Virginia

It's February 1973 and we have been in our new-old house in the San Fernando Valley for two and a half months. I don't know it yet, but I am pregnant with our first child. I am a transplant from the Westside of Los Angeles, and the valley is a little rural, a little unfamiliar compared to the more cosmopolitan (if you could call it that in 1973) Westwood, Hollywood, and Santa Monica of my previous world. 

I still work at UCLA, so every weekday I make a roundtrip over the Sepulveda pass or the 405 freeway.

But today is a Saturday, so I am home in my kitchen, making a phone call to my grandmother who lives in West Hollywood. We talk every day. And I talk every day to my other grandmother too, and my mother. We have that generational connection, for good or ill.

Whenever I see old family photographs, they often look as if the whole gestalt of that moment were peaceful, tranquil. If by some magic you could go back there now, maybe you could wander out of the frame and enjoy the picnic, the party, the holiday, that was the occasion for the photo. People seem to be enjoying themselves because after all they are all smiling, right? You don't get what went on before the moment caught on film, or after. All you have is a person with a smile, or maybe a funny face. 

 My son posted a picture of me with my mother on Mothers' Day this year. I must have been between two and three years old, and because the picture is not that clear and the faces very tiny, all I ever saw was my mother, perfectly groomed, and me with my polished white shoes and yellow dress holding her hand and waving.   

I recently took a road trip to Sacramento, driving alone up the I-5. This is a trip I made many, many times when I was working, and although the I-5 has never been known as a picturesque drive, I always loved it. The California landscape is never boring to me. The mountains are lovely, even sensuous with their undulating contours and changing colors.  Wild radish and mustard, lush California lilacs, line the roadside. The tumbleweed and scrub grass scratch the dirt, farmlands have gone to dust, trees dead and uprooted, alongside carefully tended groves of citrus or almonds. Sheep and cattle graze the hills, and horses, too. If you are lucky, you can catch a rainbow or a sundog. I saw a tiny little cloud this time, with a turquoise tail, fading slowing to rose and then pink. Astonishing in the hot, barren, blue sky.

Cleaning up a fairy garden means that first you have to find all the fairies and give them a bath. Then it may be necessary to refresh a little paint here and there, no matter how hard they try to resist. And if they have left their Winter Solstice decorations up, you must retrieve those, clean them up, and find safe storage so that they can be used again during the appropriate season. There is always a question of how the furnishings have been rearranged, as well. If you have a cat or a squirrel that likes to visit, or a bird looking for nesting materials, you may find that your tables, chairs, mushrooms, and sundials have been pushed about or overturned. Weeds might be an issue too, although it can be hard to tell, in a fairy garden, which is a weed and which is something the fairies may consider important for food, or perhaps ceremonial events. Take dandelions, for instance. Those are absolutely essential to fairies, and you must not disturb them.

This picture breaks my heart. 

Government business in government buildings grinds slow, inching along while endless conversations and copy machines murmur and people are restless in folding chairs, on dirty seats stained with coffee or soda or maybe even body fluids. Rehearsing what you will say, not paying much attention except to track your turn, you wait. If you want to be heard, you wait.

There is a stolid, yet stuffy, pretense in the walls, and the floors with dusty corners and the finger-printed woodwork, trap stale, much-used air. Someone opens a pack of gum, someone uses hand cream or lipstick and for a brief moment there is a sweetness of mint, vanilla, or cherry. But only for a moment. Someone opens a restroom door and the sweetness is swallowed up by the public latrine.

There is a particular longing, ever-present, and unnamed 

permeating into areas ordinarily inaccessible if circumscribed by specifics.

How, then, can it be a particular longing?

But it is something -- something unclaimed, wandering loose, or sitting forlornly, like lost luggage.

A sensitivity stripped bare? A need for astonishing uninhibited connection?

The thought of living shrouded is a continuous, dim discord. 

Wings may be called for.

There are eyes, legs, hands, lips, breasts, a heart

too long constricted.

That longing itself made small, unimportant, by necessity.

Can I stop cheating myself, my soul, and celebrate the ecstasy of living? 

Driving North, 1959

The silence was stacked like blocks of ice between them. Dad was driving, his shoulders defeated, and mom sat in the passenger seat, her lips a thin, tight line. I was in the back seat trying to keep my brothers interested in a game of Alphabet. No Quaker State Oil signs to be had, so we were stuck at Q. The boys finally slept after watching miles of California mountains fade to black as the sun sank behind them.

What is your Christmas dream? Every year I start spinning holiday fantasies long before Thanksgiving. I find myself rummaging around in early Christmas memories and building a chain that links to the present.  

The things we are told about ourselves and our family history shape who we are.