REFLECTION

Sep 16, 2019

REFLECTION

I’ve already described how my brother’s face got burned when he was six months old—and why I felt responsible for his injury. Years later, I had the following dream:

Last night I dreamed I was standing looking at myself in a mirror. I had some sort of stick in my hand, which I brandished like a baseball bat, then tugged at my crotch the way ballplayers do. The next moment I noticed with embarrassment that my brother was sitting on a bed watching me. “I was pretending to be a man,” I explained. At that moment I noticed how much my face in the mirror looked like my brother’s—I had never seen much of a resemblance before. Then I saw I had a burn on my cheek, that my reflection was my brother’s. “Why, I’m seeing your face when I look in the mirror!” I cried. I felt on the verge of a discovery—that something repressed was about to break through, something having to do with the actual events surrounding my brother’s accident. Suddenly I felt two powerful hands grab me by the legs—though no one was there—and start to drag me backward, which scared me awake before I could remember anything more, leaving me with the eerie feeling that whatever the revelation was, something or someone didn’t want me to know.

When Leia was pregnant with Arielle, I bought the book What to Expect the First Year for her baby shower, along with other gifts, then found out she already had a copy. I was intending to return mine but became so absorbed after reading the first few pages that I decided not to. In the chapter “Making Home Safe for Baby,” I read:

“Do not leave baby alone in a room, except in a playpen, crib, or other safe enclosure, and then only for a few minutes, unless he or she is sleeping. Do not leave baby alone even ‘safely’ enclosed in a crib or playpen, awake or asleep, with a preschooler—they often don’t know their own strength or realize the consequences of their actions.”

These were powerful words to me and eased the guilt—somewhat, at least—that I’d always felt about my brother’s accident. As for recovering any repressed memories of it, I never did, though eventually I would learn a key piece of the puzzle.

ENERGIZER BUNNY

ENERGIZER BUNNY

Sep 9, 2019

ENERGIZER BUNNY

Rummaging through more of my boxes the other day, I came across a baggy with fold-dye—as opposed to tie-dye—art I made with my godkids when they were younger. Actually, I cautiously introduced Arielle to the technique when she was only two. That was the year I was busy writing A Patchwork Memoir—and just as I made a point of chronicling my outings with Earl, I described all my play dates with her:

When I arrive, two-year-old Arielle is napping on the sofa, so Leia and I talk a while to let her sleep. I tell her I’m going to give a presentation about my father at my second grief group tonight—and how nervous I am about it. Arielle’s still groggy after Leia rouses her—and looks disgruntled about being awakened.

“Did you have a dream?” I ask.

She shakes her head, rubbing one eye with her fist.

To reanimate her, I whip out an envelope with more stickers for her—cats, fish, and birds. It’s then that Leia brings out a book with waxy pages that’s already filled with every kind of sticker imaginable.

Luckily, I’ve got another ace up my sleeve. I cut paper towels into quarters, then fold the squares into different shapes, letting Arielle dip the points into bowls of food coloring—red, yellow, and blue. “Les see what’s inside,” she lisps, carefully unfolding each one so as not to tear it—a tricky business because once they’re saturated, they glom together. I don’t know if she can see that each bright kaleidoscopic pattern is different, but she’s properly enthusiastic, taking my word for it, I have a hunch, that they’re beautiful. One day she’ll have her own opinion, I think, but for now she’s satisfied to share mine. Each time I start to fold a new square, she politely asks, “Is that mine or yours?” though I invariably assure her, “It’s yours.” I was worried that this project might be too sophisticated for her—well, it is and it isn’t. Pretty soon I catch on that I’d better be the one to dunk the squares—sparingly!—into the blue dye, or by the time she gets done with all the unfolding, they’ll be murky brown messes. She loves to use her hands, I muse—I wonder what she’ll be? An artist?… musician?…surgeon? Already I’m look forward to bragging, “I knew her when…”

Two hours later we’ve got designs laid out on waxed paper all over the dining room floor. “When they’re dry, you can pick your favorites and hang them in the window,” I say. She continues to ignore even the Dutch crepes with honey that Leia has made us, though I’ve already wolfed mine down between foldings, and like the Energizer Bunny, she just keeps going and going.

