My mother used to make cornbread of stone ground 100% whole corn and real buttermilk the night before a holiday and served it for dinner with butter and honey. The rest was for stuffing. That tradition was just as important as our usual Sunday morning waffles. Those were also of whole grains, the type could be varied, but she'd always start by emulsifying the oil in egg yolk, and the whole batch culminated with folding in the egg whites.

My father was in charge of the old waffle iron which he'd carefully heat and oil. The first waffle was always a gamble, whether it would stick. Some were disastrous, but rarely did he have to unplug it and take it out to the shop to scrape out all the little spaces, though there were enough of those. Not the same with these Teflon things that you don’t dare touch. One round waffle at a time came out, folded and split four ways, savored with warm brown sugar syrup made fresh each week. The L.A. Times had a two-part funny paper which my brother and I would trade. In good weather, even in marginal, we'd be out on the side porch. Winter time, the kitchen table. That's where most of the family’s entertaining took place.

In my years growing up at home, the dining room held my father's huge drawing table. I loved that he'd work in plain view, right smack dab in the middle of the house. When he wasn't home we could use it for homework or our own artwork, whoever got there first. This room was also where the early radio and later the Hi-Fi set stood. By the time I was in high school he had me building stereo components from kits on that work surface. Now there's a large antique walnut dining table in the middle of the room and a beautiful cabinet with a long piano hinge built into the corner. It swings out for access to all the wiring and has switches to route the sound to various speakers throughout the house. He can even control them with a remote from his seat at the table, by the back door, clear at the end of the kitchen.

My brother did the bulk of his childhood explosives explorations on the edge of the riverbank in Tucson; left that behind when we came to L.A. Or intended to, at least. One of his friend's dad joined the police reserves and 9th grader Eric thought it would be really cool to have a cross section of a complete shell. A "blank" with its wooden plug for a projectile seemed like a perfect specimen. He was in the middle of sawing it two, lengthwise, when it got hot enough to explode. Wooden peg or no, it was a live round and without a barrel to contain it, the brass split and twisted into a really wicked piece of shrapnel that burrowed its way up into his left bicep.

The roar was deafening and he was found holding his ears, at first oblivious to the wound, as we came running out to the carport. I was sent back inside to make what would now be the 911 call, but actually, that was through the operator in those days. As I was dialing, a family friend coincidentally arriving for dinner drove Eric and my mother to the emergency room. Not knowing what had really happened, of course, I reported that my brother had just shot himself, thinking we'd get an ambulance sent over. Boy, did the cops swarm, checking out this "suicide attempt." Undoubtedly most embarrassing for him when the actual events were reconstructed. Probably even more delicate for the police department when they realized where he'd gotten that live round!

He was in the hospital for a couple days, seems like, and has a long, half-moon scar where they went in to remove that brass. Brought it home in a little box--I wonder if he still has it.

"You're going to poke your eye out with that stick!" What a classic admonition! I have been so privileged. I always thought I grew up like everybody else, that families got along at least as well or better than mine, and of course, that all other kids had it better than me. It was a terrible shock to learn the things my friends went through, the sinister little games people played, the really vile things people do to each other. I am no longer so naive but I still have to recalibrate when I hear about what I “missed.” Both my folks valued accurate and non-destructive communication, respect for person and property (never mark in books or bend the pages, no littering, etc.). We spent a lot of time outdoors, and they went backpacking a lot, taking incredible photographs.

My mother kept the house filled with library books from every city around us, and my father made sure the stereo quality was up to the classical and ethnic music they played. Meals were simply prepared and beautifully presented—several different vegetables, whole or cut precisely, rich colors, nothing in sauces, dark green salads with all kinds of extras added. Thick, rare slabs of beef. I longed for macaroni and cheese, white bread and bologna sandwiches, hostess cupcakes instead of fruit with plain yogurt.

When my boys were very little we had the whole set of wooden blocks--you know, the hardwood ones based on 2x4 pieces and their derivatives. Also had the special arches and turned ones. Well, the big "Y" piece was known as the "chooch"--finally figured out that to them it was the steeple of a church, you know, "Here's the chooch and here's the steeple."

My folks also had a set of blocks for when the boys were over. There were my two and also my brother's, within 6 months of each other, mine the middle pair. So my mother found a complete used set--I mean, major blocks. Did I tell you about the construction they built in my parents' empty dining room? It was so grand! We big people helped with the upper section, and the final piece was a wedge that secured it tightly to the ceiling. Sorry if I'm telling this twice--you know how us old folks get with our stories. Anyway, this was in the Fall of 1971. Remember that big earthquake we had here early in the morning that took out most of San Fernando Valley, the V.A. hospital and a whole chunk of freeway? My folks were still in bed when it went off, and they just lay there and laughed at the sound of an entire deluxe set of wooden blocks crashing to the hardwood floor!

On my return from my annual summer in Tucson one year, my mother volunteered me to work with Serigraph artist Corita Kent, who was still Sister Corita at the time and had her usual 2-week production run "vacation" from teaching. What an incredible experience, to be in the presence of such a great artist and visionary. I cleaned screens, hung prints, mixed colors, trimmed edges--anything she needed.

Much later that association got me another wonderful position. In the mid '80's a mutual friend asked me to drive her and Corita, who was now resident in Boston, to visit the Office of Charles and Ray Eames. We had lunch with Ray (Charles had died some 7 years prior) and Ray was fretting over not having someone she could trust to go over her papers and files. Forty years of design work and collecting, she was still trying to run the office while its legacy was being acquired by the Library of Congress.

From that introduction I got to spend the next 3 years helping to catalogue their work, updating their publicity files, and making small contributions to the publishing of a book about them. My final task there was funded by a grant from IBM--I actually got a title and found a new niche--archivist! Being at the Eames Office was like taking all my upbringing and setting it out there in front of me on a very grand scale. My father had always admired Eames architecture and furniture design. We were entranced by their films and exhibitions, and I gained so much insight transcribing his lectures from the time he was Harvard's Poet of the Year. As I have said so many times before, I have led such a privileged life!


But I had always wanted to go to "finishing school" to learn how to fit into what I perceived as normal society. The other thing I wanted was to join the military and have a stable, predictable lifestyle with no worries about my care and keeping! I'm pretty horrified at the thought now, especially after spending 3 months as a guinea pig at National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, living in the hospital. Talk about giving up personal control!

As far as looking at each other's lives and hardships, I have come to take on what for me is a comforting outlook on it. When Joe was in the rehabilitation hospital after his accident, there were a number of other children there with various histories and outcomes. We mothers would always sit in awe of each other, that we could handle our own situation but couldn't see how we'd have been able to deal with theirs.

