The Shifting Sands Of Blog-itechture

2004-12-19T15:02:00.000-08:00

Me, in the office of the South County Star-News, Chula Vista, CA

December, 2004

2004-12-04T13:28:00.000-08:00

December 2

Thursday

The chilly mornings continue. About 35 on the porch when I went out to get the newspaper at 7 a.m.

And the rhythms of life slowly run their course: in August I slept under a sheet with the windows open and the fan running. Now it’s a comforter, with the windows closed and the heater whirring away. Dawn is around six, and that’s when I get up, usually to find the cat sitting in front of my door demanding breakfast. The 0530 gurgling of the Black and Decker coffeemaker in the kitchen wakes him up. Four months until baseball.

Last night Dad and I watched the first half of the made-for-TV film Hemingway starring Stacey Keach. I saw it on videotape many years ago, when I was living in Brazil. For someone who’s really “into that period,” as Charlie Berigan once put it in another context, (he was talking about the film Immortal Beloved, about Beethoven) the film clunks, clunks and clunks again. The mass audience of 1988, the year of its release, probably didn’t have this problem with it, but as I listened to the dialogue, I recognized nearly everything the characters were saying as coming from one of Hemingway’s books, and furthermore I knew which book it came from. I realize this was done for the sake of authenticity, but I found it profoundly annoying, and some of the attempts to highlight famous “moments” a shade gratuitous, as when Ernest and Hadley are dashing across a Paris street in the rain, having just come from Gertrude Stein’s apartment, and Ernest says to Hadley that he doesn’t understand Gertrude’s remark “You are all a lost generation.” “I’m not lost! I’m in Paris, and it’s raining!” he says. All of us who know the real origin of this famous remark, that it was something Stein overheard a French mechanic saying to his son, will be inclined to feel that that scene could have been left out. But it’s part of the Hemingway “legend,” so it had to be left in, romantic cliché of rainstorm and all.

The “boxing” scene was also annoying. Hemingway was fascinated by boxing, (biographer Kenneth S. Lynn said it was because boxing offered him the chance to “touch men and be punished for it”) but he wasn’t good at it. Any reasonably-competent prizefighter could pulverize Hemingway. Canadian boxer Morley Callaghan very nearly did. But anyone watching this scene would come away with the impression that Hemingway was a real force to be reckoned with in the ring, and curiously, the style of pugilism demonstrated by Stacey Keach in this scene strongly resembles the barroom brawling of Jack Dempsey, whom the real Hemingway detested for precisely that reason, that he was more of a barroom brawler than a boxer.

December 3

Friday

Went to a happy hour yesterday after having a late lunch at Ernie’s with our cartoonist Jennifer, our stringer Brooke, and my editor Carlos, who showed up just in time to have a Pepsi and pick up the check.

The happy hour was for Jill Galvez, she of the recent unsuccessful run for Chula Vista Elementary District school board. It was held at El Torito, down the other side of I-5 off E Street.

Over a couple of scotch-and-waters, (and I’d had half a carafe of burgundy at Ernie’s, so I was well oiled for chitchat) I found myself talking with a woman named Mary Ann Valen (maiden name Hedderson), Chula Vista High School Class of ’75. She’s a teacher at Hilltop Elementary.

This is where hanging around your home town, even if your home town is now a city of 200,000, gets interesting. I never knew this gal in high school—she was a sophomore the year I graduated. But she turns out to be the soon-to-be-ex wife of Richard Valen, who graduated with me, and with whom, by the way, I was chatting at the Bonita Golf Course just a week or two before Lynne died. I bumped into him while jogging, and as we quickly brought each other up to speed, the first thing I learned about him was that he was going through a painful divorce which he did not want. Three months later I find myself at a happy hour, chitchatting with the woman who is divorcing him, and by the way, all three of us went to the same high school.

And that’s not all. I dropped the name Charlie Berigan. “Oh, I LOVE Charlie Berigan!” Mary Ann said. “And what about Ray Araiza? Do you know him?” Turns out she used to hang with JRA’s sister Beatriz.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s good to be home.

I took her phone number and told her I would give her a call whenever Der Berigan breezes back into town.

December 4

Saturday

Dark and chilly, with rain. The “tough season,” as Carla called it the day before Thanksgiving, has begun indeed. Just now, upon returning from an outing to Kinko’s and Target, I recognized the necessity for getting some music going on the stereo, and quick. I had the music from A Charlie Brown Christmas running through my head, and in this season, the first holiday season without Lynne, that is a land mine with a boot poised over it. She loved A Charlie Brown Christmas so much. The boogie-woogie Linus and Lucy track was a song she played over and over. I don’t anticipate ever being able to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas again, and for the time being, can’t even bear the music from it, not even in my head.

So I put on a tape of Michael Praetorious' Christmas Music and Dances from Terpsichore, an album with which I have a 30-year history. Plenty of memories, but fortunately, none of them has anything to do with Lynne.

A week or two ago, over coffee in his kitchen, Araiza and I were discussing, of all things, depression. He calls people who have never experienced it, and who are not inclined toward it, "civilians." "Ray Lucero, he's a civilian," JRA said. We talked about our respective experiences with depression. I can actually date mine, and they usually run in three-month cycles. I first experienced depression on the eve of my 16th birthday, and it lingered until January of my junior year of high school. It came a second time exactly ten years later, as I was about to turn 26. For a time I thought I was condemned to 10-year depression intervals. But after that second bout, I was spared for 13 years: depression didn't visit me again until 1994, when I was living alone in Washington, D.C. But once again the pattern was familiar: it crept up on me in late summer/early fall, and lingered until about New Year's.

I had a brush with it early in 2002 when I was living in Towson, Maryland. But that was a mild episode, and even if it had lingered, it would have been blown away in April of that year by a larger catastrophe, the onset of unemployment. Oddly, my depressions tend to visit during periods of malaise; they don't accompany big disasters like the loss of a job, although in the fall of 1994 it didn't help that I was at that time in love with Nadya and she was 7,000 miles away, to all appearances cut off from me forever.

JRA loaned me his copy of Darkness Visible, William Styron's account of his own struggle with depression, in his case much more severe than anything I have ever experienced: Styron was on the verge of suicide. I've never ventured that far into the country of depression, although I have visited its suburbs enough times to know it when I see it.

A postcard to carry:

“Despite depression’s eclectic reach, it has been demonstrated with fair convincingness that artistic types (especially poets) are particularly vulnerable to the disorder—which in its graver, clinical manifestations, takes upward of twenty percent of its victims by way of suicide.”—William Styron, Darkness Visible, A Memoir of Madness. (New York: Random House, 1990) pp. 35.

Didn’t accomplish much today. Did a pre-breakfast three-miler at the golf course, after which I weighed in at 184. I’ve gained a couple of pounds, which isn’t surprising I suppose: you come in for lunch every day and slam down one or two cans of beer, and chances are you’re going to gain a couple of pounds.

In today’s mail was an anticipated treat: the Oct. 20 issue of the Boston Globe, which I had ordered special. Beneath the screaming headline A WORLD SERIES TICKET, it celebrates the Red Sox’ annihilation of the Yankees in this year’s ALCS. I’m going to have it mounted and hang it on the wall alongside Lynne’s Oct. 7, 1984 front page of the San Diego Union, which celebrates the Padres’ having just done the same thing to the Chicago Cubs. (She also has Steve Garvey’s autograph in that frame.)

December 5

Sunday

Still chilly, and still raining. Steady, cold rain coming down.

Alicia is cleaning the house, our weekly Sunday uphill battle. Dad will not be convinced that Alicia is anything but a helpless little cripple in a wheelchair: her impressive curriculum vitae is something he knows, and cares, nothing of. And in his eyes, the idea that a helpless, crippled little girl in a wheelchair can do something he can’t, e.g. clean this house, is intolerable. Every week she comes over here to clean, and every week we have to listen to him screaming like a stuck pig that he doesn’t want her to. It’s gotten to be something of a joke. A couple of Sundays ago, Carla and Alicia were on their way out the door and Dad called out, “Licia!”

“Uh-oh, he’s gonna fire me again,” Alicia said.

One of the reasons we have to fight with him about this every week is, precisely because he thinks of Alicia as a helpless little girl in a wheelchair, he thinks he’s paying her $50 a week just to do some dusting, which is unfair: she actually does a very good job, although I take care of scrubbing the kitchen floor myself. There’s only one person in the world who can clean that floor to suit me, and as Dennis Quaid kept saying in the film The Right Stuff, “You’re looking at him.”

December 7

Tuesday

Armand has resurfaced again. Yesterday as I was walking to Garden Farms in the morning to get some orange juice, I turned around and there he was, stumbling along E Street. “My family has locked me out,” he announced. “I knocked on my mother’s door and my brother stuck his head out the window and yelled, ‘Get out of here, I’m going to kill you!’”

He has once again staked himself to one night at the Motel 6, although he said that, thanks to some kind of bureaucratic screwup with his state disability checks, he only has $200 to see him through the rest of December.

I told him to meet me at the Flamingo Café for lunch today, and we’d talk about it.

I met him at noon. I had planned to treat him to lunch, but he was uninterested in eating—he just had coffee and an English muffin. “I went to La Bella’s last night and ordered more food than I could eat,” he said, adding, with an uncharacteristic touch of humor, “You can gain weight being homeless.” As usual, he seemed less interested in talking about his plight than in talking about everything else under the sun—he tried to get me interested in the career of some French molecular biologist of whom I’d never heard.

I put a call out to my friend Stymie Ohlson, who operates a shelter for battered women. I thought that, being part of the “helping the helpless” network, she might be able to point me in the right direction. She called and gave me the number of the San Diego Rescue Mission, where Armand might be able to flop for the night now and then, and also gave me the names of some area churches that serve free food once a week. I called Armand at the motel and passed this information on to him, and I’m afraid for the moment that’s about the best I can do for him.

Installation of new (and old) officers at the Chula Vista City Council late this afternoon. I would have taken a pass, but my editor insisted that we both had to be there. Long goodbyes for Mary Salas, followed by long hellos for Steve Castaneda and long welcome-backs for Jerry Rindone. I headed for home as soon as Castaneda had been sworn in and made his lengthy welcome-me speech, and when I came through the kitchen door, about 5:40 p.m., there was Dad in the kitchen, trying to dial the phone. “I was trying to call you,” he said. “I was starting to get concerned.”

I opened a beer for him, and now he’s watching the news. My exciting life.

December 8 Wednesday

Up at 6:00, as usual. Still reading in Wondrous Strange, the new biography of Glenn Gould. I’ve said this before, but it was such a damn shame that he didn’t live to see the dawn of the age of the Internet. Gould would have taken to the internet like a big-city wardheeler to a kickback. It was made for the likes of him, obsessed with communication but at the same time plagued by an absolute allergy to direct human contact. Glenn Gould armed with a web browser, a blog and e-mail would have indeed been a force to be reckoned with in cyberspace. In fact I can see where he might have disappeared into cyberspace altogether, keeping his own death a secret and living on, on on as some disembodied cyberpresence, his music morphing everywhere in swapped sound files, the subject of endless buzz and speculation in chatrooms and on web sites. Sort of like he is.

I’ve joined 24 Hour Fitness, (to hell with Brett Davis and his mini-gym) but I have yet to actually work out there. I thought of going after work today, but 5-7 p.m. is their busiest time, so it was easy to talk myself out of that. But I have to get back to the gym, and soon. I can already see the body fat creeping back. My last gym workout was a week ago yesterday, my last outdoor jog last Saturday. And there’s all that noontime beer I’ve been slamming down when I come home for lunch. Gotta cut that shit out.

Whatever the culprit is, it’s not lack of sleep. (Saw a news item yesterday that said scientists have found a correlation between lack of sleep and obesity.) Last night I slept about nine hours. I went to bed at 9 p.m. last night. Nothing else to do. Once John Wayne in Cahill, United States Marshal was over, there was nothing to do but go to bed. Three months, three weeks and six days until baseball.

"Rochelle" from the Jenna Druck Foundation called this morning, and I’m afraid I hung up on her. I was being gently upbraided for supposedly hurting some woman’s feelings with a remark I hoped would be helpful during that circle-of-mourners I attended last week. For the life of me I can’t remember what I said to this bimbo, whose brother recently hanged himself, nor do I especially care, callous as that may sound. Hey, I just experienced grief and loss myself, and I don’t see anyone being especially careful to spare my feelings, but I’m always getting jumped on for supposedly bruising someone else’s lil’ tootsies. I cut Rochelle off with “Don’t worry about it, because I won’t be coming by again,” and hung up the phone. She immediately tried to call again, but I let voicemail get it and walked out the door.

She called again about six hours later. “I’m sorry if I offended you, I didn’t mean to,” she said. “No, I apologize for hanging up on you,” I said. “That was childish. I shouldn’t have done that.”

I don’t know if she gets a percentage on the number of bodies who show up at these grief sessions, but she certainly is determined to keep me coming back. I did tell her that I got little out of last week’s session because “A roomful of twentysomething chicks and I don’t live on the same planet.” She now wants me to come to the “parents” grief group, which meets tomorrow night. There I’m more likely to be interacting with people closer to my own age and experience if not background. (And, it is to be hoped, a group less likely to make “like” every other word they say.)

December 9

Thursday

A snapshot of life around here without Lynne: yesterday Dad emptied out the washing machine of clothes that I had been tossing in there, preparing to wash. Declaring them “clean,” he threw all my dirty clothes into the dryer, and ran the dryer. So we have a dryer full of dirty clothes. Later he also emptied out the dishwasher, which I had been gradually filling with dirty dishes, and neatly put away all the dirty dishes—plates, cups, knives, forks and spoons, food still stuck to them. All were tucked neatly back into the cupboards and drawers, dirty. I had to go through the cupboards and drawers, retrieve everything, and run the dishwasher. What he can’t see isn’t there. He can’t see the food stuck to the dishes, so he thinks they’re clean. And there’s no arguing with him. All you can do is wait until he’s asleep in his chair and then go and undo the damage.

December 11

Saturday

Weighed in at 186 after a pre-breakfast three-miler. So I’ve gained four pounds in the last two months. I weighed 182 on my birthday in October. I have to remind myself that when I embarked on this working out program 10 months ago, I weighed about 200 and my target weight was 185. Anything under that is gravy, no joke intended. So I’ve only actually crept up one pound over my target weight. One thing that will help, though: quit coming home in the middle of the day and slamming down 1-2 cans of MGD, or ¾ of a bottle of Merlot, with your lunch.

Jaime Bonilla cancelled on me again yesterday. Talk about high-handed dealings with people: we were to meet for lunch at 12:30. About 11:15 his secretary calls me and says Mr. Bonilla has been detained by business (again.) Lunch is out: I’m being “summoned” to his office Monday morning, at either 10 or 11 a.m., my choice.

Give me one good reason why I should show up.

I want to make more than $9.25 an hour. There’s a dandy reason.

We are back once again to the days of the hot stove league around here. News today: the Padres, who reacquired Woody Williams from St. Louis this week, have lost David Wells for next season, which will in all likelihood be Wells’ last. The Red Sox offered him $8 million, twice what the Padres were offering, and he’s packing his bag for Bunker Hill. Meanwhile, Steve Finley, Mr. Job Hopper, who went from the Diamondbacks to the Dodgers last season, has accepted a $14 million contract from the Anaheim Angels.

Drove out to Coronado this afternoon, just to see if anyone was surfing. It was foggy in Coronado, and nobody was.

Went around the corner and had coffee with Araiza after that. Borrowed a stack of CD’s from him, mostly Glenn Gould.

Foggy here, by nightfall.

December 13

Monday

Yesterday afternoon, after more than two months of fiddle-fucking, I finally got around to having that “blind date” with Jill’s friend Sandy, which Jill has been trying to orchestrate since October.

Obviously, Jill isn’t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree if she thought this 62-year-old woman and I would be any kind of a match. For one thing, she’s 62 years old. Yes, she is attractive for her age, if something short of the “drop-dead gorgeous” that Jill kept touting over and over, although a quick glance at her neck and the area around her mouth are giveaways. But that wasn’t my main problem. Had she turned out to be some wild n’ crazy, randy gal, I could easily have overlooked those things.

But no: she showed up with a plate of cookies for me, (nice touch) and with a religious pamphlet clutched in one hand. She was determined, apparently, that our lunch together would be the opening tableaux in her ultimately-successful campaign to bring me to Jesus and salvation. As the French say, “un-un.” Over lunch at Galley on the Marina, I explained to her, as gently as I could, that pentacostal Protestants have been trying to drag me to Jerry Falwell-land for 35 years, and I am not going to make that trip. Not now, not ever.

What was Jill thinking? I don’t want to get within 100 miles of a born-again Christian. I haven’t had a woman since 2001. I want to get laid, for chrissakes, not saved!!

Later the same afternoon, I went to what was supposed to be a “surprise birthday party” at Michael and Lisa’s house. Only problem was, I was the only guest who showed up. Even J.D. Hawk declined to come along, and it's not like him to turn down free food. No, it was Michael and Lisa, plus Lisa's sons Ted and Willem, and me. Lisa, as usual, served a good meal: Beef Wellington, with cheesecake for dessert. Michael had just come in from a matinee performance of the latest play in which he’s appearing, which he blithely describes as “a piece of crap.” After dinner Michael and the boys played a lively game of Pitt, (nine-year-old Willem loves card games as much as he hates food: he didn’t touch a morsel and in fact even refused dessert) in which I declined to join.

After that, it was back home to fix Dad’s supper. We watched Open Range with Robert Duvall and Kevin Costner. Bed at 9:30.

It was a good weekend for exercise, if for little else. I jogged over three miles on Saturday morning, then yesterday went to my new gym, where I ran 1.5 miles on the treadmill as a warm-up, then lifted weights for about 30 minutes. Obviously a change of regimen was indicated: I’m as sore as hell this morning, which means my body had gotten too accustomed to the repeated lifting routines I was doing at Brett Davis’ gym. Yesterday, obviously, using a new set of machines, I worked muscles that haven’t been worked in a while. Biceps, triceps and shoulders are all sore.

December 14 Tuesday

Not quite dragging like I was yesterday, but still felt washed-out all day and accomplished little. Yesterday was a complete waste. I attended a Bob Filner press conference, germaine to nothing of any interest to us, but as I said before, I think my “new” editor is under direct orders to be nice to Bob Filner, which is also the reason why nary a week goes by these days without us running at least one “hooray for Bob Filner” letter on our Op-Ed page. At any rate, I was instructed to attend this press conference, at which Filner was little but a disembodied voice on the phone—he addressed us by speakerphone from Washington. The occasion was the springing-from-Mexican-jail of an American woman who has languished in prison in Ensenada for a year and a half after getting shook down for trying to buy prescription drugs in Tijuana. Filner helped her get out of jail: media party time.

From there I went to a one-hour meeting with Jaime Bonilla, who was nice enough to give me a small box of Cuban Cohibas, but his proposal for a one-hour news program in the afternoon, while interesting, will not be do-able if he only wants to hire me on a part-time basis to do it, which is what it sounded like. A one-hour news program is a lot of news gathering, editing and production: I don’t think I could do that and continue working at the Star-News, which I think is what Jaime had in mind. I’ll write him a nice thanks-but-no-thanks letter.

All that was yesterday, a day which was capped off with me putting a meat loaf in the oven, mopping the kitchen floor, and settling down with Dad to watch Kirk Douglas in Spartacus.

Today was less interesting still. The closest thing to excitement came at midday, when I came home for lunch to find Dad primed and ready to throw a screaming fit about “Those goddamned people who keep bringing that goddamned food to the door.” This senile little man, who has no friends in the world, is convinced that the Salvation Army’s bringing him a hot lunch twice a week so I don’t have to make his lunch is going to give “everybody” the idea that he’s “on welfare.” How I wanted to grab him and scream in his face, “What EVERYBODY are you talking about??!! Anyone in this town who ever KNEW you is DEAD!!!” As it was, rather than spend an hour in the kitchen listening to him fuming, spitting and repeating himself, I put on my jacket and went back out the door. Returning to the Star-News office, I asked Brooke Binkowski if she’d like to have lunch at Ernie’s, my treat. So off we went to Ernie’s. They aren’t used to seeing me there on a Tuesday; they had run out of burgundy (again) so I had to drink Chablis, and when I asked for ranch dressing on my salad, I got bleu cheese.

And that was the day’s excitement.

I’m down to the last 15 pages of Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould. More about that tomorrow.

December 17

Friday

Let’s see, my last entry was Tuesday. Wednesday night I dropped in on a public hearing about the Chula Vista Bayfront Master Plan, held at the CV Women’s Club. It was crushingly dull and I was crushingly fatigued, so I only stayed about 30 minutes, then returned home (through a fog, literally) to prepare Dad’s supper. El Dorado with John Wayne and Robert Mitchum afterwards.

Yesterday, Thursday, I went in to the newspaper office at 7:15 a.m. I was so far behind with preparing this week’s newspaper that I had to give myself a head start. I spent the morning cranking out copy, including an editorial. Carlos was especially slow with his editing. I had asked Jennifer Hodge to meet me at Ernie’s for lunch at 1 p.m. But Carlos was taking his sweet time to the point where I had to call Jennifer back and make it 1:30.

Jenn was late, but so what? The paper was off to the printer. I had my usual: grilled whitefish with fries, a vegetable on the side and a dinner salad, plus a half-liter of the lousy cheap burgundy they serve there. Jenn ordered a root beer and “frings.” “Where do you keeping FINDING these people?” laughed Pam, the waitress. She was alluding to the fact that whoever I have lunch with at Ernie’s these days, whether it’s Jenn or J.D. Hawk, invariably they order no meal, but just some little snack such as “frings,” a plateful of french fries mixed with onion rings.

But no matter. Bubbly little Jenn is an ideal lunch companion. She’s a genius cartoonist and I'm just a tired old reporter, but she keeps telling me she thinks I’m a genius. Would that it were true. Given what I know about her generation, the simple fact that I’ve read a few books is enough to make her eyes pop out. People her age, by and large, spend most of their time playing computer games with names like Grand Theft Gang Rape Part 4. Jenn is delightful, though. She’s a giggly, highly entertaining combination of percolating hormones and sweet little Mormon girl. At 21, she can’t quite decide whether she wants to continue being a good girl or go off the deep end and start being a bad girl, though one gets the impression that her idea of misbehavior would be something rather tame, like what used to be called heavy petting. After lunch we returned to the newspaper office and she closeted herself with Carlos for a while. (I think every last one of the girls at the Star-News office has a crush on Carlos, starting with Chavonne and including Jennifer, but that’s a subject for another entry.)

Adventure last night: Carla came over so she and I could listen, together, to the recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Hodie that I had given her for her birthday. Sounds like a simple thing, right? Nope. Not with our 90-year-old toddler hovering around. Although Carla brought Ricky along, presumably so he could distract Dad while she and I listened to music in the back bedroom, Dad got his nose out of joint because Carla and I were closeted in the back of the house instead of being in the living room fawning all over him. He came toddling in here and started into some speech about “you people” wanting to “be away from me,” etc. Carla tried to explain to him that we were listening to music, something in which he would have no interest in any case, but he didn’t want to hear that, he was having too much fun sulking over the fact that he wasn’t the center of attention. I stalked into the kitchen while Carla tried to mollify him; I wanted no part of that, I just wanted him to go back into the living room, sit the hell down, shut the fuck up and watch Gunsmoke so we could listen to our goddamned music in peace. “It’s SUCH fun, living with a four-year-old,” I said to Carla.

“Next time, we listen to music at my house,” she said.