CONVERSION BLUES

CONVERSION BLUES

Sep 2, 2019

CONVERSION BLUES

I never know when I’m driving back from the pool what surprises await me at home:

  • a port-a-potty situated directly in front of my bedroom window, so when I open any window, the smell wafts in.
  • a large hole punched through the kitchen wall from the other side. I can’t actually see how big it is because most of it is behind the fridge.
  • the kitchen floor bowed and the fridge listing dramatically to one side, the cookbooks on the shelf above piled up on that end—a result of “leveling” the house.
  • the living room walls riven with cracks, the plaster buckled and hanging precariously. Meanwhile, inside the closet I discover another hole in the wall and plaster dust all over my clothes.

One day after they’d leveled the house, I couldn’t even get out the front door to go swimming—the knob wouldn’t turn, and Alberto had to come over and take the door off its hinges to let me out, too late for the pool, alas.

Then there was the time we got an urgent call that the workers needed access to Gina’s apartment because there was a gas leak and they were worried that if she’d left the stove on, there might be an explosion.

And the times that I haven’t been able to hear them knocking to tell me they’re turning off the water—because I’m wearing earplugs to muffle the construction racket. So I only discover belatedly that there’s no water when I try to take a bath, flush the toilet, etc.

Also the multiple times I’ve had no phone or internet because they’ve cut the wrong wires.

At the outset of the project, Bob told Ella and me that we had to move all the stuff in our storage room to a new location in the basement of a building that he owns on the other side of the block.

Then last week we were on our way to Carmichael, two hours away, to see my aunt Audrey, who was in hospice care, when we got an urgent phone call from Gina—that the temporary storage room was flooded with sewer water and our cardboard file boxes were soaked.

And have I mentioned that because all the insulation has been stripped away and the basement left open to the elements, our apartment has been so cold that Ella and I have spent some evenings in winter jackets and blankets? No, I’m not exaggerating.

Then there was the missive Bob sent, saying we couldn’t use our carport behind the building anymore because the workmen needed the space for their trucks. Well, as I’ve mentioned, there’s no parking on the street because we live half a block from campus.

“Why do you have to be so adversarial?” Bob complained in a recent email to us tenants.

Hmmm. That requires some thought.

LUNA MOTH

LUNA MOTH

Aug 25, 2019

LUNA MOTH

I’ve been remiss. I’d promised myself to post at least one blog a week, but I haven’t because I’ve been traveling recently. It all started with searching online for the most beautiful image of a luna moth I could find—an impulse prompted, I suspect, by my latest blogs about my father. In a way, I think, the luna moth has always been a symbol of my childhood to me—the happiest part. In my journal I wrote:

For the past few weeks I’ve been on a butterfly hunting expedition—from early morning until late at night. I’ve been journeying to the wildest and most remote reaches of the planet, including the Amazon rainforest, where my father once wielded his butterfly net, though I’m traveling online rather than on foot. Like him, I’m creating my own collection of butterflies and moths—a digital rather than material one.

In the beginning, I didn’t anticipate the unrelenting fervor I would feel about this project or my undiminished excitement over every new discovery. At the outset I thought it was nostalgia for my childhood that had prompted my foray into the realm of “beautiful bugs,” but now I’ve begun to suspect it’s something more—that this love of color and pattern is in my DNA, just as it was in my dad’s. (There’s a reason I collected so many hundreds of fabric swatches while I was making doll clothes for Arielle and Emma, experiencing a rush with every “find.”)

And just as my father went through the painstaking work of mounting the best specimens, I’m engaged in the painstaking process of editing—in Photoshop—many of the photos I happen upon, repairing worn or tattered wings, enhancing color, or altering the backgrounds to better showcase these natural works of art on my Pinterest board “Beautiful Bugs.”

APTNESS

Aug 11, 2019

APTNESS

Another major player in my life is my therapist Toni. Luckily for me, she has a sliding scale.

Toni is in her forties, slim, girlish, and pretty in a natural way; she doesn’t wear makeup because she’s allergic to it and has a cloud of dark hair that she recently admitted she has to set, it’s so kinky. She wears midi-length, softly gathered skirts with ethnic patterns and matching tops—and custom-made sandals. On her walls are a photograph of a stand of winter trees on a snowy hill, the view of a beach from a cliff covered with wildflowers, and a painting of stones in a river.

Her office is on the second floor of an older building above an antique shop on the corner of a street that says No Outlet, the upstairs a labyrinth of white corridors with therapists’ plaques on all the doors. No one ever emerges from these other doors, which makes me suspect it’s a set. But then, I always arrive (breathless with hurry) within one minute of noon, so I don’t spend much time in the waiting room.

