Brought to you by: the letter "e".

(found on the sidewalk yesterday in San Juan Capistrano, right near a pink baby sock. weird.)

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Do you guys remember those coloring books where you just painted over everything with a wet paintbrush? There was that little hint of color on the page, here and there, and you could sort of manipulate where you wanted to strongest concentration of the color to go with your brush. End results were pretty dang similar to this (not sure that this is an actual page from one or not?):



...so yeah. Good times.

And then there were the good old "stained-glass" coloring books, that you could tape onto your window afterwards:





...ahh, good times. Those cellophane-like pages were so fun to marker in, even if the end result was never quite as spectacular as one would have liked.

FYI if you're my best friend you would get me this sweet Ms. Pac-Man water-color book from the '80s. yessss.

Quick question:

Does anyone else miss the light brown m&m?

Memories.

a lemonade stand with my best friend Molly, in front of the grocery store around the corner from her house when we were 8 or 9. her mom was a progressive sort of woman (to put it lightly), so we did 99% of the work by ourselves. it was nice to learn how to problem-solve. we also sold homemade chocolate chip cookies to increase sales (plus the fun of baking), and when we got "too old" we even wrote the e's in "lemonade" backwards, to garner sympathy. i'm not sure, but i think this was my idea. at least, i remember being the one to write it out. it does seem strange that i would have thought of that. once a police officer came by and told us we needed a permit. i think that was the beginning of the end. we used to take our profits ten feet away to the Mexican restaurant and eat cheese enchiladas with red sauce. i remember the clear plastic tumblers of ice water were always sweating heavily onto the lacquered table. it was quiet, usually there was no one else around. fans lazily spinning above us. we always sat in the same window booth, and i would use tortilla chips to clean my plate of sauce, rice and beans, when i was done with the enchiladas. i think Molly thought that was weird. but i was always told to clean my plate.

Sunday mornings in apartment #5 (the first [& longest] place i ever lived), on a quiet street in Berkeley, California. my dad is blasting opera music from his bedroom. he has an awesome sound system. the dog (an akita) is lying in a patch of late morning sun on the cheap brown carpet. dust motes stir and settle, stir and settle, endlessly around her. beyond, in the kitchen, i can smell breakfast potatoes frying. rosemary, butter, pepper. that means there will be eggs, sunny-side up. and silver dollar pancakes if we are lucky. my parents will drink delicious-smelling coffee and mostly ignore each other. my dad will be jolly and smiling because of the opera and the sunday breakfast. sometimes, a lot of the time, he sings along. maybe my mom is sewing, or more likely she is on the small back deck watering the potted plants. my older sister is in our bedroom, plotting ways to get out of the house today. my little brother and i are probably playing a game, involving either action figures, a homemade fort, or the Nintendo. i can hear kids playing outside in the courtyard, and see the leaves rustling gently on the trees outside the obscured glass of our window. i can feel the wind in the trees, and smell the sap, and feel the tiny heartbeats of the birds who nest there and are flying away now, into the great cloudy-blue sky and the endless possibilities of the great wide world.

when i was one or so, and learning how to walk, i burned my left hand rather badly on our wall heater. the weird thing is that i actually remember it all: struggling out into the living room, wanting to show my mom how proud i was of myself: i'm walking! inching my way towards the kitchen. i could hear my mom's voice, so i was getting close. maybe i uttered a yip of happiness at that point, who knows anymore, but my mom came around the corner and saw me. i grinned hugely and ramped up my efforts, but her eyes got big and scared. "no!!" she rushed towards me in slow motion. my smile was instantly gone in the confusion. what's wrong? and then something, somewhere, began to register. my mom reached me, then, and pulled me away from the wall as fast as she could, grabbing my arm. i had stopped along my epic journey, and rested my chubby little hand square on the wall heater, which of course was hot hot hot. there was a charred pattern of stripes going across my palm and fingers in a horizontal fashion. i began to bawl. it was awful. my mom was visibly and audibly upset. in the healing process over the next days and weeks, i would suck and suck on my hand to get it to stop hurting, so my mom had to put a sock over my hand and tape it there. but apparently i would suck on the sock until it was cool and sopping wet, same difference. ah, childhood!