Finished reading Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould early Tuesday morning. I remember my mother’s long-ago remark about Gould: “He’s not the kind of person I’d want to have breakfast with.” Indeed. What an odd duck he was, a combination of Mozart and Jonathan Edwards, of Ferruccio Busoni and Howard Hughes. I have wondered for decades why there are certain things about Gould with which I identify closely, others that repel me. His keyboard style is my favorite above all others, as clear and sharp and cleanly articulated as a still life by Cezanne. I even share some of his oddities, such as preferring the misty north to the tropical south, and his affinity for cloudy days. Other things about him rub me hugely the wrong way: his horse-blindered vision, his stuck-CD obstinacy about his quirky notions, his club-footed humor and his prissy puritanism. Also, hypochondria is something I can relate to not at all: in my view, you take care of yourself and you try to avoid prescription drugs to the greatest extent possible. Even when I have a cold, I balk at taking anything stronger than Tylenol or Benadryl. Living like Gould did, fussing and obsessing about every ache and pain, ingesting prescription drugs by the carload, taking his blood pressure every five minutes, his pulse every ten, sounds to me like life in the outer office of hell. Perhaps Kevin Bazzana had a point when he wrote that in one sense, it was a blessing that Gould didn’t live into old age. He was hypochondriacal enough at 40. Imagine what he would have been like at 90! But no matter. Much can be forgiven the guy who recorded the Bach A major fugue BWV 864 in the way that he did.

December 19

Sunday

Stayed in bed until almost 7 a.m. today. I’d had one of those nights, nights that, by the time the dawn appears, I feel like I’ve been in bed for a month.

Went to 24 Hour Fitness this morning about 8:30. Lifted weights for about 40 minutes. But going there once a week isn’t going to do me any good.

There is a Santa Ana condition upon us: it’s 40 degrees at dawn, 80 degrees by noon.

After the gym I drove over the Coronado, just out of curiosity, to see if anyone was surfing. I could see forever as I drove out along the Coronado peninsula: the mountains, downtown, Point Loma. Not a trace of haze or smog. The ocean as calm as a blue table-top in the sunshine.

Down the beach from the Hotel del Coronado, there were about a dozen people surfing. The weather was good, certainly, but the surf looked problematical to my untrained eye. Five-foot rollers were periodically coming in, but between them there was little but wash, and the rollers were breaking so fast that it appeared as though the surfers were missing a lot of them: I watched surfers trying to launch themselves on waves only to have the waves get away from them. One guy did get a nice, long ride, then came in and walked up the beach with his surfboard on his head. As he passed me, I noticed that he appeared to be Samoan. Well, natch. If he was a native Hawaiian, he's probably been surfing all his life. I watched for a few minutes, squinting in the blinding sun, (I did not have sunglasses with me) then drove on home.

Went to Costco to buy a new vacuum cleaner. My life is just too exciting for words.

Alex Zarcone, the attorney in Bonita, gave me another paralegal assignment. This time I’m supposed to do some research for him regarding California Civil Code section 49C. But today is the only day I have to do it, and I’m cooking dinner for the family, plus fighting a rear-guard action against Dad, who as usual is doing everything short of tackling Alicia in order to prevent her from cleaning this house. I’m trying to approximate a Brazilian-style feijoada, which I have not had since I lived in Brazil myself. Naturally I’ve had to cut corners. Black beans are available locally, but I’ve had to substitute turnip greens for kale, and as for linguica, Albertson’s smoked sausage had to step in, but it’s close enough. However no store around here, not even ones with Hispanic food sections, carries farofa, the powdered white root that Brazilians sprinkle over feijoada. Just have to do without it.

Tomorrow morning I have to finish a Credit Today interview, then I have my regular job. Zarcone wants this legal research done by Thursday. I don’t know when I’m going to be able to find the time to do it.

December 20 Monday

Dodging the onslaught of Christmas this year has proven easier, so far, than I thought it would be. And by the way, I never thought that “dodging the onslaught of Christmas” would be something I would want to do, but that’s the effect Lynne’s death has had, not only on me but on Carla and Madelon too, to judge from what I hear.

It gets in “through the chinks,” as it were: Dad and I were watching a John Wayne movie on AMC yesterday, for example, and at every commercial break (and I still find it morally outrageous that AMC carries commercials, the greedy, greedy bastards. TCM manages without them, which is why I incline toward TCM most of the time) they were putting in a plug for their 24-hour Miracle on 34th Street marathon starting Christmas Eve. And the lights are everywhere, not to mention the store displays and newspaper ads. But I don’t watch network TV, which has helped to keep the holidays at bay, and of course my own collection of holiday CDs remains in the closet, unplayed. As for the holiday videos, most of them are lying, at this moment, stacked on the floor in the now-unoccupied granny flat that used to be “Lynne’s room,” collecting dust along with everything else in there. That place hasn’t been cleaned since before Lynne died, and it is truly filthy.

Today is Alicia’s 22nd birthday, and tomorrow is the shortest day of the year.

This morning’s Union-Tribune trumpeted the news that the “Bolts,” as the press calls the San Diego Chargers, have won the AFC West title, having defeated the Cleveland Browns yesterday 21-0 for what I think I read is their eighth victory in a row. Football is such a joke: a team’s entire fucking season only consists of 12 games, for chrissakes. It offers none of the nuances of baseball, such as “winning streaks” or “slumps.” You only play once a week, and either take all the marbles or you don’t. But for precisely that reason, plus its prevailing atmosphere of musclebound violence, the game appeals to America’s short attention span and its stupid craving for spectacle. I put football about a notch above professional wrestling.

In fact, the only reason I even mention the Chargers’ winning their division title is as a springboard for a short reflection on how much has changed in my life since the last time they did.

It’s been ten years, on the nose. The Chargers last won their division in 1994, last appeared in the Super Bowl in January, 1995. I was living at 105 9th St. SE in Washington, D.C. at the time, and spending most of my time, both at work and at home, despairing of ever seeing Nadya again. I was writing her letter after letter, in open defiance of the DS rats who had separated us, determined that by hook or by crook I would somehow be reunited with her. Hard to believe now that it was ever that important. In retrospect, it's obvious that I had become somewhat like the Coyote chasing the Roadrunner. The project had become a thing-in-itself. Yes, I loved Nadya, but I can see now that sticking a thumb in DS’ eye was almost as important. Those flag-masturbating bastards were so evil.

I tossed everything but the kitchen sink into those letters to her: the minutiae of my life, newspaper clippings, weather reports, song lyrics, my deepest yearnings. I wanted her to have as complete a picture as possible of me and the world I lived in. I even remember sending her an announcement of the Chargers’ 1995 Super Bowl appearance, (they were dispatched in short order by the San Francisco 49ers) and she could only have cared even less than I did.

December 22

Wednesday

On Monday I took Pepper to the police department animal shelter and put her up for adoption. I just couldn’t see her continuing to live the way she has been living since Lynne died, spending all of her time in the backyard, huddled in the tall grass or under my bicycle, with no human contact outside of me coming out to feed her twice a day. She needs a real home.

We had a splash of drama at the animal shelter. The pet carrier popped open and she jumped out and ran away. I didn’t help matters any by shouting “Pepper! Goddamn it!” That just scared her, and she promptly ran under a parked jeep and climbed up into its underside. Some animal shelter people had to go under there and get her out. But Dorothy York is taking good care of her, and if for some reason she doesn’t manage to find Pepper a new home, I said I would take her back. There will be no euthanasia. She’s such a pretty little cat, I can’t see someone not wanting her.

I really do need a checkup. I’m going to have one right after Christmas. Sunday I lifted weights at the gym. Monday I was 90 years old: no wind, no energy, heart racing, could barely manage to climb a flight of stairs. Yesterday I was perfectly fine again: I bounced out the door at 7:30 a.m., jogged a brisk five kilometers, and could have gone further except I had to get home, shower, change and get to work. This morning I was at the gym again for a sunrise workout—about 40 minutes of weightlifting. I feel okay, but look out, maybe tomorrow I’ll be 90 years old again.

Telephone chat with Rob Scullin Monday night. He was to have left for Philadelphia yesterday for the holidays, and coincidentally, was asking me about my book, Losing Philadelphia. For some reason I had forgotten to tell him about it. I guess he’ll order a copy. He says he has a bookaholic sister who’s dying to read Tower-102.

Speaking of books, when I joined the Folio Society and ordered five of their absurdly overpriced, slipcased deluxe editions, I mistakenly assumed that they would be shipped one by one, and that I would able to pay for them one by one. Uh-uh: yesterday all five books showed up in one big box with an invoice attached for $245.50. I don’t have that kind of money. Dad said he would lend it to me, though. Stupid. Among my orders was a deluxe edition of Joyce’s Dubliners, which I promptly forgot about, and then went out and procured the Everyman’s Library edition on Abebooks. Dumb.

J.D. Hawk called me from La Bella’s yesterday afternoon, late. He wanted me to come over and “hang” with him in the bar. By the time I got there he had been drinking beer for an hour and a half and he was totally shitfaced. “Want to hear a rumor about your editor?” he wheezed. “I heard he’s fucking two young girls in the office, late at night.” “Who the hell told you that?” “Sheila. She fuckin’ called me at midnight to tell me she was workin’ late, and Carlos had two girls in there and he was fuckin’ ‘em. Both of ‘em under 21.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He bought me a Sam Adams, ordered and ate a small pizza, and then I watched him stumble out the door. He’s a sad fuckin’ case.

December 24

Friday

The newspaper office was closed today. Yesterday there were yuletide goodies all over the office, and Linda gave everyone little gifts (I got a bottle of wine and a 2005 surfing calendar), and then, once we got the paper off to the printer, everyone dispersed. I went off for a bibulous lunch at Ernie’s chez the bibulous J.D. Hawk, then came on home. I went in today to check e-mail and put out a couple of calls, but I was only in the office for around 15 minutes at noon.

Got up this morning at 7 a.m. after “one of those nights.” Awake at 0200, Bob Dylan on the CD Discman until 0315, then back to sleep. No running or lifting today; I decided to give myself a Christmas break. I had done no shopping at all as of this morning, so that was the day’s chief project.

But first I met Armand at the Flamingo, where it was so crowded we couldn’t get served. We moved on to Coco’s, where it was so crowded we were told we would have to wait 15 minutes for a booth, and so on to Jack-in-the-Box, where we had no trouble getting served. Armand called me yesterday, and I feel honor-bound to at least meet him when he does. I treated him to breakfast and gave him $20, (which actually came from Dad, who had just sent me to the ATM) and that’s about all I can do for him this Christmas, the poor bastard. I hate to think of him spending Christmas Eve sitting at Denny’s, but I’m afraid that if I were to invite him over here there would be simply no getting him to leave.

He said he would like to come over here and listen to some music together, as we used to do more than 30 years ago when we were kids. But I told him I’d get a boombox and we could meet at the J Street Marina or something. I don’t want him coming over here, because it would require too much explaining to Dad, especially the bizarre way Armand looks these days.

About 1:00 I met up with Araiza. We were to go out to Border’s Books in Mission Valley, where I wanted to shop for a poetry anthology to give Ricky for Christmas. It was Araiza’s birthday today, so I treated him to a pricey lunch at Chevy's, a Tex-Mex place in Mission Valley. He’s as tactless and in-your-face as ever with his political posturing: he insisted on wearing his overcoat with the homemade “Fuck Bush” button on it, even though I as much as told him to take that button off before riding in my car.

“I hope someone takes a swing at you, and I hope I’m there to see it,” I said to him.

“Spoken like a true friend,” he replied. Nothing between us has changed.

Speaking of friends and quarrels, when I returned from this shopping-and-luncheon outing around 4:30, Brett Davis had been here. He left me a conciliatory note and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label. OK, I’ll call him right after Christmas and get things patched up there.

Anya sent me a delightful Christmas e-card from Moscow. I had forgotten to send her one, so I tagged one for New Year’s, which means more to Russians anyway.

Worked on a draft of a poem to be called Great Blue Heron this morning. Amadeus kept interrupting me with his hawking and sneezing. I finally shut him out of the room so I could work in peace. He’s curled up on my bed sound asleep right now.

December 25

Saturday

365 days ago I was writing in these pages of what a damn shame it was that Lynne was still asleep on a Christmas morning that she would have so enjoyed: it was gray, cool and drizzly, the kind of “Christmas weather” she loved.

Now, one turn around the sun later, she’s gone, and from the standpoint of the weather, it’s just as well. The weather upon us this Christmas morning is more typical of the area: good surfing weather, in other words. Crystal clear, with a high-pressure system in place and not a trace of wind. 40 degrees on the porch when I got up, and it will be pushing close to 80 by early afternoon. This is the kind of Christmas Lynne used to complain about.

We revived the family tradition of Christmas Eve pizza last night. In recent years Lynne and I have kept the spark lit with trips to Fillippi’s, but this year Carla and I decided to bring back the “homemade” tradition. I did cut corners: unable to find hot roll mix at Albertson’s, I brought home ready-to-bake pizza crusts and all we did was pile on the toppings. Pepperoni, mushrooms, sausage, olives, artichoke hearts. We made three pizzas, and one hell of a mess in the kitchen, but Carla cleaned up afterwards. I fetched from the floor in Lynne’s room, dust-covered, the VHS tape of Holiday Inn starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, and we ran that in the living room, although its companion-piece in Crosbyana, White Christmas, is something that I’m not sure will ever be shown in this house again. I certainly couldn’t face it this year; it was simply Lynne’s favorite movie.

Called and spoke with Jan at some length. We joked, as usual, about what Jews do at Christmas. She made me laugh with her observation about the utter cheesiness of trying to turn Hanukkah into “Jewish Christmas.” “Yeah, on the Jewish calendar, Hanukkah is about as important as Goundhog Day,” I said. “I might send you a card for Jewish New Year, but I would never send you one for Hanukkah.” Jan mentioned that she’s going in for some minor surgery the first week of January; evidently he has the same “uterine fiber” condition that Madelon had when she was…well, when she much younger than Jan is. I made a calendar note to call her a couple of days afterward.

Up at 7:00 this morning. Somehow Nietszche, whom I’ve been reading these past few days, didn’t seem quite the thing to inaugurate Christmas Day, merry or not, so I hunted around among my bookshelves until I found something more appropriate: Milton’s delightful bit of juvenilia On The Morning of Christ’s Nativity. Carla is serving an 11 a.m. brunch, no Christmas dinner this year. So I skipped breakfast and just had coffee, although I did make Dad a bowl of oatmeal.

Called Berigan and left a message around 8:15. He returned my call about an hour later. Much talk of the usual sort; Glenn Gould, whose biography I just finished reading. But also much talk of his move back to the west coast, which is going to be a logistic nightmare. “I figure about $2,500,” he said. “No, you’d better be thinking more in the $5,000-$10,000 range,” I said. “You easily have 15,000 pounds of stuff, and they charge by the pound.”

“It isn’t really much of a merry Christmas for anyone this year,” Berigan remarked. He certainly speaks for himself and for me, what with him confronted with a homing to Chula Vista this winter to care for his decrepit parents, and me having lost my sister three months ago. It isn’t like him to be negative about anything unless it’s the abominable church-basement performance of The Marriage of Figaro he talked about sitting through a week or so back. But that’s the kind of season it’s been: enough to elicit a helpless shrug even from the normally-sanguine Der Berigan.

December 26

Sunday

Christmas brunch at Carla’s included much imbibing: spiked eggnog, straight rum, cognac. By the time Dad and I got back home, I didn’t feel like doing much of anything except “veg out” in front of the tube. I ran the Alistair Sim Scrooge film, because Lynne or no Lynne, it just wouldn’t be Christmas without that movie. Later I used one more showing of Dr. Zhivago to get Dad and me through the long, lonely Christmas evening. Bed at 9:30.

I’ve come up with a term for my periodic “droops:” I’m going to call it “Noventa No-Wind.” “Noventa” because it makes me feel 90 years old, “No-Wind” because I have none.

I was definitely “Noventa No-Wind” this morning, but after some consideration I thought that, even if aerobic activity is out of the question, perhaps anaerobic is not. Sometimes I can get away with some lifting even if I wouldn’t last two minutes on the treadmill. So I went ahead and drove out to my gym at 8 a.m. this morning.

I wasn’t surprised to find the parking lot nearly full. Yesterday was Christmas, which means this morning everyone was feeling guilty about all the eggnog they chugged down, not to mention the turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, mince pie and all the rest of it. I lifted weights for about 40 minutes, did a few sets of crunches and came on home.

Surprise: about 11:45 a.m. Nadya called me. She said she had tried to call yesterday, but couldn’t get the call through. “Is it permissible to say ‘Merry Christmas’ during the week?” she asked me. “There are certain forces in this country trying to make it impermissible to say ‘Merry Christmas’ anywhere, at any time,” I said. “But it’s perfectly permissible to me.”. She has received the Loreena McKennitt CD I burned for her; it got there unbroken. “The poems are very beautiful,” she said of its lyrics.

She expects to have a 10-day hiatus after 1/01. “I expect you to block out some time to write me a letter,” I said. “You haven’t written me a letter since last February.”

I said I would try to call her on New Year’s, but that’s sometimes a problem because I don’t know how late she’ll be sleeping after partying all night on New Year’s Eve, which is de rigeur for Russians. “You might call me on the 31st,” she suggested. “But I only know how to say S’nov’im godom,” I said. “Can you say that before it’s actually the new year?” “You say, ‘Na stu’paeshem nov’im godom,” she said. “To the coming New Year.”

Na stu’paeshem nov’im godom. It can’t be any worse than this one was. Oooh, don’t say that, or it will figure out some way to be.

December 28 Tuesday

Up at 5:55. We were supposed to get a massive rainstorm last night, but what I saw this morning did not suggest “massive.” It was wet outside, and a bit windy, but other than that, it didn’t look that much different from any other late-December dousing this area might get.

Catastrophe in Asia: A 9.9 earthquake under the Indian Ocean on Sunday sent tsunamis in every direction. 23,000 dead in nine countries, at last count. Since Chris is in that general area of the world, I sent an e-mail to check up on her, but she replied that she was not affected. She’s on the island of Borneo, out of harm’s way. That kind of harm, anyway.

Read this morning in Kaufmann’s introduction to Zarathustra. He flies in the face of much of what has been written in the past about Nietzsche, that he was some sort of proto-fascist or whatever. Writers like Bertrand Russell overlooked Nietzsche’s sense of irony, it seems to me, but what I should probably do is seek out some more contemporary writings on Nietzsche: Kaufmann was writing in the 1950s, after all.

It was not raining when I went out to do a three-miler shortly after 7 a.m., but it was when I got back. Weighed in at 186 again, which means my normal, clothed, hydrated weight is around 190. But that’s okay as long as the body fat stays down. I can weigh 190, but as long as it’s more muscle than mayonnaise, I’m doing all right.

December 29

Wednesday

As of this morning, the death toll in the south Asia disaster is climbing close to 77,000. The Red Cross says it might pass 100,000. There’s no “as usual” with a catastrophe of this magnitude, but as usual with natural disasters of most kinds, there seems to have been some shortsightedness involved. Earthquakes are common in the area around Sumatra, according to one geologist I saw quoted in the news, anyway. But even with that in mind, in recent years seaside resorts have been mushrooming in coastal areas where they clearly never should have been built, simply because this sort of thing was likely to happen. But as usual profits outweighed prudence.

Jerry Orbach has died of prostate cancer in New York. I vaguely remember his heyday as a Broadway actor: when he was starring in Promises, Promises back around the end of the 1960s, he was so “in” that he appeared in a “Dewar’s Profile” advertisement for Dewar’s Scotch, which I remember seeing on the back of Playboy magazine sometime early in 1970.* The only detail I recall from that ad, beyond his black turtleneck, was “last book read.” It was Portnoy’s Complaint, which was all the rage then.

Rain, at times powerfully hard, during the night. The racket woke me up around 3 a.m., and then the thunder and lightning started. Got up at 7:00, and this morning I have to take Dad to the dentist to pick up his new set of teeth. So I’m going to be late getting to the newspaper office, and I have a short deadline this week: the company’s annual holiday luncheon is tomorrow, so the paper has to be ready to go to the printer by tomorrow morning, not early tomorrow afternoon as is usually the case.

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is the worst week in the year for journalists (unless you’re covering the south Asia beat for CNN) and on Monday I was desperate; I had one little feature “in the can,” but nothing else. And not a damn thing for page one. National City and Chula Vista city halls were both buttoned up tight, as were all the school districts. Everybody is taking time off this week. Then my editor, who isn’t much of an editor but sometimes has really good ideas, suggested there might be a story there: why is a city the size of Chula Vista, seventh fastest-growing city in the nation, closing down its city offices for 10 days at Christmastime? Isn’t that sort of a “small town” thing to do, and not the practice one would expect of a city that wants to “play with the big boys?”

It was late, but I got started making phone calls. And now I do have a story for page one.
I cranked out a “top stories of the year” thing for page-three filler. A fluff piece or two and I’m finished for the week. Bring on 2005.

*I checked. It was Playboy, April, 1970.

December 30

Thursday

And another celebrity death: bandleader Artie Shaw. He was 94. I thought he died years ago. I’ll bet a lot of other people did, too. I asked Dad if he could remember Artie Shaw. He couldn’t. And this afternoon he asked me how to spell “beer.”

The death toll in the south Asia tsunamis has topped 116,000. An interesting detail, though: they found no corpses of dead animals. Apparently the animals all had enough sense to get out of the way. The next big worry is disease. Fresh drinking water is being flown in, but with all those decaying bodies lying around, cholera will be next.

Meanwhile, Chris e-mailed me some pictures of the house they gave her to live in while she’s in Brunei. It’s a freaking palace, of course. There was also an e-mail from Anya, acknowledging the New Year’s e-card I sent her. Putin has given all of Russia ten days off for the New Year holiday, and she’s planning a trip north with her little boy, whom she says she doesn’t see much these days with her hectic working schedule.

The company holiday luncheon was this afternoon at The Links, the restaurant at the Chula Vista Golf Course. One hell of a dreary affair. The coffee was tepid, the food was indifferent, the service was lousy and there was no bar—everybody drank water. I was as bored as could be, but I had to stay until it was over, and it didn’t end until a quarter to three. Last year’s party at Galley on the Marina was far superior. If I’m still with this company next year at Christmas time, I plan to lobby for a different place.

Up this morning at 6:10. Out an hour later to jog five kilometers, and I sure did a number on my right foot. I don’t know if it was the way I had my shoe tied or what, but I was limping for the rest of the day.

Received some books in the mail: Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus and Neruda’s Isla Negra. I certainly got ripped off on that second purchase: it turned out to be a tiny, 93-page paperback with just a smattering of selected lyrics. I thought I was buying Memorial de Isla Negra, his monumental autobiographical poem. And I paid 12 bucks for this little thing, once you tack on the shipping. Robbery.

December 31

Friday

I end the year with a hands-around worthy of Arthur Schnitzler: after having disturbing dreams last night about Valerie Blake, whom I have not seen or heard tell of in close to 17 years, I decided to try and look her up.

It wasn’t hard. Some people are easier to Google than others, and it just happened to turn out that Valerie is some sort of high-powered suburban D.C. realtor these days, with a presence all over the Internet. When a series of links came up, I chose one, (“Valerie Blake” is not an uncommon name and I might have found 26 Valerie Blakes) clicked on it, and oh yes, there was Valerie. No mistaking that pretty face, still pretty after all these years.

I e-mailed her, thinking, “It’s an office e-mail address, probably I’ll hear from her on Monday if at all.” No—to my surprise she answered immediately. She was on her way to a New Year’s Eve party, but took time out to tap out a few lines to me. That was nice of her. And a nice way to end what on the whole has been…well, no, I really can’t say that this year has been all that dismal outside of that one monstrous dismality sticking out of the middle of it like an unexploded particle bomb: September 10, the day of Lynne’s death. That’s about the biggest black eye a year could have, but from my standpoint, had Lynne not died, this year would definitely go into my archives as better than last, anyway. At least I had a job this year, no violent uprooting due to unemployment, and lo and behold, I even won a journalism award, which was nice. So, reconnecting with Valerie definitely has a “new year” feel to it. The long climb back up Garbage Mountain has begun. Perhaps Valerie and I will have the kind of scintillating dialogue that’s been so roaringly absent from my life lately. I sure could use it. I could use a better-paying job, too, but for the moment I’ll depart 2004 chatting with Valerie. That’s a good thing.

CD shopping with Araiza in Pacific Beach late this afternoon. I picked up a complete Der fliegende Hollaender for $11.95, plus some Strauss (Rosenkavalier Suite) and some of Arthur Rubinstein’s Brahms. We had a bite to eat at Denny’s, and of course he had to flirt with the waitress, who was probably 20 years his junior. He’ll never grow up. Rain: fender-benders coming and going,with CHP cars all along the railings. Southern Californians will never learn to drive in the rain.