I settle myself on Toni’s beige leather sofa and take off my Reeboks, while she goes to get me a Dixie cup of water from the little fridge in a side room. Occasionally I toss her extra throw pillows on the floor and stretch out on the sofa, pulling a fuzzy afghan over me, while she sits in a Danish modern chair and almost never takes notes.

Today, I tell her, I finally dragged the scale out of the closet and got the shock of my life. I weighed 141 pounds!—when I’ve held steady at 125 (well, give or take a few ounces) since I was a teenager. “I’ve been hitting the coffee ice cream again.” I confess. “I get the carton out of the fridge, thinking I’m only going to have a few tiny bites, sit down, and run my spoon around the sides, where the ice cream is melting from the warmth of my hand. The next thing I know, I’ve taken, oh, maybe 500 tiny bites, and the ice cream block is reduced to a little mound in the middle.”

“That’s exactly what ­I used to do!” she laughs. “And with coffee ice cream too! Now I do it with frozen yogurt.”

“I like coffee because it’s not too sweet,” I explain, “so if I eat slowly, I don’t get a sugar jag. Of course, Ella is disgusted when she opens my cartons—luckily, coffee is one of her least favorite flavors.”

“My husband has the same reaction,” she grins.

(Actually, I’m exaggerating about the little mound—I can’t manage more than half a pint at a time, but when I’m eating my second half the next day, I leave a spoonful at the bottom just to prove I can quit any time.)

Toni can’t eat ice cream anymore because she’s on a strict healthy diet—fruits and vegetables mostly, some from her own garden.

“Will you excuse me a moment?” she asks—and trots off to the bathroom.

One day a year or two ago, I asked about this, since I noticed she often had to interrupt my sessions even though she always visited the john before them too.

“You don’t have to answer, but…” I began.

“Do you really want to know?” she asked.

I said I did.

So she told me then that since childhood she’d had Crone’s disease—a disease of the intestine that causes a fiery pain. It’s in remission now, but more recently she developed Grave’s disease too—a disease of the thyroid. Her physician failed to diagnose her correctly, and she was going downhill fast until she consulted an outside doctor—coincidentally, my own second-opinion doctor—who told her to head directly for the nearest emergency room. Without that immediate intervention, she learned later, she probably would have been dead within the week.

“There’s more,” she sighed. “Are you sure you want to hear it?

I girded myself, nodding.

“I also have MS.”

Multiple Sclerosis. From TV interviews I’d seen with Annette Funicello of Mouseketeer fame, I knew how it ravaged the body. I let out a sob.

Later, thinking about the chronic pain Toni lives with—knowing from first-hand experience the toll it takes on you, to say nothing of the fear and grief you feel about your body deteriorating—I’m awed by the grace with which she carries herself through life. And I can’t help marveling at the aptness of my choosing her as my therapist, understanding now that it wasn’t an accident—that I intuitively chose the person who had the most to teach me.

MIRROR IMAGE

MIRROR IMAGE

Aug 4, 2019

MIRROR IMAGE

I don’t have many pictures of my dad and me together. (And contrary to what my computer thinks, “me” is correct because it’s the object of a preposition, a rule that nobody seems to remember anymore.) There we both are with our eyes closed, holding our drinks, legs sprawling—unlike my brother whose eyes are open and who’s drinking out of his cup. If you could see the picture in color, as it once was before it faded to sepia, you would see my dad are both freckled redheads…and, the truth is, we are very alike in many ways, even beyond our physical appearance. But my attitude in the snapshot is a mirror image of his, with my cup in the opposite hand and my leg curled in the opposite direction. How telling, I think to myself—because in other ways, I’m my father’s opposite—the negative to his positive. For my father was always unassailably sure of himself, implacably secure in the knowledge of his intellectual superiority to just about everybody else. He didn’t seem to have many of the feelings most of the rest of us do. He didn’t experience fear—of death, for example—or anxiety, like the paralyzing the performance fright I still struggle with—or depression, which hung over my life from puberty until my mid-thirties, with only a few bright spots. I was ever his polar opposite, experiencing intensely all the feelings he didn’t. And that, of course, was no accident.

FATALITY

FATALITY

Jul 28, 2019

FATALITY

Margret also sent me, carefully packed in styrofoam peanuts and sealed in plastic bags, the christening gown my grandmother Marie made my father before his birth and the Bible my grandfather Frank gave her when she converted to Catholicism.

