My Favorite Home Tours Part One

I like visiting homes that either through their creation or their occupancy have acquired some of the character of the person who lived there. You can learn a great deal about a person by their home, whether they are present in it or not. Since I love tours and my family operates on a home school schedule, I’ve been to numerous places in California where you can not only visit a person’s home, but walk around inside someone’s dream. In this first of a two-part blog I’ll give you two places along the California coast to check out.

Hearst Castle California State Park
http://www.hearstcastle.org/
On a beautiful hilltop that looks out to the sea beyond San Simeon, California newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst wanted to “upgrade” his family’s tent campsite into a comfortable vacation residence where he could entertain his famous and infamous friends in lavish style. What he ended up with was 90,080 square feet of eye-dazzling architecture that houses his museum’s worth of rare world art and fine collectibles. The California State Park’s Service has created a top-notch tourist attraction out of the estate. There’s a theater that shows a quality film about Hearst and his home, a huge gift shop, candy and pastry vendors, a cafeteria, and air conditioned busses with audio tours that take you up the hill to the estate which encompasses swimming pools, tennis courts, 96 bedrooms, 41 fireplaces, 61 baths, and 19 sitting rooms. Whether you like architecture, art, gardens, history, or interior decorating, you’ll find something awe-inspiring about Hearst Castle. And if all you’re interested in is the sensationalism, hedonism, and scandals of the rich and famous, well, there’s plenty of that, too.

I’ve been to Hearst Castle about four times now in my life and what I love about it is the humble story of Julia Morgan, the architect who started the project in 1919 and spent 28 years of her illustrious career supervising every aspect of the estate’s construction including the purchase of the Spanish antiquities, the Icelandic moss, and even the reindeer for the private zoo. Hearst paid for the castle, and he entertained in the castle, but the character of the castle is a blend between Hearst’s ambition and Morgan’s artistic vision. A San Francisco native, Julia Morgan was one of the first women to graduate from UC Berkeley with a degree in architecture. She was the first woman ever to go to Paris and gain a post-graduate degree in architecture. She has over 800 lovely architectural projects to her credit throughout California and Hawaii. She lived her talented life to an advanced age as a single, professional woman devoted to her extended family and to making the designs of buildings we live in both practical and aesthetically pleasing.

I’m not enough of a party person to have wanted to be one of Hearst’s guests at his dinner parties. But I would love to swim in the indoor pool, with its ultramarine blue gold-leaf tiles, all by myself. I’d also like to sneak up to the library and just sit in a window that looks onto the sea and read. I would have liked to go horseback riding under the riding arbor when the wisteria was in bloom and catch a glimpse of Julia Morgan directing the workman. She is someone I’d like to have split a sandwich and a cup of coffee with while sitting on one of the half-constructed walls during a construction break.

Nit Wit Ridge
881 Hillcrest Drive, Cambria CA
Michael & Stacey O’Malley (805) 927-2690

To go from taking a tour of Hearst Castle with all its glitz and glamour to a tour of Nit Wit Ridge is truly going from the sublime to the ridiculous, but seeing both sights of such extremes provides mental balance and honors the right of anyone to pursue their dreams. Nit Wit Ridge is only a short drive south of Hearst Castle along Highway 1 in the little folk artsy community of Cambria. You can GPS the address and drive by anytime, but to get in and actually walk around you need to call the O’Malley’s in advance and arrange for them to come out and give you a tour. The first time I tried to meet up with the O’Malley’s we missed connections. A few years later I tried again and was glad that I had persisted because I’ve never looked at a garbage heap the same way again.

Arthur Harold Beal lived in the “shadow” of Hearst Castle construction, but unlike the millionaire, he was the town’s garbage collector and junk hauler. He couldn’t believe the things people just tossed out that still had a lot of use in them and often a lot of artistic charm. So, der Tinkerpaw, as he was nicknamed, started creating a home for himself out of “found” materials. There’s a whole “found art” movement nowadays but in 1928 he was just considered a nitwit and the neighbors complained that he was bringing down property values. Beal ignored them and continued for 50 years to landscape his 2.5 hillside acres with 3 levels of terraced gardens, stone arches, and his small home all built out of cement and beer cans, abalone shells, broken tiles, car parts, TV antennas, and salvaged bathroom medicine cabinets. It’s the picture frames made out of old toilet seats that give a glimpse of the humor of this non-conformist. What I liked were the little found figurines, old dolls, china pieces or old salt & pepper shakers that are embedded in the mosaics of ocean glass and broken pottery.

Unfortunately, where Beal excelled in creativity, he lacked in people skills and he often had reputation-damaging run-ins with local government and the “Lookie Lou’s” while apparently being a great host to those he considered friends. After Beal died in 1992 there was pressure to tear the place down. Beal’s friends the O’Malley’s had to struggle to get Nit Wit Ridge declared a State Historic Landmark which does not carry with it the development money that comes with being a State Park but does insure that a bulldozer and wrecking ball don’t have their way with the property. The price for a tour of Nit Wit Ridge is much less than you’ll spend for a tour of Hearst Castle and there is no gift shop or modern bathroom facilities in any visitor’s center. Still, the forty-five minute tour did not leave nearly enough time to study and savor all the uniqueness going on in the place. Where Hearst had poured money into the construction of his home by an army of workmen, Beal had done the back-breaking work of pouring concrete all by himself.

Want to have a perfect tourist day? Take the Hearst Castle tour in the morning, have lunch at the State Park picnic area, then drive down to Cambria and hook up with the O’Malley’s. After a tour of Nit Wit Ridge you’ll have time to go down into Cambria and dine at Linn’s Bakery and Eatery (https://linnsofcalifornia.com/ or http://www.linnsfruitbin.com/) which is worth a trip to Cambria all on its own. We’ve never eaten anything there that wasn’t outstanding and what they do with an olallieberry is sheer artistry. Linn’s represents another form of the American Dream – a family-owned business that started out as an orchard, then a fruit stand, then a fine foods emporium and bakery, and after a fire in the 1990’s, a charming restaurant on a major thoroughfare of touristy Cambria. Be sure to save room for dessert! You’ll be able to reflect over the after-dinner coffee on a day full of inspiration.

Hounds of Heaven

People want believers in Jesus to provide them with some miraculous proof that Jesus, the Son of God, is real and alive. I think all genuine Jesus followers are the miraculous proof of life. It’s easy for Christians to forget that their lives serve as the medium for God’s message to mankind. It’s easy to become complacent about all the carefully orchestrated encounters that lead a person to glimpse a real Jesus for the first time. I do several interviews a year with people who tell me the story of their spiritual lives and how they came to believe in Jesus wholeheartedly rather than just intellectually. All their stories involve relationships with other people. Sometimes those relationships took place at churches, or Bible camps, or revivals but talk earnestly with a believer and you will discover a story of a lost sheep being herded to the safety of a shepherd’s arms by a special operations team of heavenly hounds.

Ever watch a border collie responding to the clicks and whistles of the farmer to move a herd of sheep from point A to point B? They make the sheep go where the farmer wants by every means available to a canine: physical presence, barks, and even growls. If the ewe is stubborn there might even need to be a nip here and there. From the sheep’s point of view it’s harassment but from the farmer’s point of view it’s about getting that sheep where it needs to be in order for it to thrive.

As a child, all I knew of what Christians believed was cobbled together from Christmas television specials and the “Davey and Goliath” children’s television shows on Sunday morning. I suppose that makes Goliath my first hound of heaven. I had a friend in High School that took me to a church production of Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat. Performing in that play was a future boyfriend whose mother would try to introduce me to Advent and saying table grace while holding hands. Years later when I joined Bible Study Fellowship I discovered that she had been a BSF leader at the time I knew her. These seemingly coincidental encounters were, for me, glimpses of the sheepdogs darting behind the rocks and moving me by avoidance down broad paths. But there is nothing random or coincidental about how God woos the people He has created. We just miss the method because we’re lost in our madness.

At college I met this guy who exuded peace and joy. When he smiled, his eyes became two little squinty lines and all you saw was the grin. I didn’t know it at the time, but I became the pet prayer project for him and his dormitory Bible study group. The guys told the girls’ Bible study downstairs about me. Over a two year period, try as I might, I could not shake these people. They were everywhere I went, and they were always happy to see me, like I was somehow special to them. They always offered to help me with my homework, or fix my bicycle, or carry something for me, or go fetch something for me. They would sidle up to me and start friendly conversations. They would stop by my dorm room just to let me know that if I ever needed anything, they were there for me. They had troubles and challenges and personality quirks like everybody else. What made them stand out was that they seemed genuinely hopeful. They moved through life lightly and dealt with things gracefully rather than like people weighed down with dread and bitterness. They creeped me out and fascinated me at the same time. I would tell myself I’d have nothing to do with them and suddenly find myself surrounded by them in the dining commons or the library.