a Slip 'N Slide in somebody's backyard. a small dog yipping around us in the excitement. green, green grass, dark and bright, crushed beneath our heels. small rocks would lie silently under the yellow plastic, waiting to be found by our arms or torsos. a sprinkler waves back and forth forever, somebody's mom yells for us to turn the water off. puddles are forming, and light mud. it is sunny, but still not hot enough to warrant us being out in our bathing suits. goosebumps and threadbare towels in plastic chairs, we talk about the funniest slips, and then we run inside to drink milk and eat peanut butter sandwiches.

at my elementary school, we had a whole wall of honeysuckle on the southern end of the schoolyard's long fence. the particular bitter sweetness of the blossoms' nectar on my tongue had a power to stop time. sometimes i felt like recess was hours long. i would lie on the grass and make daisy chains from the tiny white and pink flowers there, a crown fit for a benevolent fairy queen. after a rain, the worms would come wriggling out from the dirt. the boys would stomp and kill them, so i would cut them in half at that special spot, and pray for two to form and reset the balance. there were licorice plants bordering a smaller edge of fence, that at certain times of the year would be studded with what looked like big gobs of foamy spit. our recess counselor showed us that if you looked closely enough, you could see the caterpillars inside. they were going to be monarchs. later we would see the big butterflies over our heads, but it was always hard to make the connection. now whenever i smell a licorice plant, i see a big orange-and-black beauty fluttering in my mind. when was the connection finally formed?

V is for... vegetables?

Last night, on our way to Von's (yes, we should have shopped somewhere else, but it was eleven p.m.), i spotted a perfect "V" in the form of a plastic zip-tie, folded back over itself at the halfway point and likely run over. Not sure the letters are spelling anything at this point. Will have to give this more thought.
When we got inside, we each grabbed a basket and then realized that perhaps it was time... for a cart.

Now i don't know about y'all. But i have a thing with shopping carts.

When i was little, my dad used to make me push the cart (sure, no problem) at the grocery store. Then he would walk slowly in front of me down the produce aisle, occasionally stopping on a dime, at which point i would bang the bottom of the cart into the backs of his ankles. He would always yell out and admonish me, probably for walking too closely behind him. This nerve-wracking process has forever ruined cart-pushing for me, but thankfully not shopping for food, which is the only kind of shopping i enjoy other than buying music.
It's just always been a no-brainer for me. Grab a basket, fill it to the brim. That's usually all that will fit in my tote bag anyway, so no big loss. But for 8 or 9 years, i have been shopping for just two people. Last night i realized that this will probably all change when (and if) we have kids. My mom used to take my brother, sister and i to Safeway and we'd freakin' fill up the cart, often resulting in a staggering bill, not to mention produce rotting away in the crisper while boxes of instant mashed potatoes and Pop Tarts were scarfed down in one day (sorry, Mom!). I can't believe parents manage to deal with this. I guess you just do. I still feel awful for not being a better child. I try and make it up to her these days, and i also never ever waste food; the last time was a week ago (a half loaf of moldy bread), and i felt lots of guilt about it afterwards.

My dad was one of those kids in the UK during WWII, where they were lucky to eat food every day, had to walk 18 miles to school, uphill both ways, etc. etc. We were not allowed to leave the table as kids unless we had cleaned our plates. This often resulted in long drawn-out standoffs. My sister used to put cooked carrots (her personal nemesis) in her mouth, go to the bathroom, and flush them down the toilet. This worked until one day my dad found a few of the tell-tale orange coins still floating in the bowl. And apparently, when i was little, i used to take my cooked spinach (which was my personal nemesis) and carefully stash it behind the television. One day my mom was cleaning the house and reached around to dust behind the TV. The story is, she emitted a bloodcurdling cry as her fingers made contact with the large mound of cold, slimy goop.

(have i mentioned how awful i feel about being such a bad kid? Yeah. There're reasons.)