I don't think I could have made it at all in what I see in other peoples lives, even ordinary, non-traumatic ones. I have a different set of skills and ways of coping that don't work very well outside of my own experience. People admire Alice for her "strength" in getting through all her hardships. She doesn't feel anything special. You just do what you do. It's pretty straight- forward most of the time.

My last husband used to say, "If life were easy, somebody else would get to live it!" I don't think events or bad people in themselves mean we've had it any harder. I think nightmares come at all times, in all forms, real and unreal, to all of us, playing no favorites. Sometimes we're better at fending them off than others. Sometimes we just look through them, other times we become totally incapacitated and permanently changed by them. I have more anxiety over what to wear to a meeting than how I'm going to present my ideas to them. Go figure, as shy as I am!

The last time I was up to visit the Schlieman farm in Woodland was when Keith and I drove through one afternoon on a trip around Northern California. Joe was just a baby. I remember Ferd roasted a big slab of beef, coated in mustard and dredged in rock salt, placed right on the coals. It was an incredible meal. After dark, we drove off in our VW bus (I later rolled it driving on icy roads in the mountains!) and my biggest memory of that was that Joe got sick all over the back of the bus and we had to get a motel and 'start over.' That must have been about September 1965. Was the boat still in the barn? I picture it, but I don't think so. Must have been an earlier visit. Great planks of walnut filled one end of the barn. My father used some of the Schlieman walnut when he made a new cutting board for my kitchen.

Computers? I guess I was born just a little too soon. I would have loved to have used them in school and to know that a person could actually do that for a living. Instead, I dropped out of college (Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio--a “pinko-commie” school by reputation, but not really) because I couldn't see putting all that time and money into a major when I really didn't know what I wanted to do with myself. Nobody ever got through to me, although I know they tried, about the merits of a solid, liberal arts education--for me, anyway. I thought you went to school to get ready for a career. I wasn't the intellectual that I thought my parents thought I was nor that I still think they are.

So I came home with my tail between my legs, got married, started a family, and got bored senseless watching babies crawling all over the floor all day. Put little Joe in Montessori School, baby Erik in day care and signed up for 6 months of computer school. I was in heaven. They told me when I took the entrance exam, I had the highest score they'd seen, and they hounded me forever until I enrolled. This story could get really long, but suffice it to say, after I graduated, I worked for 3 months and then went on maternity leave, never to go back again. Well, not quite never, but that's a whole different kettle of grasshoppers. It was the first half of my computer career.

But the writing thing has always been there. I did O.K. in Jr. High and High School on the writing part but not the literature ('reading') part of English. I didn't realize that I had such an aversion to reading things other than science fiction or teen romances. I didn't notice until I nearly flunked out of physics for a second time and only squeaked by in Higher Criticism class that I actually have a reading problem of some kind. Apparently I was too bright for it to show up and make much difference. I'd always just avoided classes that had big books and lots of reading. Funny someone would say I should write. I haven't heard that from anybody before except once. It was a close friend who told me that right after I disclosed to her some things about my life and family that somehow she hadn't known, after all these years of our friendship. My response? "Who would want to read it?"

That's always been the problem. I can write to friends, I can write to myself (though I don't usually like the results), and I have certainly had some success at technical writing if you don't look too close. But I just can't imagine how the things I write about are important enough to others that they'd even get past an editor's pen, let alone published.

I once did a real live newspaper article for a small town paper. I was so desperate for work I'd try anything. The editor was ecstatic; I was horrified. I'd made so many mistakes in the thing I realized after I saw it in print, the people I was writing about must have thought I was really stupid and insensitive. You know, the way it is when the story is wrong and you know the writer didn't even bother to check it out, or care, or was too dumb to know better. And how I managed to write such a good article was also very strange to me. I just imaged how the article would sound if somebody who knew what they were writing about would say, and I put that down. It was like I was doing imitation writing, no formula or anything because I can't do that, I had some kind of idea in my head about making it sound good and giving it some character, and I “faked” it. I pretended I was a reporter and that's what came out, from landing the job to taking the photos (I barely covered the cost of the negatives) to talking to various people at the site. Just play-acting.

And I realize, that's how I get through most situations. I just pretend that I've always been doing it and try not to let on that I haven't a clue. It's an actual cognitive style identified and classified as a way of thinking/behaving/learning in education and psychology disciplines, or wherever they do that. In my first marriage I emulated being a wife and mother and did a great job of it before I realized that I had totally given myself up for the role. I thought that's what we're supposed to do. That certainly explained the attempts at bread baking!

Our venture into the plastic giftware business was one of the happiest times for me in my first marriage. I really enjoyed working with my husband, though I don't think he was as enchanted with it. Not necessarily a problem for him, some men just don't seem to have the same needs nor recognize fulfillment of them. I felt productive for the first time in my life, I think--for long periods, anyway. We made plastic bowls and trays with leaves and butterflies imbedded in them. It was a very unique process at the time. They sold in department stores and gifts shops all over the country, and were fairly well received. My mother's cousin had started it years before, and there was quite a following.

We had our coaster set in the Gumps Christmas catalog the last year we did it, in the early ‘70’s. They used to order 300 coasters at a time. It was quite a production, getting them out. Keith's dad had just retired from Ford and did a time-motion study on our operation to help us become more profitable, and we discovered that we actually lost money on those coasters which were so popular. They were too cheap for the amount of labor that went into them. He also found that true for the 22" bowls and trays. The fanciest thing we did was a round divided hors d’ oeuvre tray with separate dip bowl in the center.

We had 4 main patterns--gold maple leaf (Japanese maple), gold bamboo with butterflies, green maple leaf (instead of imbedding like the gold, large maple leaves were dyed green and baked onto the bottom of the pieces, then the leaves were scrubbed out leaving the green impressions; really pretty), and natural grasses with butterflies. My mother pressed and dried a lot of the leaves for us, though there were some bales of pressed leaves from years back when we took it over.

We later developed a line of framed art that wasn't quite as toxic to make, if you don’t count the spray glue--cloth background with dried plants, like a nature scene. It sold well but the glass almost always broke in shipping. They have better packing materials now.

The giftware was a very hand-made thing, despite its material. It was made of plastic granules normally used for injection molding. Like rock salt, we first sprinkled a single layer into pans to bake into thin sheets the sizes and shapes we needed, melted just enough to fuse together so you could pick it up. Then we laid out the design on one and put another blank one over it. That then baked, still in the original pan, until the grains all fused together. Part of the look was the small bubbles that got trapped between the grains.

We had big pizza ovens. Sometimes the plant material we were embedding would expel air that would make a big bubble and ruin the surface. Sometimes a butterfly wing would slip –these were imported from Taiwan in packs of 100. Sometimes a speck of glitter from some other order would get into the piece and we'd have to trash it. There was a lot of static electricity in the plastic that attracted dust and debris.

