Dianne Pearce's Blog, page 6

Is Your Dialogue Hurting Your Story?

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Happy Birthday USA

On the West Coast, where I am, it’s the quiet before the cacophony. If you have only celebrated the Fourth of July in an East Coast town, or the Midwest, I venture to say you don’t know what noise is. You cannot imagine the noise, the joy, of absolute celebration that starts last week and continues on for days after in a place where there are large swatchs of people from cultures that brought with them to this place a history of celebrating with fireworks and explosions, and an absolute love for their chosen country. And I think we ought to say, whether the United States of America is the country where you first took a breath or the country you came to later, to stay here, or to be here always, is a choice, and so it is the chosen country of even those for who it is the first and only country they have ever seen.

When I was a child I loved the Fourth of July. I had sparklers, and my patriotic clothing, and I decorated my bike, and the fathers and sons of Ridley Park played baseball in the field behind our house, and the mosquitoes chowed down, and we lit punks from the crick to ward them off, and had Pepsi’s in glass bottles, and hot dogs and potato salad to eat, and we wound through the working class streets to the fire department for the fireworks after the sun went down. I don’t think I had any idea that my neighbohood was very much a place where everyone was the same. I don’t think I understood, aside from the notion that some of us were Catholics and some of us were Methodists, how much all the families were just alike, and living in carbon-copy twin homes, and eating the same meals each day, with fried eggs for breakfast, Lebanon bologna sandwiches for lunch, and pork and beans from a can for dinner.

When my mother moved us to the town where her sister lived, the sister who had married the cardiologist, we found ourselves working class among people who were not, among people who were wealthy and never made a sound outside of their houses beyond the sound of their lawnmowers, among Methodists who didn’t have potluck suppers twice a month. Some of the neighbors were Jewish, and I didn’t know what that was until we read Anne Frank’s diary in sixth grade. Some of the kids in my school grade, about eight of them, came from the tail-end of the town, down around the train tracks, and they were Black, and they lived in clapboard houses that had been cut up by floor into apartments so that they could be stacked on top of each other, and the houses had been surrounded by train tracks and truck routes and second-hand stores, and they had a long walk home after school. There was one girl in my grade who was Korean, but her parents were white. There was another girl who told me she was adopted, but she looked just like her parents. And still another friend was Morman, and her mother sent me home from her house when, as all of us played on the trampoline her family had in the yard, I bounced off and yelled out, “Oh my God I almost died!” Her mother told me I was a bad girl, and had to leave. Because we went to church, in my opinion, all the time, and my mother and I sang in the choir, and my parents, my “churchy” parents, said, “Goddamit!” whenever they dropped an egg or spilled something, I did not understand at all exactly what had gone wrong.

When I commuted into Philadelphia for college, on the trolly and then the El, and finally the subway, I could watch the demographics change as I moved from my quiet quiet town closer to the most left-behind part of the city. It was noiser, dirtier, and a lot more people said, “Goddamit,” pretty much any place at all, even in the offices of the school, even in class, or yelling on the subway. Once I was walking to the subway before the end of fall term on a very cold night, and the row homes lining the street had metal sheets over the doors and windows, and one house had a chink missing out of the metal over the window, and I saw a tree inside with Christmas lights on it.

In college I met Rick and Randy, my first gay friends, so handsome, so fun, rommates and friends with benefits, who ironed their jeans (!) and patiently explained to me that sometimes men loved other men.

I could go on with my brief summary of how I learned about difference in the world, but really, it’s not that interesting.

Sometimes the difference has challenged me, and I’ve had to recalibrate my thinking and tell myself that someone who is noisier than I would prefer is still a human being, or someone who tells me I can’t say “Oh God!” in their house is not mean, or someone whose food is comprised of animal parts I would never eat is not weird, and the women holding hands and kissing at the bar where I kissed my boyfriend the prior night are not wrong for their PDA if I was not wrong for mine. And all of us can love this country.

No one owns the flag more than anyone else (except maybe Betsy Ross: seamstress extraordinaire, who is also from Philly!). Yet sometimes I feel like people among us are redefining patriotism in a way that leaves me out. I was so excited for the Foruth of July when I was a young girl, and I still think this country is pretty great. Yes, it’s messy, but all experiements are messy. Everyone who first opened their eyes in this country, and everyone who chose to emmigrate here, is part of that experiment, is part of the tweaking and re-working all experiements go through.  And my life was great as a kid in that small working class town, and it is better for each new experience my path through the world has brought me. Each new place, experience, person has enriched my biography, not ruined it because it did not stay static.