Their ringleader, the smiley one, drove a tiny Civic Honda. Since he was the only car owner amongst the group, eight people would squeeze in to that Honda to get off campus for some fun. When they invited me to brunch on Sunday mornings I should have known the car would stop at church because “it was on the way.” Oh, look, the service is just starting, what a coincidence! I thought I was safe when they invited me out on a Friday night to the movies. We ended up at some warehouse showing of “The Jesus Film.” All the way home I’m sobbing uncontrollably while seven other people compressed into the car are serenely silent and tactfully passing me tissues.

My heavenly hounds’ persistence paid off. Two and a half years of Christ-inspired behavior on their part led me inexorably to my own relationship with Jesus who had given them His compassion towards me. Twenty-nine years later I’m still in touch with a few of those faithful sheepdogs who refused to let me wander off into my own willfulness. I married the Honda driver and our children give us squinty grins. But here’s to those who stalked and yipped and got the occasional kick in the chops for their troubles. I may not get to thank some of them this side of heaven but I am grateful that they surrounded me with prayer and came alongside to guide me with their friendship. And now the one they guided me to communicates His signals in His own subtle ways. It is time for this old dog to get back to work.

Old Lady in the Moonlight

Our German Shepherd/Collie mix, Lady, had seen fifteen Christmases and would not see another. She was down to one working tooth, nearly blind, completely deaf, arthritic, and incontinent. The incontinence had destroyed the wall-to-wall carpet in the living room before I had resorted to doggie diapers. I ripped up the carpet and laid down tile. Lady had the unfortunate tendency to cross the tile and end up splayed upon it like Bambi-on-the-ice, flat on her belly and unable to gain enough traction to stand up. She had lost her resonant German Shepherd “Woof” and could only wheeze “hooth.” Often at night she would hit that tile and end up going “hooth, hooth,” for a long time before someone woke up and came out to pull her back up into a standing position. If it took too long for her to be discovered, her circulation would be so bad that you would have to massage her legs and feet and sort of swing her legs back and forth until she could gain the ability to stand.

One night I awoke from a sound sleep hearing a muffled “hooth, hooth” through the wall. Lady was down and who knew how long she had been there! I flung back the covers and without taking even a moment to put on my glasses or step into slippers I ran down the hallway from the bedroom to the living room and grabbed the forty pound dog up in my arms. Twice I tried to align her four legs under her and get her to stand on her own but she’d start to slide back down. I was trying to massage circulation back into her legs but she started to gag like she was going to throw up and I quickly decided we’d deal with that outside. Awkwardly, with coughing collie in my arms, I got the side door open and was mincing painfully across the patio towards the lawn. Out in the backyard it was California “nippy” cold but not quite freezing. There was a full moon out that December evening and I had a very furry dog keeping my torso warm as I softly swayed with her to keep her legs moving.

Why was I doing this? Buying the delicatessen dog food that she could gum rather than chew, putting her food on a stand so she didn’t have to bend down for it, and changing doggie diapers throughout the day? Because I believe God entrusted Adam, and by extension humanity, with the stewardship of the garden and its inhabitants. When you agree to adopt a dog into your family you commit to caring for it, for better or worse, for as long as there is quality of life. I guess I was doing it because we all grow old and deserve to be remembered for who we were in the prime of life, not necessarily at the tail end. I was doing it because Lady could still wag her tail when I scratched behind her ears.

In her youth, Lady had been a dog of extraordinary talents. We’d been told when we adopted her that she was a “jumper” – we just didn’t appreciate what that meant. We did the first time she launched herself over a six foot wooden fence in pursuit of a cat that had wandered into our yard. The kennel where we boarded her for vacations developed quite a file on Lady D. The first time we left her they tried putting her in a regular kennel and shortly after we left she scaled the six foot chain link fence. After a lovely chase from Lady’s perspective, they put her in a kennel with a roof. She watched her handlers come in and out a few times, and figured out how to flip the kennel latch herself. But in order to create a distraction for her getaway, she also flipped all the other kennel latches, releasing all the inmates in cellblock B. When they finally found her several acres away they put her in a kennel and wired shut her door. It took her awhile but she unwound the wire with her teeth and had another fun romp with the kennel owners. They admitted she was always a friendly and cooperative dog once she was caught.

Even with the gray in her muzzle and the cloudiness in her brown eyes, she was still a beautiful dog. She wasn’t one to gulp her food and when she lay down she’d cross her paws in a lady-like way. People would stop us as we were on our “walkies” to comment what a beautiful dog she was. She walked on a leash beautifully, would let you shake her paw, and she could sit, lie down and play dead on command. Her “stay” and “come” however, was based on whether she found obeying “worth her while.” She could charm a toddler out of a cookie without making a sound. I once found a fresh loaf of baked bread that I had set out on the counter to cool completely hollowed out behind the couch. Sometimes, if I forgot my sunglasses or a grocery coupon and dashed back into the house from the car, I’d find her standing on her hind legs at the kitchen counter, “pilfering” scraps off the not-yet-washed dishes. She’d look at me with some chagrin, as if to say, “Oh, I thought you’d gone already,” then slowly sink back down to all fours and saunter out of the kitchen.

For all her dainty airs, like a Southern heroine from a Tennessee Williams play, Lady had a neurotic, broken side to her personality, brought on by puppyhood trauma. Explosive noises – be it popping balloons, fireworks, gunfire, a car backfire, or thunder – transformed her from Lady Dog to Lunatic Dog. We learned we had to tranquilize her for 4th of July and New Year’s Eve or have 40 pounds of quaking, hysterical canine trying to climb into our armpits or ripping doorframes apart. She once leapt off the balcony of a two-story cabin in Lake Tahoe we were renting for 4th of July. We could only assume fireworks had been set off in the neighborhood but how she made the leap with only a slight limp to show for it we could never be sure. We once had left her contentedly in our mini-van, windows cracked, on a cold winter’s day while we had lunch at an old west sightseeing village. We enjoyed the fake gunfight between the heroes and the bandits until we got back to the parking lot and found that Lady had gone “Hulk, smash!” on the interior of the Dodge. The door whistled and leaked without its weather stripping ever after and once a repair guy questioned me whether those were blood stains on the handles of all the windows. I just told him he was better off not knowing.

Most endearing of Lady’s attributes was the way she took shepherding the children as a sacred duty. If my husband or I started to play with the children in any sort of wrestling way she’d stand and bark at us as if to say, “Enough of that rough house behavior, you behave yourselves!” She could be intimidating if she thought it was necessary, but more often she’d simply come and sit down beside your knees and put her long muzzle across them, patiently waiting for a walk, or a treat.

I was musing about that, staring ahead at the moon halfway up in the sky when I noticed Lady and I were casting a dark shadow that stretched ahead of us when it should have been behind us. I suddenly realized what the “flup-flup-flup” noise that had been steadily growing louder had to be. The shadow shrank towards me as the police helicopter skimming over my neighborhood climbed over my head. I hoped they were not videotaping their inspection of the neighborhoods. I’d hate to see the headlines, “Naked Woman Dances with Wolf,” or “Canine Cultist Moons the Moon.” I suppose they have seen stranger things and had more notorious criminals to apprehend. Once the helicopter was safely out of sight, I put down my fur coat and after a few stiff steps, she did her backyard business and then smelled her way back to me. She wagged her tail as I scratched behind her ear as if to say, “So why are we out here in the cold?”

The Funkiest Wedding

My boyfriend and I both believed that the only reason to wed was because you could love God and serve Him better together than you could apart. After a mini-soap-opera of a five-year courtship in which both sides of the family did not think we were good enough to graft into their branch of the family tree we were convinced it was God’s will that we marry. The families grudgingly resigned themselves to the fact that we were going to do this despite their disapproval. We set a date that gave us three months to pull a wedding together on what the bride and groom had in their savings and enlisted the help of our close friends. I delegated music, decorations, and key aspects of the ceremony to various people and concentrated on things that only I could do like fainting at my blood test for the marriage license.

Despite what the bride beautiful magazines tell you, a wedding ceremony is not about what the bride wants or even about having a “perfect day” of memories. A wedding is about taking two families of strangers and making them into one strange family. My beloved and I could have gone on a mountain top and said our vows before God and the arrangement would have been binding for us because we believe God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. But we felt we had to have a wedding ceremony witnessed by our relatives so there could be no more suggestions that we try “dating somebody else.”

