When the city decided my deck had to come down-—and, necessarily, my potted garden—I started taking pictures of my neighbors’ flowers so I would still have their colors brightening my life.
HAPPY SUMMER, EVERYONE!
Have I mentioned that I’m a member of BAIPA—the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association—which meets monthly in Novato, across the Richmond Bridge from Berkeley? It’s a thriving group that includes writers of all ages, editors, illustrators, graphic artists, printers, marketing experts, audio book actors, and more. When I first joined, I wrote in my journal:
“Wow! I just attended my second BAIPA meeting, and I have more than a sneaking suspicion that it’s going to be life-changing—because I’m an introvert of long standing.
“Last year before my goddaughter Arielle left to spend her high school junior year in Viterbo, Italy, I had her sign me up on Facebook. And though I loved seeing the pictures she posted of her travels on her Facebook page, my own page has remained faceless ever since—a gray ghost with a flip. (How’s that for an oxymoron? A faceless Facebook page!)
“But now that I’m preparing to self-publish my children’s books, I see I’m going to have to mend my inconspicuous ways. (Actually, I did take a few pictures of myself when I got my first iMac last February—and while I was pleased that the flash on my new computer blasted away most of my wrinkles in the photos, I couldn’t bring myself to post any of the shots on my Facebook page because…well, the closet door was open behind me in the background, revealing all the clutter inside. I have my pride.)
“Come to think of it, I’ve avoided having my picture taken ever since the photo for my Costco card. When I smiled for the camera, my lip twitched so much with the prolonged effort that I wound up looking like Elvis with his sulky curled lip—almost a sneer—though admittedly mine wasn’t as sexy.”
It wasn’t until I joined BAIPA that I had Michael show me how to do selfies (above) on my new iMac and asked Ella take a photo of me for my Facebook page.
It’s been a long, lovely spring, the hills still gloriously green well into May. Now that many of my Facebook friends are showcasing their gardens online, I’m wanting to add my voice and photos to the mix—because I once had a garden too.
The images above are old Polaroids I scanned. In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote:
Because our apartment is so small, I thought it would be nice to add on another room—a colorful, fragrant outdoor annex. So I set out to transform our 6’ x 10’ deck—which stands one story above ground and looks out onto asphalt and the sagging roof of the carport—into a bower.
I started small, with a window box. When I went to East Bay Nursery to choose my first annuals, I was astonished at the prices. $2.50 for a pansy, petunia, or snapdragon? How could anything so beautiful be so cheap? From my annuals I learned that some of the best things in life are—almost—free.
No sooner had I planted my window box than we had a hard, driving rain. When I padded out the next morning, half-expecting my flowers to be battered to the ground, I found them jauntily upright, reminding me that “delicate” and “doughty” aren’t necessarily a contradiction in terms.
When I had enclosed the deck with flowering vines and bushes—bougainvillea, star jasmine, and a camellia—and added pots of lobelia, dahlias, and a pink breath of heaven, I decided there was only one thing missing, a small tree for the corner. So I scoured the East Bay nurseries—every last one—for the perfect arboreal roommate. “The canopy won’t be much larger than the root system,” I was advised by more than one nursery worker, “so if it’s in a standard 12”-diameter pot…” Pretty pitiful canopy, I thought. Then one day I happened upon the perfect “tree”—a wisteria pruned to a single trunk—in a narrow 5-gallon pot with a broad lush canopy and white starbursts of blooms. “Too bad that variety doesn’t have a fragrance,” I overheard an employee say in passing. Of course, the very first evening I went out to look at it, its white blossoms phantasmagoric in the darkness, it filled the air with perfume. From my irrepressible wisteria I learned, “Don’t believe everything you’re told, especially by the experts.”
The one thing I didn’t like about my new tree, though, was the rude, green-stained stake that supported it. The trunk looked strong enough to me, so I cut the cords that bound it to the stake—and it flopped right over, its canopy dragging on the ground, exhorting me, by its melodramatic collapse, to leave well enough alone!
So much for my lessons—I thought I’d graduated. Naïve gardener that I was, I imagined I could go on living in paradise. With serene complacency, I brunched among my flowers and wrote. Until the barbarian hordes invaded. Then I was battling aphids, spider mites, petunia bud worms, diabrotica beetles, carpenter bees, mildew, scale, and rust… For every flower, there was a predator. From my entire garden I learned, “There are no free brunches.”