The country is in a bit of a mess right now, and that mess, to me, means that something is being worked out, the wheels are turning to make a change. I feel like, given its track record, this country will find its way to a good, new version of itself, even as some of the forces try to push it back to the summers when only the men played baseball in the field on the Fourth of July. As good a time as that was, it left me out. Now, not that I’m a stellar second baseman, but this experiment was begun, all those years ago, by people who wanted a chance to create a place were no one as left out. Of course, at the time, they meant only men, but the experiment was set in motion to see if it was possible to create a place that would have fairness as its guiding principle, as its ultimate goal.

Fairness as a guiding principle? Count me in for that!

Happy Birthday USA.

I MADE MY OWN TRADERS JOE’S GREEN CHILE CHICKEN BOWL!

And I’m excited about it because it is one of my favorite things to eat these days. I get stuck on things food-wise. Do you? This is my current fave, but, one can only go to Trader Joe’s so often.

So, I made it, and I decided to make it more me-friendly.

#1. Made some brown rice in the rice cooker, mixed two kinds: brown jasmine, and the brown version of the kind of Japanese rice you’d use to make onigiri.

2. Cooked some fake chicken made from pea protein in the skillet.

3. Took that out of the skillet and added in some roasted carrots and shitake mushrooms I had roasted the other day.

4. Took that out of the skillet and added to the skillet corn from a fesh cob, one half of the corn (the other half went to the guinea pigs).

5. In with the corn I added two heaping forkfulls of those pickled red onions that are all the rage. Mine came from a jar, and taste great, but are sooo soft that I think the turn in the skillet improved them.

6. Put rice in bowl, topped with fake chicken, topped with roasted carrots and shrooms, topped with onions and corn, topped with one of those TJ’s teeny avocados cut into chunks, topped with about 1/4 cup pickled green chiles.

It was amazing, and I forgot to even add chesse and didn’t miss it! And, I could only eat half. More for lunch (because that was breakfast!).

Meals are always so tough at our house because everyone likes different things, but we usually do our own things for breakfast and lunch, and this hit the mark perfectly, and didn’t claim valuable freezer space.

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ONE DOG FART SMELLS LIKE POND’S, SALT WATER, GARLIC LAMB, COPPERTONE….

This morning my dog was issuing forth smells, as dog sometimes do. As you might imagine they were almost smells I would describe as “loud,” because they were strong. And, being a dog, they were meaty. And sudddenly they brought me back to summer at the beach when I was a kid, under the age of ten, I’m gonna say. When I was young my mother would take the family, usually my brother and I, sometimes my father, but always my grandmother, to Ocean City, New Jersey. My grandmother was born and raised there, the granddaughter of a Methodist minister, and she always missed it. My mother would rent a house there, or sometimes just one floor of the house, always the first floor, so my grandmother didn’t have to do stairs, and we would stay for one to two weeks, depending on what Mom and Grandmom could afford.

It’s kind-of amazing to me, when I think back over the food we had there, how standardized the menu was. Firstly, and the scent the dog’s gas brought back to me this morning, was lamb. My grandmother was as Irish as you could be, and she loved lamb. My mother also loved it, and my father hated it. So, the meal my mother and grandmother most looked forward to (with my father not around) was roasting a leg of lamb. They put a bit of garlic on it, and, as my grandmother was not one for a lot of flavor, this meal was remarkable also for that addition of garlic. They roasted it with potatoes and carrots around it. It was lamb dinner one night, and lamb stew the next. I loved it too, but it would be pretty difficult for me to dig into a leg from a lamb these days: lambs are babies! While I’m not vegetarian, I definitly lean that way more and more. It’s funny that the memory came to me on the stink from my dog, but it did, and, unlike most of his smells, it was not unpleasant as it brought back that memory.

