TRADITION – Part I

TRADITION – Part I

Dec 26, 2019

TRADITION – Part I

One Christmas I decided to buy myself an 8-inch Madame Alexander Wendy doll. I’d been eyeing a display of them for years at Mr. Mopps’ toy store. But they’re collectors’ dolls—for me, an extravagance, I’d told myself.

In A Patchwork Memoir, I wrote:

The day I bought my first Madame Alexander doll—I still haven’t managed to convince myself I deserve the second—I stared at her face off and on all afternoon, I found it so beautiful. When I took off her clothes, I discovered, to my delight, that she had dimpled elbows and knees. I actually felt a pang of tenderness for her, as if she were a real child.

Curious about her reaction, I decided to show her to Arielle. If she liked my new doll, I thought calculatingly, it would give me an excuse to buy the other one—with the altruistic intention of eventually giving her to Arielle…er…when she’s old enough to take good care of her. (Her wig wouldn’t last five minutes, the way Arielle swings her dolls around by the hair, I rationalized. As for her dress… Well, let me just say that the other day Arielle pulled something out of a plastic basket full of Barbie dolls and clothes and asked, “What’s this?” All I could see was that it was roundish, gray-brown, and fuzzy—I thought it must be a wad of some kind of wooly fabric. It wasn’t until I put on my glasses that I recognized what it was—a withered orange, blanketed entirely by thick gray mold.)

Another evening I fetched my old Muffy’s doll clothes from the basement—the ones I used to play with with Kathy—thinking they would fit my new doll, only to find that she was slightly too tall and wide in girth. OK, I’ll make her clothes myself, I resolved. But when I went to The Cotton Patch the next afternoon, I got more and more discouraged as I perused shelf after shelf of cotton prints, none of which I liked. After an hour of scrutiny, I left with only two swatches, one checked and one striped; all the floral prints were in grayed “country” colors that don’t particularly appeal to me. What’s wrong with me? I thought, appalled to realize my aesthetic was—apparently—so narrow.

But this morning at Beverly’s Fabrics in Alameda I got light-headed, I found so many flowered prints—bright and pastel—in the clear colors I love. I actually set foot in the store at 2:00 in the afternoon and didn’t stagger out until after 5:00, with a receipt a foot and a half long! This evening I’ve been trying the trims I picked out with the various fabrics and can already see in my mind’s eye half a dozen outfits and costumes I’m itching to make.

Why did I buy this particular doll? you may be wondering. Because I couldn’t resist the hat. Strangely, I later saw in a Madame Alexander catalogue that the hat in the photograph was on backwards. Whoever dressed her for the shoot hadn’t realized that the lace on these old-fashioned bonnets was meant to frame the face.

And, by the way, I did eventually buy the other doll I coveted—a blond frog princess.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Dec 25, 2019

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

 

And Happy Hanukkah!

 

Below is a photo of me in my pajamas, trying a clown costume on my new Muffy doll when I was…nine, maybe?

A LINGERING SPRING

A LINGERING SPRING

Dec 24, 2019

A LINGERING SPRING

A later Christmas letter:

Dear friends and family,

Today when I was driving back from Walnut Creek, I saw the brown hills just beginning to green, which always lifts my spirits. (Actually, I learned recently that the indigenous grasses were perennial, so the landscape used to be green all summer…until annual grasses were introduced and took over.)

Last spring, when the green hills persisted, full of wildflowers, into May, I drove everywhere I could think of to go, including bayside towns like Tiburon and Sausalito that I hadn’t visited in years, as well as Point Richmond to see the progress they were making renovating the old natatorium where my mom used to swim as a child. (They finally opened in August—a beautiful pool with a huge mural of the local park, its tiny lake and small island, on the far wall.) I got to know my way around these towns—where the best views were, the best restaurants, and, most importantly, the best gelato. Eventually I bought a laptop and spent time writing in cafes all over the place.

I also made my annual trip to the dunes north of Drake’s Beach, bordered by fields of ice plant—blooming yellow and magenta—and dotted with wild purple irises. (At my age, it’s not so easy climbing under barbed wire fences, however. It was also a challenge walking across the lumpy terrain to get to the dunes without spraining my ankles.)

All three of my godkids are taking karate classes now. (The day after Arielle showed me how to get out of certain holds, I had bruises on my arms.) She’s taking a computer arts course as her elective this semester and announced the other day that she wants to go to MIT! (Before she wanted to go to UC Santa Cruz because they didn’t give grades and she loved the boardwalk.)

