pause. He looked at me with a puzzled expression.

Then very gently he said, “Really, dear, that’s okaaaaaaay.”

***

I didn’t get the Fremont job. My status as #1 on their list must have plummeted after that polygraph test. They probably thought I was just too weird for words.

Of course, in retrospect it was good not only for me but for the safety of all the citizens of the Bay Area that I did not become a police officer. Things, as they say, happen for a reason.

There are countless people in our lives who say or do something, however insignificant it seems at the time, that we will remember all of our lives. I wish I could thank all of them. When I think back on that sweet little evening in Scotts Valley, I can’t help but smile. It really did me a world of good, in so many ways. Thanks, Rusty.

***

PART TWO

Due to popular demand, for those of you who are NOT on Facebook, I am including for you, here, the random diary entries that I’ve been posting on Facebook for “Throwback Thursday.” These are all taken absolutely verbatim from the lengthy diaries I kept between 1971 and 1987, and they’re all inadvertently hilarious. From now on, my most recent entries will be at the top.

3/26/71:

“We went to Clear Lake today. Big deal. It was miserably cold, miserably rainy, and miserable. Dad took us out to dinner and I became ill. There’s a lot of flu going around. It’s weird — you get very depressed and feel very blecchy. And another weird thing is you feel like crying. So I ate only 2 pieces of chicken, 1 helping of beans, 1/2 baked potato, 2 pieces of bread, and a chocolate sundae. Since I hardly ate anything, they KNEW I was sick.”

2/27/71:

“I wanted to see what sport I’ll be in in P.E. It’ll probably be tennis, basketball, or flag football. All of those choices are good, but I like basketball best. I just adore the feel of that big orange ball.”

1/3/71:

“Today I took my ‘big bath.’ There I 1) wash face with special soap, 2) pluck eyebrows, 3) clean ears, 4) blow nose, 5) brush teeth, 6) shave, 7) take the bath, and 8) clean my nostrils, etc.”

12/22/70, one of many displaying my teenage eating prowess:

“While there I ate an egg sandwich, macaroni salad, toast, popcorn, and Tab. Then I came home and ate dinner.”

12/21/70:

“Today [my cousin] and I stayed at [my aunt’s] house while they all went shopping. We played with [the baby] a lot, and we looked at all their dirty books. One that was really a crackup was A Guide to Sex in Marriage, and man, it told the whole procedure!”

11/11/70 (and it MUST be the winner of the “Unclear on the Concept” award):

“We went to the Veterans Day parade on 1st Street today. We were going to march in the ‘Silent Majority’ section but there wasn’t one.”

11/1/70:

“[My brother] Marc beat me 17 games to 0 in Hex today. It’s a game like Twix but on paper. It was the first time I played, and quite possibly the last. How humiliating!”

9/17/70:

“Mark, the president of our class, is in my History class with Mr. Ferguson and he is the most good-looking boy I’ve ever seen. He says hello all the time and WOW!”

4/24/71:

“Barb and Denise came up later and we just talked in my room for hours. I showed them my big Glen Campbell poster and we tied all our shoes together and other such mature stuff.”

1970:

“On another one of our numerous high school surveys, I had to put down 3 careers I want to enter. I was tempted to put down prostitution but I’m sure Dad would find out.”

***

PART THREE:

Again, this is just for people NOT on Facebook:

Our band, “Hotter Than Helga,” will be playing in Fairfax at 19 Broadway on Thursday night, September 14. (I play drums.) If you like alt/country/rock/Americana music, come out and have a listen!!

Oops!

And then there was the time I found myself downtown at rush hour with my nylons around my ankles.

My latest blog posts have been a bit on the serious side, so I decided that today’s would be simple and light – another in my endless series of embarrassing moments now set forth for all eternity.

I’ve had a number of clothing-related mortifications in my life. I once walked out the door and all the way to the bus stop before realizing that I was wearing only a slip. The uncommon chill is what finally tipped me off.

But a couple of other incidents stand out.

Early in my career in San Francisco, I would periodically wear dresses to work. I had landed a job as an “editorial assistant” at Harper & Row Publishers right out of college, and while most English majors would have swooned at that opportunity, I worked in the production side of things, which meant that I really functioned as an accountant. I dealt with lots of invoices and spreadsheets (all by hand, of course) as I developed a growing familiarity with the intricacies of offsheet presses and bookbinding.

Anyway, one evening I was walking down Sutter Street after a long day at work when quite suddenly both of my nylons rolled down around my ankles. I was wearing thigh-high hose at the time – individual nylons with a tight band at mid-thigh level that miraculously gripped one’s leg. They were supposed to stay there. I don’t know why I preferred them over your standard-issue panty hose, but that was my scene at the time. (By the way, I just Googled them and discovered that they still exist today, so perhaps I was not as far afield fashion-wise as you might be thinking.)

I have no idea why both nylons decided to defy all odds and slide to earth at the same time. In fact, I don’t understand why they slipped down at all. My best guess is that they were getting on in years and perhaps I’d stretched them out when I was heavier – when I had put on the “freshman 15” living in the dorms at SF State, scarfing down as many carbohydrates as I could stuff into my gaping maw. Well, that and the sodas.

Speaking of sodas, I must digress for a moment, because one day I was in line at the college cafeteria with my friend Kati. I had poured myself a Coca-Cola and she had gotten a Pepsi, both in gigantic paper cups, but I’m sure we were distracted by a million things and by the time we paid our “scrip” for them we couldn’t remember which was which. “Don’t worry; I can tell just by smelling them,” she assured me. So she proceeded to stick her nose down into one of the cups and draw in a huge, dramatic sniff. Well, in front of a long line of students, the soda shot way up her nostril, so far that it then streamed out the other nostril and back onto the counter. We both guffawed so hard that she practically choked to death. It caused quite a delay at the counter.

“Well, I can say with clarity that that was definitely not the Pepsi,” she deadpanned.

And that, my friends, was the only time I’ve been around someone snorting Coke.

Anyway, back to the nylons. So now I’m in a torrent of people heading home, my stockings are bunched loosely around my ankles, and I’m overcome with embarrassment. What the heck am I going to do? Undress right in the middle of Sutter Street?

So, I decided to ever-so-gradually back into a doorway so that I would go undiscovered by at least the majority of the people on the street. I eased myself slowly backwards until I could lean up against the solid wall behind me, at which point I took off my heels, rolled each piece of hosiery all the way down and off, stuffed the nylons in my backpack, and slipped my shoes back on. It took quite a bit of time because I was very deliberate and protracted in my actions so as not to draw attention.

Then I turned around to look at the building.

Oops.

The “wall” that I had backed into was really a window. A huge plate-glass window. And inside the lobby of that building was a large crowd of people, all of them staring. They had had quite a show. A long show at that. They could have consumed an entire tub of popcorn watching me undress!

***

I suppose the most mortifying of all my clothing situations, though, occurred the day I went to the water-slide park with my sister Janine, my former brother-in-law John, and their children. This time I planned carefully in advance and donned a one-piece bathing suit to avoid any mishaps.

I had a fantastic time that day. It was an hour of pure joy and laughing and screaming.

On my last trip down the largest slide, a 10-year-old boy had somehow gotten stuck partway down and along I came, barreling towards him. I flailed around and tried to stop myself, but to no avail, so I careened into him and ended up taking him down with me, the both of us shrieking and hopelessly entangled.