The difficulty was finding a neutral territory in which to have the ceremony. Our college church had met in the YMCA and our pastor wasn’t available for a month surrounding our wedding date. My mother-in-law’s church wouldn’t marry us because I was not Catholic. My family’s Methodism was the kind that didn’t have a home church. So we settled on an outdoor wedding in the back yard of my imminent in-laws. They obtained a little trellis arch and decorated it with silk flowers. My future father-in-law offered to make arrangements to have a new, young pastor from his church perform the ceremony. I had never been to his church – it had a really long name that ended with the word “wonders” – but I was relieved to have one less thing on my to do list.

It is only in the last century that we have grown dependent on weddings to economically sustain caterers, bakers, florists, confectioners, tuxedo rentals, bridal boutiques, and wedding consultants. I found out recently that it is considered bad luck to make your own wedding dress. I had sewn my share of nightgowns and for $50 of white satin and lace, I was able to sew my own wedding dress. I’ll admit, it looked somewhat like a nightgown, but at least there were no complicated fittings and my maid-of-honor could hand sew the hem as we drove to Grover City (later renamed Grover Beach). I bought a nice pair of high-heeled dance sandals. My mother had a silk flowered headdress made for me and since brides in other countries have had to wear far worse, I figured I could get through the ceremony without it toppling off my head. The groom and the best man would wear dark slacks and shoes and traditional Filipino wedding shirts made by the mother-of-the-groom.

Initially, I was just going to have cake and punch for the reception, but my future mother-in-law refused to have a “white people’s” reception for her only son. She and the aunties told me they would cook some decent Filipino food like lumpia, chicken adobo, and pansit, so “at least people could eat” and when word of this leaked out my side of the family volunteered to bring meat pasties and potluck salads. Since I like “naked” Angel Food cake with fresh strawberries, the maid of honor and I baked about six of them and chopped up the berries the night before.

By the morning of August 6, 1983, it had been discovered that the best man had forgotten his dress shoes and had only ratty sneakers to wear. I suggested he go barefoot since the whole thing would take place on the grass in the backyard. My friend in charge of decorations had strung white and pink crepe paper over every part of the patio, clothesline, and shrubbery she could reach. In the coastal air the crepe paper was already beginning to stretch so the patio looked like it had been TP’ed by pranksters. My friend had been drinking cola since breakfast and was looking a bit jittery so I told her she had achieved modern art without a government grant. I later found out she tied three dozen aluminum soda cans to our getaway truck. She also drew hearts in shaving crème over the vehicle which, because it sat out in the sun all afternoon, ate into the paint job so that a heart could be seen on the side of that truck for the next 17 years we owned it.

As we approached the time for getting dressed for the ceremony, my fiancé pulled me aside privately and said, “If you have any doubts about marrying me, this is your chicken exit. You can call it off right now. But if you vow to be my wife, and take me for your husband, it’s for life because divorce will not be an option. We may be happy or we may be miserable, but we will be together until we die.” I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something to the effect of “let’s do this.”

I was trying to pull together my whole hair and dress ensemble in my parents’ motorhome when my maid-of-honor came in and said soothingly, “We’ve had a slight miscommunication but things are going to be JUST FINE.” Turns out the young pastor my father-in-law had asked to perform the wedding had thought he was being invited to attend a wedding. I had thought it odd that there was no wedding rehearsal scheduled. Poor guy showed up just when the ceremony should have started only to be greeted by two really annoyed fathers. Fortunately, he lived a few blocks away so he raced home and got his “wedding gear” and raced back to do what the state of California had invested him with the power to do.

I told my musician friends, who often played at coffee houses in our college town, to choose something they knew we would like. I believe our processional was “When I’m Sixty-Four” by the Beatles and our recessional was “Crocodile Rock” by Elton John. Our maid-of-honor was the loveliest thing at the wedding in a rose gown she had chosen. She has a habit of giggling when she’s nervous. The audience kept wondering what joke they were missing as she walked up to her place. Our best man is very tall and very sentimental and as he took his place, there was much questioning among the relatives as to the significance of having the best man go barefoot. The groom was trying to look dignified while giving our names to the pastor. I was concentrating on not losing my headdress of flowers while gripping onto my father’s arm as my high heels snagged on the brick walkway and sunk into the lawn.

I made it to my beloved’s side, was given away by my father, and faced the pastor completely unsure of what would happen next. He threw back his head and flung his hands to the sky and cried out in a booming southern accent, “Praise God, Brothers and Sisters, for the GLORIOUS day HE has made and the bringing together of these two young people in that SACRED and HOLY institution of marriage, AMEN and HALLELUJAH.” I looked at my betrothed and he looked at me and we smiled. God had provided the perfect pastor who would make both sides of the family equally uncomfortable.

We loved everything the pastor had to say except for the fact that he kept getting my name wrong. My husband not only married Sandra Sue that day but Sharon, Susan, and Sally. This sent the maid of honor into suppressed fits of giggles. The best man began to weep and sniffle as large tears dropped off the end of his nose. My groom and I had our own distraction in the form of a fly that thought we looked good enough to eat. I made an effort to not swallow it as I was saying my part and at one point I wanted to reach out and smack it off my man’s mustache but decided the audience wasn’t going to understand a loving slap’s role in the ceremony anymore than they were following the preacher’s southern drawl.

Vows were vowed, rings exchanged, and we were pronounced man and wife. The traditional family photographs were taken. My family made a point of cutting off the best man’s bare feet in the photos they took. My in-laws made a point of including his feet but cutting off the best man’s head in every photo they took of the wedding party. One of our friends had made a lovely mix of wedding music that he played for our reception as both sides of the family endured the afternoon heat on their own sides of the patio and visited their own buffet tables of food. I was particularly proud of the fathers, who broke ranks and went to the opposite sides to fill their plates. My father picked up a piece of lumpia and stared at it. My father-in-law picked up a meat pasty and stared at it. Then they both took a bite and smiled at each other with recognition. Chopped meat and vegetables in a pastry – this they could appreciate!

My brother had been kind enough to play some of his bluegrass music for the reception and now with a piece of cake he came to sit beside me. My husband’s family was on one side of the patio, muttering. My family was huddled on the other side, murmuring. My brother said gently, “You were a flower girl at my first wedding so you remember how perfect it was. The church, the dress, the flowers, the ice sculpture at the reception – all just the way they were supposed to be. But ten years later the marriage failed. Based on what you’ve gone through today, you two must really love each other and I’m thinking your marriage will succeed.” I was too numb at the time to remember if I had a response, but I’ve often thought since about marital success being inversely proportional to the size of the wedding ice sculpture.

Our musicians were getting ready to leave and one of them came up to us with congratulatory hugs and said appreciatively, “I’ve done a lot of weddings but THIS was the FUNKIEST wedding I’ve ever seen.” Twenty-seven years and many weddings later I can say with confidence that mine was the funkiest wedding I have ever seen. But for all the quirks and mishaps of the wedding, the marriage has been glorious, delightful, and blessed. A wedding is just a day, a ceremony, a life-marker that announces, “from here on out, two lives become one.” It’s the marriage and the legacy it creates that matters in the grand scheme of life.

Alma

“I’ll go get Alma ready to receive a visitor,” the orderly said and left me in the hallway of the assisted living center for seniors. Looking around at the various old people inexplicably left in the hallway propped up in their walkers or parked in their wheelchairs I knew, as most of them did, that this wasn’t a center for living but rather one for dying. I was thirty years old, and nine months into a healthy pregnancy that had made my waist-length hair flourish into a shampoo-commercial mane of shiny locks. I stood there, the poster child for fecundity, listening to the grunts and squeaks as the residents sidled closer and closer to me. This always happened. No one said anything, but these souls trapped in withered bodies would crowd around me and silently reach out and touch my belly and smile. The new life I was carrying attracted them like moths to a flame.

“Y’all leave the nice church lady alone now!” the orderly said, shooing old people away like they were overly affectionate cats. To me he said, “Alma’s glad you’re here, you just go on in.” Alma had been some sort of civil service employee, married and divorced, and now in her old age she had no family left and only a few friends. Years ago she had smoked a pack of cigarettes a day and now she was dying of lung cancer. She had rediscovered a faith in God she had known as a child and a friend of hers had asked the church to send somebody who could talk to her about “heavenly things.” I was the trained Stephen Minister that had been assigned as Alma’s care giver.