Marilyn Williams had called to say Happy New Year and she left a message. I called her back and we chatted for a few minutes, but Dad, thinking I was talking with Carla, got his nose out of joint about us “having secrets” from him, i.e. not conducting our conversation at the top of our lungs so he can hear every word. When I told him I wasn’t talking to Carla, but to Marilyn, he retreated to another tactic: “It’s always so LOUD in here!” (how would he know? He’s deaf.) “I don’t hear anything,” I replied. “Kelley, you can’t CLOSE A DOOR without SLAMMING IT!” he declared.

That was it, brother. I got in the car and drove away. Carla wasn’t home, so I went to Walgreen’s, bought some Tylenol P.M. and when I got home, slipped him two with his other medicines. I hoped they would put him to sleep in his chair. But we sat through Shane starring Alan Ladd, and he stayed awake until the end, although he hardly touched the food I put in front of him. Bed around 10. Bring on 2005. This is as good as it gets.

November, 2004

2004-11-28T09:06:00.000-08:00

November 1 Monday

Carla and I returned from Spokane Saturday night. Noteworthy from the flight back: between Spokane and Phoenix we had, for the most part, good clear weather, and our flight took us directly past the Grand Canyon. I had never seen it before. Carla was out of camera film, but I grabbed my video camera and shot a few moments of tape out the window of the plane.

I wrote almost 2,700 words in this journal on the trip, about half of that on the plane.

Last night was of course Halloween. I spent a nerve-wracking two hours, between 5:30 and 7:30, jumping up to get the door every time I heard little footsteps on the front porch. It seems to me that there were more kids this year than last. By the time I turned off the porch light and closed the door for the night, I think I was down to four pieces of candy. And I had bought three bags.

Controlling my 90 year-old father was the other hard part of that. Having all these strangers coming to the door, whom he could neither hear nor recognize, had him jumpy, especially after it got dark. He envisions himself as surrounded by thieves and burglars; he tends to lock the back door even in the middle of the day. I couldn’t keep his attention on Gunsmoke (sigh!). He kept suggesting that I just “Close the door for the night. This is all over.” I kept telling him I wanted to at least stay open until the candy was gone. But for a few moments I thought I was going to have to go out and get more candy. Trick-or-treaters were coming to the door in groups of six and eight. Of course we who live around here know what’s happening: for the past few years, truckloads of kids have been coming up from Tijuana to trick-or-treat in South Bay neighborhoods. It really increases the traffic. I was relieved to close the door at 7:30. I really did have only four pieces of candy left, and wasn't inclined to get in the car and drive to Albertson's for more.

But oh my god, we have truly entered the abyss. Twice over the weekend Dad has lamented that we no longer have baseball to watch, and no one regrets that more than me. I’m facing four and a half months of Gunsmoke for two hours every night, before the Westerns Channel goes to a feature film at 8 p.m.

Then Dad got up this morning and threw a fit because I had opened the windows in the kitchen. He has the heater blasting away, and I want some fresh air. He stalked about, slamming the windows shut. Then, a few minutes later, after I had finished shaving and went to tell him that Joey would come later to take him for a haircut, he went into his Drama Queen mode and announced that he was no longer going to make his monthly doctor’s appointment. “I’m not going to the doctor anymore,” he announced. “I’m TIRED of living.”

“Okay,” I replied. “You want some more coffee?”

I duly called Carla and passed this on to her. “That will last about two days,” she said. “You know, like him announcing he wasn’t going to eat mayonnaise anymore.”

I went around to Araiza’s house yesterday afternoon to return some CDs I had borrowed. We had a cup of coffee in the kitchen and I talked about my Spokane trip, including the episode of the great blue heron. “There’s a poem there,” he said. But then, safe in the knowledge that he will get no argument from any member of his own family because he has brainwashed them all with his newly-discovered left-wing, hate-America bullshit, he launched into some of his cliché-ridden anti-Bush sewage. He’s just too hip and with-it for us mere mortals. Someone should explain to him that he is not cutting-edge with all of this 60’s crap: he's throwing around the same rhetoric we were hearing out of Berkeley in '68. And this ain't Berkeley, '68. Herbert Marcuse has been dead for more than 25 years. If Araiza is waiting for Che to rise up out of his grave and start the Revolution, well, all I can tell him is, a lot of other people were waiting for the same thing, and most of them are now in rest homes or worse.

“I better leave before we get into a fight,” I said, heading for the door. “By the way,” I said, “I love coming over here to visit you in my car, because the whole time I’m here, you have a car parked in your driveway with a Bush/Cheney sticker on it, for all the world to see.”

That shut him up.

Called Randy Couts yesterday morning. Because it rained as recently as Thursday, my surfing lesson has been postponed yet again. By the time we get back out on the waves, it will have been a full month since our last session.

That was actually a thread in the discourse when Carla and I were up north over the weekend. She kept urging me to buy Spokane real estate, and I kept replying, “But if I come back here, where would I surf?”

November 2 Tuesday

Election day. This time tomorrow morning we could be looking at the unspeakable: President Kerry, which would please Osama bin Laden to his dirty toenails. Bin Laden released a video last week that was all but a campaign spot for Kerry.

It’s only 5:30 p.m. but CNN already has Kerry 11 electoral votes ahead of Bush, 77-66.

I got up this morning at 5:30 with a cluster headache so nasty that, after going to 7-Eleven for some Tylenol and taking three of them, I ended up crawling back into bed for about an hour. I never do that, which means this particular skullbuster was indeed a skull buster. I know exactly what caused it, too. Last night I baked some delicious stuffed salmon for Dad’s and my supper, and nibbling while I prepared his plate, I ruined my own appetite and hence, went to bed with a bellyful of liquor and practically no food. I paid for it, all right.

Still had the eyeball-dinger when I went out the door at 8:30, but by midmorning I was all right. Voted on my way to work, and stopped back by 7-Eleven to hit the ATM machine for a money order. I found out last week that the checks I’ve been writing are on my old SDMCU account, which has been closed, which means I’m going to bounce about five or six checks, and had to order more checks for the new account, which won’t come for another 10 days. So, for the time being, I’m back to paying my bills with money orders. This morning’s ATM stop was for a $134 M.O. to make my student loan payment with.

Beautiful fall day today, which Lynne would have loved, but there is a Santa Ana in the weather forecast, and she would have bitched about that. The extended forecast is for sunshine until Saturday, then partly cloudy, then scattered showers on Sunday, just in time for my next projected surfing lesson. When I call Randy tomorrow to schedule our next session, I think I’ll suggest Saturday so we can do it ahead of the rain. I pointed out to him the fact that, now we have returned to Standard Time, if we meet at 4 p.m. it’s going to be getting dark an hour later. So mornings seem a better bet, although there is the temperature to be factored in. Early mornings are chilly at this time of year. Who wants to be splashing around in the surf when the air temperature is barely 50?

“You’re gonna have a wet suit,” my editor said this morning.

“Yeah, but Randy told me it’s a short one.”

“A spring suit?” Carlos knows the jargon—he used to surf. “That’ll keep you warm, in the spring. But not in the winter.”

I may yet have to go to the Surf Hut in Imperial Beach and buy a full wet suit.

I had a thought today. Actually, it didn’t come to me today, but today is when I decided to write it down: "When I try to imagine what love itself sounds like, what I hear in my head is Mozart." Specifically, what I hear is Dove sono.

November 3 Wednesday

8 a.m. It looks like it's gonna be 2000 all over again, only this time the “Florida” drama will be played out in Ohio. As of early this morning, the presidential race was just about deadlocked, with Kerry only two electoral votes behind Bush, 254-252. It’s going right down to the wire again: New Mexico and Iowa are still up for grabs, but it looks like this time the swing state will be Ohio. An army of lawyers is no doubt lacing up its sneakers as I write these words.

November 4 Thursday

Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. John Kerry decided there was nothing to be gained by dragging the election results through the courts, and at 11 a.m., with Bush leading in the key state of Ohio by more than 100,000 votes, Kerry conceded. Bush is re-elected for another term.

Worked out at the gym last night. Weighed in this morning at 184.

I woke up at 4:00 a.m., though, and somehow knew that I wasn’t going back to sleep.

I had a dream that caused me to wake up sad. When I wake up sad, I tend to want to stay awake, even if my eyelids are drooping, which they are now.

I can’t remember many of the details, but the dream was a fantasia upon a book, a book whose title was the same as the book that Carla and I found on the floor behind Lynne’s dresser the day after she died: Old Friends and Lasting Favorites. It was Volume Four of the ten-volume Golden Treasury of Children’s Literature that Mom bought for us when we were ourselves children, most of which are still in the glass-fronted bookcase in the dining room.

The discovery of this book, on the floor among the dust and trash behind the dresser as we cleaned out Lynne’s room, overwhelmed me with sadness at the time of the discovery. For there could be little question of how it came to be there: obviously it had somehow slipped behind the dresser years ago, and now, like a little time-capsule, was unearthed accidentally in our random cleaning of the room. And like a little time-capsule, it represented an earlier, somewhat happier time, those days some dozen or more years ago when Ricky was a little boy and would sometimes, as a weekend treat, be allowed to go out to the guest house and spend the night with Tia Lynne. There would be cartoons, and pizza, and apparently there would also sometimes be story-reading time before Ricky went to sleep. How else to explain a volume of familiar children’s stories such as Puss in Boots and Rapunzel turning up behind Lynne’s dresser? I’m sure that book had lain behind that dresser for at least a dozen years, maybe more.

I guess the discovery’s poignancy for me lay in its being essentially a double-dose of sadness: the book was obviously an artifact of Ricky’s early childhood, being found where it was. I can’t think of another explanation for its being there. Perhaps if I ask him, Ricky will be able to recall some dim memory of Tia Lynne reading Puss in Boots or The Real Princess to him after tucking him in for the night.

But of course the book is also an artifact of our own shared childhood, Lynne’s, Carla’s and mine. I was about six years old when Mom, no doubt scrimping and saving from the grocery money, managed to bring this set of books into the house. Lynne would have been maybe four or five. They are indeed familiar old friends, those books. I was thumbing through them myself at just about the time I was learning to read. Even at that age, I noticed little details: the first few volumes have a yellow emblem on the back reading, An As-You-Grow Book. The rest say The Golden Treasurry of Children's Literature. I had my own favorites, of course: Dr. Seuss’ Gerald McBoing-Boing especially tickled me at age six.

So the book is an artifact of Ricky’s childhood, and by the way also of his mother’s, and mine, and Lynne’s too. And finding it behind her dresser on the day after she died was a punch in the stomach for me, the sort of moment that makes me want to crawl into the next room and weep, like the moment a couple of weeks ago when Dad, stroking my cat on his lap, starting to sing Love Letters In The Sand. How do you deal with such moments? I don’t know. But I do know that one of them was the root cause of my waking up at four a.m. today. It’s going to be a long day.

November 6 Saturday

Last June, an article I wrote in the Star-News was instrumental in getting big, fat, hated-among-the-rank-and-file Bob Griego squeezed out of his $148,000-a-year job as general manager of the Otay Water District.

This week Jack killed another giant. On Wednesday, the night after the general election, the board of directors of the Tia Juana Valley County Water District voted to surrender their charter to the City of San Diego. Yesterday it became official: LAFCO shut the “waterless district” down forever.

I can’t take sole credit for this moral victory. Howard Freelove was generalissimo in charge of the operation, with help from Mike Giorgino. But relentless press coverage in the Star-News (right up until the new regime under Carlos Davalos forbade me to write another word on this story, potentially-embarrassing as it was to Linda’s favorite congressman, Bob “The Weasel” Filner) was a key factor in driving that coven of tax-leeches out of their little cash-cow boondoggle in the Tijuana river valley. Freelove was in the trenches, but Dupuis was firing artillery salvos through the press. We did it.

I may get to surf this morning, for the first time in more than a month. My last session was Randy was Oct. 2. The following week we were pre-empted by rough surf, and every weekend since then, we’ve been pre-empted by rain. But it didn’t rain last night and the sun is shining now, so I have my board strapped to the top of my car and I’m ready to go.

6:30 p.m. Surfing didn’t go that well. The surf was a tad high for me, and Randy declined to join me—his excuse was that he was fighting a cold, but I think he just didn’t want to bother. He told me to paddle out and try going “solo.” But all I could do was bellyboard; I wouldn’t get close enough to the real breakers to try and surf them, so the 45-minute session was mostly just me paddling around in the soup, catching a few little ones on the downside, practicing my “arching” but making no attempt to stand up. It was the first time I’d used the Craig surfboard I bought from Randy last month, and he also brought me a “spring” suit—a wetsuit with short sleeves and short legs.

He urged me to go out on my own some weekday afternoon and practice by myself.

Lucia sent me $40 in the mail. I had asked for a copy of Wondrous Strange, the new book about Glenn Gould, as a belated birthday gift. She didn’t want to be bothered shopping, so she just sent me the money. In the afternoon, after my surfing lesson and after Dad and I had made a trip to Albertson’s for groceries (yes, Dad was feeling well enough today that he asked to come along) I went around the corner and got Ray Araiza and we went first to the downtown San Diego Borders, where they didn’t have the book, and then to the one in Mission Valley, where they had it, but I wasn’t about to stand in that 50-yard line to pay for it. Home empty-handed.

Carla and Co. are coming over for Sunday dinner tomorrow. I have a pot of split pea soup simmering on the stove. It all feels very “autumn evening,” and for that reason makes me miss Lynne that much more. Mom too—it’s her recipe I’m using. Mom taught me how to make split pea soup years ago.

November 8 Monday

Was on the telephone with Nadya yesterday for about an hour, the first time we had spoken since my sister died. The truth is, I was angry with her (again) and told her so, because she hadn’t so much as sent a sympathy card. So many other people did, but not Nadya, who once meant so much to me. Ah, but I’ve spent a goodly number of hours over the past ten years reconciling myself to the fact that, as much as she once meant to me, I have never especially meant much to her.

“We’ve been going around this mulberry bush for years,” I told her. “You do these things, and I get angry, and then the moment I hear your voice, all is forgiven.”

“But Kelley, you know that I always think of you,” was her reply.

She did say that she had tried to telephone a couple of times, including the Saturday after my birthday, but had gotten no answer. “And I got the bill for those calls yesterday,” she added.

“It couldn’t have been a very big bill, if you got no answers,” I said.

She is such a piece of work. When I mentioned that I was reading a new book about Stalin, she bristled. “How can you still be interested in that?” she demanded. “I am so tired of hearing about that. Nothing has been proven.”

So there you have it: Nadya Grigorievna Stepanenko is probably the last holdout, the last person in Russia, maybe on earth, who still refuses to believe, against a tidal wave of evidence, that Stalin ever killed anybody. Stalin, who was responsible for the deaths of 20 million people. I’m sure she’d like to have him back. Actually, such a desire is not uncommon in Russia, but it’s usually found among the over-65 pensioned crowd. To find someone Nadya’s age who still loves Stalin and longs for his return is very unusual. But I must say she is consistent. Her longing for a return to totalitarianism is no secret. She likes Putin for precisely the same reason Russian liberals dislike him: he’s an iron-fisted strongman, and Nadya likes that. She has no use at all for notions of liberty and free speech; law and order are all she craves.

“Let’s move on to another subject,” I said. “And by the way, if you and I ever see each other again, we are NOT going to talk about Russia. Or if we do, we can talk about the forests and the birch trees, but we are not going to discuss history. Because all we ever do is get into a fight.”

Some years ago, Nadya told Lena Watt that the focus of our relationship, hers and mine, “as lovers,” was going to be working past what she called “the cultural differences.” But this is a cultural difference we will never work past: Nadya was raised to love totalitarianism and I was raised to hate it. She described herself to me, on the telephone ten years ago this month, as “a weak woman,” which was her way of telling me that she would have no part of any such adventure as leaving her beloved Moscow to marry me, whom she didn’t love anyway, but what was the poor woman to do? Her arm was being twisted by the KGB-FSK to do some play-acting: she had been instructed to pretend to be my “girlfriend” so that they might, in turn, sooner or later, get access to classified American documents. They played their card in 1998 when a guy posing as a book publisher tried to get me to accept an envelope full of cash, which I refused. Game over. But I know perfectly well that Nadya was involved with those people up to her eyebrows, despite all the denials she has issued. How else to explain the sudden, unexplained crying fit she had in Spain? She didn’t want to hurt me, but she was afraid of them, of what they could do to her and her poor old mother.

But never mind. In her sea-lawyer way of dealing with me, she has denied ever having been a Communist, by which I think she means that she never actually joined the Party. See what I mean by “sea-lawyer?” She also once told me that although she had belonged to the Komsomol, she did not attend their meetings, something that Bob Demidov told me would have been frankly impossible: “If you didn’t show up at meetings, they would come knocking on your door and want to know why you didn’t,” he said.

What this all boils down to is that Nadya has no particular use for the hurlyburly of democracy: all she desires are crime-free streets, a guaranteed job and free medical care, all of which she enjoyed as a Soviet and does not have any more. This is the cultural difference we are never going to work past: democracy is nothing to her, sacred to me. When I was a school child, on commencement day we had choral recitals of poems like I Speak For Democracy, with its rousing opening lines, “Listen to me, fascist, Communist. Listen well, for I speak for democracy…” To Nadya, “democracy” is practically a dirty word, reeking of the chaotic Boris Yeltsin period in Russia. Nadya hated Yeltsin and greatly admires Putin, who is crushing freedom left and right, but what’s that to Nadya? Freedom is less important to her than being snug and cozy. From where I sit, it’s sheer moral cowardice, but who am I to judge her? I wasn’t raised in a dictatorship, she was. (And the lying liars who ran that dictatorship told her it was a democracy.) But it was easy for me to sit here in California during the 1970s and hero-worship Solzhenitsyn; to openly admire Solzhenitsyn in Brezhnev’s USSR would have gotten you tossed into jail. And that’s the world Nadya grew up in. She told me that she seldom thinks of her childhood, but I’m sure she misses that world. And it was a world I was raised to hate with every fiber of my being, just as she was raised to hate mine.

She was interviewed recently by what I think she told me was some sort of magazine devoted to education. The interview centered around her trip to England last spring, her views of the English education system, etc. Although the whole thing will be in Russian and I won’t be able to read it, she nevertheless said she would send it to me. Apparently it was quite an in-depth interview; it ran over three issues of the magazine.

Yesterday Carla and Alicia came over in the afternoon to join Dad and me for some of my homemade split-pea soup. It was a perfect “split-pea soup” day: rainy and dark. “Lynne would have loved this,” I said. “Yes, she would,” Carla replied. “Let’s not go there.” Carla brought corn bread, and she and Alicia had baked am apple-and-cranberry pie. Ricky joined us, but he has a cold and ate little.

Now, my split-pea soup is good, and I knew that, but here is the measure of just how good it is: Dad ate three bowls, Dad who usually has little or no appetite.. We looked at each other, amazed, Carla and I. Two bottles of Gato Negro merlot were consumed. After Carla and the kids left, Dad and I spent the rest of the afternoon watching Patton on video, and then in the evening it was The Treasure of the Sierra Madre on DVD, which I’d gotten from the public library. Since Dad had eaten three bowls of soup in the afternoon, he wanted no supper, nor did I try to foist any on him. All I had for supper myself was a salami sandwich.

Oh, yes, and before I forget, when I told Nadya on the phone that Carla and I had gone to see Riverdance at the Spokane Opera House, there was a moment’s confusion when she didn’t quite know what I was referring to, but then the idea “clicked;” apparently Riverdance has been on TV in Russia as often as it has here. “I am jealous,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s a pretty incredible show,” I agreed.

November 10 Wednesday

Today marks two months since Lynne’s death. It seems like two hours.

I talked with Dr. Moreno the last time I saw him about coming in for a complete checkup. I should do that. I’m getting on for 50, and I’ve been told that people over 45 should have a checkup every year. I intend to ask him about the spells of fatigue and tachycardia that have been dogging me for about two and a half years now. I suspect it’s just my genes fucking with me, like the crooked teeth and double-chin that I inherited from my father: in her last years, my mother was dogged by spells of breathlessness and tachycardia.

I tried to jog on Sunday morning and got nowhere: after ten steps, that iron band was tightening around my chest, squeezing the wind out of me. I gave up and went to the Flamingo Café for a lousy breakfast. Monday night I went to the gym and pretty much the same thing happened: after about 15 minutes of lifting, I had to go home.

Last night, no problem. I got up yesterday feeling fine, felt fine all day, and in the gym after work I did a full one-hour workout, three weightlifting “circuits” and five sets of crunches. Weighed in at 185 afterwards.

But christ, I wish I could walk into the house just once without walking into a damned crisis. When I came home from work yesterday afternoon, Dad was having a meltdown because he had misplaced his teeth—he couldn’t find the lower-bridge set of choppers that the dentist had made for him. Apparently he took them out to clean them, wrapped them in a paper towel and promptly lost them. I searched the house from one end to the other. I couldn’t find them anywhere. I even checked the trash and the toilet. Zip. I do suspect that he flushed them down the toilet. So now Carla and I will have to persuade him to have another prosthesis made, which he’ll resist, kicking and screaming about how much it will cost.

I made spaghetti for supper, and we watched John Wayne in The War Wagon, but sometimes I just want to run away from home.

November 13 Saturday

7:00 a.m. Very autumnal this morning, gray skies and the temperature around 50. I hate to keep saying it, but O how Lynne would have loved this. On a day like this she would have busted out White Christmas on VHS and pretended it was already the holidays. I miss my little sister so much.

I’m not working out as often as I should. I skipped Wednesday and Thursday entirely, and last night, although I did go to the gym, I only did two “sets” rather than the three which constitute a complete workout. Discipline has always been my big problem—making yourself go to the gym at the end of the day is hard, though God knows I don’t have any reason to feel tired at the end of the day. I have the cushiest job in the world: yesterday I did practically nothing all day except web-surf and read e-mail. But that’s Friday: The Star-News hits the street on Friday morning, and knowing that I have until next Wednesday to generate enough copy for the next issue, I tend to spend Fridays loafing. “Super jack-off time,” as my old friend Tom Paul, from Amembassy Bonn days, used to describe any moment when our dominatrix, Sandy Muench, was away from the office.

Yesterday morning, as I was getting settled in for a day of vegetating at my desk, I overheard our graphics assistant, Sheila Newbery, who for the most part I tend to tune out, telling Steve Melvin, our in-house parasite who will drive across town for a free doughnut, that she had rescued an abused cat. This cat had been confined in a locked storage bin at Security Storage, on Beyer Blvd., in a pet-carrier not much bigger than the cat himself. She had made the discovery while helping her son move some stuff either in or out of storage. She heard “meowing” coming from an adjacent storage bin and had the staff open the bin up. She took the cat and put it into a larger pet carrier, which she had in her SUV. She told Melvin that she was going to take the cat to the pound. Steve, seeing no opportunity for a free meal in any of this, half-listened, shrugged and mumbled that he didn’t know if it was animal abuse, it would depend on the circumstances, etc.

I told her to let me get in touch with the police department’s animal care facility before she did anything, to see what recourse we might have. I wanted to find out if there were any way we could get the people who had done this punished.

I drove down there and talked with Dr. Dorothy York, the veterinarian who runs the place. I knew her from the telephone: I’d written an article about the facility roughly a year ago. She told me that yes, they could issue a citation to whoever had done that, and that we should bring the cat down and give it to them. Depending on the outcome of their investigation, she said, they could decline to return the cat to the people who had abused it, and slap them with a fine on top of it. I called Sheila back at the office and told her to bring the cat on down to the animal care facility, which, as it turns out, is right next door to the storage place where Sheila found the cat.

Mission accomplished. And as I drove away, I was talking to Lynne. “I was your hands, Lynne, I was your hands.” Somehow I felt that her spirit was guiding me. What I had just done was exactly what she would have done. She would have gone the extra quarter-mile to help rescue that cat, animal lover that she was.

I may have crossed the Rubicon yesterday afternoon. I made a lunch date with The Godfather.

Yes, I have been brooding ever since my last luncheon with Jaime Bonilla, wealthy plutocrat, who just purchased his 13th radio station.