After the flat pieces were done, they'd get reheated on molds to form bowls or pressed into trays. Then the edges would be trimmed off and the back surfaces that were against the pans would be brushed with solvent to shine them up. Wrap, pack and ship! Up to 2 weeks from order to shipping. We did whole batches each week based on what we had to ship on Friday, all the while trying to stock up on “blanks” and paint leaves and go to trade shows. We had 2 sales reps, East and West coasts. Fortunately, most of that was in place when we started.

I've been so many different people in my time. I once typed up a curriculum vitae, in imitation of somebody really important, and it was 3 pages, single spaced. As I said, it wasn't really official, just a list of things I'd done or special notice I'd gotten. But these weren't anything that anybody else would consider significant. Well, actually there were a couple. But one friend teased, "Oh, couldn't hold a job?”

I had helped out in a silkscreen shop. I mixed colors for Corita. I measured yard goods at a discount fabric store. I washed test tubes at the National Institutes of Health, checked books in and out at the American Friends Services Committee library, raised kids on Forest Service stations (my own), took care of others' kids when I couldn't do anything else but stay home with mine. We took over our cousin's giftware manufacturing plant and made plastic bowls and trays with gold painted bamboo and butterflies inside.

I learned some acupressure and wrote a book for the doctor I learned it from, "Touch for Health." It was the publisher's all-time bestseller, even for vanity press. Sold out that first printing in 6 months and has by now sold millions, translated into about different 20 languages including Braille. I never saw a penny in royalties from it but I could teach it and be believed, because I believed in it. I headed up, in name only, my mentor's foundation where I organized classes, sold books, and put on conventions to promote the use of the alternative self-help tools. I have no idea how I ever got in front of an audience and lectured, or single-handedly led 8-day instructor training workshops in exotic resorts. Even got good enough to teach professional courses, training chiropractors, physical therapists and nurses.

I love that first bit of light in the morning. We have a path along the edge of our town that used to be a railroad track. They took out the rails, planted the ties upright in the center and created a paved bike/walking/skating path on one side with a horse/dog or whatever-you-wanted-to-run-with dirt lane on the other side. It starts at the city border and runs a mile and a half or so to the park at our end. I used to get out early enough to walk eastward on it and see the sun working its way up through the craggy ridges of mountains that ring the greater L.A. basin.

We live in the foothills at the base of those. It's dry scrub vegetation for the most part, broad sanding riverbeds that only have water after storms. The area is quite arid but for the imported water that feeds all those lawns and palm trees you see in the pictures. Actually, our valley area is hilly with many old residential sections, and many, many tree-lined streets. When the air is clear there are great panoramas I can see as I drive around the edges, here and there. And coming back home I get to have the mountains to the north as my view. In winter we’ll even get snow on the peaks down to about 3,000 ft.

I had never finished college and I finally decided that I had better put some credibility behind my words. I squeaked through the prerequisites by taking a guitar class and a couple weekend workshops on psychology and enrolled in Chiropractic college, the discipline from which all that I knew about the body arose. I later had a nightmare about turning into a doctor in a blue suit, seeing myself as a man at the end of a long hallway of doors to little treatment rooms.

A year before I was to graduate, Joe was run over by a farm tractor outside of Eureka where they lived. He and his little brother had an after school job riding around and picking up the stakes that held up the branches of the peach trees. They were not supervised and in hindsight had no business being there, not even big enough to operate the controls properly. I left school one week into the Fall semester and spent the next 3 months sitting beside his silent, nearly lifeless body.

Just before Christmas, he began to come out of the coma. Talk about the best Christmas present ever....

We spent the whole next year getting him through rehabilitation and therapy, to where Joe could walk (sort of), talk (slowly, if you could understand him), and start to handle basic functions on his own like eating, breathing, dressing, and all the things we take for granted. The second year he spent in the public school for 'special' kids, usually transported in a wheel chair. And I finally finished school, including my internship at school's Chiropractic clinic in El Monte.

The year after that, Joe was welcomed into the Pacific Oaks Mini School where every day he climbed upstairs to the high school classroom over one of the nursery school groups. It was a wonderful place for us.

I took my Chiropractic boards, first in New Mexico, twice in California, missed getting to take Arizona's by one day and finally got that one too. Joe moved back up with Keith, and Alice and I moved to Phoenix, where I worked with a doctor at his office for a while. But he didn't like my leaving to go teach, which I was still trying to do, so we parted ways

Keith and I traded kids back and forth as we all saw fit, kids included in the choice. But I couldn't quite make a living in Arizona so I put my tail between my legs and came back to Southern California. Joe finally graduated from high school, having been given a lot of leeway on courses but nevertheless getting A's in English, in Coeur d' Alene, Idaho. That summer he traveled through Europe with a companion, the trip a gift from his dad who would have wanted to go in his stead.

After that first experience trying to be a 'real' (if chiropractic counts for that) doctor, I settled into just having a part-time office out of my house. I could greet casual patients in my stocking feet, wash dishes when there wasn't much activity, and be home for whatever kids were in and out. It kinda worked. When that wasn't enough, I did the stint at the Eames office as a fill-in, satisfying another side of my creative self. Alice finished at Pasadena Alternative School (see, none of us really fit the conventional mold) just as she turned 15. But that's where we came in.

Whew. Made it through all that. But I left out the whole thing about computers! That fit in when the boys were little, and then again when I was doing the TFH Foundation's newsletters, Alice typing the school plays for English credit. At the Eames office I created listings all the boxes of slides on the computer as part of the Library of Congress records of the materials they were taking over. I linked the image dates and subjects to their 30-year chronology which became a reference for the production of a beautiful big Abrams book on their work. Those were fun times. See? Now was that so hard?

I worked in Alice's office after a year of doing diet counseling for Nutri-System (I needed a job reee-eaall bad!) and automated their office records and processes onto computers. It was one of my biggest technical accomplishments. When my back went out while I was filing, rehab agreed to get my programming skills updated so I could earn a living easier. After taking a whole bunch of courses, I got hired to help teach them and further honed my programming skills. Did a little consulting job that was supposed to last 2 weeks but ended up 6 months, and then went to work for Spelling Entertainment, seated not far from the man I had taken all my classes from (he had recommended they hire me). Now, that's most of it.

I lost a friend to cervical cancer--she was in denial about having it, till it was too late. It was the growth around her kidney that was so painful, got her attention and eventually took her life.

One of the gifts we were given when Joe was injured was to meet up with Gerald Jampolsky, author of many inspirational books along the lines we've been exploring. My mother had heard him on the radio and was studying "The Course In Miracles" which was the source of much of his work. She gave him a call and he followed up with visits. Joe went to some of the conferences as he got better. "Love is Letting Go of Fear" and "Good-Bye to Guilt" are a couple of the books on my shelf. He mentions Joe in a them, and I got to contribute a chapter to "Teach Only Love" telling Joe's story.