Frank was a chemical engineer who designed city water systems and was already in his mid-thirties when he married Marie, one of his technicians. Not long ago, my mother told me that it was my grandfather who insisted she have their baby in the hospital—at a time when most women, with the help of midwives, were still delivering at home. Apparently he believed she’d get better care there. But twelve days after giving birth to a healthy red-haired baby boy, my grandmother died in the hospital of “childbirth fever,” caused by unsterile conditions. Family lore has it that if the baby had been delivered at home by a midwife, Marie probably would have survived. This conjecture was buttressed in my own mind by a TV documentary I saw about Martha Ballard, a midwife who delivered a thousand mothers a hundred years earlier—and never lost a one. My grandmother Marie was only twenty-three.

Like Scrooge’s father in “A Christmas Carole,” my grandfather blamed his infant son for his young wife’s death—and treated him forever after that with resentful hostility. It’s even likely that he hit my father as an infant in the cradle, because that’s what he did years later to Margret. After Marie’s death, my grandfather’s sister, Julia, came to live with them and take care of my father, so for years he thought she was his mother. But when my dad was seven, Frank remarried—Estelle, a sadistic, perhaps even psychotic woman, by all accounts. Julia was sent away, and Estelle gave birth to a son. My father described to me once how Estelle used to strip his half-brother Ray when he was a boy, put him in the bathtub, and beat him mercilessly with an iron cord. And though my father insists Estelle never beat him, Ray told me she deliberately put rotten meat in my father’s sandwiches. In the Catholic school they attended, the nuns were physically abusive, as well. My father said one nun smacked a classmate of his on the side of the head and permanently deafened him in one ear. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that my father eventually repudiated the religion of his tormentors. While still a teenager, he decided there was no God. The only thing that was painful about reaching this conclusion, he told me, was the thought that he would never meet his mother in heaven.

What struck me after reading “ The Black Lyre” was how like Ariphanes my father was—an unwanted child, an orphan in a sense, whose extraordinary gifts were scorned by the “pious” adults around him—an embittered father who couldn’t love him, a brutal stepmother who seemed intent on poisoning him, tyrannical nuns who ruled their classrooms by intimidation and physical abuse…. When he grew up, the revenge he took was Ariphanes’. He spent his entire professional life proselytizing against religion; in philosophical papers and university classes, he tried with his instrument—not a lyre but his exceptional powers of logic—to create doubt and undermine faith wherever he found it.

JOLTED

JOLTED

Jul 21, 2019

JOLTED

I have eight photos of my beautiful Swedish grandmother Marie, my father’s mother. In a blurry one, she’s sitting cross-legged in a field, bundled in a light jacket, her long skirt wrapped around her feet. Her hands are resting in her lap, a jaunty straw hat with a large bowl shading her eyes. Her head is cocked charmingly, the slanting sun lighting up the hat, casting the shadow of her nose across her cheek and catching the full breadth of her engaging smile.

My half-aunt Margret, who’s my age and like a cousin to me, recently sent me a ninth—a photograph of my grandparents she’d found in a chest in her attic. They’re sitting in the grass in a park. Without her hat, you can see my grandmother’s hair is fair, and I’ve always wondered if she was a strawberry blond like me. Her collar has a tassel, her dress a cummerbund, and her shoulders look thin and angular, like mine. The brown oval mat that frames the two of them is crumbling with age. I’m torn: out of reverence, I want to keep the photo just as it is; out of aesthetic compunction, I want to strip away the moldering mat. With a razor I slit open the paper backing, only to find the photo fixed in place with a battery of tiny rusted nails. Using pliers and a screwdriver, I carefully bend and jiggle them free.

When I finally pry the oval mat from the photo, I see, in a corner that was hidden, three women in broad-brimmed hats strolling on a path beyond the shrubbery—in another second they would have passed beyond view. And suddenly, I’m jolted—shocked—into an apprehension of the moment: that one instant of that one day, when my grandparents were in love and thought they had all the time in the world.

MYTH

MYTH

Jul 13, 2019

MYTH

 

Ella and I were disgruntled when Bob, our new landlord, told us we had to move our belongings in the basement to a storage room in a building he owns on the other side of the block. There wasn’t enough room for all our stuff at the new location, so a tower of boxes now stands at the foot of my bed. Take this opportunity, I told myself sternly, to start winnowing their contents. And I’ve been making some startling discoveries. One was this forgotten logo I designed years ago for a friend, an Episcopal priest, who formed a group called Open Heart. Another is “The Black Lyre,” below. I’ve always thought I never did any creative writing before college. Then, among my high school papers, I found this story. Apparently, our assignment was to make up a myth. Actually, I was so stunned by the ending, I couldn’t believe the work was mine—until I realized that, unknowingly, I was writing about my father.

