Remembering Dad on Mother's Day

Last night, while I was looking for pictures of my mother to post on Facebook for Mother’s Day, I ran across the eulogy that I wrote for my dad’s memorial service. This past week was his birthday—he would have been 92—and he’s been on my mind a lot. But he always is; I think of him every time I saw a piece of wood (he could fix or build almost anything) or climb a ladder (he once fell off one and broke his back). For most of my life, he seemed to know everything, until he began showing signs of Alzheimer’s seven or eight years before his death. In the end, he didn’t know me or anyone else, and he couldn’t remember any of the houses we’d lived in or the Cessna airplane he flew or any of the cars he'd owned, except maybe the last one, which we had to take away from him. I delivered this short eulogy on a sunny day in Los Gatos in front of family and friends, and I wanted to remember back past the Alzheimer’s, back to who he really was, or who I remembered him to be.

June 9, 2007

I want to thank Dad for being a good dad, not complicated or ambiguous or demanding. I thank him for being so solidly good—a good man. He was simple in some ways, without an agenda or ulterior motives; he was almost childlike in that way. He valued learning and wonder, and he didn’t seem to care what people thought. He went crazy over handwriting analysis, astrology, self-hypnosis, biorhythms, waterbeds—anything to make life better and more interesting. We kids thought he was kind of a kook; we were embarrassed of him, like most kids are embarrassed of their parents. It took time and maturity for us to understand what a treasure he was.

Dad wasn’t rich, and didn’t seem to care that he wasn’t. His wealth was in experience, in stories, in places he loved and things he’d built. He never talked much about religion, but my guess is that for him, the underpinnings of the universe were a tidy garage, a smooth landing in a small plane, and a sympathy for old radios. He hated television, distrusted politics, and didn’t quite understand art. But he could fix your water heater, and he’d drive out to some godforsaken highway in the middle of the night to replace your power steering hose after it caught on fire again. He’d do whatever it took to get you back to living, so you could get on with your art or politics or whatever it was you liked to do, all things being pretty much equal with him as long as the belts were tight and the lines were bled and the wiring was wrapped and safe, so he could go home, knowing he’d done it right.

4 Things I Love about Basketball

Lately I’ve been filling out Nielsen diaries—lists of what I watch on TV, to be returned to the Nielsen company, presumably to determine which shows are hits and which are misses. But the Nielsens picked a boring time to monitor what I watch, because it’s May, and every night it’s pretty much “NBA playoffs…NBA playoffs…NBA playoffs.”

There was a time when I didn’t like the NBA. Years ago, I was a basketball purist—I watched only college ball. And every spring, after the frenzy of March Madness, I couldn’t bring myself to switch over to the NBA; after watching those college athletes play their guts out all through the NCAA tournament—which, for most of them, was the peak experience of their lives—well, after that, those guys in the NBA seemed like big, lazy showboaters. But then I got drawn into the NBA playoffs one year, and I got attached to a few players, like Tim Duncan and Steve Nash, who were just as articulate in interviews as they were gifted on the court. So I kept tuning in to see them, and the list of players I admired grew and grew—Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, Baron Davis, Manu Ginobili. Now I have my bicoastal-hometown favorites—the Warriors and the Celtics—and my personal faves, the Spurs and Suns. And sometimes another team breaks onto the list, like this year’s fast, young OKC Thunder.

And just as I love the aesthetics of baseball—the slow pace, the arc of the human body as the shortstop makes a throw to first—I’ve found a lot of things to love in basketball, too. Here are four of my favorite things about it.

1) The athletes don’t wear many clothes.

All sports are cults of personality—for most fans, it’s all about the players and their ups and downs, and who we like and who we don’t. But the cult of basketball is more intimate than that of, say, football or baseball, because we get to see so much more of the athletes’ bodies—the shape of their knees, the tail of a tattoo snaking up past a collar, the scratches on their arms from those under-basket melees. And because they don’t wear hats or helmets, we get to see their faces the whole time—every expression, from sour contempt for a teammate who blew the play (think Kobe Bryant) to fierce, foaming, crazy-good competitiveness (think Kevin Garnett). For me, being able to see all this makes for a more personal connection to the players. Sometimes it’s too much intimacy; occasionally a player looks too undressed out there, like I’ve rung somebody’s doorbell and caught him in his underwear. But for the most part, it’s splendid to really see great athletes. And to address the obvious: Frankly, I’m surprised more women aren’t NBA fans.