About 2 years after Joe's accident, he and Alice, ages 14 and 10, were living with me in Sierra Madre. I had a 20’x20’ apartment on top of an old garage. It was amazing, how I carved three bedrooms out of its corners. Nice little place. I was supporting myself by teaching classes and I had a group of podiatrists out in San Fernando Valley, several miles west of here, that was meeting once a week, evenings. One night my mother couldn't watch the kids so Alice stayed with the neighbors up front and I took Joe, then 14, with me to the class. Not my first choice, but it should be OK. Anyway, we took off on the freeway headed west into one of the most gorgeous sunsets. And I just started to ball. Here was Joe, who had formerly been such a visually sensitive kid, never to see a sight like this again. I told him how bad that made me feel, and asked him how would he ever have that incredible satisfaction again? You know what he then reassured me? "I get it through Love."

I've always found it hard to make friends and usually leave people with a terrible impression, if I'm out of my realm. Alice is so lucky to have an automatic smile set on her face. Even when she was very young the corners of her little mouth had an upward bend at the edges. I'm sure that affects how others responded to her, so easy from the start.

Me, I've always been shy and scared, and my face shows it. The corners of my mouth turn down, and the tension holds them there. Even when I put on a lame smile, they move down before they move up again. One of the things I've always experienced is that people then misinterpret my feelings and intentions. I'm scared, they think I'm mean. I'm confused or unhappy, they think I'm angry. I have a handful of friends, but the ones who stick around in spite of me get to know the real me and become dear.

Oh, I'm friendly enough to strangers and I've worked hard at being more socially polite, more outgoing, more positive in public. Sometimes I even get people to laugh. (Actually, more than I try, because I often talk as weird and off the wall as I write--I don't seem to have access to the right words for things so I have to use unusual ones to fill in, and that makes it more interesting, I guess.)

I sat down here to talk about a short film the Charles Eames did about 'Covetables.' He talked about how we see unopened packages, and stacks of them, like reams of paper, boxes of chalk, balls of twine, and how that seems to get spoiled when we have to open them to use their wonderful contents. The patterns they make when closely held by their wrappers, how we can never get them back quite the same once they've been disturbed. I think of a box of crayons, that I want the colors arranged as they were when they came from the factory, all the perfect points aligned. And envelopes with a band of paper around the waist, fresh cut edges on the stationery that slightly sticks the pages together until we move the corner and they sigh and stretch as they disconnect. We love having containers that nest and stack, that share the same lids. A shelf of folded towels--a rainbow of sweet softness.

And yet I love a table set with beautiful bowls and platters all from different cultures and materials, each showing off the talent of its craftsman and the unique character of this expression. We choose a well worn, flattish turquoise dish for the yellow squash, a round orange vessel on a little ring will hold potatoes cut and boiled in their skins. The baby gets a sturdy little glass with a slightly decorated rim, special from the cupboard. How about that pretty cup with the funny grip for her brother? And let's use those little blue handled fruit knives tonight.

Envelopes are a wonderful container. When I had my practice I had cards made up the first couple of times but I was not always happy with them. I found a medical office supply catalog and discovered I could order a box of tiny envelopes, intended for dispensing pill samples. With my own name and address on them, I could hand them out filled with little hearts or stars. I used them for a lot of things and I still have some left, the address long out of date, where I can put in the odd screw or clock parts, today's vitamins, or just marvel at the edges of the box as it comes right up to the top, how the lid fits over snuggly and goes on the shelf in the cabinet.

My father was in commercial art and design for years, and often he dealt directly with the printers to follow through with a job or get a paper sample. He found certain print shops better for special projects. Then came the day that he filled the whole car with packages of the printer's cut off edges. All kinds of shapes, colors, sizes, textures, weights, coatings. There was a thin pink sheet, almost tracing paper that I used for writing love letters. A long light poster board (probably card stock), two shades of green, we used for birthday crowns. I sewed little books together of poetry and ink drawings, some brown, some ivory, some a blotter paper white. The whole basement was lined with these brown wrapped packages, a sample of the paper taped over the front. I could not imagine growing up without such a supply of paper.

I still have my father's original pot of rubber cement. The brush is forever stuck in the remnants of the dried up glue at the bottom. The outside once wrapped in a fresh strip of paper now dripped and smeared and stuck with years of dust, the screw knob to raise or lower the handle immovable. It is on display in the hallway where I use the top of the bookcases to hold special things that I enjoy, walking by several them times a day. My older pair of glasses sits underneath the thermostat should I need to read the dial in the middle of the night. Two orange butterflies cut like snowflakes out of tissue paper keep me from piling the day's mail on the end closest to the front door. The rest of the space is mine.

What is being asked of me? What can I do that will satisfying that request? How can I do it in a way that will also satisfy other, unstated requirements? My friend wanted me to trim her hair. She said that what she really wanted was for her hair not to get in her face when she went swimming. Nobody had ever been able to achieve that for her. She had lovely, fine, straight hair. It was strong, shiny, auburn in color, and planted very thick. Wonderful to work with. She wore it straight in a short page boy cut with bangs, whatever way it fell when she came out of the shower. Sometimes it looked like somebody had cut it with a bowl over her head.

To meet the first demand, I simply pulled all of her hair together in front of her face and with one big snip cut it all off in front of my fist. Now there was no way that any part of it, from any place on her head, could cover her face. To be sure, I followed the hairline and further trimmed whatever still reached to her eyes or past the cheeks to her mouth and nose.

The rest was up to me, creating a style that worked with that, didn't drastically alter her image, and still showed off how pretty she was. So my next task was to give it a carefree shape that allowed her the freedom to comb it and leave it alone, yet compliment her rounded countenance. I leveled off her bangs and then feathered them out so they followed the contour of her forehead without stopping so abruptly at her eyebrows, short enough to allow for at least a month's growth.

Over time, we let the back grow out even longer to show off it's beautiful color and strength, keeping with the initial limits. The details of reducing the overall volume, shaping the sides, undercutting the back to curl under a little, these things are not important here. To accommodate her athletic nature, I watched how she moved, what her hair did when she shook it out and than made various corrections so it would land well, no matter what she did.

She later told me it was the best haircut she'd ever had. I don't know if it was technically correct, but I'd been happy enough looking at it afterwards, and it did exactly what she wanted. That's all she asked. We just have to listen to what they ask.

There is a columnist in the L.A. Times who has a writing style like I think I write. I don't know if I could do that on demand--that's the other thing, having to. I had tried that once. Anyway, she puts down her personal experience, opinion, feelings. I wrote to her once in response to one article, and she said I made her cry. She's a widow with 2 kids; I had told her about Alice.