At our first meeting she asked me, “Do you smoke? Have you ever smoked?” I shook my head, taking in the numerous tubes and the gurgling oxygen tank that was keeping Alma alive. “Don’t you ever take a single puff. That’s the message of my life. If you care about your friends and family, you make sure they never smoke. You tell anybody with a lit cigarette about me. I know everybody dies. But this –“ and she paused both to gesture to her tank and to struggle for breath, “is a horrible . . . way to . . . die.”

I visited Alma once a week for months. In a typical church body the demand for counsel and visitations exceeds what a pastor can keep up with so the Stephen Ministry program was created to train lay members of the church to assist people through the changes in life that create crises. I’d cared for people who had been injured or were recovering from a surgery, I’d visited families with a new baby trying to sort out what life was life without sleep, and I’d been there for people who were grieving the loss of a spouse or a child. Alma was my first assignment in “walking someone home.” There wasn’t anything I could do to make breathing any easier for her. I was just there for her to have someone to talk with about what really matters in life. We talked about God, and faith, and heaven. We talked about hopes and regrets. As the months passed, though, we seemed to talk more and more about the baby.

As Alma’s body trembled as she fought for oxygen between sentences, she would plot how I could bring the baby to see her. She didn’t want me to bring the baby “into a place like this.” But there was a little courtyard outside her room and she would get the orderly to unlock the gate. I could bring the baby up to the window. She would get the attendants to roll her bed up to the glass. We talked about baby names and Lamaze class and I showed her things that were going into the baby’s nursery. Our visits grew shorter because Alma would grow too fatigued to talk.

I went into labor on a Sunday night and by Monday morning I had delivered at the birthing center. My daughter was 7 pounds, 21 inches and “perfect” according to every criteria of infancy. I, however, had complications with the delivery and had it been a century or two earlier I would have probably died. Since it was 1990, I simply had to have outpatient surgery. It meant that my little family did not get home until mid-day Tuesday. My best friend was there to make sure mother and child were resting comfortably and when the doorbell rang she signed for the delivery. It was a beautiful flower and balloon arrangement in a little bassinet vase. I was surprised when the card said it was from Alma. How did she know the baby had been born? I had a phone number Alma had told me to call when the baby was born but up until now I had not had the chance. I did so to thank her for the flowers but was only able to leave a message on a machine.

The next day I got a call from Alma’s friend who had first referred her to our church. Because my husband had called the church to announce our daughter’s birth, the friend had found out I had delivered. Alma had passed away sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning but she had left money and instructions with her friend that when my baby was born, a gift would be sent in Alma’s name. I looked over at the bassinet and at the cat playing with the balloons and realized that Alma had taken her last breath around the same time my daughter had been struggling to take her first. I started to cry, realizing that I would not need to break into Alma’s courtyard in order for her to see the baby. In the twenty years since I knew Alma, I have tried to pass on her message: don’t smoke – ever.

What's with the pigs?

When someone comes into my house it doesn’t take long for them to ask, “Who’s the pig fanatic?” or “What’s with all the pigs?” I estimate that there’s 200 different pig-themed items around the house. I have pig-themed art, tools, books, clothing, kitchen utensils, mugs, table settings, banks, flower planters, wind-chimes, refrigerator magnets, and figurines. If you reach for a flashlight, it’s shaped like a pig. If you lift off the shower cap from the wall it was hanging on a pig head. I have pig slippers and a costume rubber pig nose. I have dozens of pig-themed bracelets and pins. I have pig-shaped corn cob holders. If you are in a public area of my house, there are pig things watching you.

I never intended to collect pigs. In my early teens my family went on a vacation to London. We visited the British Museum, we went to the tower of London, we watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, but we also went to a county fair on the outskirts of the city. I loved the fair because it was so green, and the horses were so beautiful, and they had these pink piglets of the breed later featured in the movie “Babe.” These tiny porkers were reminiscent of my childhood favorites, Wilbur from “Charlotte’s Web” and Piglet from the “Winnie-the-Pooh” series. When we returned to California my brother asked me what I liked best about London. I mentioned that I liked the country fair and I showed him photographs of the pigs and he said sarcastically, “You went to London, England and what you liked were the pigs?!”

For my next birthday he gave me a pig candle with a card that said, “Since you like pigs so much!” There were about thirteen of my high school friends watching me open presents and read cards and they all burst out with, “Oh! You like pigs! You should have told us.” At my next birthday party, everything I got for a present was shaped like or decorated with pigs. The following Christmas, people had noticed I had a shelf of “pig things” and I started to get more presents for my “pig collection.” By the time I went to college, the collection was out of control and since I showed up in my dorm room with pig pens and a Miss Piggy calendar and a pig keychain, I had no hope of coming off as anything but a swinophile, an oinkologist, or a pigmaniac.

For a long time I wasn’t sure I wanted to be associated with a creature typically thought of as dirty, gluttonous, and destined for slaughter. But along with collecting pigs, I started to learn about them. Pigs are the fourth smartest non-human animals on earth after primates, dolphins, and elephants. Pigs can be obsessive about rooting things out using their extremely sensitive noses whether the object of their search is a truffle or a landmine. Pigs can swim. Pigs enjoy music. Pigs are curious and play with toys. Pigs are sensitive and expressive – if they’re happy their tails curl tight; if they are sad or sick, their tails go limp and straight. Pigs are typically covered with mud not because they lack a sense of hygiene but because they wallow in mud to cool their sensitive skin and protect themselves from parasites, much as we might slather on sunscreen or bug repellant. You cannot be “sweating like a pig” because pigs don’t sweat. Pigs, unlike a lot of animals, prefer to defecate away from where they eat and live. Pigs are omnivores but they do not overeat. They are simply “made to be meaty” when they are healthy. The more I knew about pigs, the more akin to them I felt.

But it was at the Kern County Fair one year that I truly bonded with the nature of swine. It was pig judging time and I was sitting in the stands watching 4-H kids move their hogs around before the judge. Vision and cooperation are not a hog’s strong points so to get the beasts to turn the swineherds had to use wide boards with a handle. The pig would plod along and then the youth would plant this board down directly in their path, and make a corner out of it with another board, putting up impassable walls in front of the boar or sow and leaving them only one direction to turn (swine do not go in reverse well). So, resignedly, the porcine creature would turn and waddle in the direction indicated, while its handler ran around it and set up the barriers to turn it in the next direction they wanted their prize porker to go. And then it dawned on me: that’s how God sometimes has to direct me. I get so fixated on going forward that the only way for Him to divert me in a different direction is to put up these barriers, these hardships, these disasters, these losses in my life so that when faced with “dead ends” ahead and to the side I blunder on in the only direction left open to me. I’m one of God’s pigs. Smart, social, curious but built for practicality, not for style. I require spiritual whacking with a cane (“thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me”) or “direction by limited options” to get me where God wants me to be.

Pig anatomy is similar to humans in the arrangement of their internal organs. Nearly every part of a pig can be used for some pharmaceutical purpose which is why we have pig insulin, pig thyroxin, and pig heart valves inside lots of humans today. Not to mention the delicious array of pork products (the other white meat) digesting inside a large portion of the population. I had the most delicious bacon-wrapped dates at my niece’s wedding and was told by the caterers they were called “baby fingers.” Is it any wonder that the oldest known domesticated farm animal was the pig?

What perversity on our part has allowed us to make the term “pig” an insult? Sir Winston Churchill once said, “I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” Harry Truman was quoted as saying, “No man should be allowed to be President who does not understand hogs.” So whether God knew I was a piggy at heart and allowed the pig collection to develop around me or whether being surrounded by pigs has influenced my approach to life is hard to say. But I do hope the Mama Pig Cookie Jar holding two piglets survives me. It’s where I’ve told the kids to stash my ashes.

My First Miracle

Our lives get bookmarked by our “firsts.” I remember my first day of school, my first romantic kiss, and my first job interview. I now know there were many miracles in my childhood but the first genuine miracle that I knew was for me, from God with my name on it, happened in late March of 1981 on the UC Santa Barbara campus. I was not yet 21 years old and I was not a believer in the existence of a personal God who cared about the piddling details of human lives. This was not a problem for God.

My problem was so small, so inconsequential to the grand scheme of human achievement, and so trivial that I’m now embarrassed I cared so passionately about it. I wanted to take a Film Studies class on Movie Musicals that was only taught once every four years. I was already in my junior year and this would be my only chance. I had followed protocol and gone with my boy friend and my roommate to sign up for the class. This was in the day when to register for a class you picked up from the instructor a computer punch card created for that class and that class alone. You then took your collected “hand” of computer cards to the registrar’s office and had them filed with an identity card issued to you and it was all fed into the computer so that it would show you were officially registered for that class. If you didn’t file the card, you didn’t get credit for the class. Because the movie musicals class was so popular, if you weren’t taking it for credit, you could not just audit the class. I had been so pleased to accept that class card from the instructor and place it with the rest of my class load. I was on my way to file my cards when I read in the small print at the top of the card that I had been handed the card for the other class the professor taught, Films of Ingmar Bergen, not the card for Movie Musicals.