When we had lunch last month, he as much as offered me a job in radio news. I was (and am) reluctant, because who wants to work for The Godfather? But a number of factors caused me to go ahead and make that phone call to Bonilla yesterday afternoon, setting up another lunch date with him, next Friday at the Fish Market in San Diego. (By the way, he told me his daughter is getting married today, which called up further images of Brando, Pacino, Caan and company.)

What the hell?

First of all, I don’t like what’s been going on at The Star-News since Michael was fired on the day before my sister died. I don’t care for Carlos Davalos’ editorial style, which seems to center around being careful not to offend anybody. Since Michael got fired, for example, the only letters to the editor we have printed about Bob Filner are those praising him to skies for being such a swell guy. Puke. Also, when Michael was in charge and felt my stories needed to be cut, he would let me do the cutting, on the theory that the guy who actually wrote the story would be the best judge of where it should be cut. Carlos doesn’t bother with that; he just hacks away and then lets me see the final result.

But most importantly, before Michael was fired, I had never had a story “spiked.” Since Michael was fired, I have had four stories “spiked.” First came the one that was spiked on the very eve of Michael’s firing, the story about Steve Castaneda having dug up some dirt on his political opponent, Dan Hom (who ultimately lost the election anyway.) Linda told Michael not to print that story, presumably thinking she was doing her friend Dan a favor. She fired Michael the next day.

Then, two weeks ago, on the eve of the election, Carlos called me into his office and told me that three separate stories I was working on concerning the Otay Water District were being killed, and that I should pursue them no further. I asked him, point-blank, if this had anything to do with Jaime Bonilla being an advertiser. He denied it.

I’m pondering the old saying, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” If I’m getting jerked around because of Jaime Bonilla, I might as well go to work for Jaime Bonilla, as long as he pays me decent money. Because in the final analysis, that’s what’s really going on here: I began working at The Star-News 16 months ago, for $9.25 an hour. I am still getting $9.25 an hour. I get praised and praised and patted on the back, but there is never any talk of a raise. I won an award from the San Diego Press Club last month, and still there is no talk of a raise. I’m getting sick of this. I know what I’m worth, and it’s more than $9.25 an hour. If Jaime Bonilla is willing to pay me what I’m worth, why should I stay at The Star-News? Well, I’m going to have lunch with him next Friday. Let’s see if he makes me an offer I can’t refuse.

November 14 Sunday

Utterly glorious autumn day (which is to say, a day as “autumnal” as we get around here): bright November sun in a blue fall sky. Dry and not too warm, about 72.

Went to the gym yesterday morning. Did two miles on the treadmill, then Brett and I went to Merkl’s Deli and got some breakfast. Later Dad and I went down to Circuit City and spent $1000 on a new TV, which they are supposed to deliver today, but as of 1:15 p.m. have not.

Tried to run again this morning, but I just didn’t feel like it. My wind was okay, but I plodded down across E Street in the bright sunshine and then said to myself, “Fuck this, I just don’t feel like it.” Walked back home and made Dad some oatmeal, then some ham, eggs and toast for myself. It’s the weekend. I can’t make myself eat oatmeal every day.

But yesterday Brett did determine (so he says) that my body fat is down to 15.7 percent. That’s down from 35% last February. But the double-chin, my paternal inheritance, lives on. It’s going to require liposuction, no matter how much body fat I lose.

I have a meatloaf in the oven. Since Lynne died, we’ve begun a “Sunday dinner” tradition, just to get what’s left of the family together once a week. Last week it was split pea soup and cornbread; today it’s to be meatloaf and butternut squash. Just to add a little touch of those long-ago family dinners in this house when this was Grandma Winrow’s house, I’ve also put pickled beets and a loaf of toasted garlic bread on the menu. Oh, how I do remember those dinners, in the dining room of this very house, with members of the Winrow, Billon, Dupuis and Bradley clans gathered around the table, more than 40 years ago. Grandma made the best meatloaf I ever tasted, and she knew that we kids loved toasted garlic bread, so there would often be a loaf of it on the table, fresh from Bennett’s Bakery on Third Avenue, now long-gone.

Wrote a new poem today, my first since Lynne died. I had been tentatively trying to write poems again as of August, but Sept. 10 slammed the lid down on that. Today I tried again. Sept. 10 was the theme, that and Sept. 9, and since. The poem is called “Glory Hurt.” Its first draft was called Household Chores, and went nowhere. It ended up in the trash. Then I glanced at Kiri Te Kanawa’s picture on the cover of Opera News, and remembered Glenn Cunningham, the champion runner who had once been paralyzed from the waist down. Don’t ask me what the two things have to do with each other, but the result, an hour and a half later, was Glory Hurt.

Carla is talking about the two of us, when the time comes, pooling our resources from the sale of this house and buying a house in Spokane. It’s really not a bad idea. This place will probably fetch at least half a million on the open market, and in Spokane we could buy an enormous place for 200K. Coincidence: in Sunday’s newspaper was an item announcing that Buck Knives, a venerable San Diego area company, is shutting down its El Cajon operation because they just can’t afford to do business here any more. Where are they moving? Post Falls, Idaho, about 20 miles from Spokane.

November 17 Wednesday

On this day in 1966, Truman Capote threw his famous “Black and White Ball” at the New York Hilton. And also on this date in 1966, I drew my first star chart, standing in the driveway at 1002 Monterey Court. I was 11 years old. It was the beginning of a single-minded fascination with astronomy that would dominate my imagination until I was almost 15.

Got up this morning at 5:30 in order to be at the National City Police Department at 7:00. I was to go along (with about a dozen other reporters) on a city-wide sweep in search of sex offenders who had failed to register with the department. Naturally, we all stood around scratching ourselves for almost an hour before we finally got started. It took up the rest of the morning, and was a big yawn, on the whole. Even sex offenders are generally at work after 8 a.m., so we got a lot of “nobody’s home,” and also, some had moved or, in one case, been deported 18 months ago. In any case, we didn’t see a single sex offender for all our collective pains.

No workout tonight. In fact I haven’t worked out since doing two miles on the treadmill last Saturday. I just haven’t felt like it, and today was a very long day: at the end of my usual labors for The Star-News, I came home and then at 5:00 had to conduct a Credit Today interview. No room for the gym in any of that.

I’ve begun reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The only reason it’s taken me this long to start reading it is because it wasn’t until yesterday that I was able to find it in the public library. This is probably the very same copy that Lynne was reading five or six weeks before her death. That’s why I’m reading it. She told me it was her very favorite book when she was a child, and it also turned out to be the last book she read before she died.I was curious to read it even before she died, and told her so, if only because it had been her favorite. “It’s kind of a chick-book,” she told me. I’ve only read the first chapter, but I can already see why it was her favorite. It’s about a little girl growing up in Brooklyn, who obviously lives within her imagination, which is to say she has her own way of ordering the world around her, and it’s remarkably similar to Lynne’s. There’s a large tree in the yard, and, sitting on the fire escape, Francie likes to pretend she lives in a tree.

That’s Lynne, in spades. I remember, 15 or so years ago, her telling me that she liked to lie in bed early in the morning and pretend that the far-off whooshing sound of the traffic on Interstate 5 was actually the ocean surf. I used to tease her about it, but that was the way Lynne was. Her imagination was incredible. Who else would close all the windows and turn up the air conditioning so she could pretend it was Christmas time in the middle of July?

November 18 Thursday

Went to the Third Thursday breakfast of Crossroads II. Two guys from code enforcement doing their spiel: might be a story for next week in there somewhere. Home to check on Dad afterwards, then in to the office to help get the paper out. I only ran two stories this week. Carlos said that’s OK, though, because holding back the additional two I gave him will give us a “jump” on next week, which is going to be short because of Thanksgiving.

No luncheon at Ernie’s today because there was no one to have it with. J.D. Hawk has taken a job as a telemarketer. I came home, drank some beer and took Dad to the dentist. Back to the office at three O’clock. I feel lousy. I’m developing some kind of upper-respiratory crud: coughing, slightly feverish. I can’t remember the last time I had a cold.

We had a spectacular fatality accident this morning. A guy who turned out to be high on methamphetamine ran over an old lady with his pickup truck. He drove right up on to the sidewalk and into somebody’s front yard after killing the old lady. He and his passenger tried to walk away, but some onlookers tackled them. Our photographer, Rick Eaton, was on the spot and got pictures. Ghastly thing.

Coffee with Araiza in the early evening, as I had to stop by his house on the way home to drop off some CDs. We talked about migraines, which he gets, but I don’t, and about depression, which we have both been through. He lent me his copy of Darkness Visible by William Styron.

November 19 Friday

The phone rang this morning at 6:30. “Somebody better have a damn good reason to be ringing my phone at 6:30 in the morning,” I said, getting up from the chair where I’d been reading.

It was Carla. As promised back on Sunday, she had received, this week, the results of Lynne’s autopsy report. She had not read them all the way through yet, but she was able to give me the medical examiner’s verdict on what killed Lynne.

It was apparently an accidental overdose of methadone.

The thought has been lingering at the back of my mind since Lynne died that there might be some correlation between these two events: her sudden death and Dr. Leon’s having switched Dad’s painkiller prescription from vicodin to methadone exactly one week earlier. But Columbo I’m not: the thing remained shrouded in head-scratching until word finally came from on high.

The whole family knew that Lynne was taking Dad’s vicodin, that she was in fact as addicted to painkillers as she was to alcohol. She had been taking his vicodin for years, re-filling the prescription whenever it ran out. The day after she died, we found numerous empty vicodin bottles under her bed and in her dresser drawers (along with Old Friends and Lasting Favorites.)

Dr. Leon changed Dad’s prescription to methadone on September 3rd. Lynne had told Carla that she was worried about how confused Dad had been getting, especially late in the day, and Dr. Leon guessed that the vicodin might be what was doing it. It occurred to me at the time the switch was made that this presented Lynne with a problem: her steady source of vicodin had just disappeared.

And by the way, it occurred to me today, although it didn’t back then, that when Carla told me Dr. Leon was going to change Dad’s prescription, I should have replied, “Vicodin can’t be the problem causing Dad’s late-in-the-day confusion, because he actually gets very little vicodin. Lynne takes most of it.” But it didn’t occur to me at the time to bring this up. But in fairness to me, I had no idea how much vicodin Lynne was actually taking. She kept it all in her room, and would give Dad some whenever I told her he looked like he was in pain. “Okay, I’ll give him a couple of vicodin,” she would say, and then I’d forget about it. Lynne was in charge of his medicines. I never touched them.

The sudden disappearance of vicodin from the property, and its replacement with methadone, turned out to be not just a problem for Lynne, but a fatal problem.. Lynne was an addict, not a pharmacologist, and she did not know that methadone is actually stronger than vicodin, and stays in the bloodstream longer. Possibly she thought that, because the methodone pills were smaller in size than the vicodin pills, she had to take more to get the effect she wanted. Whatever the explanation, on the morning of September 10 she took 15 milligrams of methadone, (Dad’s daily dosage is five milligrams) probably chased it down with brandy, then got undressed, lay on her bed and, a short time later, stopped breathing.

Jaime Bonilla stood me up for our big luncheon today. I made it to the restaurant on time, and waited 45 minutes, but he never showed up. It turns out he was in Tijuana, and had gotten stuck in traffic at the border. He left me a voicemail, apologizing. I guess the fates will have to wait until after Thanksgiving to pronounce on what their next plans for me might be.

November 20 Saturday

More from the autopsy: Carla told me that, according to the report, there was nothing especially wrong with Lynne. Despite her horrific personal habits, the drinking a bottle-and-a-half of brandy a day, the stuffing herself with hot dogs, pizza, fried-egg sandwiches and pie, the obesity and the pack-a-day smoking, the autopsy showed no sign of either liver disease or heart disease. Small fatty deposits in her liver, but no cirrhosis. Her heart was fine.

In other words, aside from being dead, she was pretty healthy. If she hadn’t offed herself with an overdose of methadone, she might have lived another 40 years.

Everybody is telling me not to blame any of this on myself, not to beat up on myself, that there was nothing anyone could have done about it.

I’m not inclined to argue, but give me leave to weep.

Lengthy phone chats this morning, both with Lucia and Charlie. Charlie will probably be returning here, permanently, some time between New Year’s and Easter. His father has Alzheimer’s, a detail he has left out of our conversations until now. So it’s coming full circle: soon “the triumvirate,” Berigan, Araiza and myself, will all be back in Chula Vista, caring for our aging parents, or in my case, parent. It’s that time of life for The Three Middle-aged Musketeers.

Berigan puts a positive spin on all of this, his usual practice. San Diego, he said, isn’t the backwater it was in the 1970s, when we all dreamed of getting as far away as possible.
“There are some cool things going on there.” He’ll make the best of it. I know he will. Besides, in recent years he’s been getting disillusioned with New York anyway.

November 23 Tuesday

Still fighting the cruds, though I didn’t feel as bad today as yesterday. Yesterday I was blowing my nose every thirty seconds, sneezing, coughing, and I’d been blowing my nose all the night before. Last night I smeared some Vicks around my nostrils before I went to sleep, which enabled me to get through the night without having to get up to blow my nose. I still feel a bit weak, though, and my chest is scratchy.

I’m almost finished with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It’s nothing if not an easy read. And again, I can surely see why it was such a favorite of Lynne’s. Francie Nolan is Lynne in some very important ways: her loneliness, her absorption in the beauties and terrors of her own little world, and her devotion to her family. Francie’s relationship with her doomed, drunken father is telling. Johnny Nolan is a drunk, all right, but not a mean or abusive one. He’s a tender-hearted Dad who dotes on his daughter despite his fatal weakness. Reading this, both as a little girl and later as an adult, must have an exercise in wish-fulfillment for Lynne. Perhaps the greatest failure of her life, perhaps indeed the failure that led to all of her other failures, including the substance-abuse problems that killed her, was her failure to have that kind of loving and devoted relationship with her own father. She was the apple of his eye when she was a little girl, but when her life jumped the tracks in her teens, not only did she get no parenting from either of our parents, but she lost my father’s approval forever. From the moment she dropped out of high school until the moment she died, there was nothing Lynne wanted more than Dad’s love and approval. And he just wouldn’t give it to her. She kept getting kicked in the teeth and she kept coming back for more, until finally brandy, pills and comfort food were her only solace.

I’m expecting Jan Barnett this evening. She’s visiting her sister for the Thanksgiving holiday this week, and said she would drop by.

November 25 Thursday

Jan did come by on Tuesday evening. We sat here in my room, drank Scotch and visited. Odd. Last January we had a falling-out because she tried to tell me I could only come visit her in L.A. if I promised not to drink, and I wrote back telling her off. Now we can sit here and drink together.

She surprised me by showing no acquaintance whatever with the late Beethoven quartets. I played Op. 131 for her and she was struck by how little it sounded to her like what she knew of Beethoven. So I went on to play the slow movement of Op. 132 as well. What a thing of unearthly loveliness it is.

I asked her, point-blank, why it was that, all those years ago, she never showed any interest in sleeping with me. Her vague answer was that it had something to do with the Araiza connection. I didn’t press it any further.

So today is Thanksgiving Day, again. The high drama of last Thanksgiving Day was when Lynne and I found a baggie of marijuana behind the living room couch. My, how things change in a year. The druggies are gone and so is Lynne.

Carla, on the phone last night: “Tomorrow is the beginning of the tough season.”

Yes, and it has already begun. Driving to Albertson’s this morning for some beer and wine to take to Carla’s later, I tuned the car radio to Oldies 99.3 – and immediately had to turn it off. It’s only Thanksgiving morning, and they’re already bombarding the airwaves with pop Christmas tunes.

There was a time when I would not have minded this especially, might have even enjoyed it in a limited way. Not this year. Christmas and Lynne: how can I ever separate the two in my mind? All her life, Lynne got excited about Christmas, every year. Toward the end of Mom and Dad’s lives, there would have been no Christmas tree in this house but for Lynne insisting every year on having one. Buying a tree, putting up decorations, getting out the old familiar Christmas videos, listening to the familiar tunes, all of that was so important to Lynne, every year, despite the unrelieved misery of her life. I noted in these pages how pathetically sad I found it, toward the end of her own life, how she would festoon that filthy hovel she lived in with holiday decorations, every year. I know what she was doing, all right. It was her sad little attempt, in the middle of all that trash, drunkenness and despair, to retrieve some tiny spark of childhood’s joy and magic again. Childhood was the lost Eden for Lynne. For me, too, but unlike her I didn’t let the homesickness for that Eden suck me under.

Dad was driving me nuts this morning, obsessing over the thermostat. He played with it for an hour and a half, refusing the oatmeal I made for him. Finally I had had enough—I went over to Carla’s and had breakfast with her.

Of course we talked about Lynne, and the holidays. Trying to put the best possible spin on this situation, Carla said that, if nothing else, we were being spared – and so was Lynne – the spectacle of watching her “drink and puke her way through the holidays,” her regular habit since Mom died four years ago.

November 26 Friday

Thanksgiving dinner at Carla’s yesterday. Not a joyous occasion by any means, but we got through it.

There was actually a sadly “slapstick” touch to the dinner, which was my fault: when we arrived, Dad and me, I was helping him out of the car and squeezed his hand a little too tightly. He complained afterward that his hand hurt, so I gave him two Tylenol, realizing too late that I had given him, not regular Tylenol, but Tylenol P.M. He was also drinking beer, and halfway through dinner the combination kicked in: He became so disoriented that he tried to eat his napkin, and during dessert, couldn’t quite lift a forkful of cheesecake to his mouth—the fork just kind of hung there in midair. Ricky and I took him home and put him down to nap in his chair until the sleeping pill wore off. I went back out to Carla’s, but when I came in at 6 p.m. he was up. He was very confused, didn’t know what time it was or what day, but he was up. Strangely, given the fact that he had eaten dinner a few hours earlier, and usually has no appetite at all, he said he was “hungry as a pig.” I made him a sandwich and we watched John Wayne in Chisum. Later, I made sure he got that piece of cheesecake that he’d missed out on earlier.

Rosie and her daughter were there for dessert, in fact Rosie brought the cheesecake. The kids were getting rambunctuous at the table, so I deliberately threw a wet blanket on their shenanigans: I looked at Rosie and said, “You know, Rosie, my sister was very fond of you.”

Ricky started to cry. He got up and went into the kitchen. He has been depressed ever since Lynne died. He was closer to her, much closer, than either Alicia or Joey.

I went into the kitchen and put my arms around Ricky. He sobbed against my shoulder. “I know exactly how you feel, because I feel the same way,” I told him. “I loved her as much as you did.” I suggested that he and I should spend Christmas Eve together, and maybe watch some of those videos I’m scared to watch now: White Christmas and A Christmas Story. (although the cherished “kid videos” of yuletide that Lynne and I used to share, Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, A Charlie Brown Christmas and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer are, honestly, things I don’t think I will ever be able to bear watching again, ever.) “We’ll share it just like she was there with us,” I suggested.

November 27 Saturday

Lynne would have loved this day. It’s dark, overcast, and actually kind of chilly. In other words, the closest thing to “real” autumn weather that we ever get around here. If she were alive today, and reasonably sober, I could just hear her saying to me, “It feels like Christmas today, let’s go Christmas shopping!”

I worked out this morning, probably my first workout in two weeks. I’m still somewhat weak, not yet recovered from the cold I had last week, so it was a truncated workout: to “warm” I did a 10-minute mile on the treadmill, then did two upper-body weight-lifting circuits or “sets,” as Brett calls them. Afterwards, before climbing into the bathtub at home, I weighed in at 182. Since despairing a few months ago that I would ever get my weight below 195, I’ve lost another 13 pounds. Should I manage to get it below 180, I’ll be one happy camper.

November 30 Tuesday

We have been having a spate of cold mornings here in southern California. It was almost down to 32 on the front porch when I got up this morning.

My “friendship” with that musclebound nitwit Brett Davis ended last night. I had just finished a workout and was on my way out the door. He was in the midst of one of his marathon cell-phone conversations in the back room. On my way out, I remarked in passing, “Are you still on the phone?” Whereupon he went sideways, pointing his finger at me and declaring, “I don’t need any of your fucking shit right now!” He has never talked to me like that before.

And he never will again.

“Fuck you,” I replied.

“Fuck you!” he shouted. “You can’t talk to me like that!”

“Fuck you,” I repeated calmly, and walked out the door. Donna, one of his employees, was going out the door at the same time I was. We stepped into the alley together. I was on my way back to my car. “That piece of shit has seen the last of me,” I said.

Who needs that? Especially from a nitwit? First thing I gotta do this morning is get out the yellow pages and find another gym I can join.

When I got home, Dad was trying to empty the dishwasher. But he was “sundowning,” in the parlance Carla taught me, e.g. he was totally, and I mean totally, confused. Didn’t know where to put anything, hardly seemed to know where he was. Carla says this is quite normal with elderly people, that late in the day they get more confused. That’s why it’s called “sundowning.”

He wanted to discuss with her a letter he’d gotten from his lawyer. I telephoned her, handed the phone to him, and after an almost-incoherent exchange, he prepared to hand the phone back to me. “I’ll give you back to…George,” he said to Carla.

Suddenly I’m “George?”

I shepherded him to his chair, poured him a drink, put Bridge on the River Kwai on the DVD player and prepared supper. But later he went looking, apparently, for the pair of warm gloves I gave him on Sunday, and, unable to find them, was ambling down the hall toward the living room wearing his work gloves, the ones he wears to work in the yard. I took them and put them in my room. This morning I hunted up the ones he was looking for (they were on top of the radio in his bedroom) and put them next to his chair.

Life around this place is just endlessly interesting.

October, 2004

2004-11-28T07:08:00.000-08:00

October 1 Friday

The four-year anniversary of my mother’s death, and wouldn’t you know it, around 4:45 this morning, I dreamed about Lynne for the first time since her death three weeks ago.

I’d been having a bad night, waking up a lot, but that’s normal. I haven’t slept through the night since I was in my teens. So I was dozing, 20-30 minutes at a time, and it’s when I’m lightly dozing like that, especially toward dawn, that dreams often get very vivid. Does that have something to do with increased blood flocculation as dawn approaches? I’ve read that that’s the reason why moribund people often die right at dawn. Don’t know. But this was a vivid dream.
I was walking along the driveway, past the kitchen door, toward the street. Then, suddenly, who walks out the kitchen door but Lynne. She’s dressed as she often was toward the end, wearing one of those dumpy top-and-shorts outfits, and she was barefoot, as she often used to walk around here. She kind of walked past me, like I wasn’t there.

“Lynne!” I shouted. She acted like she didn’t hear. I shouted again, “Lynne!” And this time she turned around and smiled at me, without a word, then kind of disappeared around the front of the house, toward the front yard.

Second scene: now we’re down by the granny flat, near the tool shed. I’m telling her about how she died and we found her body lying on the bed. She seemed blithely unconcerned with any of this. I don’t remember if she said anything. She was sort of leaning out the window on the windowsill, inside the flat, next to the air conditioner. The windowpane had somehow disappeared.

Third and final scene: I’m inside the granny flat, with Carla. I’m standing in the living room and Carla’s in the bedroom, between the bed and the wall—I think she’s preparing to open the curtain over the bed. I start telling her about all of this, how I saw Lynne and spoke to her. I’m kneeling on the floor, picking up coins and bits of detritus, as I did when we cleaned out the room on the day after Lynne died. I’m talking to Carla while I’m doing this, relating how I spoke to Lynne and told her how she died and how we found her.

Then I look up and it’s not Carla standing there in front of me , it’s Lynne. She gives me a big smile and makes a little joke, saying something like, “I’m really worried about that.” Then she’s gone, just as I’m trying to stammer out the words, “Lynne, I love you so much,” and I wake up. I look at my watch. Ten minutes to five. Too early to get up, and I know I’m going to go back and doze some more, but I lie awake long enough to fix this dream in my memory so I can write it down later.

October 2 Saturday

If the season was unofficially over on Wednesday, it’s officially over now. Last night, despite the fact that the Padres beat Arizona 3-2, Houston also beat Colorado, which removes the Padres from wild card contention. Tomorrow they play their last game, also against the Diamondbacks, and then they’re done for the season.

The bright spot is Jake Peavy. He beat Arizona last night, his final start of the season. In doing so, he clocked up a 2.27 ERA for the season, making him the National League’s youngest ERA champion in 19 years, and the first Padre to win that honor since Randy Jones got it in 1975. In fact, he has the lowest ERA not just in the NL, but in all of Major League Baseball. Good on the kid from Alabama.