2) After a free throw, even a bad one, all the teammates touch hands and encourage each other.

It doesn’t matter if that player has missed every freakin’ free throw the whole game—still, the other players walk over to him, touch his hand, and give him a heartening word or two. How often I wish life were like this. Missed deadlines, crappy sales figures, and a-hole customers could all be washed away if co-workers would just go over and touch each other’s hands and say, “It’s OK, we’ll get the next one.” I know that’s un-American, but I can still dream.

3) Jumping in the air is one of the most exuberant things a human can do.

Lots of sports feature jumping, but basketball is packed full of height-defying feats—hundreds of them in every game. And not all of them are part of the play: That iconic shot of Michael Jordan leaping in the air, the one that came to emblemize basketball’s airs-above-the-ground mystique, was taken after his game-winning shot against the Cavs in the 1989 playoffs. Basketball is full of mid-air maneuvers, many of which happen so fast that you can only see them in slo-mo replay. It’s like springboard diving without the water—bodies arch and twist, and still the guy with the ball manages to toss it up into an arc that goes in the basket, game after game. And the shot block—which requires the defender to jump even higher than the guy who’s trying to make the basket—is one of the most exciting and underrated plays in all of sports.

4) It’s deliciously international.

This season alone, NBA teams have players from countries including—among dozens of others—Cameroon, Turkey, Montenegro, China, Israel, Latvia, Venezuela, and Iran. A few years ago, there were times when the Suns had no Americans on the floor at all. Soccer’s the only other sport I can think of where you can see athletes from so many far-flung nations, all competing at the professional level. Just the exotic names—Goran Dragić, Luc Mbah a Moute, Hedo Türkoğlu—are enough to suck me in. It’s like a menu in a particularly intriguing restaurant. And I love to hear players taunt each other in Serbian.

Ghosts of Gardens Past

This past weekend, I broke ground on the new vegetable garden. My newly bought townhouse has a small back yard, and I can already see that this garden will be an adventure in rocks and compacted clay. I spent a few satisying hours shoveling out landscaping rock and boxing it up to be hauled away, then pulling up weed cloth and taking a few tentative stabs at the soil with the spading fork. It will need compost and manure, probably several years of it, but I’m game.

           

All the sweat and back spasms got me thinking about about the other gardens I’ve had over the years, each with its own distinct personality. Those gardens are like big, generous friends I once knew and then moved away from. Until now, I always rented, and I moved a lot. And every time, as I left a garden behind, I felt a hollow hole of regret open up inside me—who would take care of it now? Would the next person just rip this all out? And sometimes the questions were more existential, like: What does our work really amount to? Does it make a difference?

I still ask myself those questions, but even if those gardens are now (shudder) driveways and swimming pools, I still have the memories of all the soul-soothing work I did on them, and I have photos to prove it. So here now is installment 1 of gardens past: the first one.

Garden Past #1: Monte Sereno, 1984–1988

Oh my, look at that flannel shirt! I loved that shirt. This photo says “’87 Garden” on the back, so I was 25. This garden, nestled at the foot of the Santa Cruz Mountains, pretty much taught me everything: double-digging, woodworking, fence building, gopher-proofing, and how to lie on my back in the dirt and watch the clouds go by. In the photo, there’s a bean tower behind me, probably about eight feet high. On the wooden frame are sweet peas, which shouldn’t be flowering at the same time as the beans, so it must have been a cool summer.