One of the things I’ll be featuring on my website is activities that kids and grownups can do together—like scrapbooking. The page above is from the scrapbook Arielle and I started when she was in elementary school, chronicling our favorite pastimes. “Us, Livin’ the Life” she titled the front cover we made out of bright poster board.
I designed the page above to celebrate our first play date, which Leia had arranged. (When I’d arrived at Live Oak Park, two-year-old Arielle was about to climb into a play-structure tube. Scampishly, I peered in the other end of it—and she waved me away with a scowl.)
At the start of our project, I took her to Scrapbook Territory on 4th St. down by the bay, which has to be the best scrapbook store ever—or should I say had to be? (I’m still not reconciled to it going out of business.) It had aisle after aisle after aisle of papers arranged by color, texture, or theme, an astonishing array of ribbons I still use for the doll clothes I make, fanciful adhesive letters, and every kind of—flat—miniature you can imagine.
Besides poster board for the covers and colorful papers, you and the child in your life will need:
Two metal rings, scissors, a hole punch, a ruler, glue dots in different sizes, a glue stick, adhesive letters, assorted stickers, colorful brads, ribbon, and, if your kid likes bling, also glitter, sequins and stick-on gems.
I would also recommend you buy a plastic 14” x 14” scrapbook bin for storing everything.
Hurray! Michael Daniel was born last night. Leia’s birthing coach called me this morning with the news, just before Igor was supposed to arrive. (Hey! It’s Labor Day weekend, Leia—how appropriate!) Then, during my Alexander session, Leia herself called twice, but her voice was so soft and dreamy my answering machine kept cutting her off. I didn’t know they did that.
Today when I drop by her house, all the balloons from Arielle’s birthday party are gone, and the house looks uncharacteristically sedate. Seeing the TV on through the window, I knock softly instead of ringing the doorbell, not wanting to wake Leia if she’s sleeping. I’ll leave my congratulations card on the doormat, I think. But Mamachela, Manny’s mother, answers and waves me toward the back room, where I find Leia in a jumble of linens on the master bed with red-faced little “Who is like God?”—which is what “Michael” means. Her two midwives are there too. I have a toy shopping cart for Arielle but want Leia’s approval because I’m worried Arielle could get her fingers pinched in it.
I hold Michael Daniel while the midwives press his feet to a three-tone inkpad and make sets of footprints on two documents. His weight is down from nine pounds to eight-and-a-half, they say. “How come?” I ask.
“Because for the first few days he’s suckling colostrum instead of milk, so he gets all the nutrients he needs, and antibodies, but no fat,” one of the midwives explains.
Leia tells me she started having contractions just a few hours after we got back from the lake. She called the midwives around midnight, when she began to have the urge to push, and Michael was born three hours later at 3:15 a.m. His head came out with one contraction, his body with the next—she didn’t really even have to think about pushing; her body just took over, she says.
“Did he start to breathe as soon as he came out of the water?” I ask. (That’s the part of the water birth I was anxious about.)
“Yeah, when the cold air hit his face.”
“And Arielle—how does she feel about having a brother?”
“Oh, she wants to kiss him all the time. Unfortunately, she wants to jump on him too. They’re so different!” Leia marvels. “Arielle used to wake me up every hour to nurse; he slept for five hours last night. She was wide-eyed from the beginning, taking everything in. He mostly keeps his eyes shut or squints out at the world with one eyebrow cocked like he’s a little bit skeptical about it all.”
And three years later, a little before dawn, along came Emerald–also a water birth. Arielle–at age five–was going to cut the umbilical cord, but suddenly got cold feet…er…fingers. So I did the snipping, and a few minutes later I witnessed Emma’s first yawn.
Three more major players in my life are my godkids: Arielle, Michael, and Emma (for Emerald), as I mention in my long bio. From the beginning they’ve been a family of globetrotters. Maybe I should add that my friend Leia, their mom, is Dutch, and their dad, Manny, is Peruvian? Besides multiple trips to Hawaii, South America, and the usual European cities tourists visit, they’ve been to Sydney, Cairo, and Istanbul. And I’ve had the great good fortune to know all three kids from birth, since they live only three blocks away in a house Leia bought and renovated years ago. In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote a vignette I called “Movie Star.”