I did not want to spend a trimester watching black and white movies about death, illness, betrayal and insanity, but I felt like I was on the verge of all those things. I had done everything right, and by sheer inattentiveness on my professor’s part, I was going to be excluded from watching with my friends big splashy Technicolor musicals where people were singing and dancing and things always worked out right in the end. As my boyfriend and I made our way across campus to throw myself at the mercy of the Film Department and beg for another class card, I was filled with rage at the universe and just about to overflow with hot, salty tears.

My boyfriend stopped me in the middle of a major walkway with hundreds of students moving past us and said, “I think we should pray about this. May I pray for you that God work this out?” I’d been dating this guy, in an off-again, on-again fashion for three years. The off-again was mostly due to the fact that he believed God listened to him when he prayed, which my boyfriend did often, out loud, and in public. At this point I was accepting it as one of his “quirks”. Besides, I knew there was no way I was going to get a class card since I had seen the professor give the last one out and turn away a long line of people who wanted a card and were denied. “Fine, go ahead and pray,” I told him.

He took my hand, closed his eyes, and then got that serenely delighted look on his face he would get and addressed the clear blue Santa Barbara sky with its puffy white clouds. I don’t remember the exact words because I was too busy thinking that if there was a God and he cared a rat’s tail about me then I wouldn’t have gotten the ticket to cinematic hell in the first place. But I know that my boyfriend stated, as naturally as if he was explaining to someone standing right beside us, my predicament, and that he asked that I get the class card and be in the class with him and that we needed a miracle for that to happen. Amen.

With only a couple of hours left to file my class cards for the next semester, we showed up at the Film Studies office. There were only two teacher aide types working in the office and I earnestly explained my problem. The young ladies agreed that I had a problem. “I’m really sorry for you,” one gal explained, “but there are an exact amount of cards for that class printed and we can’t make more or change that one you have to a different class.”
“Maybe somebody decided they didn’t want the class and turned a card back in?” my boyfriend suggested.

They laughed. The class was popular enough you could make money on an unwanted class card.
“I’m sorry, there’s really nothing we can do,” said the girl at the counter sincerely.
“Of course,” said the girl at the desk slowly, “there was that envelope that was dropped off.”
“What envelope?” asked her co-worker.
“You know, the envelope that was brought in just a little while ago.”
“Who brought it?”
“I didn’t know him. I couldn’t even tell you what he looked like, ‘cept he was big. It’s that white envelope sitting at the end of the counter. I didn’t look to see what was in it yet.”

The Film Studies secretary walked to the end of the counter, riffled through some mail and came back to us holding a plain, unaddressed business envelope. She broke the seal and gently pulled out a single class card. “It don’t believe it! This is amazing.” She had the other office employee come and verify it and they joyfully traded me a computer card with Movie Musicals typed on its edge for the Bergman Films card I had. Somewhat in shock and awe, I thanked them and my boyfriend and I left and went to where you filed your class list. After hugging and dancing me about while thanking God, my boyfriend just walked along smiling like a man whose team had won. But while I’m going through the motions of the registration process, while I’m walking back to the dining commons, while I’m having dinner, while I’m telling the story to my roommate, and while I’m going about the business of life in the dormitory there was a part of my brain that could not categorize what happened.

Was it coincidence? That’s what I wanted to believe but the odds were so against a card being turned in, and just dropped off in a blank envelope, with no explanation. Those women would have remembered a film student saying, “Hey, I’ve got a hot class card here, what will you give me for it?” Why couldn’t they remember or describe the person who had dropped it off? Why hadn’t they asked questions or looked inside the envelope earlier? And what was the connection between my boyfriend earnestly asking that I miraculously get placed in the class, for no other reason than that I wanted it, and the grand coincidence happening. He had believed if he asked that God was capable of doing something. He didn’t instruct God on what to do; he just asked that it be done, in the tone of voice you’d ask a loving parent, “Fix it, please?”

That’s when a huge rip was made in the veil that covered my thinking about God. It would take days, nearly a couple of weeks, before I stepped through that opening and discovered the reality of faith and grace and the Living God. But this was my “there’s more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy” moment. What if there was a God that answered prayer, not because it mattered to the grand scheme of the cosmos, but because it mattered to those who loved Him, and in answering He showed His love for them? It had taken the courage of conviction for my boyfriend to pray aloud in front of me, with all my negativity and doubt, and involve God in the drama of my selfish life. What if prayer and what we called coincidence were somehow connected? What if this give and take between something we called God and something we called “real life” happened all the time around us and we weren’t paying attention? What if God was trying to show me something and this was the only way of getting my attention? What if when things didn’t happen, it was because no one had bothered to pray?

Disneyland Now

When I had children of my own I lived only three hours away from the Magic Kingdom – a fact that I did not want them aware of as they watched Disney videos and an actual Disney channel. So when they’d ask, “Can we go to Disneyland?” I’d take them to the Disney Store in the mall. The toys, clothing and videos available at a Disney store was enough stimulation for any preschooler and all mine knew about the land of Disney. I never told them it was Disneyland -- I just never told them there was anything else.

Disneyland should not be seen from the viewpoint of a stroller. Regardless of how tall you must be to ride this ride, in my kingdom you have to be at least five years old to be worth the price of admission to Walt’s world. When my daughter turned five we left her one-year-old brother with the best kind of friends and told her we were going on a vacation to a hotel with a pool. This hotel was within walking distance of the famed amusement park and as we went out for a stroll I pointed out the snow-capped mountain and discussed with her how odd it was to see such a thing in Southern California in late May. By the time we had reached the entrance she had figured out where she was and was appropriately thrilled. We were celebrating her birthday and she assumed the parades and fireworks had been arranged just for her. She loved everything about Disneyland – except the costumed characters. Characters in costumes whose human faces showed were fine, but my daughter was too smart to believe mice and ducks and dogs should be parading around at such abnormal sizes. She liked her animated characters in two dimensions, thank you.

When it was my son’s turn for the five-year-old initiation to Disneyland I was so proud of his sister. At nine she was adept at pointing out to her brother, “Hey, look over there. A mountain with snow on it! What’s that doing in the middle of a city in California?” Her brother fell for it hook, line, and sinker. We bought our tickets and entered into Disneyland and I told my son I’d take a picture of him in front of the Mickey Mouse Flower Display. “That way we’ll have a record of your visit to Disneyland.” He posed for the picture then looked at the wall of flowers and sighed, “This is the happiest day of my life. Thank you for bringing me to Disneyland. I always wanted to see this.” As he kept gazing fondly at the flowers, I leaned down and said, “You know, son, there’s more than just flowers at Disneyland.” His eyes got big, “There IS?” The whole family could barely contain themselves. “This is just the entrance. If we go around through that tunnel, there’s more to see.” He was agog, and murmured, “Better than this?” You never met a more appreciative child. The look of absolute awe as he surveyed the wonders of Disneyland should have been in a travel brochure for a Disney resort vacation.

Chip and Dale came strolling up and his sister began, “Now you don’t need to be nervous about the characters, they’re just . . . “ but it was too late. My son flung himself in adoration upon the costumed characters and begged to have his photograph taken with them. He was fearless when it came to spinning things and creepy situations. I have since come to realize that the world as he sees it is rather like Disneyland which may explain why he was completely at home there.

In a world of amusement parks, one of the things that makes Disneyland stand above the rest is how it treats those “less able” with respect. If your size, age, physical or mental capabilities are not up to a statistical norm, Disneyland is still accessible and enjoyable. We got to experience Disneyland from the “wheelchair” view when the Aunties met us there to enjoy it with the children. Because one of the aunties is in an electric wheelchair, we suddenly learned that there are entire boats at It’s a Small World for wheelchairs and special entrances to everything for wheelchairs. If one of your party has special needs, the whole group gets to move up to the special needs entrance, no waiting in those pesky lines. You have automatic front row seating (if you don’t mind having children on your lap and feet) for the parades. But most importantly, you are spoken to and dealt with as a human being of worth by the Disney personnel.