I've always wanted to write about the people in the family so the coming generations could understand how we got the way we did and feel they're O.K. to be who they are. But part of me says that's just making excuses. Another part says, "So, who made you the expert?" That's a line I usually throw at myself after I write things for myself to preserve the idea, but not having somebody I'm telling it to. Sounds too much like bragging if it's a "good" idea, or whining if it's negative. It's only my own perspective and may not even be close to right, so why embarrass everybody?

I’ve often wanted to just print my saved up writings and put them into a binder or box and be done with it. I've mourned ones I've lost. Some I come across I can hardly recognize. Papers from college I can't figure out how I ever understood the stuff, and was that me? Enough. See what goes on in my head? But for some special people I can let go and type my little heart out.

Part of the joy of writing is the actual manual act of pushing keys with fingers. My handwriting could never keep up with my thoughts and was a terrible distraction. One can look at scribbling only so long before the crossings-out start censoring one’s very thoughts. In new friendships, there is so much to fill in, like when you've known each other all your lives and haven't seen or heard from the other for SO LONG! There is so much to catch up on, to fill in. With some new friends, it doesn't seem like we're starting from right now.

I had an English professor in college (doesn't that sound elegant? But it was just a brief happening, me and college.) who told about sitting next to a man on the plane and they exchanged the usual chit-chat about work and family, very superficial. They almost didn't get down to the real stuff, but by some quirk they learned they were both well known poets and they were absolutely delighted to finally meet the other and share some of the magic that comes from that. It was one of those life lessons, that they almost missed it, they were being so busy being modest and careful and ordinary.

I have a lot of thoughts about the immune system and how it can make our lives so painful, trying so hard to protect us from dragons. Most of my theories probably wouldn't stand up to medical scrutiny, but again, who am I to say? But I think a lot of our pain is environmentally based. Our world is so toxic now. It will be years before they realize we've done it to ourselves, just like they're starting to own up to global warming. Last report I heard, it's much worse than they even imagined. By the end of the next century the temperature will have gone up more than in the previous I can't remember how many thousands of years. Maybe we can save some little corner of the earth. I laugh at all the houses built on our coastline and along the ridges of our crumbling mountain ranges, as if the dirt stays put forever, where we see it today. But part of me cries. It's hard to watch people make such big mistakes.

I wear a lot of the beads but most of my wardrobe doesn't lend itself to showing them off. I wish I were the elegant type that could just put on a black sheath and a great necklace and look terrific. I'm a rumpled type. Things get untucked, hems get crooked, shoulders slip. I just can't ever get it right. But I do have a few favorite strings that go with simple sweaters, when the weather is right.

I have always had an aversion to piercing (wouldn't take Alice but told her she could have her ears done if I didn't have to go; she went out of state!). Tried clip on earrings but they hurt too much. I love rings and sometimes put on several, but then I forget again for years on end.

Bracelets usually get caught on things. I'm a lot clumsier in real life than I like to think. I had a beautiful 18 carat gold ring with a large sapphire as an engagement ring--we found it at a gun show at the Pomona fair grounds and then had simple gold bands made to match. But I closed my hand in the car door and lost the stone. We combed the parking lot and never found it. I think it must have shattered. So I had an opal set in it because we had one lying around, but I knocked that against the refrigerator and popped it out, too. Just too big a profile, I guess. 'Fingers and Toes...' whenever my last husband was getting ready to shut the door for me in the car. I have been known to close the door on my own foot, getting in, in such a hurry.

What scares me the most about people meeting me for the first time is that I'm so plain, so shy, pretty low-brow. I can't think of things to say and I'm awfully boring. My friend and I have long silences and then both start to talk at once. She is a social wallflower, too. We're a great bunch! She usually handles it by finding something to do--help with food, clean-up or anything that makes her feel useful instead of a lump. I'm not so industrious. I don't think she's as concerned about what other people think of her, the way you and I are, but just so sensitive to not fitting in. I often point out to her that in most of the specific circumstances where she's been feeling like that, so have all the other people there!

And I think that does go for a lot of folk. The 'in' that we're trying so hard to fit, doesn't exist! There are those who tend to group together and make a tight little clique to which they can feel they belong, but that's usually in response to them NOT feeling part of the remainder where they think everyone else does fit. Aren't we a funny species?

One of the things I loved about my folks' life was that people would drop in at any time of the day and be welcomed. Another place would be set, even if just for coffee, if we were sitting down to eat. People knew to come to the back door and walk right up the back steps into the porch and through the French door into the kitchen. Even now, there's a good likelihood my folks would be right there with open arms. My own life, you'd probably not even find me at home, and there probably wouldn't even be a place to sit if you came it, though I'd try to move things aside. My heart is there, and I'd love the surprise company; it just doesn't happen the same way. What a loss.

Raisins. Remember that great song they had in the mid 80's, taken from some classical piece, where they were naming all the things you could do with raisins? Always loved that. I used to request of Alice that she play the Raisin Song and she knew which that was. She'd taken a year or so of piano when she lived with Keith. I never had enough money but I rented a piano for her and it came with these dumb lessons (melody + chords) and it kept her happy for a while. She'd get an odd tip from various friends of mine and then in high school [age 12-14 at that point] her homeroom/English teacher who is a great pianist gave her a lot of help and she did some serious classical pieces--one was the "Raisin Song”, Rondo Alla Turca. I've had to ask her what it's real name is. I'm terrible about names of things. No music, literature, authors, movies, actors, or anybody sticks in my head. I love music but can't buy it! Alice and I had a deal, I'd do dishes if she'd play piano. Got her to practice. She thinks she got the better end of the deal. I disagree. I got to hear her play!

The fourth was an adventure of sorts. Had the kids over Friday night, drove them to Laguna Saturday noon. Then Joe, up through Sunday afternoon. After that I was working on my program but took time out to watch the neighbors light off some of their goodies. Duarte still allows fireworks, crazy as that is. Then we had a knock at the door, the folks next door to Alice's wanted to know if the dog that jumped into their back yard was hers. Poor thing, alone and scared, had forced her way through a weak spot in the fence. So Larry went and brought her here, where she sat happily at his feet until Alice called at 10:30PM that she'd finally gotten home.