In general those summer vacations were very full of smells that I can rmember quite clearly. First, like the lamb, the other meals. We had meatloaf, always, and my mother made it with bacon on the top, not ketchup or tomato sauce, so it was always pretty fragrant with the smell of bacon. And there were several mornings with bacon for breakfast too. On the day after meatloaf there would be bacon for breakfast, and mashed potato pancakes from the too many potatoes made the night before. My grandmother would form the cold potatoes into patties, and salt and pepper and flour them, and fry them in Crisco with some butter. One of the dinners there would also be fresh greenbeans, ends snapped by my grandmother, and boiled until they were almost soup. Another night the “green vegetable” would be lima beans, and to this day I don’t know, between the smell and the taste, why anyone ever eats them. One night there would be spaghetti and homemade meatballs from veal and beef, with a salad for the green vegetable. One night we would have the amazing Mack Manco’s pizza, and one night we would go out to Shafto’s restaurant, and I would have fried shrimp. And I’m pretty sure one night dinner would be breakfast: eggs and pan-fied sliced potatoes, and, if we were there for two weeks, boiled hotdogs (a big favorite of my grandmother’s) would be on the list, and on another night porkchops cooked on top of baked beans in the oven, so that one side was wet and beany, and the other side was curled up and dry, though my mom laid bacon over them too, which helped a little. Always breakfast was substantial: eggs, or pancakes, or jelly donuts, or huge bowls of oatmeal. Every single day lunch was a ham sandwich with Swiss or American cheese and tomatoes and pickles and Miracle Whip on white bread, and a cold peach from the fridge and kept on ice in the bag on the beach. They stopped along the road, on the drive down to the shore from Philadelphia, to get those peaches, and tomatoes, and corn on the cob too, from a roadside stand. Jersey peaches and tomatoes: you’ve never had better. Drive over the Commodore Barry Bridge and get you some.
I don’t remember ever drinking anything during the day because my mother always packed a jug of iced-tea, which everyone loved but me (I cannot… tea with sugar? barf!), but my mother just figured I should get used to it, and I don’t think we had a second jug for water, and, in my childhood, there were no individual thermos/water bottles or plastic water bottles you could buy at the store. All there were were gallon milk jugs filled with water, and I don’t think we lugged those to the beach. Ocean City water has a very strange taste. My mother said it was well water, and she loved it. She said it tasted like roses. I didn’t like it at all, but Philadelphia water tasted like exhaust back in the day, so they both were awful IMHO. Sometimes I’d get to go up on the boardwalk and buy a fresh-squeezed OJ, or sometimes I could get a popsicle (a Bomb pop) from the ice cream cart. But it is sort-of amazing to think of how much the food was important to my usually food-averse mother, and how they had these certain meals that they always cooked, and they were always so pleased with them. Dave makes amazing chicken cutlets, that Sophie and I adore, but aside from that, I cannot think of any meal that we make on a regular basis, and certainly none that I look forward to as much as those women looked forward to those dinners.

I realize now, looking back on it, that, while my mother was always thin, a size 4 or less, a huge part of this vacation for her and her mother (who was always fat, she wore a 22 short!), was the food. They spent a big chunk of change on food: at the grocery story, at the bakery for donuts and cookies and usually at least one pie, and we typically went to Shafto’s, which was pricey, and got takeout at least one night from the place that cooked seafood to go, Campbells. It was a huge storefront, and all they did was fry seafood and put it into boxes with lemon wedges and coleslaw, baked potatoes and corn relish, with big scoops of tarter sauce. It amazes me to think of it. I have always taken after my grandmother much more, in size and temperament, than my mother, and my mother always wanted to be thin, but she ate, and ate well, when she was at the beach, and the food was hugely important to her on her vacation. She and her mother liked all the same foods, and they got all their favorite things, and no one was stingy or frugal with money or portions. It was almost like an eating holiday. My grandmother would go to the beach for an hour or so each day, but she was as pale as a bedsheet, so she would soon go back to the rented house to snap beans or start cooking, and watch her “stories” on someone else’s TV in a house with all the windows opened and a cool breeze that smelled like salt water coming through the windows: so different from the row home in Southwest Philly where you could often smell the nearby dump burning trash, and there were no trees, just the brick line of houses and the cement porches and cement sidewalks and asphalt road. Ocean City roads were tar, and I walked to the beach without shoes, and the hot tar roads would be very fragrant and soft: I could almost leave footprints in them.