The Black Lyre

There was a feeling of disquiet among the gods on Mount Olympus that day. None had gone about their usual business. Zeus paced restlessly before his throne, while others lingered in the main hall, some conversing quietly, all sensing vaguely that something unusual was about to happen. Hebe had just been sent out to fetch some nectar, when suddenly, a shrill cry was heard from the front hall. The startled gods rushed out after her. There in the large entrance to the palace, near the astonished Hebe, stood an old man, a gnarled gnome, not half her height. Under his arm he carried two lyres—one was white, the other black. The gods were amused as well as intrigued by this strange, disheveled visitor, and they invited him to dine with them. When all were settled comfortably after the supper, he told his story.

His name was Ariphanes. He had been raised by peasants and had loved them greatly, although he knew they were not his true parents. When he was a child they often used to tell him how they had found him, a little baby, on a hillside with the two lyres beside him. He first discovered that he differed from most men in his extraordinary strength, yet he never considered it seriously. As he grew old in appearance, he didn’t lose his youthful agility and vigor. He waited for death for years and years, and finally acknowledged that no mortal man could live as long as he had. Therefore, he must be a god.

Why his divine mother and father had abandoned him, he could only guess. Probably they were ashamed of an ugly, deformed child such as he had been. Even then, they had left a sign of their love by giving him two magical instruments. He said it would be dangerous to reveal any more about his unusual power and hoped that his secrecy about this matter would not offend anyone.

The narrative completed, Zeus asked Ariphanes to demonstrate his musical ability. He submitted readily, using the white lyre, and soon the hall was filled with the sweetest, clearest tones imaginable. The enchanting melody melted away any doubts that might have existed as to the truth of his story and claim to divinity.

The homely but merry old god, with the light-heartedness of a child, soon became the favorite on Mount Olympus. What charmed them into trusting him the gods never knew. Apollo, too, could not help but like him, but, as the former champion of the lyre, he was also terribly envious of the old god’s superior talent.

Several months after his arrival, Ariphanes announced that he was leaving the palace for a week and asked that during his absence no one should touch his instruments. Apollo had been anxious to try to play the lyres of Ariphanes. Now that he had his chance, his desire overcame any guilt he might have had about ignoring the god’s request. He stole the black lyre from its peg and that evening performed for the other gods. The haunting notes soon quelled their disapproval of his actions, and gradually a certain doubt took hold in the minds of many. At first only a few whispered words were interchanged. “Ariphanes’ tale certainly was an odd one. You don’t suppose…” The suspicion grew rapidly. “He’s probably not a god at all.” Finally, all were convinced. “Surely it was all a lie!” “And we were completely taken in.” “We offered him our hospitality, confided in him…” The furious gods held a council and decided what was to be done.

On his return, Ariphanes was greeted by a host of hostile faces. Guessing the cause immediately, he hurried on to his room. The situation could be remedied only by the song of his white lyre.“We have your instruments!” Zeus thundered after him. “And now we want the truth! Admit that you have lied!”

“There is nothing to admit!” cried the old god, turning. “All I’ve told you is true! I am a god! Why, I have power greater even than yours, Zeus, and now I see that I must prove it.”

But the king of the gods seized Ariphanes and hurled him from the palace, sending the lyres flying after him.

Then the old god picked himself up and took his precious lyres. The angry jeering voices faded gradually as he made his way down the mountain.

Greatly embittered, Ariphanes descended among the mortals and wandered the earth for many years, the music of his black lyre working his revenge, for the black lyre spread doubt; the white, long unused, inspired belief. He did, indeed, prove himself a greater divinity than Zeus, for he destroyed the Greeks’ belief in their own gods.

SHELTERS

SHELTERS

Jul 8, 2019

SHELTERS

Another major player in my life—my painter friend Earl Pierce. In A Patchwork Memoir, I wrote about several of our outings together:

Earl and I are tootling south along the coast highway in his truck; he’s telling me jokes about flying. Advice to a pilot (he was one in WWII): “Try to make the number of landings equal the number of takeoffs.” And “Helicopters can’t really fly—they’re just so ugly the earth repels them.” He’s wearing a new black shirt, instead of his usual red one with red suspenders. With his white beard shaved off, kids no longer mistake him for Santa Claus. His jaw and neck are still taut, I notice, and clean-shaven he looks years younger.