Now, at the bottom of the slide was a shallow pool. Just beyond that was a large, grassy hillside, on which all of the parents sat to watch their kids as they splash-landed after a wild ride.

I stood up out of the pool, cackling and grinning from the delight of not only the fast ride but also the craziness of being intertwined with the startled little boy.

John and the kids met me at the edge of the pool, and I began breathlessly recounting the details of the slide.

As I stood there jabbering, facing not only my family but the hordes of parents on the grass, I noticed that John was staring perplexedly at me. And not at my face.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, still catching my breath.

He just pointed.

Somehow in all the chaos my bathing suit had slipped down on one side, and my entire lily-white left breast was out and pointing like a beacon at not only him but also the large crowd on the hill.

“For God’s sake, John, why didn’t you say anything?” I blurted at him while stuffing everything back into place. “A hundred people are staring at me!”

Hand to God, this was his response:

“I wasn’t sure what it was.”

**********

For SF Giants fans, my latest Giants blog posts (most of which are dullsville) are at http://sportsspotlight.com/blog/author/paulabocciardi/

Fug’s final feature

My father had the world’s most bizarre middle name.

If you think yours can top it, think again. If your middle name is Phinneas or Clothilde, you still don’t get the blue ribbon. Even if your middle name is Adelgunde, step aside.

My dad’s middle name was . . .

Wait for it . . .

FUG.

Hand to God.

As the story goes, my father grew up believing that he did not have a middle name. No one told him otherwise, and because Italians really didn’t hand out middle names the way other cultures did, he was simply Gerald Bocciardi.

At some point, though, someone decided that he should adopt Raymond as his middle name. His paternal grandfather’s name was Raimondo, so that made as much sense as anything.

So he’d been going along in life as Gerald R. Bocciardi until the day he went to the Oakland Hall of Records to obtain his official birth certificate.

***

My father had been in the army’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) at UC Berkeley when he was an undergraduate. ROTC was a program that trained young college students to be commissioned officers in the armed services. When he got his draft notice in August of 1952, in the middle of the Korean War, Dad drove from San Leandro with my mother – his new wife of three months – directly to the Presidio in San Francisco to activate his commission so that he could go into the army as an officer rather than as a grunt private. After a full day of being sent from building and building, signing and transporting paperwork, he was given an official letter to present to the Oakland draft board declaring that he was a commissioned officer.

Now, my dad was a patriotic man and he wanted to fulfill his duty to his country, but Gerald Bocciardi’s boots on the ground would not have served America well. He was a smart guy, but he was also completely inept at practical matters. The man just could not master the most basic of everyday tasks. Boot camp would have kicked him to the curb.

When he got to Camp Cooke – a former army base near Lompoc, California – he was assigned to, of all things, “heavy mortar.” That obviously was not going to be a permanent spot for him. Later, at Fort Lewis in Washington, he was asked to oversee “reconnaissance patrols.” As my mother told me later, those were “the guys who go out in the middle of the night, and they have to read the maps in some foreign, strange jungle. He couldn’t find his way around San Leandro!”

That was a bust, too. It was then that my dad, who was nothing if not crafty, marched into the General’s office with a plan. “I think I’m probably misplaced here,” he announced. “I’d be much better utilized in Intelligence. I speak foreign languages. I’m fluent in Italian and Spanish, I can get by in French, and I also know a smattering of German.” It was all true, although because we were at war with North Korea, I’m not sure how any of those skills mattered. In any case, the General bought the pitch, and my father soon found himself with a top-secret clearance.

1952_11_Southern California_Mom and Dad — Bev and Fug, November 1952

During that time, Mom and Dad lived off base in a motel room because Dad was supposed to be deployed to Korea any minute. Every day they waited for his papers to arrive. Mom was isolated and had nothing to do all day, so she put her considerable energies into a lot of cleaning and knitting. At night they watched television. In those days you had to put a coin in the slot to watch a motel television, but when the coin box broke and my mom – in all of her honesty – told the proprietors about it, they felt so sorry for her being alone all day that they decided to “forget” to fix it. So Mom and Dad had free TV for all those months. As long as she lived, she was always grateful for that.

She and Dad would get out to the Officers’ Club every Saturday night, though. “For one buck,” she told me, “you picked out your huge T-bone. Thick, and choice meat. The army had the best meat in the world. And then they had all the other stuff on buffet tables and salad tables. And they cooked your steak right in front of you. For a dollar!”

Months passed, and more months, and the deployment papers never came. It was a classic army snafu.

***

In any case, at the beginning of this whole process, Mom and Dad stood at the counter at the Oakland Hall of Records waiting for a copy of his birth certificate to submit to the army. The woman helping them returned with a wry smile on her face. “Well, I see you have a very unusual middle name,” she said, mysteriously.

“What do you mean?” my dad replied. “Raymond?”

“Oh, no. Fug.”

Well, that certainly blew their minds!

My father made the mistake, when he first got into the service, of telling a fellow soldier about his newfound middle name. It was a grave error. From that point on, he couldn’t walk through the base without someone hollering “Hey, Fug!” at him.

And when his two years were up, his army buddies sent him off with a party, a poem, and a cartoon. The presentation was called “Fug’s Final Feature.”

***

I now have a certified copy (dated 1980) of Dad’s birth certificate, and it offers Option No. 3. It lists his name as Gerald Gus Bocciardi. Gustavo was his father’s name.

I don’t know what happened. Maybe the original original did show Fug as his middle name. Or maybe someone transcribed or typed something incorrectly along the way, and “Gus” became “Fug.”

You know, maybe the army never got Dad’s papers sorted out because they were looking for Gerald Raymond, who technically didn’t exist. Or maybe they were looking for someone named Fug. I don’t know. Things happen for a reason, though. Had Dad gone off to Korea, it’s possible that his ineptitude would have singlehandedly and inadvertently sabotaged the entire U.S. war effort. On a more serious note, it’s also possible that he never would have come back.

I’m glad you made it home, Fug.

“Fishing First!”

Those of us who live in California are getting a bit tired of the unending rain. We’re ecstatic, of course, over the apparent end to our five-year-long drought, but enough is enough. I have to check the weather sites and watch the “motion radar” every few minutes just to determine whether it’s safe to take our dog out without walking into a deluge. The lakes, streams, and reservoirs are getting full now – some dangerously so – and we could all use some sun exposure.

When I was young, full lakes and the promise of spring meant one thing to our family: fishing. We never took fancy vacations, but we spent many a Saturday or Sunday throwing worms or minnows into a host of Santa Clara Valley reservoirs hoping to bring home bluegill, crappie, bass, and catfish. Mom packed a picnic basket full of salami sandwiches, potato chips, and Cragmont sodas. Dad spent much of his time untangling our lines, and he and my brother ultimately had the task of cleaning and filleting the fish. (We ate everything we caught.) Once in a great while we would rent a cabin up at Fallen Leaf Lake in the Sierras, and Dad would take us out in the early morning chill to fish for trout. I remember that he used to sing or whistle the Army’s “Mess Call” (“Come and get your chow, boys”) so the trout would bite. In the early days, I believed that that worked. I will never forget the taste of fresh rainbow trout, right out of the water, wrapped in bacon for breakfast.