Leia says this time she’s going to have a water birth, that she remembered what I’d said about the documentary I saw—how the babies delivered this way sometimes smile at birth. So she’s rented a tub and installed it in the master bedroom.
We’re sitting on towels at Lake Anza, eating bite-sized chunks of watermelon. Arielle, just turned two, is wearing psychedelic sunglasses, feather ponytail bands, and a neon Minnie Mouse swimsuit. “She’s a little movie star, isn’t she?” says the woman on the next blanket. Oh, she’s way beyond cute.
Leia says when they’re out walking and come to an intersection, she tells Arielle, “Stay close!” And Arielle takes her mother’s hand and presses her cheek against it as they cross the street together.
I tell her how my friend Marcia’s two-year-old, Wesley, makes his little plastic action figures kiss and made up after a skirmish. When he thinks he’s done something wrong, he announces he needs a time-out, then goes into his playhouse and whimpers to be let out.
“Callie, come!” Arielle calls back as she trots down to the water’s edge. I obey.
“You’ve made a cake!” I exclaim when she pours a little pile of sand out of a plastic cup. “But it needs in a candle.” So I stick in a twig I find.
She starts to rock from side to side. “Happy Birsday to you, Happy Birsday to you…” she lisps in a soft, sweet voice.
Marilyn would have eaten her heart out.
Well, the conversion of our apartment building into a mini-dorm continues. Though I put in earplugs last night to shut out—or at least mute—any noise this morning, I awoke to my body vibrating with every hammer stroke, along with the entire structure around me. Nevertheless, I’m determined to continue too:
Another major player in my life was my father, who was—arguably—my primary parent and who would exert a powerful influence over me long after my mother divorced him and moved my brother and me halfway across the country. He was brilliant, it must be said—perhaps the most intellectually vital person I’ve ever known.
Everyone called my father Red, but it was years before I connected this nickname with the color, it sounded so completely different to my ears. He used to wear a nylon stocking over his head to train his dark red hair back, like Einstein’s. Throughout my childhood he spent the better part of every day holed up in his study, reading, except for the hours he taught at the university. I’d knock on the door timidly, afraid to interrupt him at his work.
When I was a child, he was the one I took all my questions to because he—literally—knew all the answers. He gave my brother a chemistry set (Doug says he was six at the time) and bought us both a microscope with which we peered at the one-celled organisms he brought home in jars of swamp water. He took us butterfly hunting, sent away for eggs, and eventually hatched from cocoons a cecropia moth and the most spectacular luna moth I’ve ever seen, even in museums—huge, pale green, its body covered with white down and its extravagant tails tinged with pink. Cases of insects of all kinds stood propped on dressers and hung from the walls.
He took us lizard hunting on cross-country trips. In our bedroom was a terrarium filled with reptiles. He created tools for their capture—a slip noose on the end of a fishing pole for the collared lizards that sunned themselves on the rocks of Oklahoma, a two-pronged fork on the end of a broom handle for the lizards that camouflaged themselves under the sands of New Mexico.
In Carlsbad Caverns we caught a giant millipede that wound up in the terrarium too (even with all those legs, it couldn’t move very fast). Throughout the southwest, we took night rides to capture tarantulas by the glow of our headlights. Near the Desert Museum outside Tucson, we caught two sun spiders—the most hideous arachnids I’ve ever seen—and put them in a jar. Later we discovered they’d completely dismembered each other.
On one of these trips we found an egg, brought it home, and waited to see what would hatch out of it. What finally emerged was a hog-nosed viper, a tiny spotted snake with a flattened nose. For weeks my father sent my brother and me down to the Triangle—the vacant lot at the end of the block, overgrown with weeds and nettles—to catch insects to feed it, but, curiously, it never seemed to eat. From among the last slides my father sent me a few years before his death—he was cleaning out mementos—I held one up to the lamplight, only to see that tiny snake swallowing a lizard twice its size.
There was the time Dad captured a porcupine and kept it in a barrel in the basement till the stink became unbearable. The time he fired his gun into a crevice in a rock and dragged out a rattlesnake. The time he returned from Mexico with the back seat full of five-foot iguanas, which he donated to the local zoo.
He took my brother hunting and both of us fishing—at the Twin City lakes and in the northern wilderness, where we would rent a cabin without water or electricity. Each morning we would row out on Lake Owen or Radison at dawn to the call of loons—and catch sunfish, crappies, bass, and northern pike that my dad would scale and fry up for breakfast. On one trip we even went on a long trek through the dense woods (in Minnesota, you had to worry about poison ivy, not poison oak) eager to see a small, newly discovered lake.