This brings me to what truly makes Disneyland one of the happiest places on earth: the employees. The hiring standards are strict and extraordinary because I have chatted with the lady who sweeps up every speck of trash to the ride attendants to the store operators and I have never been treated rudely or coarsely. On our most recent trip to Disneyland we spoke with Carly, an intern with Disney University, who sincerely testified that Disneyland is the best place to work and that she loves the people who work with her, the guests who come to visit and the vision of Walt Disney. She was talking to us while waiting at a bus stop outside the park after the park had closed. No one was around to make her say what she did, this was someone who truly believes in Disneyland and had traveled from out of state to spend her days there.

I wasn’t sure Disneyland would still appeal to my children now that they have reached the ages of sixteen and twenty. But this is the genius behind the place’s design – whatever age you are there is something that will appeal to you. It was rewarding to see that my children are now able to not only enjoy the Indiana Jones adventure but to equally enjoy the stage shows and the landscaping and the engineering behind keeping so many people content in such a small area. They loved discovering live ducklings on the Jungle cruise growing up next to the animatronic apes. They were moved by Moments with Mr. Lincoln. They respected what Walt was trying to do, basing main street on an idealization of his home town, and they appreciated that there should be a place where a family could just play without the real world cares intruding. They could see how the illusion worked – but they enjoyed it anyway.

Disneyland truly is a small world after all. Family groups from all walks of life mutually undergo the sticker shock treatment of paying for admission and then docilely exhibit peace on earth, good will towards all by standing without complaint in lines, and following directions as they are loaded on and off the various conveyances. You will see the most frightening biker dude covered with tattoos and rippling with muscles, holding a fairy wand and a princess hat while his little girl waves at him from the carousel. You can sit at any restaurant and close your eyes and listen to families chatting in every language and know what they’re saying without knowing their dialect. You can park Grandpa with his walker and Grandma with her oxygen in New Orleans square and they are entranced just to people watch and share an ice cream bar in the shape of Mickey Mouse ears. And as for me, you can just leave me on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride – I keep expecting to find a ride I enjoy better and every time, that’s the one that thoroughly satisfies. I’ve got my Pirate Mickey souvenir tee shirt to prove it.

Disneyland Then

Sunday evenings during my pre-school years there was one thing worth watching on television: Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. The music would strike up and there would be the dazzling color of the kaleidoscope. Kindly Walt Disney would welcome us to the show and talk about something creative and inspiring and then there would be cartoons and animals and wholesome family movies. There were even rumors of a magical realm, the happiest place on earth, called Disneyland. For a kid growing up in New Jersey it had the same mythic resonance as Camelot or Shangri-la.

One summer we took our Dodge Caravan motorhome out to California to visit the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins on both sides of the family. I’m sitting up front next to my father who is driving through Los Angeles traffic when he says to me, “Now isn’t that strange. Here it is summer and hot enough for shorts and there’s a mountain covered with snow. See it over there, a snow-capped peak? I wonder why it doesn’t melt. Do you think we should go check it out, Sandy?” I was intrigued and agreed to investigate. I practically came unglued when we drove through an archway that had letters that I could pick out and put together as Disneyland. What I had spied from the freeway was the Matterhorn ride and it was an E-ticket ride!

My memories of that first trip to Disneyland are from the perspective of someone who was at eye level with everyone’s knees. I remember how friendly Dumbo looked and how exciting it was to fly on his ride. The Matterhorn was cold and scary but I was propped up against my burly father and felt perfectly safe. I loved the train (it had dinosaurs!) and the characters, and my little felt Mickey Mouse ears with my name embroidered on the back.

My mother loved “It’s a small World” and bought me a Tinkerbell doll for my collection. She also went nuts over the Tiki Room. I think we sat through that show repeatedly because Mom liked it so much. She came back to New Jersey and completely redecorated our basement to resemble the Tiki room. She covered the bar with fake grass skirts, put up fake parrots in fake palm trees, and arrayed coconut monkeys against the bamboo wall treatments. My brothers would go through it singing, “In the tacky, tacky, tacky, tacky, tacky room . . . “

Since that first trip to Disneyland was in our motorhome, we could get our hand stamped and leave the park and have lunch and naptime in the motorhome parked under some patron saint of Disneyland such as Goofy or Dopey. We stayed overnight in the parking lot that first trip, in the days when that was encouraged. It was an utterly wonderful experience to my big, brown Anime eyes and one of the few things we did as a family that had something that everybody could enjoy.

We moved to California in the summer of 1967 and visited Disneyland on our way to our new home. I was old enough to ride everything, and get the jokes on the Jungle Cruise, and adore Pirates of the Caribbean. I don’t know which trip I saw “The World of Tomorrow” in Tomorrowland but I was confident that if Walt Disney said this was what the future was going to be like, then it would be so. I’m still miffed that there are no flying cars or monorail in my town, now that tomorrow has become today. As I grew, I came to appreciate that Walt was a visionary, a man of drive and genius, but not always the nicest guy you’d want to deal with. Then I learned how his brother Roy was the balm to Walt’s burn, the businessman to the dreamer, the peacemaker to the one who poked until he got what he wanted. I like Walt’s statue with Mickey at Disneyland but even more, I like that Roy has a statue tucked away with Minnie at Disney World.

Once I lived in the same state as Disneyland, I visited it with each new season of life. My parents and I took in Disneyland on a trip during my early teens in which we also saw Knott’s Berry Farm and Universal Studios. My parents were past the spinning tea cups stage and more inclined to sit and people watch in New Orleans Square. My college friends and I met up at Disneyland one summer between semesters. That’s when my boyfriend John learned the bitter truth about my low blood sugar issues when I nearly passed out against the wishing well by the castle. When John and I married in the summer of 1983, our honeymoon consisted of driving from theme park to theme park. We slept overnight in our pickup truck in the Disneyland parking lot in the days when that sort of thing was frowned upon. We came back with friends in the summer of 1989, staying in the cheapest motel possible. One of our friends loved to stand in line for the rides but would take the chicken exit at the last minute. We were trying to get pregnant and I was afraid to go on any of the really jarring rides in case I had conceived and didn’t know it yet. Disneyland was getting ready to undergo some dramatic transformations, as were John and I before our next visit to the Magic Kingdom.

Dave

My mother dearly wanted me to become a competent enough keyboardist to play duets, I on the piano, she on the Hammond organ. By the time I was ten years old I had met and vanquished in glorious musical conflict seven little-old-lady piano teachers. They would come, some for weeks, some for months, brandishing their despicable books of scales and finger exercises which I would passively resist practicing until they gave up on me. I liked playing the piano; I just hated practicing pieces that didn’t sound like music to me.

My mother met Dave in a cocktail lounge and restaurant near our home and was impressed with his musical expertise at the piano. I don’t know how many cocktails she had imbibed or how hard pressed he was for money, but somehow she talked him into coming to our house and giving her electric organ lessons and me piano lessons. He told her in advance, “I don’t give lessons to children” but my mother insisted he give it a try.

Dave was built like a six-foot tall bear with a mole-like face. His pointy nose was centered between a high receding hairline of gray and floppy jowls. He had tiny, squinty eyes that he occasionally magnified with thick, black-rimmed glasses. He smelled musty and he had a deep, growly voice. But what totally undid me were his huge hands. They were old so the veins and tendons and knuckles were prominent but on his right hand he had the same ring as the vampire on my favorite television show of the time, Dark Shadows. Only someone who had made deals with the undead would have a ring like that and I was terrified. He told me to “play something” so he could get a feel for my abilities and I nervously started to pick out the first thing that came to mind until I made a mistake and he said in deep, sepulchral tones “No, that’s not right.” Sad to say, I did not take correction well so I burst into tears.

Dave leapt up as if my tears were made of acid, all the color drained from his already pasty complexion, and his limbs began to tremble. He snatched up the briefcase he had brought and fled down the hallway where my mother intercepted him at the door. I could hear her trying to placate the terrified man. I could hear him insisting that he was incapable of teaching little girls in pony-tails who cried when corrected. I did not hear how my mother convinced him to return another day but I can only suspect that generous sums of money were negotiated. Dave must have been hard-pressed for cash to pull himself together and face his greatest fear: the manipulative, passive-aggressive, spoiled little girl.

Music lessons with Dave – take two. This time he had me sit on the bar stool about two feet away as he sat at the piano. He asked me what kind of music I liked. I mumbled the sort of thing a ten-year-old would. So he played some jazz. Did I like that? “S’okay.” He played some classical, some rock, some ragtime, and then he did several of his lounge tunes. When he played his “standards” he would hum in this deep growly way to himself as he played. I could see what had impressed my mother: when Dave played the music was alive. He asked me, “What’s a song that you like to listen to?” I told him and the next week Dave came with an extremely simplified arrangement of the song I had mentioned. No finger exercises, no scales, just, “You know this song. Let’s figure out how you can play it.”