The Bocciardi kids became avid anglers.

1962_07_sea-cliff-fish_paula-marc — **1962, flounders caught at Seacliff State Beach, CA**

Meanwhile, we also loved to form clubs devoted to our youthful pursuits, and as luck would have it, I still have the “minutes” to two of those clubs. One of them, The Tibby Club, was dedicated to my grandmother’s dog, an adorable but spoiled and yappy Lhasa Apso whom we revered. The other club was The Fishing Club. We were a little older then, so the minutes were, of course, typed.

The year was 1969. The meetings took place in our house in San Jose. I was 13 years old, my brother Marc was 11, and our beloved but beleaguered (you’ll see what I mean) little sister Janine was 8.

Please note that although there were four meetings, all of them appear to have taken place on the same day. Then the club completely fell apart in acrimony.

I don’t believe I need to say anything further. I have re-typed the minutes precisely as they originally appeared. They speak for themselves. Enjoy.

MINUTES

Date: June 19, 1969

Time: 8:25 – 8:48 a.m.

Place: Paula’s room

Present: Paula Bocciardi, Marc Bocciardi, Janine Bocciardi

Acting Chairman: Paula Bocciardi

The meeting was called to order by Paula at 8:25 a.m. All were present.

This was the first meeting. The list of club duties was passed around.

Next, we voted on the place to go fishing. The area that came in first will be presented to our parents and if they disagree, the others, in order, will be presented to them. Lexington was first with 11 points, Mt. Hamilton second with 9, Coyote and Chesbro with 5, and Anderson is the alternate.

Then we decided on date, time, bait, and other articles which will be on the plan. Paula will type the plan.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:48 a.m.

***

Fishing Club Duties:

The main duties and functions of the fishing club are as follows:

To plan and prepare one fishing trip a month
To trade fishing gear
To make better fishermen of all its members
To find out the fishing rules and regulations for various areas
To aid, if possible, in fish conservation
Any other duties pertaining to a fishing club

***

Members:

Paula Bocciardi – secretary

Marc Bocciardi – equipment manager

Janine Bocciardi – frog-keeper

Meeting place – 3561 Telegraph Drive

Meeting days – anytime

***

Motto:

Fishing First!

***

Fishing Plan:

Date: July 19 or 26
Place: Lexington
Area: Drive around lake, then return to old spot if no other one is available.
Getting up time: 4:45 [a.m.]
Bait: 2 dozen minnows, 2 night crawlers, 2 worms, no clams, etc.
Leave: anytime parents want, possibly no later than 2:30 [p.m.]
Children will:

Make food
Load car
Go across street to buy bait
Wake up parents
Get ourselves ready
Make breakfast

All parents have to do is dress, drive, and pay for bait.

HAVE FUN!

***

Fishing Day Activities:

Make breakfast (Janine, Paula)
Get Bait
a. Tell man what we want (Paula)
b. Pay (Marc)
c. Carry bait (Janine)
Wake up parents (Janine)
Load car (Marc)
Make lunch (Paula, Marc)

***

1968_07_clearlake_paula-marc-janine-2 — **1968, Clearlake, CA**

MINUTES

Date: June 19, 1969

Time: 12:37 p.m. – 12:52 p.m.

Place: Marc’s room

Present: All

Acting Chairman: Paula Bocciardi

The meeting was called to order at 12:37 p.m. The minutes were read.

There were no corrections. There was no old business.

Paula read the fishing plan. No corrections were made.

Janine suggested that we have a suggestion box. This was voted down.

Paula informed Marc that, as manager of the equipment, he must obtain a notebook for the club.

Marc suggested that we should collect dues every once in a while to pay for certain fishing gear we could buy. Paula added to this and said that the equipment manager should present something new we might get at every meeting and we could vote on these presentations.

It was decided not to present the parents with our plan today, but wait.

The meeting was adjourned at 12:52 p.m.

***

1970_08_ship-n-shore-resort_clearlake-ca_marc-janine-paula-1 — **1970, Clearlake, CA**

MINUTES

Date: June 19, 1969

Time: 2:24 p.m. – 3:09 p.m.

Place: Paula’s room

Present: All

Acting Chairman: Paula Bocciardi

The meeting was called to order at 2:24 p.m. The minutes were corrected by Janine, who said that the opinion she gave of the problem that she and Paula would fight over the lures, etc. we buy was not included in the minutes. However, since this was only part of the discussion, and not a suggestion, it does not have to be included in the minutes.

Janine, the frog-keeper, was called upon to report. She said that she was going to ask the twins (Chris and Dan Sears) to take care of Toby, the frog, when we go up to Fallen Leaf Lake on Saturday. The twins weren’t home, so Marc will call them later.

Marc, the equipment manager, was called upon to propose some ideas on things to buy. He suggested a bass/crappie jig, some split shot, some #8 hooks, some #2 hooks, or a plastic worm. We voted on the split shot. We will pay, as individuals, 8¢ for 20. It was agreed that anyone who loses a lure, etc. will be unable to use the others.

There was no old business.

We then chose some projects to undertake. Marc will write to the Fish and Game Department and ask if there is anything we can do, such as putting up posters. I, too, will write to them and tell them about the bad situation at Ed R. Levin Park.

Marc then read the portion of the fishing regulations that tells about night fishing. We discovered we cannot night fish at lakes here.

We decided that Janine should put up posters saying to come to our house for information on local fishing. Janine refused and was kicked out of the club.

The meeting was adjourned at 3:09 p.m.

***

MINUTES

Date: June 19, 1969

Time: 9:44 – 9:58 [p.m.]

Place: Paula’s room

Present: All

Acting Chairman: Paula Bocciardi

The meeting came to order at 9:44 p.m. The minutes were read. There were no corrections.

There were no new developments on the frog. The equipment manager had nothing to report.

There was no old business.

Janine orally took an oath, then signed a written one, which enabled her to come back into the club. This was done because Janine tattled and Mom said that if we didn’t let her in, we couldn’t have a club either. Mom also said she did not want any posters to be put up so we’ll have to think of a new project for Janine.

Marc got a notebook during the meeting.

It was decided that we will write our letters tomorrow if possible, and if not, as soon as possible when we get back from vacation.

We voted on a suggestion made by Paula and Marc. The club shall temporarily be closed to further membership. However, if one of us would like a new member to join, the person would have to be approved by every other member.

The meeting was adjourned at 9:59 p.m.

***

Oath:

I, JANINE BOCCIARDI. DO SOLEMNLY SWEAR THAT IF KICKED OUT OF THE CLUB I WILL NOT CONVEY THIS MESSAGE TO OUR PARENTS IN ANY WAY. I ALSO DO SOLEMNLY SWEAR THAT I WILL NOT DISCUSS ANYTHNG ABOUT THIS CLUB TO ANYONE, INCLUDING OUR PARENTS, UNLESS I AM GIVEN PERMISSION TO DO SO BY EITHER MARC OR PAULA BOCCIARDI.

SIGNED,

Janine Bocciardi

***

I hope you enjoyed that peek into the past. Meanwhile, for those of you not on Facebook, I have some blogging news. I am now the official blogger for the San Francisco Giants on a website called “Sports Spotlight.” If I think any of those blogs might be of interest, I’ll include the links at the end of my Monday Morning Rail posts.

