Month: April 2011

A Family Vacation in Carmel California, Part 2

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Part II: Balderdash

The Acorn’s crowning glory, the place everyone could agree was beautiful and worth its wood was the backyard. It grew from a multi-tiered deck that led down into a freshly laid rectangle of grass, where there waited a horseshoe pit and a small platform for spectators or, as we used it, afternoon yoga sessions. Here, we could all stand together and see the ocean without being mauled by strong winds. Here was the grill where Andrew made delectable pork chops. Here was the hammock Caroline lounged in briefly before being summoned to play cartwheel. Here was the small square of sand with the metal rod sticking up where Darwin and Hoyt spent hours trying to toss horseshoes around, punishing the loser with push-ups. And here was the platform upon which Lynn led the girls from pose to pose until we ended up with the sun falling upon our faces in Shavasana, the yogic dead pose, feeling more alive than ever. 

 

On our last evening we dined at the Flying Fish Grill in downtown Carmel, a gem that slopes gently down to the beach, where a giant twisted tree stands with one sharp, dead branch jutting into the grey sky. Like stone, its trunk was smoothed from sandy winds. For dessert we bought a carton of Mocha Almond Fudge (an ubiquitous albeit elusive flavor – cartons never taste as good as scoops from a sweet shop) and two boxes of Magnums – ice cream bars I discovered on another beach, in another country to enjoy at sunset on the Acorn’s deck. And we did, taking in the seascape for one last time. Geese walked about the grass beyond the deck, foraging for their own sweet grub. My cousins played a final game of horseshoes. The sky glowed, than began to fade. The air was crisp, the sea calm, the grass soft but cold, as though prodding us indoors. Our ice cream finished, we went in, single file and slightly muted as people usually are at the end of vacations. Behind us, the sun fell slowly down behind the sea. 
In the living room Andrew announced, “We have time for one last game.”
Caroline and I nodded.
“Balderdash,” we said. They were leaving that night, while the rest of us the following morning.

As our parents talked wistfully in the kitchen – save for uncle Louis who sat down once again in his favorite chair – Caroline explained the rules of “Balderdash: The Hilarious Bluffing Game.”
The cards provide five categories including strange words, movie titles, and acronyms. Define or explain them. Make up what you don’t know and hope people believe it.  

Caroline was right, I was good and won the game by a two-space margin; though the highlight of the game belonged to my cousin Andrew, who for the acronym TEAM, wrote “Turtles of European American Mothers”. I laughed until my lips cracked. Balderdash indeed.

And all too soon, it was time for two of our party to break away. As Caroline and Andrew readied to go, Lynn played a little girl’s tune upon the old piano in the Acorn’s game room while her husband stood by, hands crossed over his chest, marveling.

“I didn’t know she could play,” he said, as I walked by.

A few walls away, my mother chatted quietly with Darwin, both thinking that the music wafted from someone’s computer. My uncle Louis stood up from his chair and paced around, dreading his youngest son’s departure. He wrung his hands.
“Too short,” he said, face forlorn, “Too beautiful, too short.” 
We stood on the grass, the only light coming from the Acorn’s windows and Caroline’s car, which glared at us from the pitch-black driveway and cast long shadows of our bodies left behind. Hands in our pockets we thought collectively of the following day, the long drive home, and life with less garden and less sea, more light at night. They waved goodbye. We waved back.
“And now we are eight,” Darwin said softly.
The Acorn became the only source of light.
As I wondered how far I dared to walk without a flashlight, Uncle Louis turned to go inside. “Too short,” he said again, “too beautiful, too short.” And though he couldn’t see, I nodded. Balderdash indeed. 

