Tidbits

Every now and then my mom will drop a nugget of her personal history on me and anyone else lucky enough to be in earshot. 

Last night over dinner she did it again. This time it was: I didn't have a group of friends in high school. I ate lunch alone. 

N., the friend with whom my mom is currently living, would maybe beg to differ as they met in school when they were both 14 years old. Or maybe N. sat with other friends while mom went off to buy ice-cream and be by herself. 

The fact that my mom was both senior class president and voted 'most desirable' that same year seems not to square well with her high school recollections, but what do I know? (She was also on yearbook staff and a member of the drama club, even performing in a high school production of the Broadway hit 'Bye, Bye Birdie!')

I managed to score a seat on the yearbook staff during my high school years, but the other designations certainly alluded me. 

Here's mom performing part of her duties as senior class president--

Mom crowning the prom queen, 1964

Mom was a foster kid, so she probably did have a hard time attaching emotionally to others given the revolving door of kids who came and went during her childhood over many, many years. However, I wonder how her classmates perceived her. Could they have seen a different person than she herself saw when she looked in the mirror, so to speak? 

When I look back I can say that I categorically did not eat lunch alone. I ran around with a somewhat fixed group of girlfriends. What about you? Were you a lone wolf or one of the crowd? 

Wood/Driftwood

Bartie in the yard.

Backyard horse, Palo Alto

Ocean Beach filled with art materials.

Wild wood in Golden Gate Park

The most I've 'made' with found wood is to haul it from park or beach and put the pieces in various spots around the garden as accents, if you will. I can't imagine the thought and creativity it must take to fashion a life-size horse out of various pieces of wood. -remarkable effort! I took a gander around the internet and I think the driftwood horse artist is called Deborah Butterfield. 

Bus stop

For most of my in-town travel, I take public transport or ride my bike. I am fortunate to live on a train line, but track work has meant that one must take a replacement bus for part of the downtown journey. On St. Patrick's Day, at the bus stop where one transfers from one mode of public transport to the next, an entire family save for a baby was struck and killed by a motorist. Given the date, I had thought that the driver was inebriated, but it would seem that age and prescription medication played a role in her driving into the opposite lane of traffic at high speeds before hitting a public library, spinning out of control, then careening into a bus shelter. At least twice a week, I am at that bus shelter as is my elderly neighbor and so many others who live in out in the Avenues (read: western San Francisco). Yesterday, a large group of us met at the crash site for a memorial. To say that it was a somber affair is an understatement. 

Where the bus stop stood.

Last year, 17 pedestrians were killed in road accidents here in San Francisco. At the risk of sounding morbid, we're only into March and I wonder how many more families will be affected by this sort of senseless tragedy in 2024. Reps from City Hall have stated that current city infrastructure played no role in the tragic accident on March 17th. But I would say that there hasn't been enough infrastructure put in place, certainly in this specific area, to prevent such a tragedy from occurring in the first place. West Portal, where this accident occurred, is home to SF's oldest municipal railway station. The station pre-dates the automobile. The West Portal branch library, at least one elementary school and a robust business corridor are all a stone's throw away from both the rail station and the bus stop where the family where awaiting the bus traveling to the zoo. This area is awash in both cars and pedestrians. 

West Portal branch library, the site of the memorial.

There were news media outlets at the memorial, the district supervisor and someone I recognized from the city's transportation department, but not the mayor. I wish she would have made an appearance, to be honest. I stood next to someone who appeared to be a journalist (he was taking notes on a small pad of paper) and I asked him how he covers such a story. Looking clearly upset, he said that this was his beat, he regularly reports such incidents, and looks at how proper city infrastructure could have possibly aided in preventing such a tragedy. 'If there'd been a raised platform in the middle of the street, then maybe this would not have happened.' Shaking his head, he told me how his family used to live around the corner and that he used to take his nieces to the library here on a regular basis. 

The very real idea that this could have been any of us, does not (yet) seem to be a motivating factor in making change, so that nothing like this could easily happen again. 

March 2024

It's me.

My buddy, David, very graciously decided to create a series of portraits of your truly & the above image is one of them. He's asked that I supply him with images of me throughout the years. I keep threatening to dig up an 80s feathered hair snap...have yet to find one. He says he'll take whatever I have. Baby snaps are also welcome. I thought this rendering very nice & thanked him for not drawing my forehead with its current crop of crosshatched lines. He said he'd used a photo of me circa 2008 for the piece. Ha. 

The hubs and I just filled out our ballots for the primary election. Beyond voting for who will be on the Democratic presidential ticket, we were tasked with selecting state and local politicians as well. I have to say, we are a bit spoiled for choice regarding the US Senate candidates. Be it Schiff, Porter or Barbara Lee, I think we'll have good representation here in California. 

I will leave you with this image from our primary ballot---

Dig the second choice listed. I have no idea who this person is, by the way.

Baby, he was born to run! 

Mysteries unearthed

There's a man that visits the house across the street next to Party House every so often. His routine is this: He double parks his car then hops out leaving both the engine running and the car radio blasting. And it's always the same song. No lyrics--just a thumping beat. We've lived here now for three years and his jam never wavers. The length of his visits vary. It could be minutes or it could be a quarter of an hour. The car thumps and runs. He does what he does, then pops back into his vehicle and drives away. So fucking weird.