The latest:

On whether Barry Bonds should be in the Hall of Fame: http://sportsspotlight.com/blog/boys-bay-021317/

Save

A sloth’s guide to exercise

When I was talking to my good friend Julie R. last week, she told me with great disappointment that she had a terrible cold and had to scale her cardio exercise session “down” to 30 minutes. Then she and I immediately laughed, because we both know that getting up to 30 minutes of cardio is my never-ending goal.

I am cursed blessed with a group of friends – none of them spring chickens, mind you – who all seem to be paragons of physical fitness. The aforementioned Julie R. runs marathons. Jill and Barb climbed Mt. Everest and, when that got a bit tedious, trekked around Machu Picchu. Michele works out with kettlebells (or, as I like to call them, “rotator cuff rippers”). Ron hikes the Pacific Crest Trail. Annabelle is a national champion in velodrome cycling. M.L. does triathlons.

It probably goes without saying that none of those things is in my repertoire.

For the most part, I hate exercising, unless it involves playing competitive sports. I used to be a decent athlete, but nowadays my sports endeavors typically end in a torn muscle, a broken bone, or some combination of the two. So I have settled on exercising as an individual, because of course it’s good for your heart and helps keep your bones from disintegrating and blah-dee-dee blah blah blah.

I have a feeling that some of my readers (outside of my close circle of superjock friends) might feel the way I do, so I would like to offer my surefire method of starting an exercise program and sticking with it. My method involves just three components:

Exercising for only 30 seconds;
Getting into a furious lather over newstalk; and
Hoping that Max Weinberg gets food poisoning.

Follow the “30 Seconds” program

The most critical element of the Bocciardi exercise program is exercising for only 30 seconds. Now, I know you’re all assuming that I’m just trying to be funny, but my closest friends and family members can verify that what I am about to say is 100 percent true.

It seems that every year or two something happens that completely derails my exercise program. I shatter a bone, rip a ligament, get sick, experience some kind of life interruption, or just plain get lazy. And as many of you know, it is really, really hard to start up exercising once you have stopped. It is painful. The lungs burn, the legs ache, the heart labors, and it’s simply a boatload of misery. So I have found that the only thing that makes me start up again is knowing that I have to do it for only 30 seconds.

My cardio machine of choice is the elliptical, and what I do is exercise for 30 seconds on my first day back, 60 seconds the next time, and so on. Of course, increasing by only 30 seconds per outing means that it takes 60 outings to work my way up to my 30-minute max, but that’s fine with me. (And if I get on the elliptical three days a week, that means it will take five months to reach my half-hour max – about enough time for me to tear another ligament and have to start all over again.)

Knowing that I have to suffer for only 30 seconds that first day is a sublime motivator. And I really get into it. I pull on my sweats, grab some Gatorade, and even make sure I wear my sports bra.

Get infuriated over newstalk

My ideal sports regimen involves using the elliptical on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, I work out for 20–30 minutes on our hybrid weight machine in our downstairs “guest room.”

I discovered many years ago that listening to newstalk radio in the car always makes me furious, which can really make a lengthy trip zip by in seemingly no time at all. If a 22-year-old know-it-all starts ranting about how future Hall of Fame coach Bruce Bochy doesn’t know what he’s doing and should have replaced a pitcher, the time you spend sitting in rush-hour traffic will pass swiftly as your disgust rises. Or if one of those “survivalists” calls in from his bunker to offer his completely uninformed opinion about the Constitution, your three-hour trip will evaporate while you seethe.

So, while I spend time downstairs on the weight machine, injuring myself in small increments (until one day: SPROIIIIIIING!), I watch cable news on television. I can simultaneously do a shoulder press and shriek at the TV, “Why on earth do you still have a job, Wolf??! Is no one else sick to death of your breathless pettifogging?”

Not only does that pass the time, but my blood boils, my heart pumps like a locomotive, and my theory is that it enables me to lift more weight!

Imagine Max Weinberg with salmonella

While I’m on the elliptical in the garage, though, I don’t watch television. What I do is put one of my so-last-millennium CDs into my so-last-millennium living room CD player and listen via wireless headphones.

(Of course, as you might imagine, when I’m exercising for only 30 seconds, I don’t get to hear very much of a song.)

Dealing with the pain and misery of cardio exercise, however, requires that I do something more than just listen to music. So I fantasize.

fess_parker_as_daniel_boone — Fess Parker

When I was a little girl, my favorite fantasy was that I was a wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers. As I got a little older, I had a dream (now legendary among my circle of friends) about Fess Parker and me that involved no clothing whatsoever except for coonskin caps. It was rather wonderful, but I digress.

For the last two years I’ve slowly been going through my entire Springsteen CD collection, which includes studio recordings, EPs, and a raft of bootlegs. My objective is to catalog all of them in a detailed database and to rate each studio and live performance according to the Bocciardi ratings system. This means hundreds of hours listening to Bruce while I work out on the elliptical.

What I do for the entire 30 minutes – or seconds, as the case may be – is fantasize that I am playing drums in the E Street Band behind Bruce at a live concert. In my scenario, I’ve been conscripted to play, on the spur of the moment, because regular drummer Max Weinberg is suddenly stricken and unable to take the stage.

Rock fans, this is where we absolutely must discuss the fact that this did happen to the world’s luckiest teenager. And it occurred right here in Daly City.

On November 20, 1973, the Who – one of the greatest bands of all time – were (or is it “was”?) in the middle of a show at the Cow Palace when drummer Keith Moon passed out cold, allegedly from a combination of tranquilizers and brandy. After being revived offstage with a shower and a cortisone injection, he came back out and continued drumming, seemingly back to normal. But during the very next song he passed out again, and this time he meant it.

Miraculously, some of this was filmed and has been posted on YouTube. You can see Keith slumped over at about 8:22, right after “Magic Bus” ends.

https://youtu.be/aIjH9OU2JKw

Guitarist Pete Townshend then looked up into the crowd and asked whether there were any good drummers who could come down and help them out. Holy nirvana! This doesn’t even happen in the movies!

Nineteen-year-old Thomas Scot Halpin, a fan who’d arrived 13 hours early with a friend to see the legendary band, was standing on the floor off to the side of the stage. When Townshend made his plea, the friend dragged Scot over to a security guard and insisted that he knew all the material and would be the perfect person for the job. Concert promoter Bill Graham came over to check out what he thought was a security issue, but he ended up recruiting Scot for the job. So Halpin found himself onstage, where someone gave him a shot of brandy to calm his nerves and he proceeded to spend the next few minutes of his life living out a dream that afterwards he could barely remember because of the adrenaline and the unreality of it all.

The band did three more songs, two of which were classic blues numbers. The third song was a Who tune called “Naked Eye” that had been played live but had not been released on a studio album, so I don’t know whether Halpin had even heard it before.

Although he had not touched a drumstick in a year, and Townshend sometimes had to help him through the tempo changes, I think the teenage drummer did a great job:

https://youtu.be/X5ZGlVY5rg4

At the end, Halpin takes a bow with the band and looks like the happiest man alive.

It gives me chills to watch it.