It was really a vacation of the senses, each summer in Ocean City. All the food, which I can still smell, and Ocean City, because it is a barrier island, smells distinctly of the salt water from the bay, and the scent of Coppertone, and the rose scent of the sink water, and the Noxema on my always present and very bad sunburn (I was also as pale as a bedsheet). My grandmother brought the sheets for the room she and I shared that always had two twin beds in it, and she used different laundry detergent than my mother, and the sheets had a clean smell that was her clean smell. Both my mother and my grandmother only bought percale sheets, and if you have not used percale (it is tough to find these days!) you do not know how crisp and cold sheets can be. My grandmother would cover herself from head-to-toe in Ponds cold cream at night. It sat on her nightstand, waiting for her, with a Harold Robbins novel and these:

which I always felt to be kind of terrifying, because they seemed so death-oriented to me, like the prayer I had to say in her presence which included the line, “…if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” In Ocean City, one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to this day, I did not want to go to sleep thinking about dying before I woke. And because I shared the room with my grandmother I went to sleep when she did, and she fell asleep quickly, as the innocent do, and slept on her back, hands folded across her ample bosom like she was in her coffin already, and snored loud enough to hear from all the other rooms, and loud enough to reassure me she was still alive. Itchy and hot from the sunburn, I would lay there, just desperate to doze off, and unable to do so, and listen to her snore and snore. I loved her though, in spite of the snoring. She was a perfect grandmom: very sweet, very silly. And soooo unlike my mother in every way.

My brother was 9 years older than me, and I was 8 when my sister was born, and I remember the beach vacations as, primarily, and it will sound strange to say, lonely.

And it’s strange to me now, looking back, to think about how delightful the holiday must have been for my mother and my grandmother. My experience of them both is that they looked forward to this all year, immensely, and they thoroughly enjoyed themselves, the food, and all the same things they always did, without exception, year after year, as much as they must have done the first time they did it, before I was even born. They went to the Ocean City department store, Stainton’s, shopping on one day, and both bought a new dress. One night they spent at the Music Pier, sitting on the outside benches to hear the music without buying a ticket. One night my brother and I got to go on a few rides, and even my mother would ride the Tilt-O-Whirl and the Whip back then. My mother and brother and I would rent bikes and ride the boardwalk for a few mornings. When I was in middle school and high school we shlepped my bike down on a rack, and I road the five-mile stretch two or three times a morning to escape a little of the planned and slow-paced boredom and my ever-present loneliness. It’s tricky to realize that it was a lovely time, and I remember it very clearly, and miss it a good deal, and at the same time it was so lonely for me, and all I wanted was to get back to my friends and my own room.

My mother is tough for me, always was, and is even more so now. We are oil and water, which is funny considering how much more I take after my granmother than her, from my looks to my personality: I am also inclined to be rather silly and affectionate, and my mother is neither. I would have thought she would find me reminiscent of her mother, and therefore enjoyable, but all I can really think of is her looking for me to be more like herself (my mother) and seeing my differences as an affront. The shore trip was always a bit dangerous for me, I felt, because I could get out-of-step with her expectations, and she would be enraged. She was never able to extend the tolerance to me that she was to my grandmother. There was a lot of downtime. We never went to the beach until noon or later, and I was not allowed to go early, and when we came back cleaned up, and ate dinner, there were long hours of boring TV before bed, and I was not allowed to go to the boardwalk, or back to the beach, or even to the 5&10 by myself, so I read a lot of books, tucked out of the way on a dark porch as long as there was even a little light from inside the house to see by, and generally tried to be unseen, and therefore, unprovoking. It is strange to think how I could just look, I suppose, unmoored, or uninterested in their TV choices, and cause quite a bit of anger on the part of my mom, who would seem to feel that my lack of engagement was a judgement on her in some way. She could get amazingly angry over me doing nothing, so I had to be out of sight, and occupied. I don’t remember her reacting in that way to my brother, and I don’t think she worried as much about what my sister was doing, and my sister was better at making friends with kids from another vacationing family, and I don’t think I ever did that. It’s like the trip shone a light on my quietness, and my introversion, and that just was not something that worked for my mother, and it still doesn’t.

But all those many details of our Ocean City vacations are deeply imprinted in my mind to this day. And one of the more interesting things about smells is, in my view, they reinvigorate memories more than other senses do, even if those smells come to me from the back end of a dog.

ONE DOG FART SMELLS LIKE PONDS, SALT WATER, GARLIC LAMB, COPPERTONE….

This morning my dog was issuing forth smells, as dog sometimes do. As you might imagine they were almost smells I would describe as “loud,” because they were strong. And, being a dog, they were meaty. And sudddenly they brought me back to summer at the beach when I was a kid, under the age of ten, I’m gonna say. When I was young my mother would take the family, usually my brother and I, sometimes my father, but always my grandmother, to Ocean City, New Jersey. My grandmother was born and raised there, the granddaughter of a Methodist minister, and she always missed it. My mother would rent a house there, or sometimes just one floor of the house, always the first floor, so my grandmother didn’t have to do stairs, and we would stay for one to two weeks, depending on what Mom and Grandmom could afford.