Anyway, Nat pushed the cart last night, bless his heart. We were buying food for 20 people for this weekend, the PhilSci retreat in Idyllwild (god that's such a lovely name), where Nat has been given the task of making lunch for everyone on Sunday. We decided it should be tacos, and everything (avocados, tomatoes, beans, cheese, tortillas, cilantro, sour cream, hot sauce, veggies, fake ground chuck, etc.) ended up being $93.58. That's slightly less than $5 a person! Pretty good, if you ask me. It would have been less had we planned ahead, and shopped at the smaller places. Ah, well. At least i got a little bit of that damned cart phobia off my shoulders... baby steps!

friends, and "friends"

i was that girl.
the one who everyone made fun of.
when i was little, i was always off playing by myself, looking at bugs; daydreaming. Around this time, my friends were:
~Molly, probably my first (and still one of my best, in memory) friend; her mother ran a daycare, which i was placed in for awhile. Molly and i were the same age, and inseparable. We grew up together and worked at her mom's daycare, which was very fun. We had lemonade stands every summer, supplemented with homemade cookies, in front of the Berkeley Bowl until we got "too old" for it. Climbing on roofs and finding as many snails as we could in her yard were two of our favorite pastimes. When we got older, we would ride bikes around town and spend our allowance on Mexican food (usually flautas). This was our first big taste of what it was like to be "grown-up". Her mom and stepdad (who annoyingly called Molly "Girl" 99% of the time,) took me camping many times, and even to Death Valley once, which is still one of my favorite memories. Later the neighborhood was shocked when it was revealed that her stepdad was actually an escaped member of the I.R.A., in hiding here in the States. Crazy!
~Jody, a sweet, sweet lad; also technically my first boyfriend. ;) His is another (amazing) story for another day. Our friendship ended way too soon.
~Dara, a super-blond waif who didn't hold your hand so much as she just let hers lay in yours, limply. You could tickle her merely by wiggling your fingers in her general direction. She was extremely gentle and sensitive. Had a bratty little sister named Bridget. Last i heard she had beat thyroid cancer and was married with a kid.
~Colleen, a very brief friend of mine whose parents spoiled her rotten, if memory serves. She had a doll collection, the kind with lots of curls and frilly dresses and tiny polished shoes. She also took ballet classes, which i attended one of and was shocked at the snottiness of the girls there. She had beautiful long red wavy hair, though.

Eventually i got a boy's haircut (super-short, with a tail!) and only wore overalls, which earned me the loving title of "Muskrat!" by the local children. Often i would be asked (usually on a dare), "Are you a boy or a girl?" ::snicker, run away:: This was around the time that i played with dirt a lot and frequently shimmied up trees, taking solace in the non-judgmental branches and pinecones. Didn't have a whole lot of friends around this time, hmm..
~Alexandria, a sassy young girl who had a much older sister and brother, a dad rarely seen, and a mean (alcoholic?) mom. She lived in a huge, picture-perfect house with rose bushes in the front yard and even a white picket fence. Sometimes i would pretend like i actually lived there, instead of the loud, tiny, mold-infested dank apartment around the corner. We played with Play-Doh a lot, also Strawberry Shortcake & Rainbow Brite dolls. She and i were madly in love with the movie La Bamba, and knew every Richie Valens song by heart. I had a crush on her older brother, Owen, who used to constantly whack me on the leg with the end of a wet towel. Around this time (that would be the '80s), many wonderful things were discovered, such as: Slip 'N Slide, Atari, and Lite Brite. Also, this is when i Got Caught Shoplifting. We dressed up one afternoon and headed down to the drugstore, specifically the candy aisle. We filled our giant boots, cuffed pant legs, and fake purses with Twix, Rolos, Skittles, Snickers, Milky Ways, Abba Zabbas- you name it. Then we craftily headed up to the checkout counter with one Caramello apiece, to buy (so smart!!). We paid the .50 cents each, then headed out the doors to victory. Twenty feet out, with the rush of what we had just done really starting to buzz in our heads, from behind us a voice came, boomingly: "Your momma let you buy that much candy?"
It was the security guard.
We really should have just made a run for it, but i think deep down we really were good kids, and scared. I remember one of us saying, "Yeeeaaahhh..?", all unsure and warbly, and the security guard, clearly not buying it, just holding out his arm and saying, "okay, come on- let's go." He was trying to sound comforting, but i think we both started bawling right away upon re-entry. He marched us to the office at the back of the store, right back down the candy aisle, where i wailed: "I'll put it baaaaaaaack?" but it was too late. We were criminals. They actually took mug shots of us, with our respective piles of pilfered sweets sitting on a tray in our laps, while our parents were called. Alexandria and i were forbidden to see each other ever again, and i was grounded for 2 weeks. Even though we did see each other again, our friendship sort of fizzled away, especially since she started getting somewhat popular and i was still a chubby bookworm who ate frosting out of the can when upset. Last i heard, Alexandria had joined the Peace Corps, or something similar, and had done some work with children down in South America. Good for her.