I sort of inherited this garden. I was living in a one-room cottage (without a kitchen) that was once the maid’s quarters on a sprawling 1920s estate. Nextdoor were a broken-down greenhouse, a shed that had once held tractors and wagons, some abandoned pigpens, and a woodworking shop. The place had seen better days, and the gardener, who had worked there for more than 50 years, had just retired. I was renting the cottage from some friends, and we were left to take care of the place ourselves. So I had to learn in a hurry how to groom chrysanthemums—there were about 150 of them, scattered between two gardens—and divide iris rhizomes and prune cultivated blackberries. I knew zilch about gardening, so I armed myself with a thrift-store copy of the Sunset Western Garden Book, picked up a few tools at garage sales, and learned by the seat of my pants.

There were coyotes in the woods, lizards in the bougainvillea, and snakes in the grass. But the biggest challenge was gophers; I learned to plant twice as much as I needed and just let them have their share. Many times, in broad daylight, I saw full-grown plants twitch and then disappear, sucked underground. One night my cat caught a gopher, brought it inside, and dropped it, still very much alive, into her food bowl. It sat up in the bowl and looked at us warily. I shooed the cat into the other room and managed to trap the gopher in a jar. Then I walked it out to the end of the driveway and let it go in the grass. To my horror, the gopher turned around and ran after me, coked up on some sort of crazy Don Quixote mission. It chased me all the way into the house.

I lived there for four years and grew everything from squash and tomatoes to wheat and amaranth. The soil was so loamy and good that you could throw anything into it and it would grow. Crops came and went, but I always had two things: green beans and morning glories. At night, to give myself good dreams, I would lie in bed and think about morning glories twining up bamboo poles.

The story didn’t end well. My little house got caught in a property-line dispute between my landlord and a neighbor, and with just a few day’s notice, I had to move out. A week later, the cottage and all the outbuildings were bulldozed, and the place was eventually sold. When I visited it a couple of years later, the new owners had made it into a sort of miniature golf course, with a concrete-banked creek and little arched bridges over it. I don’t think I’ve ever been so sad in my life, so bitter. I drove away, hoping the gophers were still there and raising hell.

            

States Avenue

We sat on that corner
and argued the politics
of rye & ginger,
too broke for breakfast.

We knew the park’s damp pillow
after a long night,
the muddy dogwalks
that led us home:

a two-room flat,
the landlord’s foul rendition
of “Stardust” in the garden.
Now these days rattle

with a pill-jar all their own.
I hear the late TV’s
overture to the lonely
repeated beyond these walls.

I think I see your slow dance
on the sidewalk, your misbegotten
groceries, the kitchen ready
to let you in, paused

in the scene you loved:
the spoon at ease against the bowl,
the dishtowel soft
and waiting for disaster.



(Appeared in Permafrost)


Posted for DVerse Poets OpenLinkNight, Week 41.
Hello, DVerse poets!

Not Your Mother’s Roller Derby

Like a lot of kids growing up during the 1960s, I was raised on roller derby. Saturday afternoons found me glued to the TV, cheering on our local women’s team, the Bay Bombers, as they elbowed and eye-gouged their opponents in grainy broadcasts on Channel 2. Roller derby was a part of life back then, with its spectacle of ponytailed Amazons in their hot pants, shoving each other over the railing. But even as a kid, I knew that roller derby was more theater than sport: The skaters scowled for the cameras, and some of the moves were obviously choreographed, like when teammates “accidentally” punched each other, or when they flattened the entire opposing team with a crack-the-whip clothesline.

So on a recent Saturday night, when a friend suggested we go see one of Medford's roller derby teams, the Sis-Q Rollerz, I pictured a watered-down production with a few local women skating badly, overacting, and throwing each other into the railing now and then.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

For starters, there was no railing for the skaters to throw each other into; there was only (gulp) us, the crowd, who were separated from the action by just a taped-off line marking the edge of the track in the awkwardly named Venue Community Civic Center. As we took our seats in the front row, watching the skaters hurtle past us during their warm-ups, I whispered to my friend, “Is this safe?” As it turned out, it wasn’t, exactly—and that was part of the fun.

The Venue—with its slick concrete floor, bare-bones concession stand, and obscure location in a part of Medford that seemed like an ideal place to dump a body—made it all feel a bit like a middle-school volleyball meet. But the comparison ended there. These athletes were not kids, and the first clue was their uniforms. Our local Rollerz were decked out in teal-and-black jerseys, torn fishnet stockings, and various kinds (and colors) of miniskirts, microshorts, and—I don’t know how else to describe it—underpants worn over their stockings. Their beaten, scratched helmets come in all colors, too, and some skaters wear elaborate face paint. (Two sported the black-goggled look of Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner.)