Just last night I went to hear her chorus and Michael’s band perform at King Middle School (Michael plays the trumpet.) I always feel a sense of wonderment to find myself back at “Garfield Junior High,” as it was called in my day. After Mom moved Doug and me to California, I started eighth grade there. But now it’s so changed I hardly recognize it. There’s an atrium full of greenery just beyond the main entrance and a huge garden out back where the students have a chicken coop and grow all kinds of vegetables. (The garden was the brainchild of Alice Waters, of Chez Panisse fame.)

Meanwhile, I’ve been applying myself to doing my final painstaking colored pencil drawings for The Incredible Adventures of Jix, while waiting to hear—or not—from the latest dozen publishers I sent my manuscript to. (They no longer contact you—no more rejection letters—unless they’re interested in your book.) If I don’t get any nibbles, I’ll have to begin to think about publishing my stories myself.

I hope you enjoy a Christmas and New Year full of good health and good cheer!

In the photo above, I’m drawing on my light table, wearing three pairs of glasses that I used to piggyback depending on the magnification I wanted. Originally, I transformed my sewing table into a light table with a rectangle of translucent plexiglass for a drawing surface and a flat florescent light from Ace Hardware underneath it.

With my back problems, however, I eventually decided it was more comfortable to work on the sofa. And when I discovered Readers in San Rafael, a shop that has beautiful reading glasses for $6 a pair, I started a collection in a variety of magnifications.

ARIELLE’S FAIRY

ARIELLE’S FAIRY

Dec 22, 2019

ARIELLE’S FAIRY

Before I go any further, I’m thinking, I should post a montage of scrapbook pages from “Us, Livin’ the Life”—to showcase the activities for kids and parents featured there. Among them are the following:

Using felt markers, draw a quick, spontaneous scribble with a dark marker, then color in all the sections for a beautiful abstraction.

Make a What In the World Are You Doing? booklet of your favorite answers. This is a game I made up for my godkids to pique their imaginations. Here are some of their whimsical inventions:

         What in the world are you doing riding to school on a chicken? (Michael’s answers                 invariably involved a chicken or the toilet.)

         What in the world are you doing combing your hair with a cactus?

         What in the world are you doing taking a bath in the dishwasher?

 

Make a cootie-catcher fortune-teller, another fun opportunity for invention. Examples from my godkids:

         You will grow a beard 1,000 miles long.

         You will eat a magical hot dog that will turn you into a bowling pin.

         You will get trapped on a desert island and the only thing to eat will be Brussel                       sprouts.

 

If you have a scanner and know Photoshop, you can minimize your kids’ fold-dye and other art to display as collections on a scrapbook page. Having a papercutter, too, helps!

 

HEAD ELF

HEAD ELF

Dec 20, 2019

HEAD ELF

Above is Arielle’s scrapbook page for Christmas 2010. It’s hard to get anything to stick to glitter paper, so we tried various adhesive embellishments to hold photos in place. The captions “Tree Hugger,” “Head Elf,” and “Spiked Eggnog” are hers. The pointed hat is a tree made of Christmas tree sequins I found at Pier I Imports.

NO PICKLES

NO PICKLES

Dec 19, 2019

NO PICKLES

There are no pickles or dolphins or spaceships on my tree. Half of the glass ornaments I’ve been collecting since my twenties are traditional round ones, and the remainder have a holiday season theme, broadly speaking: Christmas trees, Santas, snowmen, icicles, pinecones, candy canes, bells, stars, and hearts, as well as musical instruments (like drums, lutes, and horns) and toys (like tops, rocking horses, and locomotives). The one exception is a single strawberry—because it’s snow-capped and the first ornament I ever bought. Oh, and did I mention my myriad birds? One year the only ornament I bought was a white dove at East Bay Nursery, which has a fabulous selection. Coincidentally, my therapist, Toni, bought only the very same one, which I like to think reflects that we’re birds of a feather..

I also have a little collection of mini ornaments (above), including a wreath, nutcracker, sleigh, and gingerbread house. When my godkids were younger and came over for our annual Christmas celebration, the first thing Michael and Emma wanted to do was play “Find the Ornament”—even before they opened their presents! I had a list that I would read out one at a time, and they would compete to see who could spot it first. Of course, the miniatures were a special challenge—so much so that sometimes when Ella and I took our tree down, we couldn’t find them among the rigidly drooped branches, which accounted for some of the blank places in the box above (till I added a toy car and a mitten).

I mention all this for any parents who might like to play the same game with their kids.

SQUATTERS

SQUATTERS

Dec 18, 2019

SQUATTERS

Well, it took the management five weeks to get an exterminator to set traps for the rats. Meanwhile I was tearing my hair out, worrying that the four-legged squatters were chewing the kids’ beautiful Christmas stockings to pieces. When I decided I couldn’t wait any longer, I went back to our temporary storage room, armed with Gina’s heavy metal rake to fight off the invaders if necessary. What I found was the bag they’d been nesting in vacated, though chewed up, while the stockings themselves were still intact—just so filthy I doubted they could be salvaged.