My fantasy, as I mentioned, is similar. But there is no way Max Weinberg would ever be under the influence at a concert (or probably anywhere). For a long time my scenario involved his having a heart attack, but after many months it occurred to me that if Max had a coronary before a show, Springsteen would not blithely carry on with the concert as if nothing had happened! So I decided that he needed to suddenly get a raging case of food poisoning. Nothing too serious, of course, but enough to keep him indisposed for a few hours. Meanwhile, I would be dragged up on stage to finish the show.

My appearance would be, of course, triumphant.

And that’s how you can get through your new exercise plan for 2017.

You’re welcome.

Screaming through Bakersfield

When I was a little girl, I was afraid of a multitude of things, including lawn mowers, elevators, cat’s eyes, cuckoo clocks, the mosaic stone tower at Valley Fair Shopping Center in San Jose, and the revolving Hamm’s beer display (with a giant bear) at the local supermarket. Sometimes, with luck, those things would disappear. For example, my grandparents would nail shut the little door of their cuckoo clock whenever we visited. And the revolving Hamm’s display was ultimately taken down. I spoke Italian at that age, and when the scary things vanished I would ask my father where they had gone. “Dov’è la statua che gira?” (“Where is the statue that turns?”) And Dad would always answer, “It went to Bakersfield.” That town clearly had a lot of open space.

Well, one day when I was three years old, our family was driving to the L.A. area to visit our grandparents, and in those days you had to drive down Highway 99, which ran through the San Joaquin Valley and was the only major connection between northern and southern California.

Most of the towns along the route had arched signs over the highway, welcoming travelers to their communities.

So, visible from the highway was a big banner that announced “BAKERSFIELD” in enormous capital letters as we approached that cowboy town.

That would have been just fine, except that Jerry and Beverly Bocciardi had forgotten that they had taught their daughter to read at the age of three. (It was absolutely unheard of then, although common now.) So they were startled, to say the least, when an ear-piercing scream such as they had never heard before issued forth from their hysterical daughter in the back seat.

The scream did not relent. I shrieked all the way through Bakersfield and continued to shriek through the next three towns. My parents both suffered partial hearing loss. The sheer decibel level caused all the Bakersfield residents to stop in their tracks. Local lore has it that Buck Owens even wrote a song about “The Unending Scream.”

In my mind, all the lawn mowers, elevators, cuckoo clocks, disembodied cat eyes, stone towers, and Hamm’s beer displays were waiting along the side of that dusty road to attack me.

More than half a century later, my terror of even the word “Bakersfield” was finally alleviated when I reluctantly spent the first night of a ’cross-country trip there and was not assaulted by a marauding bear statue.

Whew. One totally unreasonable terror that I can now check off the list!

Panic at the pump

I’m afraid of salad bars and gas stations.

There. I’ve said it.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a “Dear Abby” column that consisted of three letters entirely about people’s fears and neuroses. One letter, in particular, broke my heart. It came from a poor soul in Montana who described being terrified of driving on interstates and said that the phobia was preventing him or her from going places and doing things. The person believed that no one else in the world had such a fear.

But I can relate. When I first learned to drive, I was afraid of merging. Once I made it onto a freeway I was fine, but the act of merging was nearly incapacitating for me. Shortly after I got my license in San Jose, I was driving with my friend Carolyn to the movies in my 1971 Toyota Corolla. Our younger sisters were in the back seat. As my sister Janine reminds me, we were on the freeway on-ramp when I freaked out and stopped cold, on the ramp, screaming that I was too terrified to merge. Carolyn had to leap out, race around, jump into the driver’s seat, and get us to the theater. There must have been some very patient drivers behind us.

I’ve conquered that fear, thankfully, but it has been replaced by a raft of others.

The common denominator of my phobias seems to be a general terror of being tasked with figuring out how to do something new. What are the rules? Will my impracticality prevent me from following the simplest of directions? Will my fear of embarrassing myself paralyze me?

About 20 years ago, there was a salad bar on 2nd Street south of Market, near my workplace. This was long before the techie migration to the City – long before the emergence of artisanal brewpubs featuring hand-massaged beef and French fries made with specialized potatoes grown only in the Kennebec region of Maine. No, the whole restaurant was just a salad bar, full of fresh and delicious items that ranged from healthy vegetables to caloric pasta salads. As much as I loved that place, though (primarily for the enormous fried-in-butter croutons), I was filled with dread every time I ventured inside. There were so many ways to mess up. In the first place, I was never sure about the etiquette. I zoomed around the salad counter at a pretty quick clip, but there were many customers who lingered over every item. They would debate for what seemed an eternity about what kind of sprout to get. And I never knew whether it was ethical to jump ahead of them and head for the pasta, so I suffered in silence. Then there were other issues. For example, the price of the food was based on the weight of the salad (which meant that my salads were always very, very expensive). But it also appeared that customers were entitled to free bread. How many slices were we allowed to take? More importantly, were we supposed to put the bread on top of the salad, which would greatly increase the weight? Or could the bread be carried separately? Similarly, were the little Saltine cracker packages free, or did we have to disclose them? And what about the soup? How did people carry that back to the office? (I ended up never getting soup; it was way too stressful to think about it.)

You get the picture.

I don’t know whether there are salad bars like that around anymore, so I no longer have to worry myself to death over that particular scenario. But one fear that will affect me until I no longer drive a car is my abject terror of gas stations.

I believe the underlying principle is the same: I’m worried that I won’t be able to figure out the “procedures.” Nowadays it seems that there is often an enormous set of complex instructions greeting you at the pump. Does the station take cash, regular credit cards, oil company credit cards, or some combination thereof? Do I have to wander inside and pay first, or can I pay right at the pump? If I have to go inside, how do I tell them which car belongs to me? Do I leave my card with them and then have to retrieve it later? And how does the pump itself work? Are there handles I have to position a certain way before the gas comes out? Do I have to hold the nozzle the whole time, or is there a little lever I can flip so the gas flows on its own? Do I have to wait for the pump to tell me to “remove credit card quickly,” and if so, do I really need to yank it out violently, or can I just remove it at whatever pace I prefer? And God forbid I need to put air in the tires. Do I have to relentlessly stuff quarters into the air machine while trying to inflate four tires? Or is the use of the air free for customers, in which case do I go inside and tell them that I just paid for a tank of gas? If so, how will they know I’m not lying? (And by the way, do other people find it really hard to stretch that air hose all the way around the car to the tires on the opposite side? I feel like I have to muster up herculean strength to do that, and then I’m always afraid the hose will snap out my hands, whip across the car, break all the windows, and tear up the paint. Plus the whole process takes forever, because I always seem to let out more air than I put in.)

My solution to this problem, my friends, is that for decades I have gone to one gas station, and one only. In the entire world. It is the Chevron station at the corner of 19th Avenue and Ortega Street in San Francisco. I have been a customer of this one and only gas station for 25 years. And I know all the procedures.

One might wonder how I have managed to get gas at only this station for most of my life; I mean, I’ve traveled by car through all 50 states except Alaska and Florida. Well, when we need fuel and we’re in another city or state, Julie gets the gas. It’s that simple. Our road trip to Kentucky? Yep, she fills up every time. Inclement weather? Julie has to be the one to brave the elements. There’s no sense in risking my having a nervous breakdown over a tank of gas.

Then one day it happened. Julie and I were driving by the 19th/Ortega station when, as she describes it, I actually gasped, screamed “No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!” and threw myself against the passenger window, my face and hands plastered against the glass, my mouth open in shock and horror. I had just seen some barricades and a sign that the station was closed for renovation. I never could have imagined such a thing. Poor Julie had to put all the gas in our car for the two years it took for my beloved Chevron station to open back up again.

