Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Goodbye, Hacienda, you weird old restaurant



I heard you were a swank dinner and dance place in the 1960s. A neon martini glass and lit-up sign with your name emblazoned across in that quirky mid-century font, those tall palm trees swaying, big cars lining your parking lot, men and women dressed up for a night out. A landmark.

During my childhood in the ’70s and ’80s, you were tired around the edges, just like all of the places on San Pablo Avenue. Some people still wanted to have dinner within your walls, but there was nothing special about you any longer. I remember going there as a kid and liking your indoor fountain and the pretty ironwork over your bar.

By the time I moved back to the Bay Area in 2002, you had visibly fallen on hard times. One of the letters in the sign on the side of the building was falling down, the arches looked water-stained and rusted. You served watered down drinks and terrible food. You smelled musty. Your bleached-blonde, mid-life waitresses (still wearing those ridiculous peasant blouses) vocally complained about the management. Only one or two cars could be seen in that big lonely parking lot at any given time.

Oh, but your building. Your glorious, monolithic, Mad Men-esque building. With your imposing stone facade and hacienda-style arches, you were still the perfect monument to mid-century kitsch and “Mexican-American” dining. You had such wonderful potential. H. and I had dreams of buying you and fixing you up, opening a retro dinner-dance club with live music and great food. 

As you slowly crumbled down each year, huge and abandoned, we couldn’t understand how you stayed open. Then one day you did finally close your doors for good. Your owner, Antonio Carrico, had died. And then the bulldozers came.

And now you are gone. All except your sign which still stands over what is now a Grocery Outlet parking lot.  It will be gone soon, too, I imagine. I hope, at least, the palm trees stay.



Saturday, February 25, 2012

Unexpected, in Safeway parking lot


Photo by astrophotographer John Green


"Ma'am. Ma'am! Excuse me!"

I hesitated to look over. It was night in a dark parking lot.

"Look! Just look at the sky for a minute." He was pointing up at the moon.

I stopped and glanced over at him. A big, young guy in a baseball cap, over-sized t-shirt. My alert rat-like mind immediately thought, "Danger, danger! He's trying to stall and distract so someone else can run up behind and rob you! Kidnap you! Rape you! Kill you!"

"Do you see the moon and those two planets lined up to its side?" His face was eager.

"Um, yeah," I said, looking behind me.

"No, no. Look up."

(When have I last looked up at the night sky?)

"That's Jupiter and Venus. They're lined up. I bet you thought those were stars, huh?"

"Yeah, yeah. I guess I did."

The sky was its usual underwhelming city version, light pollution erasing everything but the brightest markers. The crescent moon was there and the two bright planets lined up to its side. Hardly a star to be seen around them.

"This only happens once every, like, 8 or 9 years. Go tell your kids, tell your family. Look at the sky."

"Wow, that's really awesome. Thank you," I said as I opened the trunk and put my groceries in.

"Hey! Look at the planets lined up!"

The young guy was now yelling this to an old man with graying dreads who was walking toward us. He stopped and looked at the sky.

"Well, I'll be," he said. Then looked at me and smiled. I smiled back.

The young guy was still leaning against his car, staring up at the sky, as I drove away.

I like to think that he eventually got into his car and picked up his girlfriend and drove for a couple of hours until they were out in the desert, where the multitudes of stars overwhelm the night. I like to think they parked at some rest stop and lay on the hood of his car. I like to think that he pointed to the sky and she smiled.








Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Obsession




We had just arrived at my grandparents’ big house in Pueblo, Colorado. It was a hot July day that made the tall elms outside the open front door buzz with the electric sounds of insects. The grown ups were busy talking in the living room, their ice clinking in glasses. My older brother jumped up and down because he wanted someone to go outside with him.

I slipped away. Nobody noticed.

At four, I felt very small in that house. I ran up the grand living room staircase that curved into a long green hallway, up two more staircases and through a door that I knew led to the attic playroom with its grooved dark-wood floor. The room’s warm air had the familiar smell of wool and mothballs. I opened the white toy chest against the wall and there they were, the three of them, tangled together with doll clothes and doll shoes and stray toys. I carefully took them out, one by one. I hadn’t seen them for a whole year. I touched their chipped lids that clicked open and shut on blue doll eyes; I put my pinky in their pudgy porcelain hands. I kissed their tiny rose-puckered lips.