It’s kind-of amazing to me, when I think back over the food we had there, how standardized the menu was. Firstly, and the scent the dog’s gas brought back to me this morning, was lamb. My grandmother was as Irish as you could be, and she loved lamb. My mother also loved it, and my father hated it. So, the meal my mother and grandmother most looked forward to (with my father not around) was roasting a leg of lamb. They put a bit of garlic on it, and, as my grandmother was not one for a lot of flavor, this meal was remarkable also for that addition of garlic. They roasted it with potatoes and carrots around it. It was lamb dinner one night, and lamb stew the next. I loved it too, but it would be pretty difficult for me to dig into a leg from a lamb these days: lambs are babies! While I’m not vegetarian, I definitly lean that way more and more. It’s funny that the memory came to me on the stink from my dog, but it did, and, unlike most of his smells, it was not unpleasant as it brought back that memory.

In general those summer vacations were very full of smells that I can rmember quite clearly. First, like the lamb, the other meals. We had meatloaf, always, and my mother made it with bacon on the top, not ketchup or tomato sauce, so it was always pretty fragrant with the smell of bacon. And there were several mornings with bacon for breakfast too. On the day after meatloaf there would be bacon for breakfast, and mashed potato pancakes from the too many potatoes made the night before. My grandmother would form the cold potatoes into patties, and salt and pepper and flour them, and fry them in Crisco with some butter. One of the dinners there would also be fresh greenbeans, ends snapped by my grandmother, and boiled until they were almost soup. Another night the “green vegetable” would be lima beans, and to this day I don’t know, between the smell and the taste, why anyone ever eats them. One night there would be spaghetti and homemade meatballs from veal and beef, with a salad for the green vegetable. One night we would have the amazing Mack Manco’s pizza, and one night we would go out to Shafto’s restaurant, and I would have fried shrimp. And I’m pretty sure one night dinner would be breakfast: eggs and pan-fied sliced potatoes, and, if we were there for two weeks, boiled hotdogs (a big favorite of my grandmother’s) would be on the list, and on another night porkchops cooked on top of baked beans in the oven, so that one side was wet and beany, and the other side was curled up and dry, though my mom laid bacon over them too, which helped a little. Always breakfast was substantial: eggs, or pancakes, or jelly donuts, or huge bowls of oatmeal. Every single day lunch was a ham sandwich with Swiss or American cheese and tomatoes and pickles and Miracle Whip on white bread, and a cold peach from the fridge and kept on ice in the bag on the beach. They stopped along the road, on the drive down to the shore from Philadelphia, to get those peaches, and tomatoes, and corn on the cob too, from a roadside stand. Jersey peaches and tomatoes: you’ve never had better. Drive over the Commodore Barry Bridge and get you some.
I don’t remember ever drinking anything during the day because my mother always packed a jug of iced-tea, which everyone loved but me (I cannot… tea with sugar? barf!), but my mother just figured I should get used to it, and I don’t think we had a second jug for water, and, in my childhood, there were no individual thermos/water bottles or plastic water bottles you could buy at the store. All there were were gallon milk jugs filled with water, and I don’t think we lugged those to the beach. Ocean City water has a very strange taste. My mother said it was well water, and she loved it. She said it tasted like roses. I didn’t like it at all, but Philadelphia water tasted like exhaust back in the day, so they both were awful IMHO. Sometimes I’d get to go up on the boardwalk and buy a fresh-squeezed OJ, or sometimes I could get a popsicle (a Bomb pop) from the ice cream cart. But it is sort-of amazing to think of how much the food was important to my usually food-averse mother, and how they had these certain meals that they always cooked, and they were always so pleased with them. Dave makes amazing chicken cutlets, that Sophie and I adore, but aside from that, I cannot think of any meal that we make on a regular basis, and certainly none that I look forward to as much as those women looked forward to those dinners.