I count as one of my proudest singular achievements that in my college years (the first time around) when I was back east for a spell and got to climb the Washington Monument! On a sadder note, I was strolling around Kensington Palace on a once-in-a-lifetime business trip to London, the same grounds that not one month later was a sea of flowers, a shrine for Princess Dianna. From my desk in Los Angeles, I felt like I was still there, that it was happening at my feet. I think, too, that it was one of the things about my son-in-law Greg's death that hit me so hard--we each had been sent by our companies to London, very close together, he and I, for similar work, and when he left this earth, he left behind our own Princess Alice, so much like Dianna, and so soon after. The images, which for me became related to Greg, were all mixed together--these two beautiful women, our virtually shared trip just weeks apart to England with the same sights, and the hopelessly tragic, untimely losses for not just all of us but especially for their respective children.

When Greg died; Lauren was 15 months old. She didn't have words except "Doggie" and "Daddy" and those were indistinguisible. You could see her wandering around as if looking for him, yet I don't think she even knew what she was looking for. It was eerie. It seemed like months before she got her giggles back; it was Dad who had always made her laugh. I know she was affected by the uncertainty we were feeling while he was struggling so to live, and though we tried to keep the kids on the regular schedule they were used to, there were long periods that they didn't even see Alice, let alone Daddy, and it was hard to keep up a hopeful, comforting stance when we saw him slipping away.

Scott, on the other hand, was very verbal. He has always had access to his feelings and with everyone's help, was wonderfully open and expressive. But you can imagine our pain at the content of his expression. His initial wails when we broke the terrible news that day, "Daddy! Daddy! Daaaddddyyy!" tore right through our hearts, and my eyes are filling up just telling about it. Yet we knew we had to be right up front about it, and there for him at the same time. He was in the Quaker nursery school and they helped, too. I'm told he talked with his older half-brother a lot, and Alex gave him a good sense of knowing Greg's place there in heaven, very forthright.

This is all very much in our minds. And there is a certain amount of good feeling, surprisingly, in getting to wallow in it. There is a balance. I know it must be hard to read all. A year later, when I was running around with my friend/co-worker/former boss Chris, the actual anniversary. Besides being a computer genius, Chris is an ordained Episcopal minister and had switched to that role the year before when the walls came crashing in. He had us all over to his house--Greg's family was all here from back east--and spent the time counseling us by way of preparing for the memorial services that we arranged together. Chris gave a lovely service at a beautiful little stone church they go to. Greg had actually worked with Chris on some programming projects (Greg was also a computer person) so they had a relationship of their own, and Chris his own grief to deal with it all of it. Chris's wife, Sally, took over a lot of the kid support during those 2 weeks, finally having them overnight that last night when all of us were gathered around Greg's bed as he slipped away.

At the very end, Greg's mother remained with his brother and sisters out in the waiting room. Keith and I stayed with Alice as she held his hand and let him go, Keith's arms around her at his side, me at his feet. They'd turned off all the beeps and warning buzzers on the monitors, but we couldn't help but watch the wavy lines up there get slower and softer, the numbers going lower and lower. There was so much equipment still going, they never did flatten out all the way, but we knew.

One of my dearest friends tried to come to the services we had for Greg but got lost and couldn't find it, went home and cried, her sorrows doubled. We missed her and I worried that something like that had happened but I was too busy to get back to looking into it. She called that night in so much pain. I had had an instinct that I should have done a better job of directions, or had someone go get her since she tends to have trouble driving when she's stressed.

The same here, I think, if I know someone close is having difficulty, I’d want to help get around those obstacles and enable them to participate more fully. I’m reminded of the movie "Hans Christian Anderson" when he got locked away while his ballet "Little Mermaid" was being performed. How he had to let go of the hurt and imagine the beauty of the performance as he caught strains of the music from the stage far away. I have so much trouble with those ironies.

Greg was cremated and my down-to-earth daughter set the cardboard box of his remains on the edge of her drafting table in the den, under a leftover dime store joke parking sign designating that space as reserved only for Greg. It sat for ages with only occasional notice until Alice’s cousin's wife offered we all go to their house for a last farewell. (We had already held memorial services on each coast to accommodate all his friends and family.) Greg had loved visiting this place along a ridge at the edge of Mariposa overlooking the central valley to the west.

We gathered on a windy weekend and watched from the porch as our cousin hiked down a ravine and climbed up onto a great boulder. There she lit a small cluster of sage leaves and feathers per a tradition she had read, spoke a poem she had found appropriate to Greg's life, and tossed handfuls of the gritty ashes across the wind. It took several throws to empty the box and each was its own cloudy spray like fireworks and smoke. We waited as she climbed back down (she skinned her knee) and shortly after, all set a garden flower on the earth underneath the young pine tree the kids had just planted near the house for him.

We have the pictures and memories of this but I wanted more of a marker. On a whim I wrote to England and "bought" a star in his name (or a name on a star), permanently recorded, they said, in a couple of places--one in Greenwich? It came with a colorful certificate and a celestial map with its coordinates. I ordered enough extras for Greg's mother and both his children. I just felt that Greg would have like to leave his mark somewhere on the universe.

Suddenly I’m distracted by an awful problem--I think we've got a dead animal under the house or something. There's that horrible smell and I can't find the source but it's been here since yesterday, getting worse. At least my husband would be home later and could try to find it. We really looked all over for where that smell was coming from. Finally decided it wasn't under the house. I had recently found a dried up mouse in one of Scott's toy cupboards, so Larry was getting ready to empty out all my kitchen shelves when he noticed my pumpkin swimming in its own juices at the back of the counter.

I'd saved it from the year before and had begun to think it would just dry out like a decorative gourd. I think it was the biggest of the whole patch. Greg had planted them and he and Scott were tending them before he died. Scott had his whole kindergarten class walk over to see them growing. Anyway, this big one he'd picked out to display at the memorial services, his Dad's pumpkin.

So I'd been saving it all that time since we'd picked it in August, and now it's July a year later. Well, rotting flesh, even if it's just vegetable, is still rotting flesh. The worst thing was that Larry got so zealous when he found it, instead of dropping it right into the trash that I'd run over there with, he thought it best to whisk it outside. But it couldn't take all that swinging in the air and fell apart, splat, all over the steps out to the patio. What a stinky mess! We sure get enough things to laugh about. I got him the BBQ spatula to help scoop up what he could, and he hosed down the rest. So much for saving that lone pumpkin. A little furry, but not animal. Whew.

I think the best fireworks I got to see were while we were driving home from where we'd been all evening. The freeway passed by the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, and theirs were still going. Many people had pulled off onto the edge just to watch. Then as we rounded our corner to get home, we could see that the neighbors had all had their own celebrations in their driveways. It's always been fun to sit on the front porch and look up and down the street.

But the dogs go nuts. That year, Alice had brought her dog over to our house and had kept her company and calmed down most of the night. When things finally quieted down, we opened the front door and let her see the world again from behind the baby-gate. Suddenly, she bolted over the gate and out into the front yard. We yelled at her to get back inside, ran out and chased her in, but not till after did we see that she had that quickly caught a large possum, now bringing it into the living room. Shrieks and yells at her, she let go. It lay limp on the floor. Larry swept it back onto the porch and we shut the door. By morning it was gone, thank heavens.

