party behind us!

We went to a party this Sunday in a one-room artist's house, the walls lined with his own oil paintings, which were like rustic baroque wallpaper that refuses to be dislodged. There was a white-haired surfer with big green eyes and smooth olive skin playing a guitar, and the birthday boy, the gray-haired artist himself, a former Vietnam combat vet, was drinking the red wine his neighbors had bought him and singing a surprisingly good version of "Knights in White Satin" by the old Moody Blues band. This song is from his generation, and I could see the boy in him, the high school boy who would have turned up his car radio with the coolest new eight-track player really loudly in the driveway, before shipping out to Nam and, if what they say is true, having his best buddy die in his arms. Why is it always the best buddy dying in the arms? Perhaps war makes best buddies, and if you get lucky enough to hold them after they're wounded and you aren't, that further cements the guilty, loving bond. I don't know, I've never been in that kind of war, so I wouldn't claim to judge.
Anyway, he still suffers from the war, and the hard parts of being a struggling artist for 30 years in a changed Laguna Beach, but Sunday, he was the king of the neighborhood. I'd thought until then he was sort of tolerated, on the fringe, but as more people crowded into the tiny house with more guacamole, more salsa, more wine, I came to see he was the nucleus of several people who like and even love him. If he can be loved, not only for his talent, which gives people permission to love him, but for his sad days when his body won't work and he hurts so much he can't paint or play guitar, for when he's smiled the hazy, happy smile of alcohol and slurringly gone to bed at 6pm, then perhaps we all can be loved--at least modestly. This makes me say, let's allow people in the spaces where we live. And more than one, or three, but maybe 6 or 7. We need each other. And to find one another, we need a place to gather.

A big house means more to clean

Wood floors collect dust bunnies. Windows get rain- splashed and coated with pollen-and-bird-DNA. Woodwork needs wiping. The pale stucco front of the Tudor house reveals the tiny dried brown feet of ripped-down vines, which will need water-blasting and hand-removal. The scent of old wood that reveals itself on entry to the house needs a new lemon-scented candle, which I bought and lit to enjoy the reputed scent that was created for Madame Pompadour in the reign of Napoleon, but which smells like lemongrass spa lotion to me.
Lots of flower-watering is called for. Lots of sweeping, and of course, the picking up of sweatshirts and jackets flung by my 12-year-old son and 24-year-old stepdaughter (and me of course). It looks like I'll have some housekeeping duties I didn't expect with this house. I did expect the clothes and the cooking and the dish-washing (at which my husband excels). But the allegiance I swore to this home when we made our way through two months of counter-offers and financing agony to buy it calls for very specific care.
"Murphy's Oil Soap," counsels Lupe, my dear friend of 14 years and now cleaning woman again. "And only little on the mop, nothing too much, can cause prrroblem on the floor." I used to know how to nurture and take care of wood, from antiques to doors. Growing up going to an auction house filled with old brown furniture in the Civil War battlefields of Virginia taught me that. Reverence for wood is fealty to history. I am the head of a house now, a large one, although not overly, and it's filled with rooms, glass windows that open to the sound of the faint sea, and old and new furniture made of burled, inlaid, leather-covered and polished wood. Flowers in big pots out back thirst for attention. I must give it to them. I owe them that.

Laguna Beach nutjobs

The nutjobs of Laguna Beach are the most disorienting yet charming surprise in this town. These are people who pop up around its corners dressed in bizarre costumes, toting dogs, umbrellas, large wacky purses or similar stage-show props. This has nothing to do with gender either. In our first week of our residence, Ive seen about four honest-to-god nutjobs. The first was around his late fifties to early sixties. He was tall, slim and surly, and had--that day--bleached-blond hair with multi-colored feathers in it. He wore short shorts and something sparkly to complete the look, and walked a small hot-dog dog wearing multiple bejeweled collars in pink and ruby. This was only the hardware store in the day, so I look forward to catching him in evening attire.
Nutjob number 2 was a lady around 60 (see a theme emerging here?) outside the Whole Foods store downtown. She wore a panties-high WIDE flounced miniskirt, bare legs with cowboy boots, a jeweled cummerbund around her waist, long, twisted blonde locks to her mid-back, and some kind of accoutrement on her head...the nutjob piece de resistance is always to be found on the head. Tony and I were both dumbstruck by this vision as she sashayed ahead of us, until he broke the reverent silence with, "That is awesome! Thank God!"
Yesterday was a big nut-job day, a Sunday rich with fine weather and nutjob-enticing tourists for the early pre-spring tourist season. First sighting? As we stood on front the patio of the Unitarian church, chatting after services had ended, a woman came whizzing up on roller skates, like a drug-fuled version of a witch from the Wizard of Oz. She wore fur buskins wrapped around her legs, a very short skirt as well, long hair, was around 60, and displayed multiple garments on her relatively fit body (another nutjob commonality). Her strange tall hat flaunted a "Dr. Dope" button and she carried a parasol. She was blathering and gibbering at top speed next to the doughnuts, and I worried that she was a late-coming congregation member. But she didn't enter, and she seems to have her own theology going on. You could feel the white-hot smoke and sparks shooting from her brain, her smiling and contorted face the portal to an energy as palpable as an odor or loud as an electic guitar. Someone gave birth to her, but she is a creation only of herself, a collision of femininity and chemicals and toxins and wild color found in this particular pocket of ocean called Laguna Beach. To top off our Sunday, there was one milder sighting downtown. Outside the gelato store, there were two middle-aged males who seemed to be friends, probably part of a "Puppy and Papa" playgroup, both respectably dressed, with their tiny dogs in baby strollers by the gelato store. One was acting the part of Daddy by telling his doggie the gelato was "All gone," making big sad eyes and flopping his hand-paws sadly at the dog as it begged upright in the stroller. Lat, I saw a young blonde woman with enormous cannon-ball-sized breast implants, but how boring she was in her tight jeans and black spandex tube top next to the old attention-seeking pros! Thanks to our nutjobs, a walk downtown is a potential rabbit hole of pleasure, but with a painful frisson of cognitive dissonance, as I wonder how they live like this. But whatever worries THEY had are dead and buried, and they live the way they want to. Now THAT is awesome.