Dave came to my house every Thursday for the next eight years. I got used to his rings, and his smell, and his hot breath on the top of my head as he’d reach around to show me some intricate fingering or rhythmic pattern. I never got used to the fact that he’d do his growl/hum while I played. When I asked him about it he was unaware that he was even doing it. But Dave succeeded where the other music teachers had failed because he let me learn what I was interested in learning. He wanted me to love music, and to play the music I loved, and he empowered me to have a musical opinion and the technique to express it.

When I was twelve, Dave started introducing me to new genres of music. He’d come with a cassette tape of music he had compiled from his “collection” and have me listen to new musical artists in every musical style that existed. If I liked something, that sheet music would show up with the next lesson. I put in half an hour of practice before leaving for school in the morning and usually a half-hour of practice before or after dinner. As the years went by Dave introduced finger exercises only as they were needed for me to master the piece on which I was working. As I tackled new pieces that required understanding music theory, Dave would provide me with the necessary reading and charts.

By the time I was fourteen, Mom and I could play our organ-piano duets and she stopped taking lessons with Dave. It was then that he said I had to make a choice. “Do you want to be a piano player or a pianist? Do you want to play for your own enjoyment or do you want to play for performance? I can guide you either way but your choice will affect how much you practice and what kind of training I put you through.” I did not see a future for myself in “serious music” but I did enjoy the instrument and wanted to keep playing.

Every Thursday for the next four years Dave would unpack his briefcase with excitement, “Look what I’ve got for you this week, my musical child!” He would pull out rare recordings, antique folios, clippings about musicians and performances. I would have my own collection of show and tell for him. “Did you hear this on the radio? How do they get that sound? Wait, I’ve got their latest album, listen to track 8, and tell me is that in 5/8 time?” Whenever I asked Dave about his work or his career as a musician, he would refuse to discuss much with me, almost as if he was embarrassed. Every now and then while we were talking about performers and pieces he would let slip that he had played with someone famous. When pressed for more information he’d mumble about “poor choices, tough breaks” and go back to talking about the music on the music stand.

By the time I was eighteen I could jerkily finger my way through Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” It was the most complicated piece I ever got through on the piano and the height of my piano prowess. As the years would go by, lack of practice would diminish my skills but not my ability to appreciate music, all kinds of music, from all parts of the world. Music has added a richness and depth to every aspect of my life that I would have lacked if Dave had not persevered with me and allowed our lessons to be “delight-driven.”

I went away to college but Dave and I kept up the musical exchange through letters every season. He would always include a new cassette of something that “blew his mind” when he heard it, and I would tell him about what concerts I had gone to or what musical tastes my roommates had. When I took a class in Beethoven and was struggling for a topic on which to write my research paper, I wrote to Dave for advice. He sent me back a recording and pages and pages of notes on the Diabelli Variations. “Nobody thinks to do these – your professor will be thrilled.” Dave was right and he had provided exactly the resources I needed.

By the time I was 21, I had my own car and I decided one summer vacation to drive the 40 minutes to Dave’s house and visit him. He was retired, growing very paunchy, having all kinds of diabetes-related health issues. I had never been to his little seaside house before and I was totally shocked to discover that he had a wife and apparently grown children. He had never mentioned them in all those years of piano lessons. His wife didn’t look too thrilled to see the 21-year-old with the waist long hair being greeted by her husband and taken back to see his “collection.” An additional room built onto the house was filled from floor to ceiling along every wall with vinyl albums. In the center of the room was a “state of the art” recording set-up with his baby grand and his electric piano. Radio stations had smaller libraries than Dave. We spent the day just listening to one “cool thing” after another. His wife brought us, grudgingly, some sandwiches and iced tea. I tried to ask about her and his children but all Dave would say was, “They’re not interested in my collection.” Was that why he called me his musical child?

The next summer I took my fiancé to meet Dave. Back to the collection we went, and we spent the day talking about music. My fiancé was a piano player and had very eclectic musical tastes. Dave approved, and wanted us to come back and visit him more often. My wedding the next summer was a small, private ceremony and I wrote to Dave afterwards to let him know I was now married and living in Bakersfield. I told him about joining a hand bell choir with our church and he sent me several cassettes of his favorite church choir music. We had never discussed God so I had no idea what his views on spiritual life might have been. I wrote to him about my parents letting me have the piano for my own when we moved into our first rental house. He sent me a cassette of the musical “Chess” with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by the guys from ABBA but there was no note in Dave’s distinctive, spidery, block lettering accompanying it.

Sometime while we were still in the rental house, a postcard from his wife arrived stating that Dave had died, he had valued our friendship, and please don’t write any more. I looked around at the hundreds of cassettes he had recorded for me over the years, the shelves of sheet music he had given me aligned beside the piano. I wondered what his wife had done with Dave’s vinyl records which, while obsolete, represented a fortune from a music collector’s standpoint. I wondered if he had left as much of a legacy to his own children as he had to his musical child. I think Dave would have approved of all the different types of music I exposed my children to during the years I gave them piano lessons. I think he would enjoy talking with my son, the drummer, about bands, and cover tunes, and rhythms. If we’re not gone until we’re forgotten then Dave is as vibrantly alive as was his music.

Acting Responsibly

I have always loved theater performances, whether I was in the audience or acting on the stage. I was, however, typecast at a young age. My kindergarten teacher cast me in the role of Mother Goose for our class play which recreated a number of the well-known tales. I thought it might be because she recognized the “old soul” storyteller within me. She told my mother it was because I was the only child responsible enough to leave on stage for the full duration of the play.

What followed through my grade school years were a series of roles in school plays that bore a striking similarity: mothers, teachers, judges, librarians, soothsayers. In real life I’ll admit I was the goody-two-shoes, the brainiac, the teacher’s pet, the crossing guard, the Hermione to everybody’s else’s Harry Potter. But I wanted to stretch my acting skills, explore my alter-ego “bad girl,” and play the vamp, the tramp, the biker chick. What I got to do was perform in the Mark Hopkins’ Hotel lobby in San Francisco at a dental convention playing Wanda Pick, trusty secretary to the detective Brush Floss who was out to rid the world of decay in “The Great Cavity Caper.”

My only starring role was that of Little Mary Sunshine in the play of the same name. I was pure, I was sweet, I was obviously going to need Captain Jim to save me from a dastardly fate. The fact that Captain Jim missed his mark so that instead of kissing my finger and putting it to his lips (our hot love scene) I kissed my finger and rammed it up his nostril was not my fault!

I wondered if I should pursue the theater arts as the venue for my storytelling skills. I was trying to become one of the “drama club gang” when I was cast in my final school play as the plucky comic sidekick to the heroine in “The Bookshop Mystery.” My character was supposed to be loyal and clever but clutzy. As an 8th grader I had the clutzy down and did twice as many pratfalls as the script called for simply because I kept tripping over props and stumbling during my entrances. I had a crush on the guy playing the hero of the play and after our performance run was over I approached him one day to flirt with him. He commented, “We’re not in a play together anymore so I don’t have to be nice to you.” I never became a drama major.

Thirty years later I was a stage mother. My life path had intersected with that of a drama director for a church’s youth ministry and I thought my daughter should have the chance to see if theater arts was something in which she excelled. I tried not to shout stage instructions at her and instead focused on driving her to rehearsals and working on my bible study in the back of the sanctuary while she worked through her drama exercises with the rest of the students on stage.

In her first play she was cast as the principal of a high school, although she was only a 7th grader and smaller than all the other members of the drama group. Her second play she had the role of the plucky comic sidekick to the heroine. Her third play was entitled, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place” and it was a dramatic retelling of the gospel story, staged in the 1920’s prohibition era of U.S. history. Instead of the Sanhedrin, Jesus was up against mob bosses. Instead of the woman taken in adultery there was the mob boss’s moll. Jesus was pulling disciples out of a cross-section of flappers and dapper dans of the late 1920’s, early 1930’s. Instead of a Roman centurion supervising Jesus’ crucifixion there was a hitman and a lackey whose stage directions included shooting and stabbing Jesus.

As the results of the auditions were being read I kept expecting my daughter to be cast as one of the disciples or even as the moll. When her name was read as the lackey I felt compelled to ask the director why she had cast my daughter, the second smallest person in the cast, as a murderous thug. The director replied, “You see the kids I have to work with . . . your daughter was the only one I’d trust to handle a stiletto and a prop gun back stage.”