Of course, the only thing this means is that the minute he becomes a free agent, the New York Yankees will offer him a gazillion dollars and a Lexus, and he’ll be in pinstripes, working for Darth Vader.

Sympathy card in the mail yesterday from Jim’s parents in Camarillo. Flowers, cards, e-mails, phone calls, I just can’t get over how supportive everyone has been through this thing. There have been some glaring omissions: my cousin Melissa Billon hasn’t so much as farted in our direction, nor, until she finally checked her e-mail and called me last Monday, had Robin Clemons. But by and large I am amazed at the network of friends out there that we still have, some of whom I thought I had severed ties with. Araiza, for instance. I had dismissed him from my life, lock, stock and Che Guevara T-shirt. But the very night Lynne died, as soon as he got the word from Berigan about what had happened, he was over here, pronto, and has stayed in touch ever since.

In fact he wanted us to go CD shopping in San Diego today, but I have too many other things going on: my surfing lesson at 11 a.m., a housewarming party for Michael and Lisa at 3:00, and then at 8 p.m. I have to be at the airport to pick up Amadeus.

Chris phoned on Wednesday to say she was sending him out on a United flight this evening. I’ll be taking care of him for the rest of his days, which will be short, because he’s 17 years old, which is quite old for a cat. So here comes another bout of grief, heading at me over the horizon. But it’s then or now, because if she takes him to Brunei, he’ll be subject to six months’ quarantine, and that will surely kill him, at his age. So he’s coming to live with us. Earlier this summer I discussed this with Chris. I was hesitant, mainly because Dad hates cats. (Read: fears any life form he can’t control.) But when Lynne, who loved cats, heard about it, she was emphatic: “Have her send him out. Just tell her to send him. Just do it. Don’t worry about Dad. He’ll be fine. Tell her to send him.”

She never got to meet Amadeus. But she told me that she had told Pepper all about him, so Pepper would know that another cat was coming to live with us.

I do so miss Lynne.

October 3 Sunday

It all went down yesterday pretty much as predicted, with a couple of kinks in the way. Predictably, Brett Davis did not show up at 8 a.m. when I was to borrow his truck. I had also pushed the Fuji bike over to his gym (the chain had come off) because he had said he would sell it for me in a “yard sale” he was planning to have yesterday. I waited around until 8:30 and pushed the bike back home. I’ll rent a truck next weekend. I am so fed up with him. I’m reliable, goddammit, why can’t other people be?

I was 45 minutes early for my surfing lesson. I had thought Randy said to be there at 11:00. He thought he said 11:30. I was just getting into my car and getting ready to drive away when he pulled up in his SUV with two surfboards on top. We had a good session; the water was warm and the waves gentle rollers like last Sunday. Lots of kelp in the shallow water. I still need much work on standing up. I’m not “arching” soon enough—doing the “pushup” that gives you the leverage to stand up on the board, and I’m still having trouble placing my feet correctly. I fell into the drink over and over, but on the last wave before calling it a day, I got into a crouching position and stayed up for perhaps three seconds before going kersplash over backwards. “That last one was almost regulation,” Randy said as we hauled the boards back up the beach.
I decided to give myself a little treat, well-deserved, and after going up to the public beach, where they have bathroom facilities, to rinse the sand off my feet, I went to Danny’s Bar and Grill in Coronado and had a filet of fish sandwich and two glasses of Bass Ale. It was a treat, but a hasty one: I don’t think I sat there for more than 15 minutes.

After swinging back home to let Dad know I was still around, I picked up J.D. Hawk and off we went to the housewarming party at Michael and Lisa’s place. I had a Sears air conditioner in the trunk of the car. Everyone else brought flowers and candy; I brought an air conditioner. J.D. and I only stayed for about an hour, but it was long enough for Mike Giorgino, who was also present, to tell me that he expects I’m going to be fired after the election next month. Since it is Giorgino’s belief that Burgess was fired on the direct orders of Bob Filner, he believes that I will be similarly fired—also on Filner’s direct orders—and the only reason Michael and I weren’t fired at the same time was that it would have been too “messy.” Michael doubts that I’ll be fired, but he and Giorgino agree that I should find another job as soon as possible.

Another pair of guests at this party were “Pat,” an electrical contractor, and his Russian wife Olga, she from Yekaterinburg. She was clutching a one-month old baby to her breast the whole time they were there and no, she wouldn’t let me hold it. Stupid bitch.

Home at 4:15 from that shindig, I had a couple of hours to kill before leaving for the airport to pick up Amadeus. While Dad floated about like a ghost, hardly aware of where he was or what was going on, I smoked, read, listened to Brahms. Since I was going to be gone for a while in the evening, I asked Carla to come around and check on Dad. Before leaving for the airport, I put the TV on Channel 4 so Dad could watch the ballgame, the next-to-last the Padres will play this year.

Around 5:45 I left for the airport. Yes, that meant I had to wait a while for Amadeus’ flight, which didn’t come in until 8:00, but I always allow myself extra time when doing anything that involves the airport. There are just too many variables involved: parking. flight delays, all the rest of it. I browsed in the shops, had a couple of drinks in the bar. In the newspaper-and-mag kiosk I glanced at a cover story in Sports Illustrated questioning whether the Cardinals, even with their unmatched 104-57 record this year, the best in all of baseball, have enough pitching to survive the playoffs, let alone win the World Series. In a way, the Cards’ problem this season has been the opposite of the Padres’. The Padres have had plenty of good pitching, but weak bats. The Cardinals have firepower galore, but their bullpen is weak.

By the time I had retrieved Amadeus, gotten his pet carrier into the car and driven home, it was about 9:00. Carla, (big help) had only just arrived. I had asked her to pop in around 7:15, to break up the time that Dad would be alone. I had left a meatloaf sandwich in the refrigerator and a bowl of soup in the microwave and asked her to serve them to him.

But she had only just arrived (“Oh, Victor and I didn’t even leave to go to dinner until 7:00”) and by that time Dad had been alone, in a darkening house, for about three hours. He had apparently gotten a bit panicked and was more than a little confused. He had turned off the ball game, and Carla told me that she had found him in my room, looking for what I can’t imagine, unless he was looking for me, or looking for where I kept the liquor bottle. (I had given him one drink before leaving for the airport.) In any case, he was extremely confused. Carla fed him some soup like you would feed it to a baby, though characteristically he refused to touch the sandwich, and she more-or-less led him by the hand back into the living room, where I had by this time turned the ball game back on. The Padres lost, 7-6, but Dad’s attention wasn’t really on the game. He was just kind of sitting there in a fog.

“He’s failing fast,” Carla said to me. “I think it won’t be long before it’s just you and the cat living here.” Now there’s a cheerful prospect: to lose first Lynne, and then Dad, in short order. And Amadeus won’t be long after.

The cat. Good old Amadeus is home with his Daddy now. Aside from some “ship’s cat” in seafaring days, I can’t think of a cat more world-traveled than Amadeus. He was born in a small German town near Frankfurt in 1987, and since then has lived in Brasilia, Abidjan, Moscow, Washington, D.C., Arlington, VA, Bangladesh, Kiev and now southern California. I think this is where his journey ends. He looks like the old cat that he is: his fur is mangy and he walks stiffly, from the touch of arthritis you would expect in anyone who is 119 in cat-years. Still, Chris says the vet has pronounced him healthy but for the arthritis.

I found last night that I couldn’t sleep with him—a restless sleeper like myself cannot share a bed with a cat. After having him crawl all over me, above and beneath the covers, I gave up, let him have the bedroom and spent the night on the sofa. He’s only been here 12 hours, and he has already shown a preference for Dad’s “spaces:” last night, when I let him roam the house, he promptly headed for the back bedroom and curled up on Dad’s bed. I had to move him. This morning, after coffee and after opening up the house to let him roam again, I found him curled up on Dad’s armchair. Why do cats like Dad? He has always hated them, although he told me last night that he doesn’t really.

October 4 Monday

One quiet morning, it must have been back in late March, I was sitting in the living room, in the armchair by the west window, either reading or looking at the TV screen. Lynne sat across the room from me on the sofa, reading the morning paper. I remarked that the Padres’ bullpen for this year contained “three or four Hispanic names,” a situation that changed later.

Lynne rolled her eyeballs. “It’s gonna be a long season,” she said, and we both knew what she was talking about: Dad’s past habit, during baseball games, of going into racist scream-fits about how there are “no white players in baseball anymore,” whenever he saw a black face or a Latino surname. And clear the decks, by the way, for a scream-fit about how stupid the Catholic religion is any time he saw a Latino ballplayer cross himself before stepping up to the plate. Yes, my father is a trial to watch just about anything with.

But Lynne’s remark gave me a nice, warm feeling. Aside from being funny, it was one more shared joke between my beloved little sister and me, and it was also a reminder that the baseball season, the long, lovely, slow summer of baseball, still lay ahead of us.

The regular season ended yesterday in a 4-1 Padre loss to Arizona. It ended all too quickly, and who could have guessed, when I took the afternoon off from work for the Padres’ first daytime home game last April, and Lynne ordered a pizza for us and Dad and I swilled Glenlivet to celebrate the return of baseball, that by the time the season ended, Lynne would be gone?

The postseason will give us another two weeks or so of baseball, but we have already entered the abyss: ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball is also over for the year, so last night there was nothing for Dad and me to watch on TV—I had to dust off the DVD of The Sand Pebbles one more time.

As I sat there watching it one more time, I couldn’t help but remember a time when my father wasn’t the feeble, blind, confused, crippled, deaf wreck he is now. In the summer of 1967, when he and I went on that fabled 35-hour Greyhound bus trip to Spokane, with an overnight stop in Portland, Oregon, where he took me to the old Fox theater in downtown Portland to see The Sand Pebbles, he was 53 and still very much in command of his faculties. I was 11. We ate supper in the hotel grill. I asked for, and got, shrimp Louie, and Dad let me have a sip of his beer. Later we went to the movies, and ever since then, The Sand Pebbles has been a “special” film to me. (Even though it was not my choice that night—I wanted to go see the new James Bond flick, You Only Live Twice, but was overruled. I got Dad to take me to see it later that summer, at the North Cedar Drive-in in Spokane.)

But the point is, once the World Series ends later this month, and an occasional old favorite like The Sand Pebbles notwithstanding, I face close to six months of westerns, westerns, westerns until the first “Play ball” next April, assuming Dad lasts that long.

At least if Lynne were still here, we could grimly joke about it, and would. We did.

October 8 Friday

Well, let’s see, what kind of craziness has gone on around here this week?

On Tuesday, I came home from work to find Dad in the backyard having a meltdown: he was convinced that Amadeus had gotten out of the house and was in the tall grass where Dad couldn’t get him to bring him back in the house. Dad claimed he had been trying to retrieve Amadeus “all afternoon.”

It turned out that he was looking at Pepper. She was sitting on the fence. His eyesight is so poor that he can’t tell one cat from another, and he thought that was Amadeus sitting up there. It took me a long time to convince him that he was looking at two different cats.

On Wednesday afternoon I came home, changed into my gym togs and told Dad I was going off to lift weights for a while. I said I would be back in about an hour, and I was.

But when I got back, I found him once again in the midst of a disaster and having another meltdown. This time he had somehow (don’t ask me how) managed to shut off almost all the electricity in the house. There was one lamp burning in the kitchen, but all the other lights were off. I checked the breaker switch box. About five breaker switches were in the “off” position.

How did they get that way? Dunno. He claimed not to know either. I know he doesn’t have a 10,000 watt guitar amplifier, so what could have cut out those switches is a mystery to me, unless he was fiddling with them because the garbage disposal in the kitchen wasn’t working and he thought maybe one of the breaker switches was the cause, so he turned them all off. No sweat: I turned them back on and the lights were restored. But he had been a tertiary panic when I got home, totally freaked that all the lights were off and there was nothing he could do about it.

This is just one of the many reasons why I miss Lynne. When she was here, things like that might happen and she would have them resolved by the time I came home. Then she’d tell me about it and she and I would roll our eyeballs together. Now it’s just me, Dad and chaos. I can’t turn my back on this place for one hour without coming back to some crisis.

The San Diego Press Club’s Excellence in Journalism awards dinner is tonight in Coronado. I have to go because I’m getting an award. To tell the truth, when I saw the list of award winners, suddenly I didn’t feel so special: practically every reporter in the county is on that list, including Amy Oakes of the Union-Tribune, who doesn’t impress me one bit. Still, I would have been so proud to take Lynne to that dinner and have her there to see me get that award. I learned of the award on the very same day she died, which more than takes away what little luster it has. How do you like this? On the eve of my 49th birthday, I finally get some small recognition for my efforts as a reporter over the years, and neither my mother nor my beloved little sister is even here to see it. I know Lynne was proud of me and needed no award to reinforce that, but it still would have been great to have her there, although as Carla pointed out, she probably would have gotten drunk and embarrassed me. Well, at this point I think that would have been just fine.

October 10 Sunday

At Friday night’s awards dinner in Coronado, I won first place in the investigative reporting, non-daily newspaper category. Of course, I didn’t see any second and third-place entries, so maybe we were the only paper that entered in that category. I don’t know. But my date for the evening was Elizabeth Scott, who is running to unseat Jose Lopez on the Otay Water District board of directors, and when I won the first place award, for a story that helped get OWD general manager Bob Griego removed from his job last summer, Elizabeth remarked in the car on the way home that the tongues of the OWD extended mafia will be wagging, wagging, wagging about her and me. Yeah, probably.

Went to Coronado for my surfing lesson this morning, but didn’t surf. The surf was too rough for a beginner, and also, I was the only person on the beach not wearing a wet suit. It has gotten too cool for curfing without a wet suit. Randy and I sat on the sand and visited for a while, and then I headed for home.

It’s been one month today since my little sister died. It feels like two days.

Carla cooked a pot of chicken soup today and Dad and I were invited out to her place, the Sunday custom since Lynne died. But Dad was screaming and hollering, this morning after I got back from my abortive surfing lesson, about having an attack of incontinence, telling me (at the top of his feeble lungs) that he had had to shit four times since he got up. (I fixed him a protein-soy-and-fruit shake, and we had a fight when he refused to drink it, hollering about shitting his pants when I tried to get him to drink it—what did the two things have to do with each other?)

On Carla’s advice, I went to the drug store and got him some Immodium, made him take two tablets, and then went over to Carla’s by myself. I took along two bottles of Merlot, and drank one of them almost unassisted. That’s how stressed-out Dad had me, between his hollering about having the shits and his inability to write a check to pay the cable TV bill. He can’t pay his own bills anymore. He just sits there staring at the checkbook and doesn’t know what to do. I was at Carla’s for an hour and a half, and when I came back he was still sitting at the dining room table, bill and checkbook in front of him, confused. Ultimately I was given an envelope to go mail, later when I went to Albertson’s. But I don’t know if there was a check in it. If there was, it probably wasn’t written properly. Carla and I had a serious discussion of this over at her house. Dad can’t handle his own financial affairs anymore, and I don’t know what to do about it.

The Cardinals beat the Dodgers 6-2, eliminating L.A. from the playoffs. This after Jose Lima shut out the Cards 4-0 last night. This is good news. I’m rooting for the Cardinals in this postseason. But I will have serious loyalty problems, come the World Series, if the Red Sox and Cardinals are both playing in it. I like both of these teams. However, the Cards’ last Series victory was in 1982, which is a while ago, but the Sox’ last, as everyone knows, was in 1918, which is a helluva lot more of a while ago. That alone makes me incline toward the Sox. If the Cards are overdue, the Sox are mythically so. My birthday present this year is a Red Sox-Yankees ALCS. That starts Tuesday night, Oct. 12. If the Yankees win, and if the Cards prevail, it will be the 1964 Series all over again, and I’ll have no loyalty problem in that scenario. Let the ghosts of Bob Gibson and Tim McCarver (the latter of whom now calls play-by-plays for the Fox Network) come back to haunt the ghosts of Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford.

Araiza went to L.A. this weekend, at least partly on a CD-shopping trip. I gave him a “wish list” of titles I would like to have. A dozen-or-so promptly appeared on our back porch, in a Whitman’s candy box tucked in a paper bag, with an invoice attached. I owe him $92.17. I will gladly pay that. What an act of, I don’t know what to call it. Kindness? Charity? Friendship maybe? I hate this guy’s idiotic politics with all my guts, and his personality has been rubbing me the wrong way for almost 30 years, but in the face of gestures like this, what can one do except love the bastard?

October 12 Tuesday

My 49th birthday. I wanted to inaugurate it with a three-miler, but the trochanteric bursitis has kept me sidelined from jogging for about a month and a half, and I didn’t have enough wind for three miles. I made it to the corner of 5th and G, which I think is more than two miles but quite a bit less than three. So let the record show that on my 49th birthday I jogged 2 ½ miles and then did 30 pushups. And by the way, dehydrated afterwards, I weighed in at 182.

Revived a birthday tradition that began on my 33rd birthday, back in 1988: playing the overture to Die Meistersinger before I’ve even had breakfast. The origin of that tradition was Chris’ giving me, as a present that year, a painted plaster bust of Wagner, which I still have, by the way.

E-card in my box this morning, supposedly from both Anya AND Nadya. I wonder how Anya got Nadya in front of a computer, or did she?

7:30 p.m. Well, I suppose I had a reasonably enjoyable birthday. Two things marred it, well, three actually. First and most important, Lynne isn’t here anymore. Second, my 2 ½ mile jog this morning reawakened the trochanteric bursitis. The pain had been gone, but a slow, two-mile jog brought it back. It would seem my days as a jogger really are over.

Thirdly, Dad and I are watching the ALCS, game one. The Red Sox are not only losing, they are getting humiliated. The New York Monkeys are screaming with joy, the score is 7-0 and Mike Mussina is pitching a perfect game. Boston hasn’t been able to get even one fucking hit. Ten minutes later: correct that. 8-0. This is making me sick.

But I had my morning run, and after a press conference which gave Mayor Steve Padilla a chance to preen for the media about Chula Vista’s having reached an energy agreement with SDG&E, I was taken to lunch at Bob’s on the Bay by Elizabeth Scott (who showed up late, as usual) and of course, at the Star-News office we had the requisite birthday pie, lemon meringue and coconut cream being the flavors du jour.

When I got home from work, Dad had put two $20 bills on my reading table as a birthday gift, with a note that broke my heart. He had tried to write “Happy Birthday!” but it was unintelligible gibberish: “Happy Juppyy Jagiy Juuup Day Day Day!!” He can’t even write “Happy Birthday” on a slip of paper any more. He’s trying to do something nice, and can’t even write down the words he wants to say. It made me want to cry. I told Carla about it on the phone, and she did cry. It really is heartbreaking, worse than the Red Sox’ humiliation.

October 13 Wednesday

The final score in that baseball game last night was 10-7. Boston broke out and had a big inning in the eighth, but still lost. That’s OK, though, because at least Mike Mussina didn’t get a perfect game out of it. For a long moment, up until the 7th inning, Boston was hitless. It really did look like Mussina was going to get that perfect game, and we never would have heard the end of that.

Since it was, after all, my birthday, I decided a little treat would be in order, and asked Dad if he would eat a slice of pizza if I ordered one. He said he would, so I ordered a pizza from La Bella’s around the corner.

When the girl on the phone asked for my phone number and I gave her 426-6896, she said, “Is that Lynne?”

“No, it’s Kelley,” I said. “You can strike Lynne from your rolls, she died last month.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Will the delivery still be in back?”

“No, there’s nobody back there anymore,” I said. “Deliver to the front.” Then I added, “My sister ordered pizza from you guys almost every night, which is one of the reasons she died.”

My editor, Carlos, has been complaining of not feeling well this week, and I think I’m getting what he has. At any rate, during the night last night I developed a sore throat. I can’t remember the last time I had a sore throat. In fact, by and large I’ve been astonishingly healthy over the past four or five years, the usual aches and pains that send me back and forth to the chiropractor notwithstanding. The last bad cold I remember having was around the beginning of 2000.

But I think I’m finished as a runner. After six weeks and two cortisone shots, the pain in my left hip had abated to where, yesterday, I felt safe in starting my birthday with a two-and-a-half miler. By afternoon the pain was biting me again, and by evening I was alternating ice with an epsom salt bath. It would appear that the trochanteric bursitis which Dr. Moreno diagnosed last month is chronic, and any attempt on my part to jog, from now on, will bring the pain in that hip back.

October 15 Friday

Dad has really taken to Amadeus. I think having Amadeus around helps him to be a little less lonesome when I’m not here. He’s always asking me, “Where’s the cat?” It is a problem that Dad can’t keep him in the house: as slowly as Dad moves, and as slowly as Amadeus moves, it’s still possible for Amadeus to slip past him and get outside any time Dad opens the door. Then I come home and I’m informed that “The cat got out and he’s sitting on the back fence.” He’s looking at Pepper, of course. But the two times that has happened thus far, it hasn’t turned out to be much of a problem. Because quite apart from “sitting on the fence,” where I find Amadeus these days, after he gets out and Dad can’t find him, is curled up on the sofa in the granny flat out back, whose door is left ajar these days so Pepper can get to her food and water. Amadeus can’t get back into the main house, so he goes into Lynne’s room and flakes out on the couch.

Amadeus likes Dad’s chair, and if Dad is occupying it, as for instance when we were watching the Cardinals-Astros playoff game last night, Amadeus will walk around and around the room, like he doesn’t know where to light if he can’t have that particular chair. Sometimes I find Amadeus in Dad’s lap. A few days ago I came in from work and found them both asleep, Amadeus sleeping in Dad’s lap. Two old geezers, drowsing together in the afternoon.

Last night Dad had Amadeus in his lap and as he was stroking the cat’s fur, in that croaky voice of his, about which he used to joke many years ago that he sounded “like a bullfrog,” he began to sing, “On a day/Like today/We pass the time away,/ Writing letters in the sand…” He left out the word “love,” as in “love letters.” It’s an old song by Pat Boone, as I found later by doing an Internet search on the title.

I went into the kitchen and started to cry. Sometimes I can’t deal with what’s going on around here, what I live with. My little sister dead a month, my mother dead four years, and I live with a poor, feeble old man who is very close to the grave and a poor, feeble old cat who is very close to the grave, and then, in the midst of it all, in the deeping shades of a twilight becoming darker every minute, my father sits with my cat in his lap and breaks into a sweet, wistful little love song that he remembers from many years ago. That’s why I went into the kitchen and started to cry. It’s why I’m fighting tears as I type these words. I feel surrounded on all sides, boxed-in, by sadness. There is no respite from it. If Lynne were still here, I could talk about it with her, because there was nothing I couldn’t talk about with Lynne, and she would always, absolutely, understand. But as it is, I have no one with whom I can share such feelings except this damned journal.

He is failing fast, my father. A few months ago, Lynne expressed concern that he had lost interest in reading. Just a year ago, he would climb the walls if he didn’t have a pile of large-print westerns from the library to amuse himself with. Now I bring books home from the library and they just sit, unread. Carla thinks his short-term memory has gotten so shot now that he can no longer follow the thread of anything as long as a book: by chapter two he has forgotten what chapter one was about. She thinks I should get him a subscription to the large-print edition of the Reader’s Digest, so he could read short articles instead of books. I asked him about this last night, and he agreed that it might not be a bad idea. I’ll check on the Internet and see if I can get a subscription. But I wonder if he’ll survive until a one-year subscription runs out. Really, with baseball season just about over now, I am seriously wondering if he’ll still be here next spring when they shout “Play ball!” again.

Oh, and yesterday afternoon I picked what I think will be the last of the tomatoes for this year, a few lingering small ones along the driveway. We had a good tomato season this year, and a good baseball season. I suspect they both may be the last my father sees.

October 16 Saturday

A little postscript on that scene with my father singing "Love Letters in the Sand" while petting my cat. I found out where that came from. My cat's name is "Amadeus," but my father's hearing is so poor that he can't catch that. The first three syllables of "Amadeus" sound to him like the words "On a day," which happen to be the first three words of that Pat Boone song, and reminded him of it. How did I find that out? The next time I began calling my cat, once again Dad broke into, "On a day like today..." Interesting.