Family Vacation in Carmel, California

Betty2 Comments

Part 1: The Acorn 

In Carmel, I learned how to play Balderdash. 
On Sunday morning we stood at a lookout point on 17-mile drive, a famous stretch of highway that contours the ocean – or does the ocean contour the land? –  and discussed what to do after dinner on our last evening together. 
“Balderdash,” said Caroline, squinting over the water’s rolling glint, “I think you’ll be good at it.”
I nodded in anticipation; who wouldn’t love to play a game they’d be good at? 
The night before we had watched a terrible Taiwanese movie about young gangsters – they crossed and double-crossed each other mostly in Taiwanese, which most of us didn’t understand. And on Friday, the night we arrived, we played Charades, parents included, girls vs. guys. The girls lost, but it wasn’t a terrible loss. Some things take practice. 
And so our weekend passed in a sprawling, ocean side paradise. My cousins rented a rustic house – some family’s home, filled with their history, their lore – to celebrate their father’s retirement. It was called “The Acorn,” though more fittingly it might have been called “The Hive.” Single story with four bedrooms and a separate cottage, the Acorn was designed decades ago in a labyrinthine style for a large family with many children and a constant stream of guests. Built of dark, paradoxical wood that seemed both sturdy and slight, the house creaked ceaselessly, yet was quiet. At night it required dozens of lamps to light yet in the mornings, was flooded with pale, seaside sunlight, the kind that hesitates to emerge from behind the clouds, like a shy but beautiful child hiding behind his mother’s back.
The house was, as my cousin Andrew noted, like a “little museum,” filled with old books with fascinating titles (Principles and Practice of Butter Making by McKay and Larsen, and The Science and Practice of Cheese Making by Van Slyke and Publow – apparently it takes two to write about such subjects). The oldest volume was a Rutgers yearbook from 1928, strangely titled The Scarlet Letter. It left a dusty red mark on my pajamas when I set it in my lap to scan the pages for one Mr. Whisler, the grandfather or perhaps great grandfather of the family who owned the house. But he was nowhere to be found. Yet around me, the Whislers and their friends were everywhere. They hung from the walls in faded photographs and pencil portraits, stern-faced gentlemen with white hair and stiff moustaches, somber-faced children sitting cross-legged before their clapboard schoolhouse, and soft-looking women with high collared dresses and tight braids. They stood atop mantles and bookshelves in trophies of contests past, the most amusing of which was a stout bronzed cow set atop a gleaming onyx column, awarded to T.F. Riley in 1950 for Highest Butter Fat Increase Per Cow: 59.5 lbs. In the front cover of the oldest books were inscribed the names of people – some visitors, some relatives – and, on the underside of a wooden duck, a gift to the Whislers “From George, 1970.” 
My uncle Louis, nearing his mid-seventies, lumbered around The Acorn like a happy child with too-big shoes. Though a former aerospace engineer whose daily work involved pages and pages of algorithms, an hour long commute into the heart of Los Angeles and top-secret trips to top-secret destinations (to this day he is still unable to discuss the nature of some of his projects) he was immediately at home in the Acorn. He found a favorite chair in the living room and developed a routine that included consuming a large brunch, followed by a walk along the ocean if the weather permitted and if the wind was not too strong. 
My aunt Joannie wore a red parka and new, old tennis shoes for much of the trip, smiling softly at her children all around her and her husband, for whom retirement was long overdue. It was a special occasion, she said, when I complimented her shoes. The shoes were nearly a decade old, a gift from her youngest son, but she had saved them for such a trip. They contrasted nicely with the house’s dark floors and against the vivid green grass of the garden, through which she traipsed with my mother.
My parents loved the house too, but for different reasons: my mother gathered parsley from the small herb planter next to the kitchen to sprinkle on our eggs and disappeared for what seemed like hours at a time to stroll around the gardens, which were green and lush and smelled of the nearby sea. She sniffed each blossom and gingerly stroked the wisteria hanging from the trellis, trying to remember the English names of other small, pretty faces.
“Rho…” she would say on her way in, wiping her feet on the mat outside, face flushed from the chilly air, “Rhodo…” And I would finish for her, “…dodendron, Mom. Rhododendron.”  
Like me, my father found the house a perfect place to read, though not because it was filled with books. He brought his own – a thin but dense Chinese paperback with a severe-looking emperor on the cover – and read in one of two padded wicker chairs with their backs against a large window overlooking the garden. In the mornings, my cousins still sleeping, I would wake and walk into the kitchen to see my father fully dressed with hair combed, breakfast eaten long ago, reading in the chair, George’s duck sitting quietly next to his right shoulder. Occasionally my mother’s slow figure would appear in the window, her upper body curved towards a bush or tree, and for a brief moment their bodies would align, my mother standing behind my seated father, the only division between them being a large pane of glass, translucent yet impenetrable. 
Compared to the walls and shelves of all the other rooms, the bedrooms were the sparest; closets emptied and dresser tops cleared for strange guests and their strange, anachronistic things: smart phones, laptops, iPads. Faded paintings and old sports equipment hung from the walls, though like a lingering smell or an intangible albeit vivid memory, one could still feel the aura of visitors past. Being one of two single people on the trip, I volunteered to share a small room with my cousin Darwin (together we made a two-spoke third wheel) thinking it would spare him sharing a room with my father, whose snores I often compare to a jackhammer. Even two rooms away however, my father’s snores impinged upon our late night conversations. We wondered how my mother slept at all. Though in the morning Darwin would accuse me of snoring softly, like a “little bear,” at night, tucked into our narrow twin beds, the ceiling slanting close above our heads, we talked about relationships – his, mostly. What makes a relationship work, we wondered, certainly not snoring like a jackhammer. Yet all around us, married couples old and young slept and slept.

