Monday, May 24, 2010

late at night, it's calm here

Laguna Beach is calm tonight, just like the inside of my home---few people moving around, slightly cool air temp, unclassifiable but picturesque architecture....the main difference is that the kitchen never closes here. I can serve myself all the treats I want...and I often do. My son, my husband and I wandered around town for a dream trip together tonight after the homework was done. We slipped down a tiny backstreet and found a gelato store, which we nibbled from small cups with delight. We visited the second-smallest Catholic cathedral in the world, a tiny little dollhouse of a church with lots of old crosses and tortured oil paintings visible through the murky glass. We crossed the corner near the Hare Krishna place, and wondered why we always see these vague-faced young people parade in their glowing coral robes through Prague, London, Vancouver, and other cities, but we've never seen them do one of those drum-beating parades in the US? It was a lovely night. I would not trade it for the chance to go to the Oscars, see the Stones, drive the racetrack, or any other kind of exciting outing. Nights like this, however rare, are what I always dreamt of. A real family. A little piece of this joy is all I need today.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Trial over! The five-year divorce is nearly finished

My husband just finished his trial to divide property from his previous marriage today. His ex-spouse refused to entertain any ideas of settling over the past five years. He got divorced ages ago, but she had such strong urges to hang on to the marriage by litigating the burnt ashes of it, that she couldn't let go and settle the case. He was quite generous in his offers, which never made any difference. When we were dating, I admired him because he said, "She deserves half of our property under the law and I don't resent giving it to her." So different from other men! Let's hope when the verdict is handed down in a couple of weeks, he will be recognized for his attitude and attempts at fair play--not penalized, as many people of both sexes are in Orange County family courtrooms.

http://debstake.wordpress.com/

http://debstake.wordpress.com/

Monday, April 26, 2010

Artist accepts his unknown destiny?

My one-room house neighbor, the Laguna Beach artist and Vietnam vet who is being evicted, seems to have accepted his fate. This worries me but also comforts, I suppose. The damn guy may smoke and drink too much, too soon in the day, but he's a really decent guy. He came over to help me with a busted electrical breaker yesterday when he had other things to do, like a lovely lady visitor and a bottle of wine. But up he pops of his own accord, and chased down breaker panels all over this oddly wired and vast old Tudor house in his bare feet, so I could take care of the dripping load of laundry stalled helplessly in the dead dryer.
He's got 35 days, he says. "Tryin' to get some money together, so if you wanna buy a painting, now's the time, it's a good deal." And it is. He has a painting I love of a huge blue-gray sky with laundry whipping on an outdoor line, no people in sight (why is it I love paintings without people?). It won't go anyplace we can hang art in this heavy-beamed house. But we spotted a small painting of a tomato twisted amidst it's green vines, and I might get that for someone. That will be our donation to the fund, a fare-the-well fund for a fifty-something man who listens to Moody Blues like the teen he once was, has a talent he's fiercely proud of, and a future he hasn't yet figured out.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Sundays and beer go together in downtown Laguna

Sunday afternoon and The Marine Room on Ocean Avenue smelled strongly of beer from a block away. Lots of middle-aged men and women eyeballed one another, either contemplating a roll on the mattress in some nearby apartment, or walking away to sober up for Monday's work, the sensible choice but so monotonous perhaps. Inside, it was noisy and the beer was flowing---the band was on a break but not the people. So nice for me to not be inside, but to be strolling past with my son, happily married at long last. The tipsy Sunday crowd with their sexy tops and flashy shirts reminded me that I hung out on Sunday afternoons too in bars, not often, but enough. It was in Manhattan Beach and I was much younger than these hardened but hopeful LB players. Yeah, it was fun, but the music, drinks and sexy banter wore off with a sickly taste at sunset, like cotton candy when you're hungry, sweet fun with an aftertaste of emptiness.
I don't judge single people as hard as many married people do, because being single is damn hard sometimes and we are not meant to be alone all the time. As much as I enjoyed living alone and my solitude, which I truly did because I am just made that way, there were times when loneliness would gather like an unseen mist, filling the air in my apartment and although I was mostly a sensible girl with strong willpower, which saved me from a lot of mistakes, now I understand how people might do things to push that alone feeling back for just a short while, 'til they can go to work Monday morning and forget it again.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