These dolls weren’t like the squishy, baby-clothes-wearing rubbery ones I had at home that came in pink, plastic cellophane boxes. These were grown-up girls dressed like no one I had ever seen, with important lives and big thoughts. In the worn paint and porcelain of their limbs, in their clothes’ age-stained fabrics and velvet cow-licked from years of touch, in the mechanical iris stripes of their eyes, these three dolls were real, and alive. When I hugged them, the wrinkled organdy that pressed against my neck felt like breath.

I rearranged their velvet hats, combed my fingers through their tangles of mohair floss and studied their gold-slippered feet. I laid all their outfits on the floor: mended petticoats over yellowed puffs of tulle, sealskin capes with real fur collars, gingham dresses, seersucker high-waisted sun shorts with blue anchor buttons, lace aprons, plaid picnic dresses, wool riding suits. My favorite took the center spot: a tiny blue taffeta gown, as delicate as a pressed flower.

Three flights below I heard a screen door slam and my mother’s voice in a strange, high pitch. I heard footsteps across floors, which matched the beat of the faint tick-tock of the attic’s old clock. I heard my name again and again, muffled by the dust that floated down from above.

“Do you love me?” I asked the silent orbit of dolls around me.

They smiled with outstretched arms and answered yes from quiet lips.



From an unintentionally creepy 1960s children's book called "Amy's Doll"



Intentionally creepy, Second Life

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Saint




It is small and water-stained, this paper portrait of “San Charbel” inside of a plastic sleeve. The saint is wearing a black robe with a hood, his arms outstretched. His white beard is almost glowing. Behind him are a cedar tree and a white building at the base of hills that are grey and green against ice-winter mountains, which in turn blend into the faded yellow-blue glow of a sunset, or maybe a sunrise. A light blue circle around his head suggests a subtle halo. Above his left shoulder is a faint apparition of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, above his right, a wine goblet. In front of him, on clay-like orange rock, is an open book with Arabic writing and next to it a hoe or shovel. I don’t know much about him, except that he was Lebanese and his presence in Mexico is due to its large Lebanese immigrant population. He’s the saint of miracle cures—both physical and psychological—which I imagine is why he’s so popular. He’s the saint equivalent to blue-light late-night infomercial promises of less pain. He is hope found again, a garden cultivated from rock.


I’m not Catholic, or even religious. Raised loosely Episcopalian by closet-agnostic parents, I will, if asked, mumble something about secular humanism or in rare moods admit to some sort of vaguely pagan spirituality. This card is covered in symbols I don’t really understand and have never cared to learn about. The earnest prayer on the reverse side full of promises and exclamation marks and supplications pulls no heartstrings in me, nor makes me want to attend mass.


And yet I hold on to this little card, and have transferred it time and again from purse to bag to purse, for 14 years.


Shortly after we started dating, on an oppressively hot April day in 1997, H. took me to the cathedral in the Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City where the shrine to Saint Charbel is located. I stopped outside the heavy wooden doors, where an old woman was selling rosaries and milagros and little cards of the saint. I wanted milagros because I had an idea to make jewelry out of them and on a whim purchased the little San Charbel card as well.

I wandered inside and found H. near the rows of candles and an explosion of colored ribbons on the wall. He was writing something on a ribbon—a thank-you note, he explained—and then pinned it into the others. Always the sarcastic atheist, he shrugged quickly, embarrassed, but explained how one of his aunts had convinced him to visit the church several months before, at a low point. He told me how he had come here and knelt down and awkwardly asked for help, feeling silly, but doing it to please his favorite aunt.


I didn’t ask what he had needed help with—I was suddenly afraid—but the weight of the question was there, in the air between us. Instead, my hand found his, and fingers interlaced, they were like anchors in that cool, dusky church.

Monday, September 5, 2011

Anna Karlsson




The bus thumped, then pitched forward and something cracked beneath it, bringing everything to a straining, air-brake stop. There was no visibility through the side windows: not only was it nighttime, but it was also raining in heavy gushes and torrents. You couldn’t see—but you knew—that on either side of the bus and the narrow, two-lane road we were traveling along was rainforest, dense and wet and alive.

“What cracked?” I asked Anna, who was now standing, leaning toward the front of the bus to see through the driver’s window.

“There’s a bridge in front of us. It looks wooden,” she said. Soon, everyone on the bus was talking—confirming that we had arrived at a bridge that didn’t look stable, yelling out advice to the bus driver, making dire predictions of what would happen should we cross.

Our bus had already made two detours due to fallen trees and washed-out roads. If we couldn’t get through here to get back to San José, we’d probably have to return to Cahuita, or at least to the nearest town and spend the night.