When his truck and the car on the cross street both start into the intersection at the same time, he sighs, “I don’t care which of us goes first; just so we don’t tie.” Behind an old lady who’s crawling along at fifteen miles an hour, he prods, “OK, now. You can pedal faster.”

We haven’t gone far before I spot strange constructions along the beaches below. They appear to be made of driftwood—too small for teepees, too big for bonfires. “Pull over!” I cry when I see a perfect little cove, trodden only by plovers. He does, but looks at me sorrowfully. That’s when I remember his leg is bothering him. So we drive on, out of the hills, to where the road is level with the sea, and pull in at Pescadero Beach.

Here the structures have more fanciful shapes. They’re shelters, I realize. An elderly man lies sleeping in one, while a couple picnics in another. They’re constructed all cockamamie with any kind of driftwood at hand—logs, tree roots, branches, planks—all worn smooth and gray, and cunningly leaned, stacked, and interlocked. Some are long and low tunnels; others have windows facing the water.   Still others are too small for anyone but kids. “Welcome” is written on one, “Keep Out” scrawled on its child-sized annex. Charmed—they remind me of the forts I built in my childhood—I plop down in one, and Earl joins me, the two of us shielded from the wind.

Earl reminisces about his army days, saying that he may have been the youngest pilot in the Army Air Corps; he enlisted at eighteen, then was rushed through training, since the war was winding down. He flew C-37s—cargo planes—full of Jerry cans of fuel for the tankers that Patton abandoned when they ran out of gas.

The Americans flew in tight formation, he says, and joked about the British RAF’s lack of same, saying, “Same day, same direction.”

He describes the K-rations they lived on—cheese, crackers, and a slab of Spam—and the 1-in-10 rations—canned hash or spaghetti—they considered a luxury. They would poke the cans full of holes, so they wouldn’t explode, and heat them up by sticking them in a valve at the back of the plane. In the winter they washed their clothes in airplane fuel—they got cold, he explained, running around in their skivvies and it was a fast way to get the job done. Then they hung them out to dry on the wings of the plane.

After the war, he went to see With God as My Copilot with George, one of the navigators. “The way the author described his exploits,” Earl had said, “you would have thought he won the war single-handedly.” “No wonder God only made copilot,” George observed.

Since he hadn’t finished his tour of duty when the war ended, Earl flew feeder planes carrying refugees back to their native countries. Though the planes were designed to carry fifteen people at most, they were able to crowd in twenty-five to thirty because the refugees, concentration camp victims, were so emaciated none of them weighed more than a hundred pounds.

We decide to head south to Santa Cruz for dinner, but on the way we pass San Gregorio Beach, where I spot more makeshift shelters. Of course I have to go exploring them all. They’re more ambitious than the ones we saw before, the driftwood lashed together with cords of kelp and decoratively draped with seaweed like bunting. The sand is so fine, it feels silky to the touch, but it’s hard to walk on because of the sharp little fragments of driftwood scattered throughout.

Here the waves roll in in four or five tiers and the dark sand separates out from light in a chevron pattern, ranks of spearheads that diminish in size to tiny arrowheads at the water line. I pull up my pants legs as far as I can and go scampering in the surf, but not too far out because of “sneaker waves”—and because a great white shark was recently spotted at Stinson Beach to the north.

Later, in Santa Cruz, we have dinner on the pier and watch the fishing trawlers come in at sunset. Earl tells me the story of Vally, short for Valentine, a wealthy, eccentric widow he knew when he was living as a struggling painter in Greenwich Village. “If she wasn’t served promptly in a restaurant,” he said, “she’d take out her cigarette lighter and announce loudly, ‘Well, I guess it’s time to set fire to the menu.’”

On the way home, taking the coast highway again, there’s a single streak of cloud on the horizon that catches all the colors of the setting sun. The whole west is rosy-gold above the navy blue waves. I see the shadow of Earl’s truck racing along beside us, so clearly I can make shadow puppets. Sometimes it doubles suddenly—a tiny truck poised atop a larger one. Sometimes the shadow reaches half-way across the cultivated fields. I see an arrow of pelicans in formation, so I tell Earl about the wily bird I just learned about that perches atop the pelican’s forehead and, when its host lets the water out of its beak pouch before swallowing, it steals its catch. The highway is barely traveled now, the beaches deserted.   When I remember those driftwood wind blocks in years to come, I muse to myself, I know I’ll always think of Earl—and the sheltering presence he has been in my life.