our new neighborhood --live Laguna Beach camera

This is the real-time view nearby...we can walk to this beach in around 4 minutes. OK, the minute-counting is obnoxious....I guess I'm being so precise because I hate the way every realtor-humanoid says "five minutes from (fill in the tourist attraction here)," when that means anything from five minutes to 15 or 20. Or, maybe it's because I am precise, so live with it :-).

New home, new life, same old stuff

Our move is complete. We officially live in Laguna Beach now. The house is somewhat old, and actually very charming, with creaking wood, high ceilings and lots of character...part of which is a pretty quirky kitchen, with hand-painted tiles, hand-painted cabinets, hand-painted beams...yes, you get the picture. Who knew blue and pink could get on your nerves so badly?
We have a sense of ravishing newness, and happiness, Tony and I. We can't believe we can wake up and walk to a breathtakingly beautiful beach, reminiscence in geography of Waikiki and Diamond Head on Honolulu, where we vacationed last year. We go home and start our day, in a large home with dark wood, white walls made of real plaster, a wide sunny courtyard, and so many locks and doors that I feel like a castle chatelaine with a giant bunch of keys at my waist. We are faced with an unpleasant truth though...some of our furniture looks plain ol' bad in this house. Although we bought a new pale cocoa brown microfiber sectional for our previous house, it's as unsuitable as white vinyl go-go boots in church in this one. We also have the Virginia-made desks, wooden English tables, about a thousand different-colored towels (including a set of tired yellow ones with my previous marriage initials, which I happily threw out today), and weird curios from our separate career travels around the country and world. Who knew we both had shot glass collections? We didn't know we did. I'd thrown mine out yesterday without telling him, so when we found out we were both "shot-glass-guilty," he bravely picked up the banner of NO REMORSE/NO HOARDING and voluntarily threw his out too! Now that's marital solidarity. So long, Galveston, Mackinac Island, San Antonio, Australia, Boston, North Carolina, New Orleans, Detroit, San Antonio and Death Valley shot glasses! I only hope we can dispose of our tired furniture in the same remorseless manner.

Moving to Laguna Beach tomorrow

Today's our last day in the house we rented near the flat sands of Huntington Beach. A very large house, we took it a year and a half ago to hold my new husband's three daughters and my own son, as well as the detrius and hastily accumulated furnishings of our previous divorces from our kid's parents, plus the stuff we bought to make everyone happy under the same roof. Now, two of the daughters are long gone, to live in the ways they see fit. The eldest still lives with us quite happily, as well she should, getting seriously cheap room and board and a little brother to torment for free. Together, we are a happy family, something I wanted for so long and finally have. I don't take it for granted.
Today I'm surrounded by the things we will keep and those destined for the Salvation Army (Goodwill won't pick up, so I'll pass along the stuff to the Army, who does good work despite the evangelical Christian mission they espouse on their website).
The weather-beaten tables, the Afghan carpet of a muddy brown and sapphire blue my husband bought when he lived in India, the leather sofa from Restoration Hardware we bought after he said, "If I buy us this sofa, you can never leave me," and I agreed, after three months of dating...some of these will come to our new home with us. Others, like the daughters who no longer live here, will not. It is a time for me, this morning, of sorting, holding, and tossing away. The favored childhood books will stay, but the 100 other favored childhood books will not. We cannot have it all in this new house. It is a large enough house, as houses go, but smaller than the rental house where we first became a family. There's not enough room for the things we carried to this point if we want to make something new and beautiful out of the place we will now inhabit. Today I savor, and toss. There is a sadness, but it is good. Tomorrow, we move.