Bad People

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They say you can tell a lot about a person from the way he treats his subordinates. I was born with an under-bite and my parents, not wanting their daughter to be mistaken for Jay Leno’s bastard (can a girl be a bastard?), decided to get me braces when I was in elementary school. I say “get me braces” like it was a gift, and looking back with my straight teeth, it was, but at the time I saw my friends wincing from the pain of newly tightened braces and thought, “I think I’ll live with this under-bite.” It seemed that the only person in the world who wanted braces was Joanna, the daughter of my parents’ friends.

Our parents often dined together on the weekends, leaving me, Joanna and her sister Jennifer at home to entertain ourselves, which Joanna did brilliantly for all three of us. When I showed up one evening with my new decked out smile, she gasped. “Brace are gorgeous!” she gushed and raced about finding wire to put on her own teeth. Joanna, who’s favorite television shows (from the age of 10 to 14) were “Xena,” “Hercules,” and “Power Rangers,” had perfect teeth. Instead of giving her an under bite God gave her half a brain.

But before my mouth was to be admired by Joanna, my parents had first to find an orthodontist.

“Your aunt recommended someone,” my mom said one afternoon, “Angela and Michelle see him too.”

I’m pretty sure that by then, I’d spent a good amount of breath laughing at my cousins, calling them “metal mouth,” “train tracks” and, had I been clever enough, “tin grin.” But back then I didn’t yet know about my unspoken deal with God or Vishnu or whomever is in charge of Karma around here. Basically, what goes around comes around – in my universe anyway – and a few months after my cousins got their braces, the rough hands of a rather burly dentist glued the same metal torture devices were glued onto my teeth.

I forget his name, but let’s just call him Cuddles. To his patients he spoke soothingly, his voice smooth and thick, the cadence of which was meant to mask the brisk, jerky movements with which he worked. On my first visit I walked in and heard the unmistakeable spine-tingling whirr of the dental drill and a strange hammering, followed by an even more terrifying pluck – the sound of braces being popped off one by one to reveal straightened, obedient teeth along with, surprise, surprise, the festering decay. That’s the dirty secret of braces: you’ll have straight teeth, but if you didn’t brush correctly during the correction period, well, you’ve got about five years to enjoy them. Max. Cuddles’ waiting room was filled with kids and teens, as though he marketed himself exclusively in cafeteria lunch trays.

“Apparently he’s a real hit with the kids,” I had heard my mother say to my dad, and now, looking around the waiting room, it appeared to be so. Mothers waited languidly while their children lay on a deceivingly comfortable vinyl and paper wrapped chair, mouths stretched as wide as they would go while Cuddles ducked in and out with his picks and small mirrors. When he emerged, the mothers would leap up to pat their children (lips cracked, mouths slightly bigger) on the head and nod vigorously and concernedly at whatever Cuddles was saying. Always, he spoke with an exaggerated graveness, as though poorly kept teeth and loose braces would lead to long spells in prison. I could tell, even at the young age of nine, that Cuddles was in love with himself. What’s more, I could tell that several of the young mothers were in love with him as well. What’s not to love about a man who knows how to use tools, keeps unruly children in check and could practically call himself a doctor?

As befitting a man with a short, fast temper, he drove a fast, expensive car, purchased with the deformities and decay of pubescent teeth. He spoke at a pompous volume and walked with a swagger that seem to afflict many men with similar degrees. His surgical mask was never fully on, and instead hung limply from his left ear like a forlorn, discarded handkerchief. Its intended use, I could see, got in the way of his view of himself in the office’s many mirrors. However expected of someone with his ego, his habit of self-adoration confused me. Cuddles was ugly. Not only was he short and stocky in a most unattractive way, he had suffered cystic acne as a child and it had left him with small, gaping craters on his face, as though he’d seen a meteor shower and stuck his face into it. 