The dirt on one of them was loose enough that I was able to brush most of it off with a whiskbroom on our tiny balcony. (Ella hates going out there because she’s afraid the balcony will collapse). Only later did it occur to me I’d probably breathed in some of the…er…detritus and that I soon might succumb to some dread disease.

I didn’t dare wash the stockings because they were felt, so I took them to the dry cleaners instead. The red dye bled onto the white parts of the reindeer stocking, but hey… They’re now hanging from the mantle over the fireplace…and I haven’t died yet.

DOLLHOUSE CHRISTMAS

DOLLHOUSE CHRISTMAS

Dec 17, 2019

DOLLHOUSE CHRISTMAS

Those of you who’ve read “about” (the author) on my menu bar have seen the cardboard dollhouse I created for Arielle when she was little. For the holiday season, however, I fashioned the alternate living room above and snowy yard below. The inhabitants are “Kelly” dolls, Barbie’s little sister and brother, and the lights on the little tree actually work! (I found them at Ace Hardware, part of their electric train exhibit.) 

HOLIDAY CRAFTS

HOLIDAY CRAFTS

Dec 16, 2019

HOLIDAY CRAFTS

Every year in the run-up to Christmas, I make trips to Michael’s, Crate and Barrel, and East Bay Nursery to look for things the kids can decorate to make ornaments—wood or glass or ceramic shapes of stars, Christmas trees, wreaths, etc. I also buy plain pillar candles that we adorn with sequins and ribbon, affixed with short pins. Last year I happened upon white, blown-glass trees like the one above. Arielle decked hers out with gilt edging, adhesive gems, and sequins attached with mini glue dots.

I don’t have photos of the kids’ other creations, so I’m posting a couple of my own below.

 

OH, CHRISTMAS TREE

OH, CHRISTMAS TREE

Dec 15, 2019

OH, CHRISTMAS TREE

From A Patchwork Memoir:

It’s hard to find the perfect tree.

In the first place, it’s got to be a noble fir, which staunchly hangs onto its needles—rather than a fickle Douglas fir, which can’t be bothered and carelessly drops them all at once—because Ella and I like to keep our tree up weeks after Christmas, as well as before. It just seems a shame to cut down such a beautiful thing for only a few days of contemplation. Of course, the city has stopped picking up discarded trees from the curbs by the time we’re ready to part with ours, so we take it to the zoo to be fed to the elephants.

It’s also true that Douglas firs smell wonderful, while noble firs hardly smell at all—at first. But as they start to dry out, they give off a wonderful fruity fragrance that only gets more pungent as the weeks go by.

In the second place, even though the perfect tree has got to be lush and full, it also has to have lots of nooks and crannies because I’ve been collecting traditional glass ornaments since my twenties—I used to spend money on them when I wouldn’t spend it on anything else, because they remind me of decorating the tree with my dad as a child—and glass ornaments need room to hang.

It goes without saying that the tree has to be symmetrical, but I’m affronted if a lot of the branches have been clipped to make it look as though it was, when it wasn’t.

And I don’t go in for two or three topknots—no, I prefer the traditional one, which is getting harder and harder to find.

It has to have a good length of trunk at the bottom, so it will fit in our tree stand. So often when you consider what a particular tree will look like after you’ve hacked the lower branches off to fit it in the stand, you realize that it will be completely ruined.

It can’t be very wide because the only space we’ve got is between the fireplace and my computer desk—not that much.

It should have a straight trunk.

And not too obvious gaps on its backside.

All of which means a lot of legwork, slogging through tree lots (and I do mean slogging; during rainy winters, the lots down by the freeway—with the enormous balloon snowmen and inflated pavilions where kids can bounce around—are like marshes). Anyway, it’s less than two weeks till Christmas now, and though Laurie and I have gone to seven lots between us, we still haven’t found the perfect tree. (If you think we’re weird, Earl’s grandfather used to drill holes in the trunk and stick in extra branches to fill the gaps.)

Which brings to mind a cooking apron I wore for years until it became too unsightly with stains (I may be a perfectionist, but I’m also die-hardedly loyal to things I like). “When all else fails,” it said, “lower your standards.”

It may be getting to be time, I consider, noting the holiday bags under my eyes, to lower mine.

 

By the time Arielle was old enough to help us pick out and decorate our Christmas trees, we’d resorted to buying them at East Bay Nursery instead—and swallowing hard when we saw the price tag. She’s twelve in the photo above.

Re the ants: we found them in the toaster, the iron, even the freezer—and they tried repeatedly to set up colonies in our potted plants.