We lurched again and once more we heard a loud crack. The bus stopped. Someone screamed. Anna sat down.

I was paralyzed, mouth full of bitter saliva. Of course, I thought, this is how it ends. This is the headline of that small blurb you glance at on the last column of the third page of the World section in the newspaper: “Costa Rica Bus Crash Kills 38.” This is the moment the bridge will break and the bus will fall in to the river and those who don’t die on impact will drown as the bus fills with murky water. This is my death. I am surer of this than I have been of anything in my 21 years. Why have I never been afraid, never thought that something like this could happen to me? Why did I never fully take into account the laws of physics and the perversity of chance to foresee some gruesome end like this? Of course! It’s so logical!

“Turn back,” a little voice in me said, piercing through my fatalism. “Turn back!” I screamed in my head to the bus driver who was going to kill us all.

Five minutes previously I had been listening to Anna tell a story about her ex-boyfriend buying a matador outfit in Spain—her looped, bird-call Swedish-accented vowels transforming into laughter as she described how ridiculous he was. A few hours before that we had been at a beachside restaurant, saying goodbye to new friends we had made that weekend full of reggae and black-sand beaches, full of sunbathing, beer, dancing.

Anna was a tall, blonde Swedish girl I shared a host-family with in San José. She had a subversive and conspiratorial laugh that invited you in on the joke, making you feel proud and lucky to be her friend. It was the first thing you noticed after her beauty, and her sharp observational humor felt unexpected—incongruous to that bright, gold coin of a face and large, blue eyes. In the months that I knew her, I eventually started to suspect (not literally, not out-loud, but in my imagination’s eye) that she was something quite rare and not fully human: part mischievous elf from an antique children’s book, part good witch.

Anna took my hand in hers and gave it a squeeze.

“At least we know how to swim,” she said.

I imagined how I must have looked to her at that moment—my eyes squeezed shut, tight line of mouth, grimly frozen in my seat—so I croaked out a chuckle. I couldn’t let on that I was busy digesting the idea of our violent deaths, entertaining Dread and Terror like honored guests, imagining my poor parents at my funeral, when she could still manage dark humor to comfort a friend.

The bus started in reverse and for a light-as-air second I thought we were going to turn around, but then we lurched forward with a burst and crack, crunch we were speeding across that old wooden bridge.

I imagined the river below, wild and deep, overpowering the rain-loosened banks.

We made it across and the bus sped along again on solid ground. Some smart aleck up front shouted “Otra vez!” (“Let’s do it again!”). I opened my eyes to Anna’s straight teeth, wide lips, and, of course, laughter.

***

Just posting a little thing I wrote in my memoir class. I used to scoff at memoir writing but a writer/teacher I admire, Leslie Kirk Campbell, made a very good point: where else do you get your material? Even if you radically change it, morph it, shape it, take one word, one line of it and make it into poetry, novels or short fiction--where else are you getting that raw, visceral, I was *there* emotion and description?

I also miss Anna, who I've hopelessly lost touch with. If you try to do a Facebook search on her name, you'll just get page after page of gorgeous Swedes.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

I need to remember








I was standing lost, sunk, my hands in my pockets, gazing toward Tinker Mountain and feeling the earth reel down. All at once I saw what looked like a Martian spaceship whirling towards me in the air. It flashed borrowed light like a propeller. Its forward motion greatly outran its fall. As I watched, transfixed, it rose, just before it would have touched a thistle, and hovering pirouetting in one spot, then twirled on and finally came to rest. I found it in the grass; it was a maple key, a single winged seed from a pair. Hullo. I threw it into the wind and it flew off again, bristling with animate purpose, not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by the witless winds of convection currents hauling round the world's rondure where they must, but like a creature muscled and vigorous, or a creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit which bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and raising up, and easing down. O maple key, I thought, I must confess I thought, o welcome, cheers.

And the bell under my ribs rang a true note, a flourish as of blended horns, clarion, sweet, and making a long dim sense I will try at length to explain. Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous unending breath. That breath never ceases to kindle, exuberant, abandoned; frayed splinters spatter in every direction and burgeon into flame. And now when I sway to a fitful wind, alone and listing, I will think, maple key. When I see a photograph of earth from space, the planet so startingly painterly and hung, I will think maple key. When I shake your hand or meet your eyes I will think, two maple keys. If I am a maple key falling, at least I can twirl.

---From "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," by Annie Dillard



Window, Colonia Roma, Mexico City. Scarlet Pruitt Sanschagrin