These are the activities that I shared with my father and brother in the years before my parents’ divorce. And this is the expurgated version of my relationship with my dad—the one without any mention of how much he intimidated me, the one he would have allowed me to write without threatening a lawsuit.
My last blog was about how it used to be. But some things never change. No one ever mentioned that a wrecking crew would show up today. At the moment I’m writing to a deafening surround-sound accompaniment: the crash of walls being torn down upstairs and down, the strident clanking of items like sinks being lobbed into the metal bins outside my window, the machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat of a jack hammer breaking up the foundation, the whine and buzz of power saws and drills and the shouts of workmen, as well as ongoing random thumps and bumps at various levels of volume from muffled to thunderous.
This is the work of the new owner—Bob. As I’ve already mentioned, our building with its seven small units—mostly unoccupied—was once a single-family residence. In fact, one recent morning on our way to breakfast, Ella and I saw a man and woman loitering on the sidewalk, contemplating our house, and found out it had been his grandmother’s.
Now Bob is determined to turn six of the already small one-bedroom units into two-bedroom units! How is he going to manage this? Every miniscule kitchen is going to become a second bedroom. Then new kitchens will be installed in the already tiny living rooms. He’s bent on developing a mini-dorm for U. C. students, assuming they won’t be bothered by living in such compressed quarters because they won’t be here long-term and, besides, they’ll know they’re lucky to find any lodgings near the campus at all. In the meantime he’ll be making twice the profits.
Because he can’t evict Ella and me, thanks to rent control, he did offer us a paltry settlement to leave. Otherwise, he’s advised us, we’ll be living here amid the ongoing chaos of renovation for the next eight months. Also, he plans to tear down our handsome floor to ceiling fireplace, the centerpiece of our living room, because he needs that wall for a supporting wall.
Of course there won’t be any parking for all the additional tenants when the renovation is done—not in the back nor on the street. And just imagine what life is going to be like for Ella and me when all these college kids have parties!
Ours isn’t the first building he’s converted in this way. In some of these mini-dorms, we’ve heard, they install bunkbeds, so, legally, how many people could be living here in eight months? Let me do the math. Four apartments times four beds, plus one apartment with six beds equals twenty-two additional tenants in what was supposed to be a single family residence. This is the wave of the future, Bob tells us. Gee! So much to look forward to!
Yesterday when I headed out for my swim at the Richmond Plunge, I discovered two big trucks parked in the driveway blocking my exit. I’d already seen a third large truck parked out back and wondered how I was going to maneuver my car around it. Big changes are happening around here, but before I go into all that, let me tell you how it used to be. In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote:
It’s nearly midnight, and Ella and I are watching a “Beevis and Butthead” sketch on Saturday Night Live, our mouths strenuously agape. Miserly with her unwaxed, Ella is trying to wedge a length of dental floss so short she can hardly get a grip on it between two particularly tight molars. I, prodigal with my cinnamon waxed, am unspooling a great hunk from around my middle fingers as I go while my fingertips turn blue.
Since I’ve got a redhead’s temper (though I try to keep it under wraps) and Ella is absent-minded, I suggest we call ourselves “Peevis and Puffhead.” “But I get mad too,” she protests. “OK. How about ‘Peevis and Puff Adder?’” I amend.
“Nurch,” we say synchronously (which has evolved, in the unaccountable way language does, from “Buenas noches”) as we head for our respective beds.
In the middle of the night I’m awakened by voices outside my window. I peek around the drapes behind the head of my bed and see a small U-Haul truck in the driveway—and three unfamiliar people. It occurs to me that they may mean to rob us, but I’m too tired to bother about it. I put in my foam earplugs so their voices won’t disturb me…and go back to sleep, figuring if they try to steal my mattress, I’ll feel it.
In the morning Ella tells me new neighbors moved into apartment number three in the dead of night. All the apartments around us have stood empty—well, mostly—for years, except for Gina’s across the hall. I say, “mostly,” because our landlord occasionally inhabits one on the rare occasions he comes to town. “Oh no!” I groan. “No more privacy!” Jobie and I won’t be able to whoop and snort and caterwaul when we do our sounding. And Ella and I won’t be able to sing our mock operatic duets, as stridently off-key as we possibly can. The walls are so thin, when Ella put up a knickknack shelf years ago, the nail went right through the wall and skewered the tampax box in the neighbor’s medicine cabinet.