party's over for laguna beach artist

Some man is roaring outside the house this Saturday night. It sounds like he's losing it. It is probably some random drunk, but it's getting seriously psycho. Uh, oh, I know who it is and it's damn dumb of him! (No one I know personally, thank Whomever in Wherever.)
So on to the real story...my new artist acquaintance,who lives behind us in the one-room art shack, got an eviction notice. Eight years here, and thirty in Laguna total. "It's the only place where I feel good," he said wanly, barefoot at his doorstep when he told us the bad news. His times have been hard indeed lately, and getting kicked out is another blow. "Greedy," he said, indicting the landlord for buying an investment property at the height of the market and trying to pay his rent by insisting that his tenants do so too. "I've taken good care of this place for him," he added, his eyes red and face puffy from a hard night of drinking and worry. But I didn't blame him for being hurt and wounded. You can't help feelings in the face of loss.
"What can I do? I got no place to go." His face creased slightly. "I'm thinking about getting some camping equipment. Me and the guy down the end--" and he hitched his thumb north a bit--"he's out of work too, and we're thinking about getting it, so we can camp."
He's a Vietnam vet and his daily investment of time on the phone with the VA has not yet paid off in a solid disability income stream, despite serious health problems. I've grown fond of this man in a few short weeks, and I wish I could take him in, can't bear the thought of him being homeless. But where could I put him? I have four people to shelter and feed already total, and I'm not sure that a grown man older than me would make a reasonable roommate for anyone. At his age, people like their solitude if accustomed to it, although they hate it if they're not. Anyway, I was just getting used to being his neighbor myself, and now I might not be able to anymore. I didn't see this one coming. Sometimes you think you have all of the time in the world, or if not in the world, at least in your own backyard. And maybe you do. Or damn it, maybe not.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Making a video with a cool young Czech film maker

Sitting at my kitchen table, but it's just like being back in the video edit bays and recording studios I've been in before in my career as a video producer and paid hack...from Northrop Grumman in lavish Century City CA, to a big rich insurance company in Madison,Wisconsin ("Wisco" to tha cool natives), to NPR recording studios in LA, etc... when you're recording and cutting, it's the same thing still, only now the technology is seriously portable. My Czech film maker friend Joachim Vesely and I made a short little video recently that got him into film school in Scotland, one of only 13 choice spots in the whole college of art in Scotland's historic hard-drinking Edinburgh. He doesn't see dead people, he sees drunk people...nightly, stumbling, and "old" (in their late thirties! he says). So happy that our little video road trip to some of Orange County's stores and the evil Trinity Broadcasting Network ended up getting him a place in Euro film history! Right now we're editing and putting the final touches on our video, and I'll link to it when it goes live...very soon, can't wait. You know what they say---"The devil finds work for idle hands."

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

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.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

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.

Monday, March 15, 2010

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.

Friday, March 12, 2010

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 :-).

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

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.

Monday, March 1, 2010

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.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

That awful John Edwards book--I read it, alright

Being an insatiable reader and observer of human folly, I've read books about murderers, criminals, people with bizarre lives, people plagued with drug and alcohol problems who do terrible things. But rarely have I come away from a book with such a sense of disgust for all the major players in it. Although this book is penned by one of the most pathetic, Andrew Young, it still had the ring of truth, however self-serving. He never truly accepts or understands what kind of filth he was party to, especially in terms of why Mrs. Edwards got so angry at him and indeed hounded and villified him at times. Andrew, maybe one day you will get this...BECAUSE you aided her husband in having his affair! You are not innocent, no matter how much of a bootlicker you were to their family in handing their every need, an expensive lackey in a suit who would scrub the kitchen with his tongue if it would advance the Edwards' (and hence the coattailing Young's) prominence in political society.
Now, I have worked in politics myself and I know how dirty it is. That is one reason I got out. It's no shocker that many (not all) politicians are very spoiled and need attention. But to "gaslight" (make her think she is the crazy one, after the title of an old film) Mrs. Edwards by pretending that her husband was faithful when he wasn't and to go to such great lengths to cover your own participation in it, is really sad. Is the big house in NC worth it? Having lived in a big house with a socially prominent liar myself once, I know it isn't. Not to you, not to your wife, not to the kids you have a duty to raise right, and not to Mrs. Edwards. No one here has the courage of their inner moral convictions, or listens to their intuition, etc. The winner in this whole pathetic tale? Rielle "Lisa Jo Druck" Hunter, a silly user of men who squandered any talent she had and coaxed a lonely and attention-seeking politician into bed and her bank account. Keep those direct deposits flowing, John Edwards!