I’m certain I wasn’t the only kid to hate him – after all, the man tortured our teeth every few months or so, having his assistants call us at home every few weeks during a particularly delicious lunch to remind us that we were overdue for a tightening. As soon as we hung up we’d look down at the food, knowing full well that it would be weeks before we could enjoy biting into it again. But you can’t fault a man for trying to help you. No, my teeth are straight; he did his job well. I didn’t like him because he seemed to hate each of his soft-spoken, doe-eyed assistants. It was as though he lived by two rules: never bite the hands that feed you, these being the hands of his patients’ mothers, and chew off those of whom you pay.  

He employed a handful of young, timid Asian girls who had hoped for quiet careers as dental technicians but had unwittingly enlisted to work for Satan in a white coat. They were screamed at and humiliated. No matter what juicy gossip was being divulged in the latest of People Magazine, one could stop cold when Cuddles berated his assistants. He called them “idiots,” “dummies,” “morons,” and other Chinese equivalents. He threatened to fire them in front of his patients and, I heard from my aunt, actually did once, right in the middle of a removal: (“You idiot… pluck…you’re….pluck… FIRED!”) The brave ones who didn’t quit after a week courageously stayed, I like to think, for the patients’ sakes. They did their jobs well, for it was their presence more than anything that put me at ease, and held their hands steady even while Cuddles barked behind their ear, his hot breath showering over both of us.

In the end, my teeth were more cooperative than most other kids’. My under-bite became a proper bite in less than half a year. Even Cuddles was surprised by my progress, but he masked this quickly with his usual hubris. “My…pluck….amazing…pluck…technique…. blah…pluck…blah…pluck…blah.” I guessed that jaw, tired of Cuddles’ constant, violent intrusions and temper tantrums, worked furiously to correct itself. “Anything to get away from that horrible man,” it said. I got out with two cavities, a set of gum-pink retainers and directions to wear them everyday when I went to bed.

“If you don’t,” Cuddles warned, “I’ll be seeing you again real soon.”

For the first two months I wore those retainers with militant devotion until one afternoon, I’d wrapped them in a napkin to eat lunch and was horrified to find that I’d accidentally thrown them away. Rather than dig through the school’s trashcans, I decided to pray. To God, to Vishnu – whoever was in charge of Karma, paid in full. “What goes around has come around,” I whispered, “Please, please, please keep my underbite at bay. I don’t ever want to see Cuddles again.”

And whomever I had appealed to took note and let my teeth retain their position without the retainer. Now, when people compliment my teeth I give credit where credit is due.

“I had a dickhead orthodontist named Cuddles,” I say, “But he had some great assistants.” Hope they’re not there anymore; but if they are, they ought to remind themselves that what goes around come around, however long it may take.

Gym, Tan, Laundry. or None of the Above

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I wonder what sort of figure I cut, walking down the driveway in my pajamas at 1pm every weekday afternoon to get the mail. In a way, it’s quite poetic because the pajamas are ones I bought when I first moved to New York for college.

We live on a street of retirees, though most seem to be busier than I’ve ever been. They go to the gym, run errands, golf, take long ski and fishing vacations in other states, have friends and family over by the dozens, garden, write letters to my mother on flowery stationery (assuming that she too, is retired) inviting her to join them on various garden tours where brunch is included. They are probably so busy they never really see me getting the mail at 1pm, but if they did, they’d probably think, “My, we watched that girl grow up and now we’ll watch her age and wither. Does she ever change out of those pajamas? What a shame.” And they see me feeling productive because I’m getting out of the house to fetch the mail. Indoors, I putter quietly around the house, drowsy in the morning when my parents have already been up for two or three hours, and energetic by the time they’ve left to attend their own things – I rub my eyes and poof – I’m alone. The house is quiet. There’s no one to talk to.

When I was younger, I relished afternoons like this because it meant I could watch television uninterrupted. Now, I don’t really watch TV. I don’t really know what’s on TV and when I turn it on, it seems almost foreign. A strange cousin to the internet, more talkative, more boisterous. I always end up turning it off after channel surfing for two seconds.