Speaking of weird, I remember being fascinated by certain things when I was a kid like the disappearance of Amelia Earhart & the Bermuda Triangle and the mystery of The Easter Island 'heads'. I think I just read that wreckage identified as possibly having come from Earhart's plane has finally been found. Wow. -never thought it'd happen. Same, too, with what those stone statues represented way down off the coast of Chile. 

I watched a docu-film recently on Easter Island or Rapa Nui as the folk local to the area call it. I knew that the so-called heads were really full figures that had sort of been submerged into the land. -can't recall when that information came to light, but it's been known for a number of years now, I think. What I didn't know was what the figures were represented. This doc tries to answer that question by way of noting where the majority of the moai, as the carved stone statues are known locally, can be found. Fresh water can be found in many spots along the coastline of Rapa Nui. It is at these fresh water sites where many of the moai stand. I don't know if it's definitively known that the statues were placed there to mark the spot for fresh water and also serve as a community gathering space, but it would seem so. The research seems somewhat speculative as the writing system used by the Rapa Nui people has yet to be deciphered. Time will tell, hopefully.

The Moai on Rapa Nui

Your cranky film critic c'est moi

I know I'm late to the party, but I finally watched the Barbie film as it was offered on a streaming service we already pay for at no extra cost. Not being a Barbie fan, regardless of who filmed the story and why, I really wasn't going to fork over any more cash to view it. My two pfennigs: It's an advert for Chevrolet wrapped in an advert for Mattel. Beyond that rather simple assessment, I thought it was fine, if however not award-worthy. (Please, Barbie fans, don't shoot me.)

The hubs and I also watched Alexander Payne's latest film, The Holdovers, and I wasn't blown away by that flick either. I did, however, love the trailer. Whoever put that together should win an award. It's pure 70s movie trailer fare in all its glory. And Paul Giamatti's wandering eye should receive an honorable mention as well. Giamatti, who never has a bad film performance in him, will always hold my attention, so the film wasn't a total wash. The movie's run time, at just over 2 hours, was absolutely too long and the first 30 minutes prior to Dominic Cessa's character having been 'held over' winter break could have been edited down considerably. 

Da'vine Joy Randolph is a gifted performer, but she's clearly never smoked and had a hard time mastering how to hold, ash and take a drag off a cigarette. If those sorts of things don't bother you when watching a performance, then you probably had an easier time staying with the film than I did (and I'm slightly jealous). Shit like that takes me right out of the story. Ditto the continuity stuff like one minute Randolph's character is holding a newly lit smoke, the next minute it's down to the butt with a long ash. Nix the film smoking entirely, I say. 

For those of you who are as hung up on the details as I am, did you notice that when our three leads showed up at the Christmas shindig NO ONE closed the front door upon entering the house? The scene with Cessa, Giamatti and Randolph chatting to their host with the door wide open behind them for seemingly minutes on end in the cold-ass New England winter made me batty. 

Thanks for reading and, yes, I need to take a chill pill.

Merry-ish Christmas or One And Done

I hadn't really too many expectations for Christmas Day, but did want the meal I'd prepared to be edible, at the very least. The fact that it was served hot and there were some appreciative remarks uttered during dinner made me feel good. I cook, but not typically for a table full of people and really nearly never on Christmas. This past Christmas was also notable in that I had my siblings and my mom over. We have not spent an Xmas all together since before my parents divorced in the late 1970s. Now that Mom is widowed what used to be a holiday spent with her husband's family is sort of, up for grabs, if you will. I thought it might be nice to get the band back together (har-har). While it wasn't a shit show, pardon my French, there were a few eyebrow-raising moments. 

My sister, I'm fairly sure, showed up drunk. She's devolved into a pretty serious nightly drinker over the past few years, so while I expected her to drink at mine (she abstained), I did not expect her to have 'pre-gamed'. There was a point during the afternoon when she attempted to sit on great-grandma Bea's tile top table. She caught herself, fortunately, before any damage to herself or the table happened. This is a table we grew up with, so her having said, 'I thought it was a chair' felt off. I mean, maybe she did? There was a smattering of cutting comments throughout the day from sis as well, but as that's her M.O., I didn't really ruminate on them...for once.

Mom arrived a few hours early, so we spent some time in the front room chatting and nibbling on snacks. At one point, I had asked mom if she'd heard from her husband's children for Christmas. She seemed taken aback at having been asked. Of course! We are very close! I hadn't meant to imply anything by what I thought was a fairly innocuous question. This is mom's second Christmas sans husband; I imagine it's still very difficult for her adjusting to her 'new normal'. 

As it turned out, mom actually hadn't heard from one of the sons and was worried something might be amiss. He replied to her just after the new year. She read me the response over the phone while I was on break at work. All I remember from his text reply was this humdinger of a phrase: scraping the stench of a loveless marriage off my soul  BIG YIKES.

If he ever quits his day job, he may want to consider creative writing as a field.