We had a little “beach picnic” at Silver Strand today, by way of a belated birthday celebration for me. The beach venue was chosen because we knew Lynne would not have enjoyed it—she didn’t like the beach. Hence, none of us was sitting around wiping away tears, thinking “Lynne would have loved this.”

I thought it was going to be a dreary affair, because all morning the sky was as gray as lead. But just before we left for the beach, the overcast burned away, and by the time we got there, the sun was shining, and it was warm and beautiful. Carla, Ricky and Alicia were there, and Michael Burgess and Lisa joined us. We had beer, hot dogs, potato salad and beans, the usual stuff. I had three beers and ate two hot dogs—I’d had nothing all day but a piece of toast and was hungry. Besides, I spent over an hour at the gym this morning, lifting.

Back at the house, we made coffee and cut the German chocolate birthday cake Alicia had baked for me. It was the first birthday in my memory for which I got the “Happy Birthday” song twice—they sang it for me over pie at the Star-News last Tuesday.

After working out this morning, I weighed in at 184. Of course, 3 hot dogs and 3 bottles of beer aren’t going to help that, but it’s my (second) birthday. I was entitled.

The Cardinals and the Red Sox both lost today, in their respective LCS. The Sox are finished, but I still have some hope for the Cardinals.

Tomorrow I’m buying a surfboard.

October 17 Sunday

It rained during the night. Around 4 a.m. it was coming down pretty hard. The noise woke me up of course, and I couldn’t sleep much after that, so I gave up on sleep around 5:40, and will be dragging for the rest of the day. If I don’t get my eight hours, I droop.

As is normal for this part of the country (don’t ask me why) it rained really hard in the pre-dawn, and then, as soon as it became light, the rain stopped. All I know is, Lynne would have loved this. She would have gotten up, come into the house, and said something to me like, “Isn’t this great? It feels like Christmas.” Then she would have added, sourly, “Of course, on Christmas it’ll probably be 80 degrees.”

I have a surfing lesson scheduled for this morning. Now, to be willing to go out and jump in the ocean when it’s just been raining, that separates the men from the boys…

I hope Randy calls the lesson off, but I have a feeling he won’t. Maybe the surf will be too high, because of this storm, as it was last Sunday. But in any case, I’m going down to borrow Brett Davis’ pickup truck so I can haul home that surfboard I’m going to buy this morning. I am bound and determined to become a surfer, even though I am somewhat afraid of the ocean. Maybe that’s the reason I’m so determined.

Last night, as is my usual Saturday custom, I broiled a steak. I prepared a plate for Dad, cutting the steak up into little pieces, adding some potato salad and some steamed peas along with it.

When I put it in front of him, he ate the peas, but was chewing the meat and then spitting it out, piece by piece, and he refused to touch the potato salad insisting that I had given him “cold potatoes.” Jesus H. Christ. I took the plate into the kitchen, scraped the whole thing into the trash, and served him a can of Campbell’s Chunky Soup, of which he happily ate every bite. I then proceeded to eat the rest of the steak myself, with some peas and sliced tomatoes. And as far as I’m concerned that is it: from now on, on Saturday evenings, I have steak and he gets a can of soup.

The final score in that disastrous game between the Red Sox and the New York Billionaires was 19-8. I think maybe Boston should just concede that it will never again in all of recorded history have a winning post-season, shut the franchise down and quit baseball for good. What’s the point in hammering your head against a brick wall?

Later the same day: As it turned out, Randy did call the surfing lesson off. I called him from Brett Davis’ house, where I had gone to borrow Brett’s pickup, to ask if he had any rope with which to tie a surfboard down in the bed of the truck. Randy promptly informed me that, as a rule, it’s not a good idea to surf right after a rainstorm. “It stirs up all kinds of pollutants and contaminants,” he explained.

So we surf next week, and I have until then to buy a rack for the top of my car to stick a surfboard up there with. Brett and I went to the Family House and had breakfast.

Incredibly, I picked a few more tomatoes this afternoon. Tomatoes are supposed to be strictly a summer thing: here it is getting on for Halloween and I’m still picking a few here and there. If I manage to pick any o/a three days from now, we will have had three full months of tomatoes.

October 18 Monday

Bought a surfboard and wet suit today. Randy Couts must really be hard-up for cash, because he called and left me a message saying he “had” to sell that board today if I was going to buy it. He then drove all the way over to Chula Vista so I could give him a check for $280. He threw in the wet suit for $30. By the way he told me he’s tentatively planning a trip to Hawaii in two weeks. He has an opportunity to teach surfing to a hotel full of conventioneers in Honolulu.

At lunchtime today I had to listen (again) to what Carla and I are jocularly calling the “Where’s the beef?” speech. Where this notion came from is a mystery to both of us, but somehow, Dad has convinced himself that he has several thousand dollars invested in…meat. Go figure. Carla thinks it might be because he saw something with the words “money market” on it, and in his rapidly-turning-to-mush brain, which never was that sharp to begin with, he connected “market” with “meat.” But in any case, the official line, for months now, has been “I gave your mother $5,000 to invest, and she invested it in…BEEF.” Well, in the first place, he never gave Mom any money to invest in anything, And in the second place….beef? Well, it keeps coming up. Today I found him standing at the dining room table, staring at the bank statement from his Washington Mutual checking account. He’s so far gone now that he can’t tell a bill from a bank statement from an advertising flyer for nylon stockings. Anyway, he stared at that bank statement for a while, then started prattling: “I wonder if they could put me in jail for the interest on….the interest on….uh, you know? I’m getting eight percent interest on $11,000 (there’s about $11,000 in his checking account) that I have invested in a package of hamburger!”

It was about that time I decided to go back to the office. I’d heard this before.

October 19 Tuesday

It rained much of the night, and is still raining as I type these words (8 a.m.) I have to say it again: Lynne would have loved this, and it’s so sad for me to walk out to that empty granny flat to feed Pepper and look around at the gray sky and the rain coming down on an October morning, weather as “autumnal” as it ever gets around here. This was Lynne’s time of year. Mine too, back when my romanticism was still functioning. Ah, but I’ve been lamenting the death of my romanticism since I was 19.

I must say, however, that Lynne’s cat literally does not have the sense to come in out of the rain. I went out to check on her this morning, and found her huddled in the grass, getting soaked in the rain. She could easily get out of the rain: she could go into the granny flat as the door is open, or she could even go under the car in the carport. No, she was sitting there in her usual spot among the weeds, getting soaked, and when I took her into the back house and put her down, she promptly ran back outside into the rain. I thought cats didn’t like to be wet. She insists on being wet.

October 20 Wednesday

Rain continues. It rained most of yesterday and much of the night. This morning it’s threatening still more, which we have been promised, and when I got up it was windy, with clouds blowing around, as it often is at dawn after a rainy night. I suppose this means we need not worry about any October wildfires this year, although the newspaper said that this rain, heavy as it has been, has not officially ended the county’s “fire season.”

Last night I was supposed to attend a meeting of a bereavement group in San Diego. But for whatever mysterious reason, I guess I am not supposed to attend bereavement group meetings right now. Two weeks ago I canceled because I had to stay home and watch Our Town on DVD with Ricky, my equivalent of helping him with his homework. Last night I went ahead and made the drive to San Diego, but when I got to the specified address, the door was locked and the lights were off, so I went home. I learned later that the woman I was supposed to meet with would have been along in about 15 minutes, if I had only waited.

But by not waiting, I got to see most of ALCS Game Six.

Baseball: even if the Red Sox lose the pennant tonight, which they probably will, they can nevertheless claim to have made history last night.

As recently as Sunday morning, I was writing in these pages that perhaps the Sox should just write everything off, forefeit the season and leave town, having taken a humiliating 19-8 drubbing at Fenway on Saturday which put them behind 3-0 in the ALCS. But lo and behold, they came back, and I mean roaring back: from being down 3-0, they won Game Four, Game Five and Game Six, forcing a rubber game tonight. Never before has a team come back from a 3-0 deficit to force Game Seven. Last night Curt Schilling pitched the Sox to a 4-2 win, on an ankle that needs surgery, no less. And David Ortiz’ slugging was key to the wins in games four and five, one of which went 12 innings and the other, 14. Last night the Sox roughed up the Bombers in their home park, Yankee Stadium, which only made it all that much more delicious.

Oh, to silence those arrogant, smarmy, obnoxious, hateful New York Loudmouths once and for all, that would be worth a fortune, worth a year of one’s life. If I were offered a choice between that and sex with Heidi Klum, Heidi could go sit at the bar and wait for a soccer fan to come along. If a miracle should happen, and tonight the Sox should become the first team ever to come back from 3-0 and actually win the pennant, and against the New York Yankees, no less, baseball’s equivalent of the Soviet Union, there will be celebrating in the streets of Boston the like of which no one has ever seen. Only the secure knowledge that my little sister is at home with God could be sweeter than witnessing the destruction of the New York Loudmouths. Bring it on.

October 21 Thursday

Received miracles: Red Sox 10, Yankees 3.

The obvious cliché applies: There is joy in Mudville.

In fact, the San Diego Union-Tribune, which normally doesn’t pay much attention to the Red Sox, had this story on the front page this morning. Not the front page of the sports section, the front page, period. “EPIC COMEBACK,” read the headline over a page-one color photo of Red Sox fans cavorting at the Ocean Beach Grill, a local hangout for the west coast contingent of Red Sox Nation.

Johnny Damon hit a grand slam in the second, and a two-run shot in the fourth. Derek Lowe dominated. Kevin Brown disintegrated. It was, from overture to curtain, Boston’s night and New York’s nightmare. Seldom in my life have I seen anything so wonderful. George Steinbrenner, the Idi Amin of baseball, must be having a stroke this morning. No longer is he safe to assume that pennants and World Series can be purchased like armchairs at a yard sale.

New York has been destroyed. Ten million big, loud, bragging mouths have been slammed shut like a bank vault. Ten million puffed-out New York chests have been deflated like balloons at the end of a child’s birthday party. Ten million strutters are now limping home, hunched over, crying, refusing to talk to strangers.

This is too beautiful for words. I hope Billy Crystal has to go on Celexa.

David hasn’t just defeated Goliath, he has spit in his face, sliced off his nuts, run off with his wife and taken his lunch. I haven’t been this pleased with world events since the USSR collapsed.

October 22 Friday

Lynne’s memorial service is scheduled for this afternoon at Pilgrim Lutheran Church here in Chula Vista. She wasn’t a member of that church, but my understanding is that they had some sort of choral group there in which she sang a couple of times. Anyway, the pastor remembered her, so Pilgrim Lutheran was chosen. Carla, ever the petit-bourgeois, has been obsessing for weeks about wanting the house to be spic-and-span for the relatives who will be coming by afterward.

On Wednesday, in the middle of all the rain, she had the carpet cleaner come over and clean the carpets, and then, around 4:00 that same afternoon, she had a couple come in here and clean the bathroom and kitchen thoroughly. That left me with Dad to deal with after she left: he was having kittens over these “strangers in the house.” I couldn’t keep his attention on the Red Sox game. He kept asking me, every 30 seconds, “Are those people still here?” “Have those people left yet?” He was afraid they were going to steal something, never mind the fact that there is nothing in this house worth stealing except maybe my computer. The fact that it was starting to get dark just panicked him further. Thieves operate at night, you know. Around the fifth inning, he even toddled into the hallway, where they were cleaning and vacuuming, and tried to tell them to go now, pack up and leave. I told them to pay no attention to him and just finish the job. They finally left about 7:30 and I was then able to get his attention back on the glorious spectacle of the Red Sox mauling the New York Loudmouths.

This morning, after four straight days of rain, the dawn was cloudless. That also means a bit chilly, for this part of the country, anyway. I turned off the fan in the window upon rising, and got directly into my sweats before pouring coffee.

Last night the NLCS wrapped up, with the St. Louis Cardinals sending the Houston Astros home in defeat, 4-2, and that includes Roger Clemons, whose pitching could not save the day against St. Louis’ stubborn offense, although in fact that stubborn offense lay dormant until rather late in the game: Jeff Suppan gave up a home run in the first inning, and Houston promptly added another run to make it 2-0. Then the Cards brought in a runner from third on a squeeze play when Suppan, batting, laid down a perfect sacrifice bunt. The score remained 2-1 Houston until the sixth, when Albert Pujols tied it with a two-out double, and then Scott Rolen, who has not batted well in this series overall, promptly slammed a two-run homer to make it 4-2, the final score.

I cheered for St. Louis from start to finish, the Cardinals having a somewhat special place in my heart ever since they defeated the Loudmouths in the World Series of 1964. But in truth, an Astros victory would have given me a more unalloyed loyalty situation going into the Series. Truth is, I like both the Red Sox and the Cardinals. For whom do I root in this replay of the 1967 Series, which I vaguely remember, having turned 12 about that time? (As a boy, I didn’t have the attention span to sit through nine innnings of baseball, but I do remember Carl Yasztremski.) In ’85 I rooted, to no avail, for the Cardinals when they went up against George Brett and the Kansas City Royals. I missed the ’86 Series because I was in Frankfurt-am-Main at the time, but considering how I felt about the Mets in those days, Mookie Wilson’s fateful grounder to Bill Buckner would have broken my heart along with everyone else’s.

In the final analysis, this is about who the better team is, and the better team will presumably win, although one of the things that makes baseball so compelling is that the “better team” sometimes doesn’t win—fate sometimes sticks its thumb in, as in the case of Mookie’s grounder to Bill. In no other sport can little “accidents” like that have such enormous consequences.

But I have thought long and hard about who to root for in a Cards-Sox Series, and it will be the Sox. As much as I like the Cards, the Sox have been in the woods longer than anyone should have to be. 1918. For chrissakes. I’m sick and tired of hearing about “The Curse of the Bambino,” and by the way, am miles beyond sick and tired of hearing Yankee fans chant it like a mantra every time the Sox play the Loudmouths in the postseason. No, the Sox are so overdue for a Series championship that I think the fates should let St. Louis take a bye until next season. The Cards’ last World Series victory was in 1982, which is a while back, but it’s nowhere near as much of a “while back” as 1918. Of course, the fates are heartless, so it may be one more heartbreak for Boston—in ’67 the Cards took it in seven games. But actually, the way I see it, this is a win-win. Nothing, not even a Series defeat at the hands of St. Louis, can kill for Red Sox fans the joy of Oct. 20, 2004, when they sent the damned, hated Yankees and their fans, that legion of trousered gorillas, home to weep in their (hopefully poisoned) beer. The Sox will always have that, no matter how the Series plays out. So if the Cardinals win, I’m pleased. If the Sox win, I’m ecstatic. So I’m pulling for the Sox. Tear ‘em up, Johnny Damon. As for Albert Pujols, I’ll be in your corner next year if the Padres don’t make the playoffs.

Of course, if the Padres do, all bets are off.

October 24 Sunday

11:30 a.m. Jim just left for the airport, to return to Sacramento after having flown down on Friday for Lynne’s memorial service. He had originally planned to just stay one night and fgly back yesterday, but I talked him into staying an extra night so he could join me in running the Arturo Barrios Invitational 10K run this morning down on the Chula Vista Bayfront. So we did that, but I will never take part in that event or anything like it again. We finished the run, Jim going into a “kick” in the final 10th of a mile and finish about 30 seconds ahead of me. My time was 1:03:40 or something like that—a full five minutes slower than the last time I ran a 10K, which was about 3 ½ years ago.

Lynne’s memorial service on Friday was a conventional Lutheran memorial service: organ music, prayers, Bible readings, a homily, and songs sung by Carla and the Horrible Twins, who so scandalized Berigan when they came to sing in a choral concert at Carnegie Hall in 2000. The pastor had been briefed by Carla (and me) about some of Lynne’s endearing quirks and traits. But the problem was, they were untranslatable, by which I mean Lynne’s and my repertoire of private jokes were never meant for public consumption, and when a minister tried to tell an audience in a church about “Who’s tap-dancing down the street?” or “I Love, I Love You, I Love you, da-Da, da-Da, da-Da,” it just didn’t “work.” I was embarrassed. Unlike Mom’s funeral service four years ago, there was no “passing around the karaoke microphone” so people could say nice things about Lynne. We just said the prayers and sang the songs and then everyone went to the community hall for coffee and cake.

Afterward, some of the relatives came over here for more food, coffee and chit-chat, but I didn’t bother shooting any videotape, as I did at Mom’s funeral party in 2000. I’ve never wanted especially to watch that video, why would I want to watch one of Lynne’s?

When everyone else had cleared out, Jim stayed. Once again, he did us all the big favor of “taking charge” of Dad, just as he did four years ago, when activity was swirling all around “He’s pure gold,” Carla remarked. She’s right. There was no baseball game Friday night, as the World Series wasn’t scheduled to begin until yesterday. I rented a movie, Father Goose, but Dad, Jim and I all got so drunk we passed out before it was over. Bedtime at 10:30.

Yesterday, Saturday, Jim and I went to Coco’s for breakfast, and then later, to the San Diego marina, where our half-baked plan to was to take the tour of the U.S.S. Midway. But it’s a tourist attraction, and because of that, it’s a rip-off: they want $13 a head to take the tour. Screw that; we strolled on down past the Star of India and then went to have lunch at a seafood place in Seaport Village. A couple founrds of Sam Adams, an Ahi sandwich for Jim and a calimare salad for me. I didn’t see the bill because Jim said he would get it, but his eyebrows went up so high when he did see it that I pressed $20 on him to help cover it.

Last night was Game One of the 2004 World Series. We watched it of course, Dad, Jim and I, but it was nerve-wracking. We’re Boston partisans this fall, but they didn’t make it easy for us, because St. Louis didn’t make it easy for them. With Tim Wakefield starting for the Sox and Woody Williams for the Cards, Boston quickly established a six-run lead with a “big” second inning…and then blew it. The Cards scored to make it 7-2, then Wakefield walked three batters in a row to load the bases. One good base knock brought in three Cardinal runs, making it 7-5. The Cards quickly made it 7-7. Then Boston made it 9-7, then the Cards came right back and tied the score again, 9-9. Finally the Sox managed to add two more runs and then hold on for the 11-9 victory. Another victory like that and I have an ulcer, although I would take it. These two teams are just about evenly matched: both have powerful offense, the Cardinals’ centering around Larry Walker, Albert Pujols, Scott Rolen and Jim Edmonds, and the Red Sox’ around Johnny Damon, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, the last of whom has been hotter than a wood-burning stove since the playoffs began. And both have weakness in their starting rotations. So you have two hard-slugging teams with “problem” bullpens. This should be an interesting series, by which I mean that I don’t expect either team to sweep the other: both have proven, in the playoffs, that they can come back from deficits and take it all, Boston being the more spectacular case.

I’m probably going to miss the first inning or two tonight, because 10K or no, I have a surfing lesson in Coronado at 4:00. But I’ll see most of it, decidedly.

October 27 Wednesday

Noted in passing: today would have been Dylan Thomas’ 90th birthday.

There was no surfing lesson on Sunday. Randy showed up and declared the ocean still too polluted to be splashing around in. So I took the surfboard that I had just bought from him, he helped me strap it to the roof of my car, and I came on home, put the surfboard behind the guest house in the weeds, covered it with a tarpaulin, and went off to watch Game Two of the World Series with Dad. The Red Sox won, 6-2.

Monday there was no game, as the teams were travelling to St. Louis. In a taste of the long winter to come, Dad and I watched Father Goose.

Yesterday, Tuesday, was fateful for me. I’m thinking that it’s time for me to move on. I mean, from that job at the Star-News. Prior to Sept. 9, the day Michael was fired, I had never in all my days had a story “spiked.” Since then I’ve had four stories “spiked.” Carlos Davalos is clearly Linda Townson’s lapdog in a way that Michael Burgess refused to be. Linda tells him what not to print, and he tells me to back off that story. In this case, three separate stories about the Otay Water District. I suspect that Jaime Bonilla, a big Star-News advertiser this political season, has put pressure on Linda to quit printing things that might help Elizabeth Scott, the opponent in the election of his pal and yes-man on the board, Jose Lopez. In any case, I was told yesterday to drop three stories. “We’re not going to print anything else about the Otay Water District until after the election,” Carlos said. I asked if this had anything to do with Bonilla being an advertiser. Carlos denied it. I think he’s lying.

I’ve said all along that, if things ever get to the point where this job isn’t fun anymore, I’m walking. For $9.25 an hour I’m not going to put up with much, and by the way I have not been offered a raise in my entire 15 months on that rag, not even after I won an award last month.

Game Three of World Series was last night, and the Sox won again, 4-1 this time. The Cardinals helped them, playing some remarkably inept baseball. Pedro Martinez pitched magnificently once he found his groove, but the game’s defining moment came in the third inning, when Cards pitcher Jeff Suppan, on third base, blew a chance to score on a short fly and got himself thrown out scrambling back to third in what turned into a double play. Bad baserunning helped torpedo the Cardinals last night.

So Boston is now up in the Series 3-0. Am I putting the champagne on ice? Not on your life. Lightning could strike twice: the Cardinals could come roaring back and do the same thing to the Red Sox that the Red Sox did to the Yankees last week. It doesn’t seem likely, but it didn’t seem likely that the Sox would do it either. And Boston has a long, long history of choking at the crucial moment, and snatching defeat from the mouth of victory. I take nothing for granted until the last out of the last game.

My hopes for a sweep, though, have as much to do with life here at home as with my hopes for the Red Sox. Tomorrow morning Carla and I are scheduled to board a plane for Spokane, with Lynne’s ashes in my carry-on. If the Series goes beyond tonight, my Dad will be watching the next couple of games without me. If the Sox are to win, I’m hoping Dad and I can see it together, rather than him watching it from here and me watching it from the Ramada Inn in downtown Spokane. But my plans are locked in: Sox victory or no, I’ll be spending the night in Spokane tomorrow night for the first time since 1971.

Logistics: Dad still has not been told that we’re taking this trip. Carla thought it would be best not to tell him until the last minute, so he wouldn’t stew about it. Of course we’re not telling him the real reason we’re going, nor are we telling him where we’re going. The official story is, it’s some sort of medical conference that Carla’s attending, and I’m going along as a journalist, to write an article about it. She’s supposed to come over this morning and tell him about it (it’s 8 a.m. now) but she hasn’t shown up yet and anyway, Dad is still asleep. He may sleep for a while, too, because it is dark this morning. It’s been raining since the wee hours, sometimes hard, and is still raining now.

I had to call America West airlines and the Transportation Security Administration yesterday. Lynne’s ashes are in a metal box, and in this post 9/11 world, a metal box can be a big problem when you’re going through airport security. And yes, I was told by TSA that I can’t do that: Lynne’s ashes will have to be decanted into a plastic or wooden container if I’m to take them on the plane. Lynne’s ashes will be going to their final rest in a red plastic Folgers coffee can, a touch of “ridiculous” that she would have appreciated, as she would have appreciated the spectacle of Carla and me trying to get them out of that damned metal box from the mortuary. It would seem the mortuary’s intention is that their metal box will be the deceased’s ashes’ final resting place itself, because they didn’t make that fucking box easy to open. Carla went at it with a kitchen knife, which proved useless; I then tried a big screwdriver, which also didn’t do much good. Finally here we were, Carla and me, with that box on the floor of my bedroom, going at it with a crowbar. When we finally got the box torn open, Carla had to admonish me to be careful with the crowbar for fear of puncturing the plastic bag and getting Lynne’s ashes all over the floor. Lynne would have howled with laughter at such an absurd scene.

9:15 p.m. THE BOSTON RED SOX HAVE WON THE WORLD SERIES!!! NO
MORE “1918!”YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

October 28 Thursday

8:30 p.m. Carla and I are aboard an America West flight, somewhere between Phoenix and Spokane. Under the seat in front of me is my carry-on bag, which contains, among other things, A Folger’s plastic coffee can bearing Lynne’s ashes. We had to “decant” her ashes from the metal box in which the mortuary served them up to us last month, the Transportation Security Administration having informed me on Tuesday that they would not be allowed through airport security except in a plastic or wooden container. I’m glad I called and asked, because even as it was, the Folger’s coffee can aroused so much suspicion that it had to be sent through X-ray twice, both in San Diego and in Phoenix, so convinced were our Homeland Security eagles that it must contain C-4.