I don’t know why it freaks me out so much to deal with the unknown, or with change of any sort. We learned recently, for instance, that Julie has to go on a business trip to Denver the day I arrive home from my train trip next month (if this *&^%$# chronic vertigo even allows me to go). So she can’t pick me up when I arrive in Emeryville as we had planned. When I heard that truly devastating news, I panicked and could hardly sleep that night. I mean, I can change my ticket so that an Amtrak bus brings me from Emeryville into San Francisco. “But then what?” I cried plaintively. “How will I get home? I can’t get on a Muni bus with multiple suitcases at rush hour! I’ll be all alone on the Embarcadero and have to sleep on the streets!” Julie very calmly asked whether I had perhaps heard of something called a taxi. Oh.

I’m so grateful that Julie understands my phobias and does not laugh (outwardly) at them or force me to confront my phobias if they are only negligibly inconvenient for her. She knows that I have powered through my fear of flying many times over the years because we were visiting her family. But the gas station aversion doesn’t really bother her. Thank goodness I’m not dating anymore: “Hi. Before we go out, let me show you a list of all my neuroses. I’ve typed them out on this 10-foot scroll. Plus I have toe fungus.”

I wish I could tell the poor sweet Montana interstate-phobic person that he or she is most definitely not alone. I believe that all of us have fears of some kind (except maybe Sully Sullenberger). There are the standard phobias, and then there are other terrors that we’ve developed over the years for one reason or another. And we can’t necessarily get over them very easily. As my sister says, “There’s no applying logic to an illogical fear.”

Isolated fears also don’t mean that we are weak. We can be brave in many respects and anxious in others. I had a friend ask me why I wasn’t afraid of traveling alone across the country. That has never occurred to me. Some people fear surgery or anesthesia, but I’ve never been a bit nervous about going under the knife. If you want to operate on me, have at it! But don’t ask me to summon a taxi.

I just read a funny little book by Nora Ephron called I Feel Bad About My Neck. She says, “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.” It’s always a good practice, I believe, to own our fears, our mistakes, and our shortcomings. Talk about them.

You are not alone, my friends. I promise you.

Shakin’ all over

No, that isn’t me in the photo. It happens to be my niece Tara. A couple of weeks ago, Tara threw me into a fit of hysterical choking laughter when she texted this picture completely out of the blue. The photo references one of my many mortifying personal stories, and it must have stuck with her, because she spontaneously saw fit to do a reenactment. So I thought I would re-tell the story. I’ve been writing some fairly serious blogs lately and I thought I’d lighten things up this week, in keeping with my vow to periodically post little vignettes that capture the inane, embarrassing, and/or idiotic things I’ve done in the past.

(See, for example, “Broken windows and empty hallways.”)

It all started at 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 1989. Northern Californians remember that day well. The Giants were about to start the third game of their first World Series in 27 years. They had lost the first two games, but of course there was still abundant hope circulating in the heart of Paula Bocciardi. I was working in the Civic Center and was desperate, of course, to get home for the start of the game. So, like the devoted but precise employee I was, I SHOT out the door at the stroke of 5:00 p.m. as if there were a rocket strapped to my back.

My preferred mode of transportation at the time was my cherished “hog.” It was a red-and-white Honda C70 Passport motorcycle. Okay, it was only 70cc and its top speed was 44 miles an hour, but for the City it was perfect. A few people had dared to call it a “scooter” or, even worse, a “moped,” but I would quickly put those people in their place. First of all, you needed a motorcycle license to ride that bike. Second, the tires were motorcycle-sized so you had to lean into curves as you would on a real chopper. Finally, it had actual gears that you had to shift. I felt studly riding that thing, even though, to be honest, if it fell over I could pick it up with one hand.

So I hit that throttle and zoomed down Larkin Street, heading towards Geary to get home, when suddenly my bike was thrown into the next lane. And I mean thrown like kindling in a cyclone. I had just gotten a new tire, so I instantly assumed that the mechanic had done something terribly wrong. I hollered every expletive I knew into my helmet. Thankfully, I was still upright when I came to a stop. And it was then that I noticed that the ground was rolling, a burgeoning cloud of dust was filling the air, and people were streaming out onto the street. The air got thicker and browner, the traffic lights suddenly went out, and everyone was yelling. I finally figured it out. EARTHQUAKE.

It took me forever to get home, stopping at every intersection in the City because the lights were out. When I pulled up to my apartment building, one of the other tenants was standing outside. “Did you feel it?” he asked. I explained that I had been on my bike and hadn’t really understood what was happening at the moment it hit. To this day, I remember his exact response: “It’s a good thing you weren’t here in the apartment building,” he said, “because you would have lost your lunch.”

There really wasn’t much destruction in my apartment at all. My beloved 19-inch television, perched on top of a trunk, had been shaken off and onto the ground, and a few things on shelves had fallen and broken, but overall everything was okay.

My workplace was closed immediately after the quake because of structural damage, so I headed up to spend a few days with my parents in Clearlake, away from the aftershocks. All in all, then, I was fairly sheltered from experiencing the true drama of that devastating quake.

When I returned to my apartment on Friday night, I settled in to relax and watch television. Channel-surfing, I landed first upon a local news station that was running a montage of never-before-seen footage taken during the temblor from various video cameras around northern California. I started to absorb the horror of what I was seeing: the terrible shaking, the merchandise falling and shelves crashing onto the floors of local businesses, a panicked bartender racing out from behind a bar to escape shattering glass, customers screaming, a freeway collapsed.

Suddenly, I was petrified. It was three days after the event, everyone else was calming down and starting the work of healing, and I became paralyzed with fear. I concluded that there was going to be an imminent aftershock that would be stronger than the initial tremor on Tuesday, and that we were all destined to perish. It was terror delayed, but it was the kind of terror a child experiences when he knows that, the instant he closes his eyes at night, a monster will leap out of the closet.

I needed to take action to ensure my safety. That action, I concluded, was to place a motorcycle helmet on the bed next to me before I went to sleep. That would save my life.

For some reason I didn’t choose my black helmet that made me look like Darth Vader in tennis shoes. In a cool way. At the time, I had a passenger helmet that was a god-awful yellow hue, with no face guard or chin strap, and that’s the one I laid carefully next to my pillow that night.

Well, wouldn’t you know, I was slumbering peacefully when all of a sudden the most clamorous racket arose in my apartment. Wham! Clang! Bang bang bang! It was like John Henry hitting a piece of iron with his mighty hammer. Bang bang bang bang bang! My eyes flew open and the bed was shaking violently and I knew exactly what was happening.

“IT’S THE BIG ONE!!” I shrieked.

I snatched that helmet, crammed it on my head, and raced for the doorway, bracing my arms and legs against the jamb and preparing myself for the inevitable crumbling of the walls.

My doorway faced into the living room, and when I could finally focus, I noticed that my big heavy flower pot, suspended from the ceiling by a long macramé hanger, wasn’t moving. Not swaying a bit. In fact, nothing was moving. Nothing at all.

Hmm.