I realize now, looking back on it, that, while my mother was always thin, a size 4 or less, a huge part of this vacation for her and her mother (who was always fat, she wore a 22 short!), was the food. They spent a big chunk of change on food: at the grocery story, at the bakery for donuts and cookies and usually at least one pie, and we typically went to Shafto’s, which was pricey, and got takeout at least one night from the place that cooked seafood to go, Campbells. It was a huge storefront, and all they did was fry seafood and put it into boxes with lemon wedges and coleslaw, baked potatoes and corn relish, with big scoops of tarter sauce. It amazes me to think of it. I have always taken after my grandmother much more, in size and temperament, than my mother, and my mother always wanted to be thin, but she ate, and ate well, when she was at the beach, and the food was hugely important to her on her vacation. She and her mother liked all the same foods, and they got all their favorite things, and no one was stingy or frugal with money or portions. It was almost like an eating holiday. My grandmother would go to the beach for an hour or so each day, but she was as pale as a bedsheet, so she would soon go back to the rented house to snap beans or start cooking, and watch her “stories” on someone else’s TV in a house with all the windows opened and a cool breeze that smelled like salt water coming through the windows: so different from the row home in Southwest Philly where you could often smell the nearby dump burning trash, and there were no trees, just the brick line of houses and the cement porches and cement sidewalks and asphalt road. Ocean City roads were tar, and I walked to the beach without shoes, and the hot tar roads would be very fragrant and soft: I could almost leave footprints in them.

It was really a vacation of the senses, each summer in Ocean City. All the food, which I can still smell, and Ocean City, because it is a barrier island, smells distinctly of the salt water from the bay, and the scent of Coppertone, and the rose scent of the sink water, and the Noxema on my always present and very bad sunburn (I was also as pale as a bedsheet). My grandmother brought the sheets for the room she and I shared that always had two twin beds in it, and she used different laundry detergent than my mother, and the sheets had a clean smell that was her clean smell. Both my mother and my grandmother only bought percale sheets, and if you have not used percale (it is tough to find these days!) you do not know how crisp and cold sheets can be. My grandmother would cover herself from head-to-toe in Ponds cold cream at night. It sat on her nightstand, waiting for her, with a Harold Robbins novel and these:

which I always felt to be kind of terrifying, because they seemed so death-oriented to me, like the prayer I had to say in her presence which included the line, “…if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” In Ocean City, one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to this day, I did not want to go to sleep thinking about dying before I woke. And because I shared the room with my grandmother I went to sleep when she did, and she fell asleep quickly, as the innocent do, and slept on her back, hands folded across her ample bosom like she was in her coffin already, and snored loud enough to hear from all the other rooms, and loud enough to reassure me she was still alive. Itchy and hot from the sunburn, I would lay there, just desperate to doze off, and unable to do so, and listen to her snore and snore. I loved her though, in spite of the snoring. She was a perfect grandmom: very sweet, very silly. And soooo unlike my mother in every way.

My brother was 9 years older than me, and I was 8 when my sister was born, and I remember the beach vacations as, primarily, and it will sound strange to say, lonely.

And it’s strange to me now, looking back, to think about how delightful the holiday must have been for my mother and my grandmother. My experience of them both is that they looked forward to this all year, immensely, and they thoroughly enjoyed themselves, the food, and all the same things they always did, without exception, year after year, as much as they must have done the first time they did it, before I was even born. They went to the Ocean City department store, Stainton’s, shopping on one day, and both bought a new dress. One night they spent at the Music Pier, sitting on the outside benches to hear the music without buying a ticket. One night my brother and I got to go on a few rides, and even my mother would ride the Tilt-O-Whirl and the Whip back then. My mother and brother and I would rent bikes and ride the boardwalk for a few mornings. When I was in middle school and high school we shlepped my bike down on a rack, and I road the five-mile stretch two or three times a morning to escape a little of the planned and slow-paced boredom and my ever-present loneliness. It’s tricky to realize that it was a lovely time, and I remember it very clearly, and miss it a good deal, and at the same time it was so lonely for me, and all I wanted was to get back to my friends and my own room.

My mother is tough for me, always was, and is even more so now. We are oil and water, which is funny considering how much more I take after my granmother than her, from my looks to my personality: I am also inclined to be rather silly and affectionate, and my mother is neither. I would have thought she would find me reminiscent of her mother, and therefore enjoyable, but all I can really think of is her looking for me to be more like herself (my mother) and seeing my differences as an affront. The shore trip was always a bit dangerous for me, I felt, because I could get out-of-step with her expectations, and she would be enraged. She was never able to extend the tolerance to me that she was to my grandmother. There was a lot of downtime. We never went to the beach until noon or later, and I was not allowed to go early, and when we came back cleaned up, and ate dinner, there were long hours of boring TV before bed, and I was not allowed to go to the boardwalk, or back to the beach, or even to the 5&10 by myself, so I read a lot of books, tucked out of the way on a dark porch as long as there was even a little light from inside the house to see by, and generally tried to be unseen, and therefore, unprovoking. It is strange to think how I could just look, I suppose, unmoored, or uninterested in their TV choices, and cause quite a bit of anger on the part of my mom, who would seem to feel that my lack of engagement was a judgement on her in some way. She could get amazingly angry over me doing nothing, so I had to be out of sight, and occupied. I don’t remember her reacting in that way to my brother, and I don’t think she worried as much about what my sister was doing, and my sister was better at making friends with kids from another vacationing family, and I don’t think I ever did that. It’s like the trip shone a light on my quietness, and my introversion, and that just was not something that worked for my mother, and it still doesn’t.