By the way, the mortuary must have intended that metal box as the final resting place of Lynne’s ashes, because when Carla and I were trying to get it open last night, we went through a knife and a screwdriver, and then finally had to resort to a crowbar. “Lynne would have been laughing her head off, watching this,” Carla said as we pried and pried at that damned box with a crowbar, on the carpet of my bedroom no less. Meanwhile, as this was going on, in the living room the final game of the World Series between the Red Sox and Cardinals was underway.

I got up this morning at 4:30. Carla had had to pull the night shift at Kearney Mesa Convalescent the night before, so we had agreed that I would pick her up there at 6 a.m. and we would proceed on to the airport. When I rose to pour a cup of coffee, I could see the morning star and assumed it was going to be a clear day. By the time I put my bags into the car at 5:30 a.m., just an hour later, it was pouring rain (again.) As I started the car and prepared to back out of the driveway in this downpour, Oldies 99.3 FM was playing Down on the Corner by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Lynne would have liked that touch, I thought.

I picked up Carla at her work, and we made it to San Diego Airport right on time.

And that was the end of “So far, so good.”

Our flight was supposed to leave San Diego at 8:05 a.m. We were booked on a connecting flight from Phoenix to Spokane at 10:50 a.m. and we expected to be in Spokane by 2:30 in the afternoon.

“Expected.”

We sat on the tarmac in San Diego for almost two full hours. They said the weather was to blame: it was also raining in Phoenix, America West’s hub, and all flights, not just ours, were backed up, backed up, backed up, they told us. We couldn’t depart San Diego until Phoenix had a “slot” for us. So there we sat, 75 or so people, couped up in this tin can on the tarmac, reading newspapers, dozing, fiddling with our laptops or whatever, until almost 10:30, when we finally got off the ground. By the time we reached rainy Phoenix (!) almost an hour later, our connecting flight to Spokane had already left and gone.

This is the only time in my experience that I have ever actually been glad, instead of annoyed, that somebody had a cell phone. There we stood, Carla and me, in line with about a gazillion other stranded souls, in front of the America West customer service counter in Phoenix. Then a brilliant idea struck: why wait? Why not just whip out the cell phone, call America West, and re-book over the phone? Carla proceeded to do precisely that, so we didn’t have to stand in line.

The downside was that our new flight wasn’t scheduled to leave Phoenix until 7:24 p.m., which gave us eight hours to kill.

We got a cab and told the cabbie to take us to the nearest shopping mall. We figured we could while away the time shopping, having lunch, maybe going to a movie if the shopping mall happened to have a theater. The cabbie, by the way, was a guy originally from Afghanistan by way of London, and had been a Phoenix resident for about 10 years. He dropped us off at Border’s Books, agreeing to come back and get us at 5:00.

So we pooped away the afternoon at this shopping mall. Since the airport doesn’t have lockers like the bus station does, I went about all afternoon lugging my red gym bag, which contained Lynne’s ashes, a brown-bag lunch I’d packed for the plane, my notebook and Bic pen, a book about Stalin that I’d brought along to read on the plane, and my world-band radio. Over my other shoulder I was lugging my camcorder.

We browsed at Border’s for a while. We both bought CDs (mine was Brian Wilson’s Smile, about which I had read an intriguing article in the San Diego Union-Tribune just about two hours earlier) and had coffee in the Borders coffee bar. I read USA Today while drinking mine, heading directly to the story, ‘SOX REVERSE CURSE” about last night’s World Series victory by my no-longer sad-sack, suddenly glory-soaked Boston heroes, second in my heart only to the San Diego Padres, another bunch of loveable bridesmaids whose day of glory is still to come.

From there we went to Champs’ Bar and Grill and had what might be called a “leisurely lunch:” Carla had three Coronas and a cheeseburger; I had three Sam Adams and a patty melt, and then we had coffee and split a piece of cheesecake.

Some talk of childhood days, and specifically of Spokane. “I think the reason Lynne and I were so close, and neither of us was that close to you, was that you’re basically a happy person and Lynne and I were basically unhappy people,” I said. “And as unhappy people, or at least, as people with a streak of melancholy in them, we were bound tighter by our shared vice, nostalgia.”

Carla replied that, for her, childhood is not a time of warm, cozy memories, as it was for Lynne and me, but a time dominated almost constantly by fear. As the eldest of the three of us, she was by default closer than Lynne and me to the hell-house of Mom and Dad’s catastrophic marriage, and apparently the situation had her living constantly in a state of fear and anxiety the whole time she was growing up, constantly waiting for the next explosion. And as far as Spokane is concerned, whereas Lynne’s and my memories of Spokane were primarily those of a green arcadia where we were happier than either of us had ever been before or has been since, for Carla, the first year we were there was a time not only of fear and anxiety but also one of intense loneliness, exacerbated by her having been the big, fat kid she was then, sidelined from the social life of Shadle Park High School because of her weight.

I was unaware, or barely aware, of some of this, and for that reason alone I think this pilgrimage back to Lynne’s and my childhood arcadia, which as it turns out was less than that to Carla, has a value above and beyond my desire to commit my little sister’s ashes back to the earth in a place for which she and I shared an enduring love and a lifelong ember of nostalgia. When my old friend and Lynne’s once-upon-a-time boyfriend Mike Baker died in 1994, Lynne drew close (for a short time) to Mike’s widow Joette, and told me that Michael’s death had had at least that one positive side-effect. “It gave me Joette,” Lynne said. Well, if Lynne and Joette never did become the fast friends that Lynne’s tender heart hoped they might, (they didn’t) it nevertheless was quite revealing of Lynne’s character that she hoped they would. Perhaps Carla and I are fated to draw a bit closer together under the aegis of Lynne’s passing, just as Lynne hoped she and Joette would under the aegis of Michael’s. Then again, maybe I’m just raving from a combination of fatigue, a little bit of liquor and a profound hatred of being on an airplane.

More later. We’re about to land in Spokane, a city I last visited during the summer I was 15. This should be interesting.

October 29

Ramada Inn, downtown Spokane

Well, this morning (a chilly, gray fall morning out of my fondest Spokane memories) we had a bit of breakfast here at the motel and then rambled across town to poke around the old neighborhood a bit, including a stop at the familiar (though remodeled) Rosauer’s grocery at Five Mile Plaza for provisions which included a bottle of wine and a single rose. We then drove in our rented Ford Taurus down to Spokane River State Park to do what we came up here to do.

I did not remember Bowl and Pitcher, the landmark rock formation on the river that I had chosen for the scattering of Lynne’s ashes, as being that far from town. Memory might have to be edited: I had thought that on that long-ago summer day when Lynne and I went on our epic “lure-losing” trip to Bowl and Pitcher, that we had walked down there. But surely we must have been on our bikes. Carla made that comment as we drove to the river this morning: it would have been a very long hike even for two adults, never mind two kids aged 11 and 12.

We found the spot, which wasn’t hard, since it is a state monument. I was probably violating some fish and game regulation by scattering ashes there, but tant pis for the park rangers. There wasn’t anybody around anyway. Under lead-gray skies, with the temperature around 40, (4.4 Celsius) we picked our way down to the river’s edge at a spot just adjacent to an old fashioned foot-bridge that crosses it.

The river at this big rock formation is a whitewater-rapids area, and Carla didn’t want Lynne’s ashes to disappear too too quickly, so she found a tiny spot among the rocks where there was a sort of mini-lagoon, a spot where the water was swirling more gently and Lynne’s ashes would be wafted away rather than swept away. I showed Carla how to work my camcorder, and she videtotaped me performing this operation, commending Lynne’s ashes to the river while we each spoke a few tender words of farewell (which had to be shouted in order to be heard above the rapids, and somehow, tender words of farewell sound a bit riduculous when shouted, but there’s another thing Lynne would have found funny.)

As I was pouring Lynne’s ashes into the river, Carla admonished me to “save some.” Her son Joey had voiced a desire to scatter some of Lynne’s ashes at her other most-favorite place, Disneyland. (Talk about arousing the ire of park rangers; I wonder what the Disneyland authorities will do to Joey if they catch him scattering ashes there.) So I duly held back a softball-sized clump of ashes, tying the bag back up.

It was then that two rather odd things happened. First, while the river did obligingly accept Lynne’s ashes and carry most of them off like a song fading away, which is what you expect in such situations, some of her ashes sank to the bottom, covered the rocks and stayed there. Now, I’m sure there is some perfectly plausible explanation for this out of Chemistry 1A, some elements in the body being heavier than others, but it was a nice touch, as though Lynne somehow wanted to linger in this place of unearthly beauty. When we left an hour later, we could still see some of Lynne’s ashes covering those rocks, as if she were in no hurry to leave.

Then we went out to the middle of the foot bridge, overlooking the rapids, to drink a toast to her. After uncorking the bottle (it was a Cotes du Rhone rouge) I balanced the camcorder on the edge of the bridge railing, risking its falling into the river and being lost forever, in order to videotape Carla and me raising our cups in tribute to our late little sister.

Just as we were making this toast, Carla cried out “Look at that!”

I looked up just in time to see a great blue heron come swooping out of nowhere, majestically flying over the very spot where Lyn’s ashes had just been scattered. He made a swing around the crests of the nearby pines along the riverbank, then swung back and settled into the very tip-top of the pine directly overlooking the strip of rocky shore where we had just scattered Lynne’s ashes. He remained perched there, as though keeping watch. Now, I know that great blue herons are common along the Spokane River, and I also know that they are well known for waiting patiently in one spot, motionless, in the hope of catching a fish. But the timing of this bird’s appearance was uncanny nonetheless, coming as it did just as we were raising our cups in a toast. It was as if some cosmic film director had said, “Cue the bird.”

Carla gathered some rocks and pine cones from the riverbank to make a little memorial for Lynne back at home. Then we drove slowly back to the city, leaving the river to Lynne and Lynne to the river. Indeed, now the river is Lynne and Lynne is the river, which is exactly what I had in mind: “Lsp! I am leafy speafing.”

I remember Spokane from the perspective of a teenage kid who got around by foot, bicycle and bus. I had never driven a car in Spokane before, and now I fully understand Carla’s reminiscences of our mother’s endless complaining about how nerve-wracking it was to drive around here. The city, especially downtown but elsewhere as well, is a patchwork quilt of one-way streets. It drives you nuts. Anyway, it took us a while to get back to our motel after our errand with Lynne’s ashes, because I kept driving around in circles. I did okay here when I was a kid on a bike, but put me behind the wheel of a car in Spokane and I need a compass and a sextant.

Once we did get back to the motel, I decided we would leave the car there and become pedestrians. Which left the question open: what does one do after scattering a loved one’s ashes in a river? That’s a no-brainer, as they say these days, especially if you’ve just carried out that mission at 11:00 on a Friday morning. The answer is lunch and shopping, which is exactly what Lynne would have wanted us to do and, by the way, probably what she and Carla would have done if it were they who had just scattered my ashes in the river.

We went to a Greek “restaurant and wine bar” and had a very pricey lunch with a bottle of wine: $75 after the tip. Then we walked over to the Bon Marchè department store, which we used to haunt when we lived here as kids. It won’t be the Bon Marchè much longer, by the way. It has been engulfed, devoured and will soon be renamed by, and for, Macy’s. And since I’m on the subject, half a block further west on Main Street, the site of the Woolworth’s drug store with the old-fashioned lunch counter, which Lynne remembered so fondly as the place where we would sometimes go for coffee or a hot dog after a downtown-crawl in our childhood, is now a Nordstrom’s department store.

Carla shopped big-time: shoes, skirts, sweaters. I bought some upscale cologne for myself, something Givenchi makes called Pi (insert symbol here.) I used the Macy’s charge account that I opened yesterday in Phoenix.

Carla had seen a poster on the street announcing the current run of Riverdance at the Spokane Opera House. And she decided we just had to go. “Lynne loved Riverdance,” she said. We have tickets for the 8 p.m. performance tonight.

September, 2004

2004-11-27T13:52:00.000-08:00

September 3 Friday

The Padres are finished for the season. Last night they completed a three-game sweep at the hands of the St. Louis Cardinals, which is exactly what I knew was going to happen. So they have slipped into third place, which is where they are going to stay for the rest of the season, and that takes care of any idea of them being in the playoffs. It’s over. What makes me so sure? It’s simple: next week they have to play the Cardinals again, and at Petco Park no less, where they already have a losing record. The Padres cannot beat St. Louis. That is a fact as incontrovertible as the firmness of the earth. St. Louis hits home runs left and right; the Padres, with their droopy little offense, can’t get a runner past third base. They play Colorado tonight and over the weekend, and conceivably they might be able to beat the Rockies, but next week they have to play St. Louis again, which means they’re going to get swept again. And after that they have to play the Dodgers, who are now 6 ½ games ahead of them in the NL West. When St. Louis finishes sweeping them again next week, that will make six losses (at least) in two weeks. The season is over.

September 5 Sunday

Drove out to Coronado yesterday and had my first surfing lesson. I doubt if I’m going to be able to get the hang of it. It’s tricker even than the cross-country snow skiing I tried in Moscow 10 years ago, because you not only have to keep from falling over backwards, but you also have to balance side-to-side on a platform that’s not only moving forward, but liable to tip over. My instructor, Randy Couts, is an experienced surfer who used to operate two surf shops in San Diego. He kept me in shallow water, and already, in my first lesson, had me trying to stand up on the board. Precisely because I was in such shallow water, and because every time I tried to stand up on the board I fell off, I kept smacking my left knee against the shallow bottom sand, and this morning have a big purple bruise on that knee. But I’ll be out there next Saturday for my next lesson nonetheless.

Carla and her progeny were scheduled to come by at noon yesterday for a birthday celebration for “the boys,” both of whose birthdays were last week. I sought to steer clear of that because it meant that the worthless 300 lb. sack of shit would be here. So, once my surfing lesson was over with, I went to Danny’s Bar and Grill in Coronado and had a sandwich and a couple glasses of Sam Adams. I lingered over lunch, but still, when I drove back up to the house at 1 p.m., they were just arriving. (Carla is always an hour late.) Well, the only thing I would consider giving Joey for his birthday is a kick in the ass with a steel-toed boot, but Ricky, that’s another matter. I asked him what he would like as far as a gift, and he and I are supposedly going for a bike ride this morning, after which I will take him to the store and buy him a present.

I don’t know as there is any point in my continuing to even chronicle the Padres’ misfortunes in these pages. They are definitely done for the year, six games behind Los Angeles in the NL West and two games behind Chicago in the wild card race. They got lucky on Friday, rallying from a 5-0 deficit to beat Colorado on a tremendous Phil Nevin home run in the 7th, but last night they got no such break. After a big ceremony at Petco Park in which they retired Tony Gwynn’s number 19, they proceeded to take an 8-2 drubbing from the Rockies. Ironically, the key problem was pitching. The Padres have famously had one of the best bullpens in baseball this season, but there is an achilles heel in their starting rotation: they don’t have a good #5 man. When I saw last night that our starting pitcher was to be Dennis Tankersley, I knew we were doomed. In his last previous start, he got shelled by Montreal, and last night he lasted less than five innings before they took him out. As of this morning he’s out of a job, but that doesn’t help, because they really don’t have anyone they can replace him with. Tankersley took over from Sterling Hitchcock, who just yesterday announced his retirement due to injuries. Andy Ashby is also recovering from injuries and/or surgery. I can only hope that one of the stories we’ll be following in the Hot Stove League this coming year will be the Padres’ quest for a #5 starter. That, and a replacement for David Wells, who only has a one-year contract and probably won’t be back, which in turn is OK with me, because Nevin’s home run on Friday was the only thing that saved his sorry fat butt.

The good news is: the Bombers got bombed again. Yesterday Baltimore beat the Yankees 7-0, cutting their lead over Boston to 2 ½ games.

September 6 Monday

Labor Day.

Life With A Drunk, Ch. 48: Sometimes I get so exasperated, watching Lynne’s not-too-systematic attempt to kill herself with comfort food and booze, that I have to pop off to my other sister about it. Yesterday was a case in point.

It was a ferociously hot day, close to 100 degrees by 2:00. Dad and I watched the Padres get clobbered by Colorado 5-2 in the afternoon, sweltering away in that stuffy living room, which must somehow be air-conditioned before the next Santa Ana. Anyway, I decided around midafternoon that I would barbeque chicken in the backyard for supper, it being too hot to heat up the kitchen. I went to the store and got some chicken and some charcoal and prepared to do that. Lynne knew that that was my plan.

So what happens? While I’m preparing to do that, and Dad and I are watching the Angels-Indians game on ESPN2, the LaBella Pizza delivery truck pulls into the driveway. Lynne, who always has money because she’s stealing it from Dad, had ordered herself a pizza. I went out back and said to her, “I take it from the fact that you’ve ordered a pizza that you don’t want any chicken.”

“Nah.” (I get so christawful sick of that “Nah” of hers, uttered as it usually is from that filthy couch she sits on 14 hours a day watching TV, while surrounded by empty brandy bottles all over the floor.)

So I went ahead and barbequed chicken for Dad and me. But just as I’m getting ready to serve Dad, here she comes through the back door, galumphing into the kitchen, all Humpty-Dumpty 225 lbs. of her, and proceeds to get out the frying pan, the eggs, etc. She is, of course, drunk. It’s 7 p.m. by now and she’s been slugging brandy straight out of the bottle all day.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Making an omelet.”

“I thought you ordered a pizza!”

“I didn’t finish it. I didn’t like it.”

So, having already noshed on pepperoni pizza, she now proceeds to make herself a cheese omelet. And that’s not all. Remember, this is a drunk we’re talking about. While the omelet is cooking on the stove, she reaches into the refrigerator and cuts herself a slice of the cheesecake they had yesterday for Ricky and the Shitbag’s “birthday celebration.” Five minutes later, she walks out the door carrying a plate that contains a cheese omelet and a slice of cheesecake. This after having already had pizza, and all of it, of course, chased down with a quart of brandy.
It was too much. I called Carla.

“You know, I shouldn’t give a shit, but sometimes, watching her hellbent efforts to kill herself just pisses me off,” I said. “After all, she is my younger sister.”

On a different subject…I have reached that stage of life where one begins hatching one crazy “affordable retirement” fantasy after another. Last month (or maybe it was in July) I was on the phone with my wife Chris, who told me that she, Karen and a couple of other friends are cooking up a “Mexican retirement” scheme. We’re all basically in the same boat: none of us is going to have enough money to retire independently, so they’ve decided that, when the time comes, they’re going to glom on to a place somewhere around Guadalajara and start a sort of “artist commune.” I asked if I might join, and was told sure, why not. Bring your money and join the group.

But then, discussing this with Michael, I was told to reconsider (he always has an opinion.)

“Don’t go to the sunny south,” he said. “You won’t get any work done.”

“You’re probably right,” I agreed. “Remember what Dylan Thomas said, ‘If I went to the sun, I would just sit in the sun.’ Thomas preferred to stay in misty Britain, where he would work.”
At almost the same moment, my new issue of the Escape from America newsletter popped into my inbox. I have subscribed to this e-mail publication since I worked at RDA; it appears sporadically.

The latest one had an article about a woman who had gone off to live on the Isle of Skye, just off the coast of Scotland.

“I know the Isle of Skye,” Michael said. “It’s Whiskey Galore country. You better take along a good supply of provisions if you go there.” But then he went on to talk about how beautiful it is, farther north than Moscow and so having long, long summer days, but not as cold as Moscow in winter because it sits on the Gulf Stream.

It sounds like my northerly paradise all right. It also sounds like one hell of a lonely place.

5 p.m., same day

I went cycling this morning, although it turned out as my little adventures usually do, which is to say, other than I expected. Around 8:15 I loaded my road bike and gear into the car and drove out to Sunnyside. My plan was to tool around the base of Mt. San Miguel. But I rode east on Mt. San Miguel Road until I came to…a locked gate. I had to turn back. Passing Proctor Valley Road, I decided to go that way for a while. But about a mile or so down that road, I saw a sign that read “Pavement Ends, 600 Feet.” I had to turn around again. So I rode back down to the Bonita Golf Club, crossed the bridge and figured I would cycle out in the direction of Lemon Grove. Nope: on the other side of the bridge was a sign reading “CLOSED TO THROUGH TRAFFIC.” That left only Sweetwater Road, heading back toward Rohr Park. So I went that way, circling around Rohr Park, back to Bonita Road and eventually back to where I parked the car. I figure I rode maybe 10 miles. It was a hot morning, though, so I worked up a sweat.

Back home, I took a shower and then made steak-and-eggs (with fresh tomatoes, although our summer tomato crop is just about finished for this year) and some fresh coffee for Dad and me.
At 11 a.m., which is 10 p.m. Moscow time, I tried to call Nadya. Her mother told me she was “na rabotaya” but would be back “skoro budet’.” So I decided to wait for an hour and try again. I went out on the porch with Dad and lit a cigar. Then Carla and Victor came rolling up, having just come from breakfast themselves. Carla and I got to talking about how, in the face of this mini heat-wave we’re having, I had decided I wanted to put an air conditioning unit in the living room. The only way to make that feasible was to rearrange the furniture, so she and I did that.
At noon, I tried to call Nadya again and this time she answered the phone, although she had been on the phone with someone else and my call interrupted that. But we hadn’t spoken since June, so we talked for a while. She had been in England again. That’s where she was on her birthday. Cornwall and Devon this time, not London. Once again, the little green monster peeked around the doorway for a moment. Two trips to England in less than six months? She said it was “business travel,” and that she was attending classes there, but I’m not so sure she doesn’t have a British boyfriend tucked away somewhere, and that’s why she keeps wanting to go back to England over and over. But, as I wrote in these pages last spring, it’s nothing I need to get my knickers in a twist about. Nadya is so secretive about her life that if she does indeed have an English lover, the only way I’m ever going to hear about it is if she suddenly announces wedding plans. So I might as well not even waste time thinking about it.
What we did talk about were my weblog, last week’s tragedy in Beslan, and my surfing lessons. About 30 minutes into our conversation she asked if I could “call back in a few minutes” because she had to get back to the other person she was talking to when I called. But I told her I’d just call her on Sunday like I usually do.

By now it was getting on for 1 p.m. Lynne and I went to Sears, where I bought another air-conditioning unit, somewhat similar to the one I installed in this bedroom in early July. Garry and Brenda came by later, (she has about one month left before the baby arrives) and Garry helped me install the a/c unit in the living room’s west window. But it is as I feared: a 5,100 BTU air conditioner is not going to cool both the living room and the dining room; that area is too big for such a small unit. So it isn’t particularly cooling either room. I told Dad that I think we need to put some kind of retractable partition between the two rooms that we can close when the unit is running.

I got on the scale this afternoon and weighed 188. I was pleased about that. It’s one thing to weigh in at 188 after a three-mile morning jog, when I’m dehydrated and haven’t had anything to eat since last night, but to weigh in at 188 at the end of the day, when I’ve had a meal a few hours earlier and have also by the way had two cans of beer, that is progress. Of course, between the morning bicycle ride and installing the air conditioner in the living room, I got a lot of hard exercise today. But still, to weigh 188 at 4 p.m., I like that.

September 7 Tuesday

A miracle happened last night: The Padres beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 7-3. And they did it without Mark Loretta, who has been sidelined for a few days with injuries to his fingers suffered when he had a collision with some Colorado Rockie sliding into second on Sunday. Victory won’t happen again: after all, the Cardinals are the best team in baseball right now. How strong is this team? Their lineup is so loaded with sluggers that they can afford to have a power hitter like Larry Walker bat second instead of cleanup. But at least now the Padres won’t get swept. They remain 5 ½ games out, two games behind San Francisco, and I still do not believe they will be playing in the post-season.

Went to the golf course this morning and jogged three miles in the hot sun. Weighed 187 back at home. But I have to go see Adam McKillican, my chiropractor. Lately when I jog, the aftermath is a sore spot on the left side of my ass that lingers for days. I think something may be out of alignment and is putting strain on a muscle.

Late in the afternoon after I came home, (it being 80 degrees on the front porch) I caught Dad standing in the dining room, with his jacket on, apparently about to turn on the heat. “I’m freezing!” he declared. It must have been 82 in the living room, but the Coumedin he takes every day keeps his blood so thin that he’s always complaining of being cold, even when the rest of us are suffocating from the heat.