And once the match began, it was clear that the theater of old-fashioned roller derby was also, thankfully, gone—these women were in it to win it, and the shoving, hip-checking, and flailing limbs were simply part of the game. They all had menacing nicknames stenciled on their uniforms—Killer Taco, Swerve & Protect, Chip ’er Bones—but they had no trouble living up to them.

The game itself, where one player from each team—the two “jammers”—have to elbow their way from the back of the pack to the front, then lap the pack and do it again, means that bodies collide and people get shoved out of the way. Some players were vicious about it; others got tired fast and looked like they were doubting whether this was a good idea. It made for a brawl of personalities—all the triumphs and frustrations of any sport—that was thrillling to watch. I shouted myself hoarse cheering on the jammer as she threaded her way through the pack, bounced off several bodies,  and miraculously emerged alone at the front. I let out an occasional boo for an opposing player, but it felt wrong to be hard on them because they were working their asses off too, and some of them were extremely talented. (Too talented—the visitors, the Sick City Dis-Orderlies from Corvallis,  blew out our beloved Rollerz in a lopsided rout.)

One unexpected delight was seeing women of all shapes, sizes, and ages doing this sport, showing a lot of skin, and looking comfortable with their bodies. A few were young and wispy, but most of the “blockers” —the ones who try to prevent the jammers from getting through—were large women, skating their hearts out in their miniskirts, battered helmets, and gnarled fishnets, their size an advantage in this game of momentum and physics. And the officials, many of whom were astoundingly good skaters, wore outfits right out of a fetish magazine—too-short shorts, black bustiers, and even one Little Bo Peep costume. Add to that the visiting team, decked out in olive green like some nightmarish army platoon, and the atmosphere was campy and slightly naughty, somewhere between Mad Max and the Folsom Street Fair. The crowd, mostly families and teenagers, ate it up.

I liked the message that this new roller derby delivers: that woman of all kinds can get out and compete in a crazy-difficult sport, express their strength, speed, and guts in a positive, supportive environment, and have a good time doing it. And at $8 ($10 at the door), it’s bargain entertainment.

The best place find out about upcoming Sis-Q Rollerz matches is their Facebook page and website. And they’re not the only derby in town—Medford also proudly sports a second team, the Southern Oregon Rollergirls.

Prayer to the God of Landlords

Bless his half-empty head,
his hand that held
the Phillips screwdriver
he lost in my yard
behind the hedge.

Bless the way he topped the trees,
the way he wanted them to be
perfect Grant Wood blow-pops.
Each day they show him sorrow:
peeling, sawed-off trunks,
severed necks above.

And bless the sound of his footsteps
on the ceiling at three a.m.,
the distant hiss of water, sounds
of him home from a trip
I’m sure went badly—traffic
and insolent weather,
forgotten skis and a flat
on Donner Pass—
but bless him anyway, home,
his gentle thumps of night,
the trail of creaks
leading off to his safe,
unmade bed.

Where Have All the Green Beans Gone?

I have stumbled onto a mystery. It’s been building and building for years, until now I just feel that something’s afoot, something’s wrong in the world.

The problem is that for the past several years, green beans haven’t tasted good.

This is no small matter—green beans are, hands down, my favorite food. I crave and adore them like some people hanker after ice cream or chocolate. To me, there is nothing more heavenly than a pile of freshly picked, well-cooked, butter-sweet green beans.

For years, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about green beans—I grew up on those leathery, frozen cigarette butts that food companies passed off as green beans in the 1960s. My conversion didn’t come until my 20s, when I rented a one-room cottage on an old estate in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains. On the grounds were various long-neglected gardens—a horseshoe-shaped rose garden, unruly rows of iris and chrysanthemums, thickets of blackberries, and a vegetable garden, all tended by an elderly groundskeeper who came twice a week to prune, hoe, and fall asleep in the rocking chair in the woodshed.