The next best thing then, is to go online. After email, Facebook and occasionally, twitter, (though I still don’t really understand the point), is surfing the internet, an activity I perfected (along with the masses in my generation) in college. It’s aimless at first – bona-fide surfing – jumping from link to link, never knowing where the blue words might take you. Then you get smart and narrow down the scope to a few choice websites you go back to again and again to get everything: news, gossip, fashion, food, travel. The NYTimes.com is a favorite. I think ninety percent of the news I read comes from the NYTimes.com.The other ten percent is hearsay and a mishmash of outdated news magazines. Before I scoffed at the notion of paying for online journalism, but when they started charging a few weeks ago and limited the number of articles I could read for free, I panicked. I agonized for days, debating whether I should shell out four dollars a week (or something) to keep my NYTimes.com addiction while living frugally off the meager ten free-article allowance.

I even tried some other news sites: LATimes.com, boston.com, the SF Chronicle which online, inexplicably, is called SF Gate. But it was like trying to replace a beloved dog or switching to a new blogging platform.The layouts were weird and jumbled. The reporters seemed less motivated. I could have done it, switched to another, less expensive news source. Give me time and I’ll adapt to anything. But it wasn’t as though the NYTimes had burned to the ground and would never update their site again. The days ticked by and I began to feel my brain withering. Finally, the feeling that I was missing out and falling behind pulled my wallet out. Wasn’t I falling behind in enough already? I imagined conversing at a dinner party with people who had read all ten articles on the “Most E-mailed” list and eliciting an embarrassing blank stare.

“I don’t have a subscription,” I imagined saying.
“Betty. It’s four dollars. Even homeless people sometimes have four dollars.”

The least I could do was stay on top of the news (and the weddings and celebrations of the upper classes). I made up my mind and paid to stay in the know.

After I devour the NYTimes I head over to People.com to see what my friends in Hollywood are up to. It’s not a guilty pleasure. Not anymore. Before, I’d close the page whenever someone walked into my room and open the NYTimes.com tab, making sure to scroll down to the middle or open up some random article on Bernie Madoff or testicular cancer. I have a blog called “Very Highbrow” and when you have a blog named such, you have to keep up appearances. But that got old real fast because sometimes, all I want to read about is why Taylor Swift broke up with Taylor Lautner and what the hell Lady Gaga was thinking, wearing meat to some awards show. Now when someone walks in and I’m surfing People.com, I say, “Hey, come and check out what my husband Shia (LaBeouf) is up to.” Chances are, people will say, “Oh that chump? Okay. Show me.”

And after all that, it’s only about 1:30pm. Now I’m desperate. The day seems interminable now – and if the weather is anything like today’s – grey, overcast, chilly…a mirage of perpetual early morning- I can’t even develop a biological sense of time. I start to fear nightfall because I know it will come swiftly and in a blink of an eye I’ll be sitting by lamplight, wondering what the hell I did with my day. That’s when I think, “Alright. I’ll write to pass the time.”

And I do. I write. Something. Anything. Like this entry about getting the mail and my favorite websites. And it’s got a few paragraphs. It seems long-ish. I lean back now, ready to put my feet up, ready to click “Publish post,” but not before I glance at the time: 1:58 pm.

Now what do I do?

The Pool Man

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Every Friday morning between 10 and 11:30 am, our pool man comes. As most pool men do, he drives a small truck and works alone, wearing faded shorts, a t-shirt, and if he feels like it, a baseball cap to protect his crown. The most extravagant thing about his ensemble is perhaps the pair of Oakley sunglasses he is never without and which protect his fifty-something year old eyes from the glare of pool water. I know they are Oakley because once on a particularly hot day, I walked outside to say hello and stood less than two feet away from him. Continue reading “The Pool Man” →

Astronauts

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In last weekend’s Financial Times (a very highbrow newspaper) I came across a series of interviews with astronauts from all around the world. I particularly liked what Jim Lovell had to say about his time in space:

“The impression I got up there wasn’t what the moon looked like so close up, but what the Earth looked like. The lunar flights give you a correct perception of our existence. You look back at Earth from the moon and you can put your thumb up to the window and hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything you’ve ever known is behind your thumb, and that blue-and-white ball is orbiting a rather normal star, tucked away on the outer edge of a galaxy. You realise how insignificant we really all are. Everything you’ve ever known – all those arguments and wars – is right behind your thumb.”