But all those many details of our Ocean City vacations are deeply imprinted in my mind to this day. And one of the more interesting things about smells is, in my view, they reinvigorate memories more than other senses do, even if those smells come to me from the back end of a dog.

IT SHOULD BE LIKE A HALF AN HOUR VOLUME 13: DISC 2 SIDE 2

I cannot believe how long it has been since I last did one of these posts.

Well, I’m back baby.

Once upon a time I had a fairly large vinyl collection. And then I started moving often. I took the whole collection with me to the dorms my first year of college, and when I flunked out that first year and my mother kicked me out of the house, I took the whole collection (and my rickety record player)

And here it is (thank you eBay!):

From there I went, eventually, back to my parents’ house, which was the worts place for me, and for which I blame Ronald Reagan (there were no jobs). After I got my degree, and then a few jobs, I moved myself and my record collection to my boyfriend’s house. But that lasted about 3 years because I am a bad picker, and so I eventually decied to move out so his new girlfriend could move in, even though he would have been happy to have me stay on, oddly enough.

My record collection and I went from the suburbs to Philly. I had an awesome, if rodent-infested, apartment in West Philly for about three years, until I managed to buy a small twin in Roxborough. I lived there for one of the longer periods of staying-put, just about seven years, and then, having both gotten sick of the parking situation (trashcans in the street anyone?) and swept David off his feet, I moved to CA, and sold or donated most of my collection (and, luckily, my sister showed up at the donation place right after I left, and she rescued a few of them, (inlcuding my Wings Over America, which she very kindly returned to me last month! It still has all the skips in it I remember. Delicious!) Of course the record player, the double of which is now selling on eBay, had long since died, so there was not anything to play the vinyl on anyway. And have you attempted to travel with vinyl? It slips and slides and weighs a literal ton. But, it is still my favorite way to listen to music.

Just to get us up to date: I spent 4 years in Venice Beach, and 4 years in Canoga Park, and then we went back to the East Coast, reluctantly for me. There was a year back in my mother’s house (my father was gone), which, was, again, the worst place for me, and then we landed in teeny tiny Milton. Whicle we were there my sister, who was living n Brooklyn, found a record player in the trash which she gave to me, and I started lisstening to my little stash once again. I had mostly saved the family Christmas albums that my mother had tried to sell at a garage sale once in my presence (the Philistine!), my small jazz collection, my smaller bluegrass and cajun collection, and a few rock albums. We then spent (I believe) exactly 7 years in Milton (about 3 too many), and then we came back to CA, and we spent 1.5 years in Montclair, and now we’ve settled in Monrovia. We’ve been here almost 9 months, and I could see myself not leaving, actually. We’re renting, which is not ideal (it’s been 16 years since I last had a rental), but we’re one-block from a street full of restaurants, which I love, and we turn the corner from our rental and see the mountains, and we’re all very happy. It’s like we found our way back home, to some extent. And so I have started collecting vinyl again, and we have just a wonderful front porch, and David recently surprised me with a second record player, very small, for the front porch. The past couple of weeks I’ve been lugging the laptop out to the porch (and the precious coffee), and working out there, and now I have music too, which is very distracting, but I do love it.

And this is about one of the most recent albums I bought, which I used to have on CD, lord do I hate cds! But that’s what we used to have for the car. In any case, I got myself BY THE WAY by one of my top 5 favorite rock bands, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, on vinyl. It’s a two record set, and disc 2 side 2 has four songs on it that I wish, each one of them, would never end.