So, when i was about eleven, my mom left my dad. They had been separated for a few years, but this was it. My mom woke us up in the middle of the night, put us in the car wrapped in blankets, and drove us to our new home in a neighboring city, Alameda. Enter the worst few years of my life. I think my first friend was..
~Wana Chiu. Yes, i still remember her last name. For some reason it seems necessary when i think of her? Anyway, she was a small, quiet girl with long straight black hair and a mumbling way of speaking. We actually didn't talk very much. Sometimes we would go to her house, where there were always massive amount of Peeps, for some reason, which we ate constantly. Often we would just walk to the park in silence along the sidewalk, and swing for hours, never saying more than ten words to each other. Nonetheless, we were good friends in that neither of us really had anyone else. One day we were sitting against a wall in the schoolyard to eat lunch, along with many others, when some boys decided that it would be funny to torment us by throwing a basketball at the wall, hard, right next to our heads. I think we might have both been crying a little during this. Nobody stopped them, and finally the worst happened. One of the throws hit Wana square in the face, and she dropped her sandwich and cried out, as blood began to gush from her nose. The boys scattered. I ran her to the nurse's office, and she stayed home from school the next day. I can't even remember if i told, but i do remember being taunted by those boys for months after that. Either i didn't tell, and they called me a coward, or i did, and they were punishing me for getting them in trouble. Either way, 4th grade was no fucking picnic. I didn't see Wana very much after that.
~Nikki. Right around that time, my newly-divorced mom was sort of trying to get back out into the social scene (not to be confused with the Man Market). A woman she met had a daughter around my age, but who went to a different school. I remember she wore a uniform, and was very chubby, possibly more than i was. We were basically forced to hang out together when our moms would meet up. It was okay, but we never really had a whole lot in common. I remember being annoyed by Nikki a lot, but in retrospect i think it had a lot to do with the fact that she was an only child being raised by a single working mother, and likely needed friendship waaayy more than i did... Once we all went swimming at a local pool, where i rudely ignored her and swam out into the deep end (she couldn't swim yet, and was always in the shallow area, with arm puffs). My brother swam over to me with a message: "Nikki wants to talk to you", which i responded to by taking a breath and immersing myself completely under the water. i watched his legs and arms treading jerkily in the blue for as long as i could hold my breath, then came back up to the same query, repeated with urgency: "Nikki wants to talk to you!". i went under again, over and over and over, ignoring both her and her message through my brother. i think it may have been the meanest thing i've ever done, and sometimes i still wish i could contact her and apologize.
~Lydia and Faith. i lump these two girls together for a reason. They are the same girl, only with different appearances.
i can't remember which one i met first, but it doesn't really matter. Something trivial was shared in common, perhaps a fleeting interest in the New Kids on the Block, who knows, but suddenly i found that i was friends with-gasp- someone popular! And now i remember, actually. It was Lydia. She had long, rocker-ish hair, wore blue eyeliner, and had giant boobs. This was weird for an early 12-year-old, but hey-it happens! Her family lived in a bad neighborhood in East Oakland, where i saw 3 separate cats get hit by cars on her street. Her parents were some serious Harley Rock 'N Rollers from decades past, and they were pretty burned out. But also awesomely fun. Lydia and i would actually play with Barbies, of all things, in her garage with her little brother Wade. Theirs was another family i wished would adopt me, but it never happened. I guess they went to church regularly, and one Saturday night i finally was allowed to sleep over, but only on the condition that i attend Sunday School with Lydia the next morning. She really wanted me to, even though i don't think i had ever been in a church up to that point, and was scared shitless. The next morning was absolutely awful. was forced into one of Lydia's hideous, chestly-ample Sunday dresses (i was much smaller now; her mom had even nicknamed me "Feather"), and we drove to the church, where we sat at a table with a bunch of items in front of us, instructed by the headmistress to write down how each of these items related to Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Um, whaa?
I was totally lost, and of course felt guilty and embarrassed and ashamed for not knowing the answers while everyone else around dutifully scribbled down the answers. A piece of wood, a chalice, a crucifix, some other stuff i can't remember. Lydia didn't even help me cheat! tsk.
Soon after this, there was a new girl at our school: Faith. Faith changed everything; she was a bad girl at heart, under her plaid skirts and brown ponytail. She and Lydia were instant friends, of course, both rebels without a cause. "We" played a lot of tether-ball in those days, but as the third wheel i was often merely there as a scorekeeper. These two vixens became closer and closer, and thus begand competing with each other more and more, the way girls that age will often do. This evolved into a game of pretending to be nice to me and asking me to hang out with them, in order to make the other one jealous. It took me way too long to figure this out. By the time it dawned on me that our friendships were completely hollow and had nothing to do with me whatsoever, 5th grade was over, which meant that it was time to go to a different school. i never saw those two again.