The gardener eventually retired—he’d worked on that estate for more than 50 years. And with my landlords busy with their own lives, I was left to tend the grounds as best I could. That first spring, to my surprise, a muscular seedling poked its way out of the ground in the vegetable garden. I bought a gardening book for a buck at a thrift store, and once the seedling leafed out, I identified it as a green bean—and, with the help of a discarded seed packet in the shed, pegged it as a Kentucky Wonder pole bean. So I drove in a three-foot stake next to it and kept an eye on it. It grew wondrously fast, not unlike that fairy-tale beanstalk, and after a few days it already needed a much taller stake. I drove in a six-footer next to the first stake, and the bean soon bounded up past both of them and was waving around for something bigger to climb. I drove in another six-foot stake next to the others and watched the tendril grow up and down and up them, making a complicated ladder of green.

Eventually it flowered, and soon I had six or eight actual green beans. I carefully picked my tiny harvest and put them in the steamer one evening. They made a meager-looking side dish, a sad pile of twigs at the edge of the plate. Then I took a bite—and all I can say is that it was a religious experience. I’d never tasted anything like them—buttery, sweet, warm, and sustaining. I swooned. I made ecstatic noises. The only thing wrong was that there weren’t more of them—lots more.

Over the next few years, I expanded the estate’s vegetable garden and became proficient at workaday crops like squash and tomatoes, and even wheat and amaranth. But my real forte was green beans. My favorite type were Blue Lakes—even more delicious than Kentucky Wonders and, at the time (the mid ’80s), somewhat rare. I perfected the bamboo bean teepee and recorded planting dates, frosts, deer raids, and cutworm attacks. And after I moved away from that estate, I had a garden wherever I lived—specifically to grow green beans. One year I grew so many of them—purple-podded and yellow wax and Blue Lakes and something speckled that I can’t remember—that my boyfriend and I had to sit down two or three times a week and work our way through dinner plates piled high with them. That probably put him off beans permanently, but I was in heaven.

Then I stopped gardening for a while—I’d moved to a rental where there was no room for vegetables, and for seven years I didn’t put a trowel in the ground. Then I moved to Oregon and picked out a house especially for its big back yard. I was back in the bean business. But that first year, something didn’t seem right—the Blue Lakes came up and climbed the teepees and looked beautiful, but when I harvested and steamed them, they were…well, they sort of weren’t there. They weren’t terrible, but they weren’t particularly good. It was weird—in all those years of gardening, I had never tasted a bean that I didn’t love. But these tasted like those chewy frozen beans of my childhood. I figured I’d gotten a bad packet of seeds.

The next year, I got Blue Lake seeds from a different company and tried again. Same thing—not much flavor. Okay, I thought, maybe the soil is off. I tried different varieties—Kentucky Wonders and Domatsus and Romanos. The Domatsus were okay, but they were still a far cry from the epiphany I was after. All the others—blah.

Then I started to notice the same problem with fresh beans from the grocery store. And then with the ones from the farmer’s market. They just weren’t beany. Now it’s been years since I’ve tasted a really good green bean. And it’s nagging at me. I feel like a character in a disaster movie, the one who spots the new speck in the sky but doesn’t mention it to anyone because she doesn’t think it’s a big deal until boom!—it hits the Earth.

The other night I was talking about the green bean problem with a friend who worked summers picking beans when he was growing up. He said that now, in the age of mechanized farming, the seed companies have narrowed our choices down to just a few varieties that are bred to withstand rough handling without bruising. In short, he said, like so many other crops, beans are now being bred for ease of shipping rather than for taste.

So now, the thorniest of questions comes to mind—have they actually bred the flavor out of green beans? Is it gone forever? Am I doomed to wander the Earth, tasting this bean and that, shaking my head and grumbling, “It’s just not the same”? I swear I am not being nostalgic. I was there—I ate those beans. They danced in the mouth. They were like eating the whole sweet Earth in one bite. They were like the call of the dodo and the wingprint of the passenger pigeon—they lived once, perfect and fleeting. What has happened here? Did we literally breed them to death?