It seems that, since the power had gone out three days before, the automatic timers that worked the building heating system had been out of whack. The heat was now coming on in the middle of the night. And every apartment had the old-fashioned metal baseboard steam heaters that sound like hammers when water first starts to flow through them. So it was the radiators that were clanking.

And it was my pounding heart that had set the bed moving.

There I was, then, adorned in that yellow beehive of a helmet, pressed in fear against the doorway. I was facing out towards the street, and when I looked out my huge living room window, I saw two passers-by staring up at me.

Did I mention that I was naked?

Broken windows and empty hallways

Today’s post will be the first in a sporadic series of short anecdotes detailing some of the myriad clueless and/or humiliating things I’ve done over the years. If you are a family member or friend who goes back a long time with me, you’ve probably heard these stories ad nauseam, so just hit the delete key and go on with your life.

The incident in question happened on May 19, 1985. I know the exact date because I kept a diary every day of my life from 1970 to 1987. I filled every blank line in those diaries with two lines of printing so microscopic that only eagles can read it without a magnifying glass. So we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of words that I set down during that period. Anyone with questions about events that occurred during that time frame, or even about what they said to me during those years, should feel free to ask me for a full recounting.

I had just moved into a one-bedroom apartment on Lake Street in San Francisco. My housemate Keith and I had been essentially kicked out of our flat on Pine Street by unscrupulous new landlords who falsely claimed they were moving into the building (which enabled them to skirt the rent-control laws) and then immediately doubled our rent. We couldn’t afford the astronomical monthly increase, so we were forced to leave.

In retrospect, it was a great move. I had just spent the bleakest period of my life in a place that was as dark, cold, and dank as my emotional state. It was the bottom flat of a three-flat Victorian. At high noon, it was pitch black. On a sunny day, we could see our breath indoors. And it was so damp inside that we actually had – I kid you not – mushrooms growing out of our bathroom tiles.

The place I found on Lake Street looked like the absolute blight of the block from the outside. Amidst the beautiful houses that line that street, my building looked like an aging pinkish ill-proportioned flat-nosed trapezoid or rhombus or one of those odd shapes we all learned about in geometry class. I’ll include a picture and maybe someone can tell me what on earth it is and why anyone would ever have built the thing.

Inside, however, it was actually quite darling. The rooms were big, bright, and airy; the kitchen was both vintage-cute and functional; and it felt like a brand-new start. Indeed, that place represented the first light of day to me. I wish I could have told my younger self, and could impress upon every young person today, that things that threaten to rip you in pieces – that make you feel like you’re going to “walk down the street and fly apart,” as my friend Ellen used to say – will usually align your compass towards a better direction. The thing that binds you involuntarily will ultimately free you. It just might take awhile.

The only flaw in my delightful new apartment was that one of the living room windows was stuck open. The window was an old-fashioned crank-style, and although I struggled mightily to close it, it would not even begin to budge. And it was frigid in that apartment. People who have never lived in San Francisco may be unaware that a “warm San Francisco night” is a rarity. (I don’t know what Eric Burdon was ingesting when he wrote that song.) Summer days in SF can be foggy, drizzly, and even bone-chilling, and the nights can be worse. I was freezing in that place, and unfortunately the heating system did nothing to counteract the temperature. The apartment had baseboard radiator heaters that were controlled by building management on a timer. They came on for only a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the evening, and although that ordinarily was okay, the bitter wind coming in off the Bay and right through my open window almost killed me.

I made a couple of phone calls to the realty company handling my apartment, but those calls were not returned. My blood was starting to boil (as much as it could, in that refrigerator of an apartment), and on the evening of May 19 I was heading out the door, fleeing the apartment to have dinner at Ellen’s house. I was looking forward to being in a toasty home and eating a warm meal and just, for God’s sakes, warming up!

Well, as I descended the stairs I saw an open apartment door, with a man in the usually-deserted hallway collecting money from the tenant inside. And his accent exactly matched the indeterminate accent that I heard the building manager speak when I had initially rented the place. Oh, hallelujah, it was the landlord!

“Excuse me, are you the landlord?” I interrupted him. He gave me a quizzical nod. “Well, my window won’t close, and I thought maybe you could come up and look at it. I’m Paula, the new tenant in #7. Please just come and look at the window, OK?” I don’t believe I sounded angry or threatening; I was just pleading plaintively, like a character in Les Misérables.

It worked. He dutifully followed me up to my apartment, and I showed him the window, recounting in strict detail my unreturned phone calls and the efforts I had made to close that (*&^%$! window. He tried his own hand at forcing it shut, but it would not yield. “It looks like the hinge is rusty and won’t bend,” he said. “I think that what you need to do is get a can of WD40 and see if that works to clean it.”

Well, that annoyed me. Typical landlord, I thought. Too miserly to call in a real repair person to do the job right or, heaven forbid, replace the hinge.

“All right, I’ll clean it,” I said, with some irritation, “but if it still doesn’t work, you’re going to hear from me again, be-lieve-you-me.” I made an internal vow to be assertive, for once in my life, and not let him get away with shirking his responsibility.

“OK,” he said. I glared at him.

“I’d like to help you, lady,” he continued, backing slowly out the door, “but I have three more pizzas to deliver.”

The wood is tired and the wood is old

I have spent many exhausting and frustrating years recommending to my nieces and nephew, as they entered college, that they sign up for a course in Entomology. That’s right – bugs. I’ve emphasized strongly and repeatedly that the course would prove to be a transformative experience. For me, it actually provided confirmation of the existence of God. I am completely serious.

But no one ever listened to my advice, no one ever took the course, and to this day I continue to be appalled.

So I am now going to take up another cause in hopes that one person – just one! – among my legions of readers will adopt my counsel. Here it is: Watch the “CBS Sunday Morning” show.

This charming TV show was recommended to me by my friend Gigi, who shares with me the desire to shut out the disturbing elements in life and ferret out the poignant, the generous, the beautiful, the artful, and the heroic. The 90-minute program, hosted by the delightful Charles Osgood, features beautifully written and filmed vignettes about regular people, some of whom have done extraordinary things in very simple ways. The stories are folksy, sweet, emotional, informative, and always eminently respectful of their subjects, no matter how eccentric.

My all-time favorite piece on “CBS Sunday Morning” was about 10-year-old twin boys whose love of the game Battleship turned into a trip to the aircraft carrier Yorktown in South Carolina, which resulted in their learning about a still-living World War II sailor with whom they became instantly enamored. Even talking about the man made them burst out crying. “We want to hear what his voice sounded like, we want to touch him, we want to know him a lot more,” one of them said through his tears. The story is about how their surprise meeting with the 90-year-old sailor changed all of their lives. I blubbered through the whole thing.

[You can watch the story at the link below. If you can get through the short video without crying, please leave a “comment” to that effect and I will immediately declare you to be a hardhearted fussbudget.]

http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/students-experience-living-history-on-retired-aircraft-carrier/

I was catching up on my “Sunday Morning” shows last week when I was particularly captivated by a story about fossilized wood that is pilfered every year from the Petrified Forest in Arizona’s stunning Painted Desert. This was a familiar subject to me because in 2001 I was conscripted to actually return a piece of petrified wood to that same area.