I've never really been huge on friends- always tended to hang out more by myself, which is fine, actually. These days i have basically one, and she lives 448.568 miles away from me, front door to front door. In high school i hung out with quite the cast of characters, but then didn't we all? I suppose that's another (boring) story for another time.

"I think that I shall never see

A poem as lovely as a tree."

Take out the references to "God" in this lovely little Joyce Kilmer poem, and it's quite a gem. Continuing on:

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

"Who intimately lives with rain." - i love that! I feel the same way, except about wind. Am i the only one here who's ever wished she were a tree? Or seen the suggestion of a human form residing -strikingly- among the branches of an oak, elm, maple, or eucalyptus? Hopefully not. Also, i thought this was nice:

.

Found that photo on a website mentioning a tree-sit in Berkeley; ah, some things never change ;). I have a similar(ish) photo to this, weirdly enough... took Nat and A____ to Golden Gate Park, and we found some of these same wonderfully twisted trees growing low and rambling, and as usual i forced them into a photo-op. The print came out really really light- you can hardly see their two faces at first, but when you finally do they are hiding at the extreme edges of the frame. It's awesome! They are not nude, however, which is probably a good thing (by that i mean that i am in the midst of a constant battle against prudishness, not that their bodies are in need of some desperate toning regimen or some such nonsense). i wish i could show you all this photo, but until i get a scanner, nothin' doin'.