Whenever our landlord shows up, we know he’s hatching a plot—and that whatever it is, we’ll be the last to know. One summer morning a couple of years ago, I was sitting drawing in a scanty nightgown, with the back door open so what breeze there was could waft in. Suddenly, I saw through the window a burly man climbing our fire escape and swinging his leg over the railing of our small deck. I hurled myself at the back door—and slammed it and locked it in his face.
“We’re the something-or-others!” he cried in broken English.
“Get off my deck!” I threatened through the door.
“But we’re the something-or-others!” he cried again.
“GET OFF MY DECK!” I howled.
So he did.
Soon I heard sounds suggesting that somebodies were painting the exterior of our building. But I didn’t venture out till they took their lunch break. Then I saw they’d spattered white paint over all the flowering bushes and plants in my deck garden. What he’d wanted to do, it dawned on me belatedly, was cover my garden with a tarp.
The night of his first lecture, Wheeler Auditorium was bursting—people were squeezed into every corner and mobbed outside the open doors. I didn’t know why it was so jam-packed because I’d never read the copyright date of Where the Wild Things Are—or of any of his other books, for that matter. I didn’t know that these college kids had grown up on his stories.
Ella had even managed to get us invitations to the reception for him afterwards in the Bancroft Library. As we walked over after the lecture, I heard Mr. Sendak behind me, telling his companions how hungry he was.
In the reception room I helped myself to a paper plate of appetizers. As I ate, I noticed that he was advancing toward the buffet table by millimeters only. As soon as he’d finish talking with one person, another would block his path. So I filled a plate with hors d’oeuvres for him and took it over, then stood back and listened to what he had to say to his crowd of admirers. When I was satisfied he wouldn’t bite—and there was a momentary lull—I finally spoke to him.
I told him I’d sent a story around to publishers and kept getting form rejection letters—no personal notes even. I said I thought kids would like it, but had begun to wonder if it was somehow threatening to adults. “Ah!” he said knowingly, “You have to be tricky to get past them.” So I asked him if he’d be willing to read my story and suggest any changes I might make. He graciously said yes.
The afternoon I delivered my manuscript to his hotel, I was a nervous wreck—I’d spent the previous days trying to write a cover letter, and now that he was about to leave, I was afraid I’d miss him altogether. When I handed the manuscript over to the hotel clerk, he gave it to a bellboy to take to Mr. Sendak’s room. I thought there was a remote chance he might read my story that night and call me.
But I never heard from him. Months passed, and I began to wonder if he’d ever received my manuscript—what if the bellboy had taken it to the wrong room? I called the hotel to see if my manila envelope had ended up in some dead-letter bin. Then I wrote reclusive Mr. Sendak himself (how I got his address shall remain my secret). I sent him a postcard with two options for him to check, including “Manuscript? What manuscript?” Which is what he checked.
So I sent him another copy along with a couple of my illustrations, including the one above. More months went by. Figuring he hadn’t liked my story and was too kind-hearted to tell me, I swallowed hard and stopped hoping. Then one December afternoon I arrived home, routinely punched the messages button on my answering machine, and heard an unfamiliar voice through static. I thought it was a wrong number and headed to the fridge. But when I heard the words “twin princes,” I froze in my tracks.
As the static cleared, I heard Mr. Sendak apologizing and explaining that he was just now recovering from a long illness. A few days later a note came on his letterhead for the Sundance Children’s Theater:
Dear Callie Raab,
Just called you—alas, you were not
at home. Beauregard is a wonder! Very well told—
fresh & smart & I do not even mind the happy ending!
If you don’t mind, I will keep this manuscript—
to show to someone in “the business.” Please, have no
hope. I know and trust no one—except this one person.
And I don’t foolishly want to raise your hopes.
Forgive the long delay. A long illness—just—
I hope!—coming out of it.
I return the art—I like them too!
No—I’m not being nice—you are good!
Maurice Sendak
I wrote him back, “When I delivered my manuscript to you at the hotel, I felt I was nearing the end of a long journey. Thank you for making the ending a happy one. Your appreciation of my work is deeply, deeply felt.”
I’d waited half a lifetime for a father’s—or at least a father figure’s—approval, and at long last I had it.