In the fall of that year, I decided to drag Julie on a month-long road trip down nearly the entire length of Route 66. The whole thing came about because I had fallen obsessively in love with the new, retro-looking Thunderbirds that had just been released, and I was determined to get one. Frustrated with the prohibitively long waiting lists and outrageous dealer markups in California, I had the brilliant idea to call some dealers in Kentucky. Kentucky is Julie’s native state, and we were out there often to visit her family anyway. It turned out that at a dealership in Versailles (pronounced “Ver-SAILS” in Kentucky), lo and behold there was no markup and no waiting list. So we put in our order, and I came up with the plan to drive the car back home to California on Route 66. We would take our time, spending a few weeks cruising appreciatively down the historic road that had been the conduit for so many Americans searching for better lives.

Not all that many decades ago, Route 66 (or “The Mother Road”) was the main travel route for people crossing the country. It became official in 1926 when, with the automobile establishing itself in the minds of Americans as their ticket to freedom and prosperity, the U.S. government decided to create a comprehensive network of interstate highways. As Bobby Troup wrote in his famous song, it “winds from Chicago to L.A” and covers 2,451 miles, eight states, and three time zones. It begins in Illinois, drops down into the verdant state of Missouri, clips a corner of the Kansas plains, plows through the Oklahoma dust, then heads straight west out of Oklahoma City through the Texas panhandle, over the long stretches of desert through New Mexico and Arizona, and into California at around Barstow, where it snakes its way through the orange groves of southern California until it ends at the Santa Monica pier.

Route 66 was the great trail that brought people west. Black Americans fled the nightmarish Jim Crow south; poverty-stricken Dust Bowl families set out to find work on California’s farms; and after World War II young soldiers and their wives, bolstered by the GI Bill and national optimism, packed up their infant boomers and went looking for housing and employment. In the more prosperous years that followed, people with cars and leisure time and a decent income took family vacations to see more of what this country had to offer than they could find in their hometowns.

What a great time it was for travelers back then. They could start their day with a heap of flapjacks, eggs, bacon, and hash browns for about a buck, washed down with a piping hot mug of coffee brought to their table by a smiling diner waitress. Then they would spend the day on the road, stopping in each small town to buy local crafts or let their kids play on the kitschy amusements set up as lures in front of each store. Take your photo next to a giant Paul Bunyan statue! Ride on a big blue cement whale! See the inside of a totem pole! At the end of the day, hungry and tired, they would pull into a truck stop and fill their stomachs with flame-cooked burgers, fried chicken, and milkshakes or ice-cold Coca-Colas, followed by enormous slabs of berry pie heaped with fresh whipped cream. Another hour or two of driving straight west into some of the most glorious sunsets they’d ever been lucky enough to see, and it was time to stop for some very sound sleep at one of the ubiquitous, neon-lit drive-up motor courts that had popped up along the road.

Unfortunately, the quaint, friendly cross-country stretch that was Route 66 suffered a terrible blow in the 1960s and 1970s, when the 42,000-mile national interstate highway system was built. Interstates 55, 44, 40, and 15 would essentially parallel Route 66 but bypass all of the small towns that had grown up along the route. Slowly, those towns withered and died as the “big slab” (as many called the interstate) promised travelers the ability to traverse great distances in far less time. Chain motels, chain restaurants, and chain gas stations replaced the colorful lodging and eateries along the route. People lost their livelihoods and moved away from their homes. In 1984, the last bit of Route 66 was replaced near Williams, Arizona. An era had ended.

Fortunately, some individuals, organizations, and state legislatures have stepped up in recent years, restoring old buildings and maintaining sections of the old road. Nostalgia-seekers and people with time on their hands are heading back down Route 66. There are parts of the road that are long gone, forcing travelers to hop on the freeway for miles at a time, especially in New Mexico and Arizona. But stretches of the old road do remain, and there are refurbished diners, gas stations, motels, and roadside attractions – not to mention museums – to be enjoyed. I highly recommend it. It’s almost as much fun as entomology.

Before we headed out on our own Mother Road adventure, my guitarist friend and bandmate Dina M. – a transplanted New Yorker – told us that she had purloined a piece of petrified wood from the Petrified Forest at least a decade earlier when she had moved out to California. In the Petrified Forest, it is absolutely illegal to remove anything because of the numerous ongoing scientific experiments that are conducted on the fossils there. Wood becomes petrified when mineral matter seeps into buried trees and, over the course of millions of years, eventually replaces all the organic matter, turning the wood into a fossilized stone. That wood/stone can reveal an entire geologic record about the passage of time.

So, consumed with guilt, Dina asked us to do her the favor of bringing the wood back to its home so she could be relieved of the crime and the emotional burden once and for all. We agreed, and we brought that little rock (it couldn’t have been more than 6 inches in diameter; we called it “Little Dino”) with us from California all the way to Kentucky and then back west as we meandered along the length of Route 66. It was 50 miles off the route and out of our way to go into the Petrified Forest, but well worth the detour – for Dina’s sake, for Little Dino’s sake, and also for our own amusement, edification, and overall sense of self-congratulation.

The petrified wood in this forest can be 225 million years old, and signs about the federal penalties attached to removing the wood were everywhere. Although we were bringing contraband into, not out of, the place, I remember sweating like a drug dealer when we passed through the entrance gate and had to undergo the ranger’s interrogation about what we had in the car. Then, once into the park, we could find only groups of large rocks that completely dwarfed Little Dino, and he was going to look supremely out of place. But we had no choice. Holding the contraband clandestinely in the inside of my jacket, I awkwardly tossed it a full 3 inches and it landed among its new boulder family, where I presume it lies to this day.

This whole caper is caught on film, thanks to Julie’s persistent cinematography. The link to the 4-minute clip is below:

https://youtu.be/oNa6kfUF6vc

For the “CBS Morning Show” story, the reporter met with a park ranger who displayed his collection of remorseful letters written by petrified wood thieves – many of them children. These people, like Dina, had carried guilt around with them for years, and their letters accompanied the pieces of wood they were finally returning. (You know, the postage on some of those boulders must have been astronomical!) As I watched, I began to get miffed. I thought that I should have been interviewed. After all, the show likes to feature people who do extraordinary things, but instead the story was showcasing the criminals who had taken petrified wood out of the park – not heroes like me who had gone out of their way, nearly 1,000 miles from home, just to bring back a 6-inch rock.

My attention was starting to drift when, at the end of the story, the reporter casually mentioned that the rocks that are sent back to the park are simply stored away because they cannot actually be put back. When I heard that, I snapped quickly to attention. The ranger explained that no rocks can be introduced back into the area because the scientists conducting their careful studies could inadvertently pick up something that had no reason to be there and the study results would all be totally botched.

Uh-oh. Oh, no. Now we’ve got to go baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!

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Monday Morning Rail

Category: Humor

Of Jews, Italians, and movie stars

What’s my sport?

Imperfect and tense

Turning a page

Smoke and mirrors

Identity crisis

Awkward!

Booth Phobia

Typos on trial

Yours sincerely, pruning away

A long, strange trip

Devil with the blue dress

The lonely neurotic

Tibby is king!

TIBBY CLUB OF AMERICA

The high cost of Slurpees

Paula’s poetry pastiche

Busted!

Oops!

Fug’s final feature

“Fishing First!”

A sloth’s guide to exercise

Screaming through Bakersfield

Panic at the pump

Shakin’ all over

Broken windows and empty hallways

The wood is tired and the wood is old

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