Do all youth drama directors make assignments based on student responsibility over talent? Are the conscientious kids who memorize their lines and remember their marks doomed to always be the nannies and nuns and knights? The months of rehearsal for that play were agony for both my daughter and myself because she had one spotlight moment in which she gave her line and then delivered the death blow that kills Jesus. She was supposed to represent all the repressed resentment toward the Jewish people held by Roman soldiers posted to Jerusalem in the late A.D. 20’s, early 30’s. But every time in rehearsal that she said, “You people make me so sick!” and went to stab the long-haired darling of the drama group who was cast as Jesus, she got the giggles. Or she tickled him and he got the giggles. Or she squeaked or mumbled or spoke calmly as if she were politely pointing out he had a smudge on his nose. The director coached her publicly. I coached her privately. Instead of the cautious, polite, respectful girl that she was she had to act like an angry, vengeful, assassin.

The show opened and I was there with friends and family in the audience and my daughter delivered her line amidst technical difficulties of the lighting and gun-shot effects. Her line was correct and well-projected but you just didn’t believe that the little girl in the oversized zoot suit meant to murder the Son of God. It was more like accidental manslaughter.

I alone went with my daughter to the final night’s performance. I had been through this play dozens of times and was just glad to be at the end of it. Unbeknownst to me, the Jesus of the cast was equally disenchanted with the production and led the kids backstage in the kind of unruly behavior teenage boys are famous for when unsupervised. My daughter just wanted to get through the play and was disgusted and angered by the general idiocy.

So I’m in the pews of the church, watching the dramatic finale with my usual apprehension. The lighting changes, Jesus gets shot in one hand, then the other hand, and now my daughter is approaching in a threatening manner. But instead of her little girl voice, she summons all the annoyance and frustration she’s held toward the actor for his highjinks backstage and roars, “You people make me . . . so. . . SICK!” Then she shanks him for all she’s worth. The moment is so convincing, so dramatic, that the audience gasps in horror.

Then this woman’s voice rings out, “YES! That’s how you do it.” It’s only when all the nice church people turn to stare with revulsion at the woman who’s so pleased to see the Savior of the World snuffed that I realize the exclamation has burst out of me.

I guess it’s easier to act responsibly on stage than it is in real life.

The Way of an Eagle

I am 17 years old, riding on the interior engine cover of a 28-foot motorhome, strategically situated between my father, the driver, and my mother, the passenger. We are on a summer vacation driving through Canada and Alaska and we have left our campsite beside a huge lake. All morning we had been watching Bald Eagles fishing for salmon.

Proverbs 30:18-19 list at the top of things that awe and amaze “the way of an eagle in the sky.” It was fascinating and mysterious how these birds could come shooting down from their piney treetops at speeds of 40 miles per hour to glide over the surface of the lake and then reach forward with their talons and snatch a fish. The fish would wriggle for all it was worth in protest of its alien abduction. The eagles knew to aim their catch aerodynamically in the direction they were flying and would return to their treetops to enjoy their sushi with no other utensils than their beak and claws.

But envision if you will that we have left the lake and are making our ascent up a gravel road that winds along the mountainside. The lake is miles below us to the right and my mother is whimpering about there being no guard rail along her side of the roadway. My father is concentrating on not pulling up too close to the cloud of dust being kicked up by a small, white pickup truck about five car-lengths ahead of us. I notice there is a large, young eagle atop a lightning-blasted tree up on the hillside to our left. I know he’s young because his plumage hasn’t changed from all brown to the distinctive dark body with white head plumage. This eagle is picking at the remains of a fairly large fish and as the white pickup truck approaches, the noise and dust cloud disturb the bird and he decides to take the rest of his lunch somewhere else.

The eagle takes off but his fish is not the nice, tight package it had been when he had flown up here this far from the lake. The bird of prey barely gets a couple of wing flaps in before he starts to tilt and dip while his claws juggle and snatch and grab at the meaty mess of his half-eaten salmon. The eagle tries vainly to gain altitude but the salmon slips from his grasp. The eagle practically snaps his talons in frustration then dives down towards the lake for something new to eat.

Meanwhile the fish is falling, flopping, spinning in the air. My parents and I have a perfect view of it as gravity brings it down. The fish carcass lands directly on the windshield of the white pickup and explodes across it in a spray of blood and guts worthy of a Peckinpah film. The remaining spinal column of the fish bounces off and sails over the side of the road.

The truck screeches to a halt and out of the driver’s side tumbles a young man in his early twenties dressed like someone from a construction site job. He is wide-eyed, frenzied, running around to the front of his truck to take in the scope of the blood smear, looking at the front grill, looking under the truck for a body. Nothing. He runs around to the back, looks under, looks around, looks up at the sky.

We slow down and pull to a stop behind his truck and he runs over to my mother’s window and bellows, “What was it? WHAT WAS IT?”

My mother points to the sky and shouts, “An eagle! An eagle!”

The young man claps his hand to his forehead and exclaims with relief, “Thank God! I thought it was a fish!”

For the Love of Story

My parents have a reel-to-reel audio tape recording made when I was three years old. On it you can hear my mother ask me what I had done that day. There follows fifteen minutes of non-stop, rapid-fire, description of my meeting Timothy the Turtle and the riveting adventure, replete with suspense, pathos, and humor that ensued. Despite the childish patois and the squeaky little girl voice, my vocabulary was disturbingly advanced for my age. Even without visuals, you can hear as the drama unfolds that I had to be waving my arms around as I spoke and making the exaggerated facial expressions appropriate to the drama. When I finally came to a halt, all my mother said into the recorder was, “As you can hear, she’s quite the little storyteller.”

My sweetest childhood memories involve my mother sitting beside me on the living room couch and reading aloud to me. She had joined the Dr. Seuss Book Club and twice a month a beginning reader would arrive in the mail. I have deep, instinctive reactions to phrases like “green eggs and ham” or “go, dog, go” or “a person’s a person no matter how small.” I loved that letters made words, and words told stories. By the time I was five I was reading the Dr. Seuss book collection aloud to my mother while she made dinner.

My kindergarten teacher was pretty harried the day it was her turn to introduce her class to the school library. Most of the children just wanted to run around the book cases. I sat in a corner, pulling down one book after another, marveling that there were so many I had never seen before. When the teacher told the class to line up for our return to class I began to cry. The librarian came up and asked me why I was upset and I said it was because I had not had the chance to read all the books yet. She told me that I could check out several of them, take them home, and read them when I had the time – just so long as I brought them back next week. Then I could check out more. My face lit up and I cried with joy, “You mean I can read as many of these books as I WANT?” The librarian got all misty-eyed and the whole class had to wait restlessly while I procured my first library card and checked out my first armload of picture books. Here was a world of stories to explore.

My fourth grade teacher showed us a short movie about black bears and then asked us to imagine we were a bear cub and write down a short story. Twenty minutes later I was on page five, scribbling furiously in my loopy, illegible handwriting and the teacher said, “It’s time to go to recess.” “Don’t want to play outside,” I said, “I have to finish the story.” At the next parent-teacher conference she suggested that I be steered towards a career in writing. Every scholastic choice I made after that was aimed at my becoming a professional storyteller. I wound up a communications major in college with a minor in film studies because I couldn’t decide which medium to tell stories with: film, radio, or print.

When I was twenty-four I joined a Bible Study Fellowship class and discovered the one true story that makes all other stories worthwhile. At twenty-eight I started sharing that “greatest story ever told” to two-year-olds and knew I had found my true calling. At thirty-seven I was asked to start teaching the Bible to adult women. I was sent to Bible Study Fellowship International’s headquarters for training and in a “getting to know you” session we were each supposed to share something special about ourselves. Some candidates were active in sports, others in the arts, others had rare hobbies and when it came my turn I said, “I’m a storyteller.” To which, the executive director sternly said, “We teach the Bible, we don’t tell stories.” I figured they’d put me on the next plane home but I survived the week’s barrage of tests and returned home to teach the Bible – by telling stories.

In the story of my life I am now fifty years told. To commemorate that half-century mark I have begun a blog, DeVera Words, in which I present words De Vera (of truth) in a manner as if “I took de verra words right outta me mouth.” These are true stories that have been a part of my life and I have reached a limit to my storage capacity so that they must come spilling out. In college I would be writing page after page of single-spaced typewritten description in letter form to my parents. My roommate would say, “What could you possibly be writing about since nothing happened to us this week?” Then I would read aloud to her the adventures of her past week. She'd say “Everything’s a story to you, isn’t it?”

Read the blog and see.