So where were we? Ah yes, trees.
Like the two small ones near the apartment where i lived as a kid, the ones which bore plums so wonderful that i always looked up at them as delicious yellow jewels. There were dark purple ones, too, but never were they as amazing and sweet. i would cram as many into my pockets (usually overalls, or my favorite pair of grey corduroys) as i could, until they began to squish, and then just eat as many as i could before reluctantly climbing down through the dappled light, onto the rickety wooden fence, and then a leap back to the earth below.
Or the fig tree, in the courtyard of that same apartment building. It had giant, fuzzy, acrid-smelling leaves, and a low, climb-able frame. There were always bustling lines of ants everywhere on the trunk, but that never stopped us from climbing up to reach the fruit, which we weren't so much into eating as we were simply plucking from the stem, and watching the milky fluid seep out from the wound, fascinated. The fig tree kept us shaded during the summer months as we splashed around in the kiddie pool underneath it. It stood stoically, like a sentinel, for years. Sometimes i wonder if it is still there?
There were also the few pine trees in the neighborhood, and their treasure? Sap. Golden, sticky, and precious- glob after glob of it. I had quite the sap collection, and i suppose i was always searching for a piece with a mosquito or other small insect held in stasis within, even though that was amber but how was i supposed to know the difference? The best part about sap-collecting was the smell. I would come down from the trees some days smelling like i was an entire pine forest all by myself. The end came when a particularly fresh and gooey piece of sap was entangled in the hair near the top of my head, giving my mother a headache and me a stern admonishment on the downsides of climbing trees.
Then there was The Magic Tree. Birch, actually (Silver Birch)- and there were definitely more than one around the street where we lived, but i always though of them all in the singular fashion: The Magic Tree. We learned in school that the betula pendula was used by Native Americans to build canoes, which i remember telling myself i would most certainly have to do someday. This tree's catkins (a word which i know now, and only wish i had known then!) would mature and blow apart in a gentle breeze, sending little floating seeds trailing down every which way into the air. We would collect them at a somewhat earlier stage, and manually rub them between our fingers until they fell apart. This was one of the main ingredients in our Potion*. When, years later, i later showed nat where i used to live, and these trees in particular, he understood right away how special they were, which is one of the reasons why i love him so damn much.
"Cherry Blossoms". These were all over Berkeley, but were actually just plum trees ;) They would blossom amazing pink sprays of sweetly scented, delicate flowers in the springtime, and make even the grottiest city street seem like a faraway place. We dutifully re-created them in elementary school art projects: drop some black ink on the paper, then blow the ink around into little skinny "branches" using a straw (something i still do in art projects these days..), then affix small bits of torn-and-crumpled pink tissue paper "blossoms" using tiny dots of Elmer's Glue... how i adored these crafty trees!!
There are more: The low, leafy tree in my mom's backyard when i was in high school, that my friends and i would clamber into after school (and sometimes even during school hours) to get stoned incognito. Just thinking about the clouds of smoke that must have wafted out of that thing cracks me up to this day. Or the really really tall one at Thousand Oaks park that we would hoist each other into at night, and climb almost all the way to the top, then- you guessed it: light up a bowl. Once my friend A___y dropped The Lighter (yes, we only had the one; what idiots) and M____l made her climb all the way back down to get it. Ha, ha. :)
Bare trees in winter, bird's nests finally naked for the world to see; soaring eucalyptus with an intoxicating aroma and silvery "acorns"; mango and avocado trees in Hawaii whose fruit i ate directly off the branches; Luna the redwood; the stately tree that marked the halfway-point of my journey out after a hard day's work, seeming to point the way towards home.

Do you have any trees? i would love to hear about them.

*This consisted of: My mom's giant silver metal mixing bowl, water, ripped-up leaves from each bush/tree/plant nearby, flower petals, dirt, tree bark slivers, Magic Tree catkins, and ground-up berries from a specific bush nearby, which were very watery (sort of like jicama) and had bright purple skins, and which we would grind to a paste on the wheels of our HotWheels, which, when flipped upside-down for this purpose, behaved very much like a child's power tool.

The gloaming.

This is my favorite time of day, i think- when the world outside is turning that particular shade of periwinkle blue, moving incrementally closer and closer to dusky uncertainty... It always feels to me like your last chance to get to safety, and yet there is something so exciting in that. The birds are softly cooing, and preening on their branches; the night-blooming flowers are releasing their fragrances to the air, and if you look up you can almost pretend that there is a new day beginning, instead of one just slipping away. If you wanted to say something important, now is the time.

Incidentally, "Periwinkle" was my favorite Crayola crayon color; something about the sweet blue and twinkly name always reminded me of fairies. Other contenders were Maize (purely because of the name; flat, browny-yellow was definitely not a fave color), Mulberry and Magenta (red-purples! yay!), Midnight Blue (so dark, so translucent!), Sea Green (soothingly serene), and of course, the lustrous and enigmatic metallics- Silver and Copper. The 64-pack of crayons was a hugely treasured item in our household.

As were the smelly markers. I know you kids remember those chubby, tempting, styrofoam-encased concentrated color-sticks: The seriously fruity Orange; the bright, bright-red Cherry; the garish, purple Grape; the weirdly sharp & sour Lemon; the fresh-as-hell Mint; the "Blue"berry; the lovely, delicate Cinnamon brown; and the addictive Black Licorice, which i swear i despised but could never seem to get enough of! Seriously, i think i probably smelled that one ten times more than the others. Ahhh, Mr. Sketch, how we adored thee.

Why the hell am i always waxing nostalgic about childhood art materials? What the hell is wrong with me?

next time: A lifetime of trees.