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Shades of John Edwards at glamorous Fashion Island

Tonight, we went out for a snack-- with the additional mission to buy two political books--The Game Change book on the election and The Politician, about the John Edwards scandal. I used to like J Edwards, being a Southerner myself and all, and I liked his ambitions for poor people to be recognized and helped. I also liked that his accent was real and that he represented that accent well, because there is still a stereotype of the "ignorant Southerner" when people hear a REAL accent versus actors, on tv. Yankee jest don't know no better, I reckon. I also had my suspicions that he was too good-looking to be true to his wife, but they were VERY persuasive folks, he and Mrs. Edwards. (She should change her name now.) So I think I want to read the book, although it sort of sickens me to read it and I also hate to give royalty money to the author, Andrew Young. Still....the parking lot was full of expensive cars, BMW, Range Rover, Mercedes, and of course, there is always a Ferrari or Maserati to be seen. But the food court was rather empty. Pasta Bravo, sadly, told us they throw out the trays of delicious-looking hot pasta at the end of the night, rather than giving it to a food bank, or even employees, so while I watched a Latin woman in her prettified, Irvine-company-sanctioned work uniform roll a garbage can around past the large central fountain, I hated to think of she or her kids not being able to eat the food which was destined for the trash can. Still...we ate, and I bought a National Geographic magazine rather than the political books, because the Edwards one is sold out, and the other one, on inspection, just seemed too maddening to read. We walked around and called it a night, and drove back home. Just a night in the lives of two happily married newlyweds who, to the viewer, look as if they never noticed the woman rolling her trash can with dedication despite her visible strain, who have the money to buy books if they so chose. I felt as if it were a modern Great Depression experience, with the shuttered food court stores, almost half closed for business now, tastefully darkened and decorated with large images of palm trees and fashionable women in $2,000-dollar dresses. But money was nearby--the "haves" were there somewhere, their high-end cars filling the most popular parking lots, while the have-nots were in my mind as I watched the steaming pasta expire on the Pasta Bravo serving bar. Was there a party going on I failed to see? It's like John Edwards, who looked and talked so damn good but whose glamorous appearance masked the dry rot underneath. Despite the cost to the people involved and our own country, the rich in that scandal have stayed rich...and the poor he claimed he wanted to help stayed poor. Damn it, John Edwards, you had a chance and you blew it.

Monday, February 1, 2010

Which came first, the chicken judge or the egg buyer?

Just got back from the grocery store. The check-out clerk asked me, "Have you checked your eggs yet?" as she rang up my carton of free-range organic eggs. I told her yes---I used to be a poultry and egg judge and got in the habit that way. I supposed that startled her...she looked up with a wow look under her mop of red hair.
Yes, I said, remembering my 4-H club experience, the best way to tell if a chicken is a good layer is to look at its beak, comb and feet. They should be gray...all the yellow pigment should be draining into the egg yolk. I also judged eggs, "candling" them by holding them over a light source and checking for blood clots and other interior imperfections revealed within the shell by the light behind. I also tried to learn about "freezer birds," but there didn't seem to be that many ways to judge a frozen dead bird. And what I didn't tell her? That we learned how to hold a live chicken upside-down and check its "vent," to make sure it wasn't yellow, and to note any pigment in that extremely personal area from whence the eggs came. Chickens don't blush in their private parts, so I can't say I saw any color of note.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Loving life, despite losses and middle age!

Once you learn that people you know or once knew have actually died, or are threatened with death, you learn that time is finite. For instance, my little sister is a widow at age 44! And when I looked at the wedding video and pictures from my wedding to my son's father (my ex, which I never do anymore), I saw that some of my friends and relatives pictured dancing and smiling are now gone. The intellectual concept we all have of infinite time, and the fantasy of a guaranteed old age, harshly melt away under this new realization. Then the time we have left to live becomes uncomfortably real. Lucky for me, I have persevered to find true love in my life. My husband is a great guy, and I told him tonight, "You are so great I find it hard to believe you are a man at times!" I hated to say this, but although I love guys, have many male friends and and a fan of manhood in general, I have met a bunch of men who have let down people they cared about. So I'm happy and I want to make these days together with my husband last and last. So what if we just got married in August, a scant five months ago? We've had two and a half years together total, and in that time we've lived like he drives---with tenacity, speed, passion and resilience.