All the towns around Los Angeles put on various fireworks displays—Hollywood Bowl, Pomona Fair Grounds, most of the large high schools and parks. Anyone with a view of any part of the city can look out in all directions and see the explosions. We're up against the mountains that rim the L.A. Basin, and there's a large sand-and-gravel sorting tower in a river bed near us. Year round, there's a lane that runs behind our house, and one section with low trees, you can see the lights that are strung up all over the tall framework of that structure. As you pass by, the lights appear to twinkle and it looks, for that instant, like another fireworks display going off.

I took Lauren with me to my friend Karen's one Saturday while I worked at her computer. It was her son's 3-year birthday party and Lauren was the only kid who came. She was great and played well before and aft. Karen and another mother there each with 3-week old infants. Afterwards Larry and I took Lauren out to dinner and after she ate her corn on the cob, she wrapped the cob up carefully in her napkin and rocked it in her arms, singing, "Rock-a-bye baby, treetop, a win a win a win." Then it would wake up, she told us, and she'd wrap it up all over again. I'm sure it was inspired by the babies at Karen's. Fun seeing little minds at work.

I love the idea of special days, so to have one for getting rid of one's extra vegetables really appeals to me. I have had some gardens but none now. Keith often had a whole wall of tomatoes but I think that was mostly Edward's doing. Edward lived with Keith and Joe and helped out; he's now officially a political refuge from Fiji. I loved eating the tiny green beans right off the stem.

I have an awful time with worms so that's always dampened my gardening efforts--from all angles. When we lived over the factory I tried having a garden in planter boxes. The caterpillars ate all the broccoli and onions; when they started on the flowers and turned pink to match, I gave up and fed them to the goldfish. If I run into a worm while I'm digging, I sometimes have to quit for the week. I don't know why I'm so squeamish. The mushrooms that I'm continually pulling out of the lawn often have slugs in them. I hate it when I accidentally touch one. I can't pick a snail out either, and have to turn away when somebody else does. Just writing about it turns my stomach! Strange creatures we are, to have such active imaginations.

I love music. There are some kinds I don't like, and if I'm nervous I have to turn it off. I think it's fun to have the TV on with the sound off and play music instead. Amazing how it fits. But I'm terrible about name and composers and can't buy any because I don't know what to get. I have to ask Alice what the words are because I can't usually make them out. I don't know why. I used to play guitar and sing with the kids but I'm not any good at it. They wouldn't go to bed without songs. Keith said the reason he proposed to me was, "That's the voice I want singing to my kids!" I don't remember many of the songs but I do sing with Scott and Lauren when they let me.

I was thinking about trees. One morning as I drove Lauren to her babysitter (too cold a word for a wonderful woman who is truly a second mom for her) I pointed out the trees again and told her how much I love trees. They come into our conversations (if one can actually have a conversation as such with a 2-year-old!) a lot. I planted three trees in the front lawn, and there were already two. I've always had the kids checking them out when we're outside.

I am in awe over how skilled the city trimmers have gotten lately, in most places, at revealing each tree's own personality when they bare the branches and clear out the overgrowth. I think the tree feels some relief from it. The good trimmers would say that, I'm sure. Here in Duarte, though, they still subscribe to creating gumdrops on sticks out of these grand old masters lining the main streets. I grieve for the trees, so misunderstood, and for us, not to get to know them for who they really are.

On our block I have a favorite pair of what I think are Maple. In the summer they seem like precocious identical twins, holding strong and tall on their property, not having to share their space with any others except the little flowers and small shrubs around the bottom. But in winter they’re more like brother and sister, one losing all its leaves and the other not, but seemingly reaching its ample limbs through and around to blanket its sibling from the elements.

I love driving through neighborhoods with such a variety of trees they look like somebody got out the architect's template of landscaping and stenciled every different one. Some bushy, some weepy, so tall, all different greens and densities. Even when all they are is a single thickness pen line. I cherish the stick figure elephant a little friend drew and marvel at how it could look so big with only a single line for a body.

I was there when the cherry blossoms came out in Washington, D.C., spring of 1962.

Early one Saturday morning, at 4 A.M., Alice called to ask if I could come over and stay at her house while she went off to accompany a dear friend in need, a would-be single mom in a terrible relationship having another baby that very moment; she'd lost her tiny daughter to SIDS less than a year before and still hasn't gotten herself out of the household. So I did that, and then some. Four loads of laundry, all the toys up off the floor, dishes out of the sink, etc. Now there's a beautiful baby boy with just her name on it, and her whole family rallied around to protect and move them on.

Another Saturday morning, grandson Scott had a tap dance recital. Little kids are so cute. The tumbling classes were the most fun to watch, some as young as 3 rolling on the floor trying to take turns and not knowing where to go next. Alice was going to video tape the whole thing but her battery ran out early. Then little Lauren decided she wanted to dance when the ballet girls were up on stage. She stood in the aisle waving her arms, twirling and jumping with them. She did about as well as they did!

When Keith and I had the giftware factory I loved painting the gold onto the bamboo and maple leaves. I don't remember the formula but we used a bronze dust mixed in paint thinner or something. I'm sure I was getting high on the fumes, and in hindsight that and all the other fumes in the place were probably responsible for my being so sick back then. (To this day I can't be around hydrocarbons without feeling sick. Like nail polish remover, bug sprays, even forest fires. We lived downwind of a fire above Sierra Madre one year and had to leave for a week.) My mother's cousin didn't fare too well in later life, which is why we took over running the business, and I think his years in that toxic environment contributed to his early death. Hearing about how to mix the gold ink for calligraphy reminded me of our beautiful 'gilded' leaves. And all the art supply terms I used to hear my folks talking about. Never did any of that, and I admire people greatly for being able to. If it doesn't come from a mix I just about can't handle cooking any more, so the idea of having to make a fresh batch of gold ink seems like real dedication. I know it's just part of the pleasure of it.

This looks like I'm not getting into any great substance here. That comes in waves and the tide must be out. I'm out of coffee. I like a shot of that in the morning, but I can't take much or I start to shake. At a couple different times in my life I was put on various anti-depressants for a while and finally decided that the side effects were worse than the mood swings. Some gave me panic attacks, others innocuous enough nightmares that nevertheless woke me up kicking and screaming. That's not at all like me, really! I read an article in the Times recently on how women metabolize drugs differently and have lower thresholds. Experience tells me there is something to it because I can't even have half a glass of champagne for brunch and feel O.K. to drive home hours later.