I think I first got into the Chili Peppers when they put out “Breaking the Girl,” which is on BLOOD SUGAR SEX MAGIK (which Dave got me on vinyl to go with the record player!). And that song is a really well known one, and a really good example of why I love them. First of all… funk. I love funk, and, in my view, they are funk. Second, they have a vibe, a thing that goes on in their music which I can only describe as cacophony. It sounds like someone is tapping a glass, and someone else is banging pot lids, and someone else is clapping, or there are street sounds, just… a lot of sound. Their songs are really layered and tend to, in general, really improve my mood any time I hear them. They make me want to move around.

Disc 2 side 2 is one of their more mellow outings, but it still has the layers of musics and noise, and it makes me want to move and sing, and I get it gloriously stuck in my head. I expect I will wear out the album, but it will be this side I destroy first, in the same way you might destroy your favorite teddy bear from sleeping with it so hard.

The first track is “On Mercury.” It has a Mexican/mariachi sound to it. I’m a big Herb Alpert fan, and it is reminicsent of that sound I think. It reminds me a bit of “The Lonely Bull.” It’s fast and upbeat, and it repeats the chorus, and I love the idea of “lemon trees on Mercury,” because I am certain that if trees on Mercury were possible, the would be lemon yellow, almost as if being so close to the sun burned them yellow, rather than buring them black.

“I change the key from C to D; you see to me it’s just a minor thing; he knows everything.” The second track on thsi side is “Minor Thing,” and even though minor keys are associated with being down, or sinister sounding, this song is very upbeat. The guitar that anchors this song sounds like vintage U2, and I would be willing to bet there’s a flute or recorder being played though it. It’s a fast song, and a little bit rap, and I just feel like it’s clever.

Then the tempo slows and Kiedis sings, “Shiver for me girl…,” and goes on to sing, “….swim for your smile in a blue rock quarry,” and ends with the words, “…settle for love.” It’s got an orchestra playing along with the band, and I think it’s very romantic (and it helps that I’ve always found the whole band to be easy on the eyes). It’s called “Warm Tape,” and I find myself going through my day repeating the “shiver for me girl” part over and over, though I confess I don’t “get” the title.

The last song on disc two side two is “Venice Queen..”

SatoriTree has this to say about it on Reddit:

If it’s true, it makes it even better. It’s not a slow song, but the vibe is very mellow, and it begins sounding almost mystical. Flea does great harmonies on this one, and he and Anthony sound to me like they could be family because their voices meld so well. I like to sing Flea’s part when I sing along, but I often like to sing the harmony. I think I would have made a fantastic back-up singer, can hold a harmony well, and I’m not really looking to be a front man.

LOL, in some ways, maybe that is why I am so passionate about publishing people. I’m not a front man, really, but I’m a helluva back-up singer.

While I have been picking away at the keys trying to write this post, being interrupted by my daughter, and my dog, multiple times over, I have listened to this on repeat, disc two side two, about 4 times, and when I finish typing this, I’m going to start it again.

“I see you standing bby the sea; the waves you made will always be; a kiss goodbye before you leave, G*L*O*R*I*A is love…. my friend, my friend, my friend….

I think anyone who dismisses the RHCP out of hand as just noise, or whatever, needs to really take a listen. This band has very complicted music, and gorgeous lyrics, and they just may be hiding them from people who judge them by their looks. And, as I alluded to above, I like their looks just as much as their music. But, really, this is a complex and talented band, and every time they make new music, I’m in.

OH MY GOODNESS, how did I just find this today?:

So fun! I love the Peppers!

VIRGINIA WATTS SHOWS EVERYONE HOW IT’S DONE!

Big shoutout to Virginia Watts, one of the OGs at OSP! Her short story collection, ECHOES FROM THE HOCKER HOUSE, just landed on the shortlist for the 2024 da Vinci Eye Award and the Eric Hoffer Book Award. As the editor on this project, I gotta say, these stories are straight-up mesmerizing. They’ll take you on a journey you will not be able to forget, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you binge-read the whole thing in one go. Virginia, you’re killing it! Fingers crossed for the win!
PS. Virginia already won this one!

19 YEARS, 364 DAYS

Dave and me on top of the Empire State Building, 2003, about one year before we got married.
Dave and me in our Laszlo and Nadja phase, a brief, but important period in our lives.
Me and Dave in our Three Stooges phase, which has lasted now, oh, about 19 years and 364 days.

I guess I am about to be married for 20 years.

Hey Dave, I guess we made it. You so stupid.

NEW POST UP AT AUTHORS ELECTRIC!

The post is called, “What I Read for Love.” CHECK IT OUT HERE