On Oprah the other day she seemed to be again interviewing the author of "White Oleanders" and talking about how the images, the crafting of language that the author (Fitch?) uses, have been opening peoples eyes to a new way of seeing the world. I don't usually watch those shows but it's my favorite when I do. The author was explaining how a teacher had asked for a definition of 'cliche', and then went on to say that ANY phrase you'd ever heard before was a cliche. As a result, the descriptions she now writes are so fresh and deep they seem to be turning a lot of people's eyes and lives around. When one comes from so much heart, and what you share has to pass through such a heavy place, it’s amazing when it doesn't get distracted or bogged down by it. Almost like the astrophysics technique of using the gravity of the sun, or the earth, or the moon, to slingshot beyond and out further into space than you could go directly, rather than being pulled down and sucked in by their incredible forces.

Life came around full circle over a weekend when Alice's calligraphy teacher, Bonnie, called her to ask for help and sympathy. Her 35 year old son was discovered 2 days after he'd died of an apparent overdose. Alice had been taking a course from Bonnie just the year before when Greg died, so there were some instant bonds renewed over this latest tragedy. Coincidentally, I was browsing the Sunday paper and came across the obituary of one of my son Joe's classmates, and was reading with great sadness over that news, on top of Bonnie's, only to find Bonnie's name listed there as surviving parent. I went numb, remembering the quiet, handsome, sensitive boy who was dating another classmate those years ago, the daughter of a friend of mine at the same little school. I called Alice to tell her, and called Keith so he can break the news to Joe as best he could. Joe remembers people and always asks about them like he'd seen them only yesterday.

We had never made the connection that Bonnie and I had that in common, our boys having been acquainted at that special school. Joe had been 2 years past his accident back then and was really trying hard to get a life back. Pacific Oaks Mini School was a terrific venture on the part of its founder, to provide a haven for kids who didn't fit into the traditional academic/social zoo of the public schools. They welcomed Joe just as enthusiastically as all the other kids. There were some really great young folks there, and we still hear things of them.

We handled the services amazingly well. We took Joe with us, since he'd known Brent and had recently asked about him. I don't know if I conveyed the situation accurately, especially since it's this strange connection that I find so unsettling. Bonnie's son and Joe's classmate are one and the same, though we had never suspected till this happened. We can intellectually make the connection but never having actually known and lived it, my not realizing that Alice's Bonnie was Brent's mom those 20 years ago. Alice not knowing that Bonnie's son was a kid that we'd known back then, it's like the circle is just a horseshoe with the gap between me and Alice--a piece is missing somewhere.

Going to the funeral helped because it made it more real, everybody together, holding up (and holding each other up) well. It was a beautiful event and though we couldn't go afterwards, the rest all convened informally at a small, casual restaurant to share and celebrate, the way Brent would have liked. He was a very funny, fun loving guy under his troubles, and that joyful, carefree spirit will survive. He'd have poked fun at all the seriousness and would have had everybody in stitches laughing at his antics at a time like that.

My back has been giving me fits the last few days. I played with the kids on the lawn the other day, bending over to get the ball to toss back. I can't do that much bending down or I pay later; now it's collecting. Also pulled a few odd weeds out of it, another thing I shouldn't do much of. We won't talk about lifting up Lauren, who is nearing 40 pounds. I guess I need to get out of this chair and get going, too, because today is her birthday party and I'm not ready. I think we're going to go look for a new bed for her. She has fallen out of the loft bed a couple of times and I think after this last episode (unrelated; hit the bathtub) where she whacked her front teeth, she's getting leery of it. Keith had made the loft beds to give them more floor space in their little bedroom. Hard to move from a 3 bedroom house with extra family room and big yard to a tiny 2 bedroom house with just a walkway.

Monrovia does not allow any kind of consumer fireworks, yet right next door here in Duarte, the selling of sparklers, roman candles and screamers of many varieties helps support all manner of local organizations. Legal there, as long as they're lit south of the E/W drive, Royal Oaks, which runs across the whole breadth of the city, more or less marking the edge of the city and the beginning of the mountain. Suburbia has obscured that distinction somewhat, since we now have houses on both sides of that line. It used to be a railroad frontage, the track converted to the walking/skating/biking path that we enjoy a few houses above mine. Of course, we can't get there from here, either, being in the depths of this little development they plunked here in the late '50's.

We had a laundry disaster toward the end of the school year--I'm out of practice. It was a blue crayon. I was able to recover about half of the load by washing it in hot water with about a quart of Simple Green and a cup of bleach. Alice cleaned the dryer. Lost one pair of navy blue uniform shorts, Scott’s, that turned purple, so we'll save them for Lauren if she wants them. She lost 3 pairs of khaki long pants (again, uniforms) but only had 3 more weeks of school and it's getting too hot to wear them anyway; she'd have outgrown them by September.

I can't think of too many other things I've laundered, besides pens and crayons, that have been so disrupting. Lots of money gets cleaned. Kleenex can be pretty bad. Usually I figure if a piece of clothing can't take my neglect and abuse, it's not worth wearing.

The night we picked up Lauren's new glasses she was busy getting used to them. She realized the next afternoon that now that she wears glasses, she could be a scientist. What kind of scientist? Having just come back from an afternoon at the local Santa Fe Dam recreation area where they soaked in the water, collected artifacts underfoot and played in the sand, carefully carrying home two paper cups full of specimens, one balanced in each of her shoes, she decided that she would be a "scientist of rocks and stones."

Friday is donut day. Alice is off on Fridays and takes the kids for a donut breakfast on the way to school. That's just a couple blocks up from here. Then she stops back to get me, if I haven’t already walked over to meet them, and after the kids are deposited at school, we go out and have a real, grown-up breakfast.

Our kids—my grandkids--don't get sugar on their cereal, but they're allowed to have a sprinkled on topping of any mother-approved commercially sweetened and marketed product. This week it's "Mud and Bugs" which seems to be chocolate-flavored puffs and colored marshmallow bits--never a whole bowl of that kind of stuff. I have been teaching them to read labels; they get very excited when the protein goes over 2 grams. That's usually the criteria for whether what they pick fills most of the bowl or only a little of it on top...

Lauren brought home a piece of her 2nd grade class work the other day. It was some 4 pages of questions, all types, in the unit Kindness, from The Story of Three Whales. I didn't see the book it's from, but this section appears to have been about Inuits rescuing some whales trapped in the ice. The last essay question reads, "Personal Response - Write about a time you or someone you know helped an animal." Here's her answer:

Once my grandma's freind
helped a snack. He brang it to
his museum. It was a glossy
snack. I got to pet it.

An earlier project was a collection of photographs to represent various stages of her growing up thus far. Included, of course, was the one of Lauren holding old Glossy. Her visit to the Natural History museum and that private showing of its reptile collection will be with her forever.