I steered him away from the heater controls, then went out back to share this latest absurdity with Lynne. So what do I see when I walk up to the falling-off-its-hinges screen door of that granny flat she has so thoroughly trashed? She’s sitting there, on that filthy sofa in the middle of that garbage heap she lives in, stuffing her face with Eggo waffles and syrup. Sometimes I wish she would just die and get it over with, even as she’s sitting there in her garbage heap, besotted every hour of the livelong day, wishing Dad would die and get it over with. She sits there and crams her fat face with sandwiches, omelets, pizza and waffles, washing it all down with quart after quart of E&J brandy. This long suicide of hers, slowly offing herself with fatty foods and liquor, is just revolting to watch.

September 8 Wednesday

I was right of course. Last night Jake Peavy, our best pitcher, gave it all he had for five innings-plus, and St. Louis still won the game, 4-2.

Getting the joke: because I never watch TV news and only glance at the newspaper, I live on the periphery of American culture. This is deliberate. American mass culture has always gotten on my nerves, which is one of the reasons I so enjoyed living overseas. As long as I was overseas, I was safely insulated from the world of Sex and the City, Jerry Springer, network television, The Washington Post, The National Enquirer, Peter Jennings, rap and hip-hop, cellulite articles, breathless reviews of trashy movies, Viagra ads, Democrats and Republicans, the food police, PETA, Ditech.com, QVC, Jerry Seinfeld, SuperSize, telemarketing, hanging chads and swift-boat veterans, Humvees, mega-boom car stereos, fad diets and J-Lo. When I lived in Europe, I had to deal with none of that noise, and returning to these shores in 1998, being confronted with all of it once more, was one of the most depressing things about the experience.

Impossible as it is to steer clear of loud vulgarity in 2004 America, I do try: when I get up in the morning, I read poetry and history, not the newspaper. I only watch TV if it’s a ball game, a movie or the reruns on TV Land: you won’t catch me near network TV, ever.

As a result, I sometimes miss out on things (most of which are just as well missed out on). Case in point: the ads I’ve been seeing in National Review Online in recent months: (yes, I do read National Review) “You Don’t Support Democrats. Why Should Your Ketchup?” You are then exhorted to buy “W” Ketchup and show your tomato-based support for George W. Bush.

Huh?

OK, now I get the joke. It has been explained to me that John Kerry, the Democrats’ candidate for president this year, is married to Teresa Heinz, she of the Heinz ketchup dynasty. A ketchup heiress. A multi-multi-millionaire. Only in America could the banner of watered-down Marxist socialism, the Democrats’ eternal agenda, be borne forth on a sea of…ketchup.

I wish I were back in Bonn.

6:30 p.m. Another mini-miracle today. Although I still do not believe the Padres have a popsicle’s chance in hell of playing in the postseason, they took a three-game series from St. Louis, beating them 10-5 this afternoon at Petco. I honestly didn’t think they could do it. But David Wells was “on” and Matt Morris was “off,” and Ryan Klesko and Phil Nevin both hits home runs, and the Cardinals committed some stupid errors, and the rest is history.

September 9 Thursday

Well, I had a big day at the newspaper today. My top story got killed, and then my editor got fired.

We had a great story ready to go on page one this week. Steve Castaneda, who is running for city council in Chula Vista against Dan Hom, and who has a reputation for dirty politics, dug up some dirt on Hom, specifically on his business past, and brought it to my door. I sifted through it, called Hom and got his response, and we were set to go with page one political scandal. But then Linda Townson, our “publisher,” overheard us talking about a cartoon based on this story. Since Linda considers Dan Hom to be her buddy, and since her notion of journalism is that news is just stuff you make up for your friends, she ordered Michael to spike both the story and the cartoon.

This has never happened to me in all my days as a reporter. It was a complete, philistine outrage, and I was furious, having put in some good hard work on that story and then written it to boot. I got in my car, drove over to the office of the Union-Tribune and handed it to Amy Oakes. “Here, I have something for you,” I said. “It’s a story. We were going to go with it on page one tomorrow, but our ‘publisher’ told us we can’t print it. So you take it.”

We didn’t know it this morning, but this flapdoodle over an article was the last nail in Michael’s coffin. He hasn’t been getting along with Linda lately, in fact was taken into her ofice July 23rd for a real ass-reaming at the hands of her and our 23 year-old media mogul “owner,” Danny Verdugo, who is much like Linda: he knows a great deal about selling ads, and nothing whatever about journalism. At the time of the July 23 ass-reaming, Michael asked them not to fire him until he had closed escrow on the house he and Lisa were buying. They closed escrow August 16, and as of this afternoon Michael is out of a job.

September 10 Friday
At 5:30 p.m. today, after having been locked in her room all day, my sister Lynne was found dead in her bed. The cops had to break in; Dad and I couldn’t get the door open.
My sweet baby sister, best friend of my life, is dead.

September 11 Saturday

Apparently she just went off into an alcoholic slumber and didn’t wake up. I left the house early yesterday, so the last time I saw her was Thursday evening. I don’t even remember what our last words to each other were, except that she had been busy, having one of her spasms of productivity. She had gone to the grocery store, and when I came in from work, recounted for me what she had bought. A bit later, as Dad and I were settling down to watch the ball game, she came in and said she had cleaned the bathroom and put up clean towels, and also remarked the rug in my bedroom needed vacuuming, and that she would do it yesterday. As she walked out through the dining room, I made some little joke like “Now go wash my car.” She looked back and smiled, and that’s the last I ever remember seeing of her.

I left early yesterday. Michael having just been fired, I decied it would be “politic” for me to attend the First Friday Breakfast at the San Diego Country Club. When I left the house at 7:25, neither Dad nor Lynne was stirring.

When I came home for lunch at noon, Lynne’s door was locked, the light on, the fan running. I asked Dad if she had come into the house at all that morning. At first he wasn’t sure, but then said yes, she had come in, because he had reminded her that she was to take him to the doctor at 11:00. But then he was fuming, because his doctor appointment had come and gone and he couldn’t raise her on the intercom. About this time I noticed that the telephone in my room was missing. I got on the intercom and called Lynne, “Do you have my phone?” No answer. Usually when I call her on that intercom, she comes and opens the door. This time, nothing. I banged on the door and window. No response.

That was when I should have smelled a big enough rat to call the police or break the door down, but I didn’t. I ate lunch and went back to work.

I left work at 4:15 and went to my gym. I got back home about 5:30 and the door was still locked, the fan still running.

Now I was alarmed enough to call the cops. Dad and I contemplated bashing the door in with the sledgehammer, but before we could do that, the police showed up. They went in through the window and found her. “I’m sorry, she’s passed away,” the cop said to me.

The medical examiner, the chaplain and the Guidos promptly descended on the house. I called Madelon, Garry, Uncle Bert, Jim Provenza, Michael Burgess and Charlie Berigan. Charlie passed the word to Ray Araiza, who came over. Ray passed the word to Jan Barnett, who called later and left a message. I’ve been on the phone much of this morning, with Madelon, Carla, Karen and Louise Nelson.

September 12 Sunday

Yes, I can’t say that my friends—even those I had recently renounced as friends—haven’t tried to be supportive.

Since that horrible moment Friday afternoon, I have been on the phone with Charlie Berigan, Jan Barnett, Lucia, Chris, Michael, Karen. Ray Araiza, whom I thought I never wanted to see again, dropped by even as the coroner was still here Friday, having been tipped off by Berigan as to what had happened.

But no amount of support from friends can begin to ameliorate this pain. As I told Jan yesterday, I grieved and mourned when my mother died four years ago, of course. But my mother was 79 and in frail health. Her death was a shock, but it came at a time of life when you start to think of death. This, this is completely different. I’ve lost my little sister. She was 47. She should not have died that young.

And of course there’s a great more to it than that. When Mom died in 2000, I wrote Lynne a long letter. Although she kept numerous of my letters dating back to the 1980s, when we were cleaning out her room yesterday I didn’t find that one. And by the way, I thought I had written about that letter in my 2000 journal, but going back through its pages, I find no allusion to it.
When Mom died and I flew out from Baltimore for her funeral, Lynne and I shared a uniquely painful moment. Once the funeral service was ove*r with, I had to go back to Balitmore—I had a job there, after all. Lynne took me to the airport, and there we had the most tearful of all our farewells. Bereft of her beloved mother, she was now having to say goodbye to me as well. She cried, told me I was her best friend, waved goodbye to me as I went through airport security (just as she did, forlorn in her little sweatshirt, that long-ago day when I had to go to school and she, too little for school yet, had to stay home, O god O god) and later told me on the phone that that drive home from the airport had been the longest and most painful of her life, because I was gone and Mom was gone and she was going back to this miserable house which now contained nothing but Dad, the worst person in the universe, Mr. No-Joy himself. She told me that, at that moment, she felt like the little boy in that song from Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, (which I will never watch again) I’m All Alone In The World. Stricken to the core of my heart, both for the loss of my mother and for love of my poor, grieving baby sister, I sat down and wrote her a long letter, expounding upon what I called “Our club of two,” the club which had no other members but myself and her. With our shared wistful unhappiness, (wistful on my part, deadly, as it turned out, on hers) our nostalgia and our inner-inner circle of shared memories, memories of Spokane and Monterey Court primarily, and with the by-products of our shared nostalgia, such as our addiction to old TV reruns and cartoons, she and I shared 100 secret passwords, 100 secret jokes and 100 secret handshakes that no one else was privy to, and thus it remained until Friday when she died. I told her, at the end of that 2000 letter, that as long as I remained alive, she would never have to feel like the little boy in that song, because as long as I was alive, she would never have to feel “all alone in the world.” Wherever I was, she would always have me.

Now I feel like the little boy in that song. I was devastated by Randy’s death in 1977 and for much the same reason I feel so desolate now. He and I also formed a “club of two,” and it got us both through high school. Shortly after Randy died, Berigan observed that even he, next-best high school friend after Randy, had never quite penetrated what he called Randy’s and my Bruederschaft. Now, the only other person on earth with whom I ever formed such a “club of two” is now gone. And I’ve never felt so hollow, so desolate, so utterly alone.

September 15 Wednesday

Went to see a psychiatric counselor at Kaiser-Permanente this afternoon. He recommended that I get into a bereavement support group and gave me a phone number to call.

Four years ago, I was able to work through the loss of my mother more-or-less unassisted, at least unassisted by the professionals. Not this time. I’m going to need help this time. I will call that number, tomorrow.

September 17 Friday

I did call that number, and guess what I was told? “We don’t have any bereavement groups in your area…” They’re all in Mission Valley, Vista and El Cajon. Kaiser Permanente has a gigantic facility right off Palm Avenue in the South Bay, but all of their ‘bereavement groups” are located far, far away, farther than I’m willing to drive. That fucking figures. That’s so typical. I need help, and it places itself just out of my reach.

Oh well. It probably wouldn’t have done me any good anyway.

Meanwhile, the predominating theme of the past five days has been…spilled coffee.
It started on Sunday. I was at Carla’s house. I told her the story that Bill Scharf told me years ago, the story of how, on the night of his wife’s funeral, he (Bill being a devout Catholic) prayed to God to offer him a sign that Olivia was with God. He asked for a rose, either the offer of one, or simply to have someone call his attention to a rose. The very next day, he rang his daughter’s doorbell and the first thing she said to him upon opening the door was something like, “Daddy! Look at these beautiful roses someone sent over!” There was a big bouquet of roses on the table. Throughout that day, Bill said, people kept calling his attention to those roses until he finally turned to God and said “Enough already, I get the message.”

I said to Carla, “I want to ask God for a sign that Lynne is with him, but I can’t. He wouldn’t give me one. I’ve been screaming curses at God for 20 years, calling him every filthy name I could think of. He wouldn’t give me a sign.”

“Better men than you have been doing that for centuries,” Carla replied, “and some of them ended up as fathers of the Church.”

And so, in my car on the way home, tears flowing down my cheeks, I asked God for a sign. “Let it be…spilled coffee,” I prayed. “Have someone spill coffee on me, or on my desk.”
It didn’t happen, of course. But all week, as I’ve gone into the kitchen at work and poured coffee for myself, it keeps slopping over on to the counter, even when I try to be careful. No, it’s not a sign. It would have happened anyway. That coffee pot dribbles. It always has.

“Madelon had a vision,” Carla said on Sunday.

“Ah, Madelon’s nuts,” I replied.

“No, she isn’t,” Carla said. “She said she had a vision, it only lasted a split second, in which she saw Lynne’s spirit rise up from the bed she was lying on, and Mom was standing at the foot of the bed with her arms outstretched, and then they went off together.”

Yeah, and Madelon also goes through her trash to see how many Scotch bottles I’m throwing away, then gossips to Carla about it. I’m not taking at face value anything Madelon says.

September 20 Monday

This morning there was just a hint of a “nip” in the air—when I got up at 6 a.m., I had to put on a sweatshirt rather than a T-shirt. Had Lynne lived just another ten days, she would have loved this. She would have remarked to me, “It feels a little like fall this morning.” She loved fall, with all its promise of Thanksgiving and Christmas, and with its early evenings which reminded her, as they did me, of early evenings when we were children and would sit on the living room carpet when it was already dark outside, watching reruns of The Flintstones while Mom got supper ready. Lynne hated summer, and died on a hot, humid morning while lying in her darkened bedroom under a light blanket, presumably to escape the heat. Had she lived just ten more days, she would have delighted to see fall coming in.

Just a few weeks before she died, it must have been late July or early August, I happened to walk past that open screen door one afternoon, probably taking the trash out. I was surprised to find that, although the heavy, inner wooden door was open, which meant she had not locked herself in as she so often did when she wanted to bathe, nap in the nude or drink unsurprised, it was quiet. That is, the ceaseless all-day blaring of that damned television set she sat in front of, day in, day out, during the entire last year of her life, had for the moment, stopped. The TV set was off, and Lynne was actually sitting there on that filthy sofa, glasses on, reading. This was significant to me, and touching. She seldom read anything except the morning newspaper. The rest of the day it was TV, TV, TV. I don’t know how anyone could live that way.
But here she was, reading a book.

“What are you reading?” I stopped and asked.

“A Tree Grows In Brooklyn,” she said. “When I was a kid, it was my favorite book.”
“I’ve never read that,” I said. Then, remembering the great tradition of “summer fiction,” the national myth that everyone reads more fiction in the summer than at other times of the year, (a myth of which I’m sure my little sister was unaware) I said, “Perhaps when you’re finished reading that, you might want to read To Kill A Mockingbird. I know you like the movie. I have a copy of the book.”

Lynne did indeed like the 1962 film version with Gregory Peck and Robert Duvall, and I did lend her Harper Lee’s novel, but I don’t know if she so much as looked at it. After she died, I found it on the couch out back and returned it to my shelves.

The subject of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn came up between us once or twice in the few weeks between that afternoon idyll and her death 10 days ago. Toward the end of August, I asked her if she had finished it, and she said she had.

“I ought to read that,” I said. “I’ve never read it.”

“Well, it’s kind of a chick-book,” she warned me.

Still, something about the whole thing I found rather touching, and now, heartbreakingly poignant. She had gone to the trouble of going over to the library and checking this book out. Usually Lynne never went near the library unless it was to check out large-print westerns for Dad. But here she was, in the summer of what would have been her 48th year, revisitng a classic that she had loved as a little girl. Perhaps there was agreater significance to that than I realized at the time, touching as I found it. Of course, Lynne and I shared the vice of nostalgia, and I have no doubt that it was an impulse of nostalgia which drove her to the library to check out A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and revisit her innocent and relatively carefree schoolgirl days, she who was so desperately unhappy with her adult life. But now, from the perspective of her having suddenly died on a late-summer morning 10 days ago, it seems to me that it might have been some sort of closing-of-the-circle moment, even if she didn’t realize it. So, indeed, might have been the sudden reappearance of Dorcy, the ex-boyfriend from Humane Society days who popped up out of nowhere, telephoning her from his home in Missouri about two weeks before she died. That made her very happy, and she immediately asked for my help in setting up an e-mail account so she could e-mail him, although her brief messages to him never got replies. He called last Friday and left her a voice-mail message, and I had to call him back and tell him she was gone.

Those were only two of what appear to be a number of tying-up-loose-ends moments which now, in perspective, look curious indeed. Here’s another: the very day before she died, Lynne was shopping at Albertson’s and bumped into a former colleague from The Captain’s Galley whom she had not seen in years. Her name was “Kelly,” and she called over the weekend after seeing Lynne’s death notice in the U-T. Odd things indeed.

September 22 Wednesday

The Padres, about whom I was so passionate a month ago, have suddenly become kind of irrelevant.

Lynne’s death is part of it, of course, the largest part. The sudden loss of my little sister has put a pall on everything.

But it’s also the time of year, and the fact that the Padres are clearly out of it, once again. There is zero chance of their playing in the postseason now. Khalil Greene and Sean Burroughs are both finished for the season with injuries. The Padres’ regular season ends next week, and they remain four games behind in the NL wild card race. The wild card will go to someone else, most likely the Chicago Cubs. It will not go to the Padres, not even if they happen to win all 10 of their remaining regular-season games, which of course they will not.

It’s the time of year when the Padres are being shoved beneath the fold: even when they win, they get the bottom half of the sports page: the top half alays goes to the Chargers at this time of year. Football is shoving baseball off the screen, as it does every September. Lynne liked to watch the Chargers, but I have no interest in football whatsoever. It’s probably the only thing my father and I agree upon, aside from agreeing that home-grown tomatoes are better than store-bought.

Last night the Padres beat the Dodgers 9-4. I was pleased, but it’s too late in a mediocre season to get excited. Indeed, when the Dodgers leaped to a 2-0 lead in the top of the 1st after Jayson Werth hit a triple off Adam Eaton, and then Adrian Beltre hit a two-run homer, I initially reacted with my usual eruption of disgusted fury and swearing, but then caught myself. The Padres are out of contention; why get excited now?

Today is the first day of fall, Lynne’s favorite season. We discussed it so many times, and yes, so recently. Fall, to Lynne, was a time of renewal, just as it was for me from age 16 until I began associating it with the deaths of loved ones. But we are also having a Santa Ana right now, and Lynne hated those.

September 23 Thursday

Last week an idea flashed upon me: that the best and most appropriate resting place for Lynne could only be Spokane.

We were so happy there as children, she and I. And how many times have we talked about going back, if just to visit and look around? Half of our nostalgia-litany centered around Spokane: last year, we sat down one morning in front of Joey’s computer and I went to the Web site www.themesonline.com, which has since been taken down, but you could listen to hundreds of TV theme songs on that site.

With Lynne sitting there beside me in Joey’s bedroom, I located and played the theme from Here Come The Brides.

At the first notes of the song, Lynne grabbed my hand and started to weep, so intense were the memories of Spokane that the theme from that beloved TV show brought back.

I tried to keep things light, bouncing in my chair with the rhythm instead of weeping, but I knew eactly how she felt. Here Come The Brides premiered in the fall of 1968, when I was 13 and she was 11, and our family had just moved to the Pacific Northwest. The show’s action took place in Seattle, just 250 miles west of Spokane. No program said “Idyllic childhood days in Washington state” more loudly to either of us.

I could cite more examples, but the point is, Lynne and I both spent the happiest days of our respective childhoods in Spokane. In particular, I was remembering that lovely late summer day in 1968, just before I started the eighth grade at Jonas Salk Junior High and just before she started the sixth grade at Loma Verde Elementary School, when I got the ill-starred idea of taking my fishing pole and walking down to the Spokane River to “wet a line,” and Lynne tagged along. All I managed to do was hook my lures on rocks and lose them. For years, we joked about the day we went “lure-losing.” The spot on the river was a picturesque rock formation called “Bowl and Pitcher.”

That, it struck me, would be the best and most perfect place to scatter Lynne’s ashes.
Still, to fly all the way to Spokane just to scatter her ashes? The expense. The time away from work.. On the other hand, my sisters flew to Hawaii in 2000 to scatter Mom’s ashes near Maui, and way back in 1967, Uncle Bert made a special trip all the way to Pittsburgh so Grandma Winrow’s ashes could be interred in her family plot.

I suggested it to Carla, and she immediately approved. She said it sounded like the perfect thing to do, that that spot on the Spokane River was probably “where she should be.”

The more I thought about it, the more the idea seemed to have an unavoidable logic.

I went to Travelocity.com and made the arrrangements yesterday. Carla and I will fly to Spokane on Oct. 28, returning two days later.

I haven’t been back to Spokane since 1971. But if ever there was a good reason to go back, this is it.

September 24 Friday

In a corner of this room, tucked behind the dresser, is a bag containing a gold-colored metal box, weighing about ten pounds.

The box contains Lynne’s ashes.

Carla left it here this noontime, when I was enroute home from work for lunch. She put it on the shelf in my bedroom and left. She had left a message at my office explaining about it, but she called after I had left the office and I didn’t get her message. Fortunately I called her as soon as I got home, because Dad was blithering about her having been here and having just left. He didn’t mention anything about ashes, of course.

Had I not called her, I might have seen that box, wondered what was in it, and opened it up.
As it is, it will sit in that corner for the next month and four days, until I can hand-carry it back to Spokane.

Meanwhile, other stuff is going on. I drove past Pilgrim Lutheran Church on E Street today, where Lynne’s memorial service next month is to be. The sign out in front of the church says, “Timothy Gerdes, Minister.”

Huh?

Tim Gerdes, the indescribable geek-nerd-squirrel of the Class of ’73, Tim Gerdes, who was famous on campus as a jerk’s jerk, who cut up and acted squirrelly on a non-stop basis just to get attention, who was constantly being slapped around by bullies, ridiculed by the student body at large and admonished by teachers for behaving like a chimpanzee, is now the minister of Pilgrim Lutheran Church?

Lynne would have loved this. I, for my part, was so shocked that I just had to track down Phillip Fox. After lunch I called directory assistance for San Angelo, Texas, got the number of the San Angelo Police Department, and left a message for Phillip.

I hadn’t spoken to him in about four years. But he promptly called me back.

Phillip and I go back to seventh grade, which is to say, we go back to that very fabled autumn of ’67 when Lynne and I inaugurated our “Cokes and Mars bars” weekend treat club, which itself became such a significant part of the mythology of the “club of two” that she and I formed in later years. In short, Phillip and I go back a long way, although our contacts since high school have been few and far between. Phillip was my companion on one of the most significant adventures of my youth: that late spring day in 1971 when he and I climbed Mt. San Miguel together. Knocking around in my memory banks like a tennis ball is a recollection of Phillip sitting here, circa 1971, (here meaning the guest house) talking about Timothy Gerdes in a tone of sheer amazement. Phillip couldn’t believe how anyone could possibly act the way Gerdes did, making of himself a clown figure beyond clown figures. “He’s unreal,” Phillip said in the parlance of that era.

I agreed. In fact my own exasperation with Tim Gerdes got me admonished at least once. One day during my senior year, Mr. Chapman threatened to throw me out of the room in Psychology class when Gerdes said something particularly stupid and I called him an idiot in front of the whole room.

Tim Gerdes is the pastor of the church at which we are going to have my sister’s memorial service. Do I hear God’s laughter?

Whether I do or don’t, Phillip and I were on the phone for at least half an hour. He has not yet retired, although he is now in his 29th year with the San Angelo Police Department. “Texas has been good to me,” he said, although he admitted that after all these years he is getting tired of San Angelo. “My wife and I are talking about moving to the Austin-San Antonio area,” he said. He was as flummoxed as I was by the news that Timothy Gerdes had ended up as a Lutheran minister. “You’re gonna drop your uppers when I tell you this,” I said. He laughed and said, “I still have all my teeth.” Gerdes apart, we discussed one or two other class members, including Richard Valen, whom I saw recently and whom Phillip remembered well (“Wasn’t he a pretty-boy?”) and some other guy whose name Phillip couldn’t remember but of whom he said, “This guy couldn’t ride a bicycle in high school, but he ended up flying Boeing 757’s!”

I told him of my plan to take Lynne’s ashes back to Spokane and scatter them in the Spokane River. He thought that was a pretty good idea. And of course I told him that if he can make it out to California, by all means come and join us at the memorial service Oct. 22.
In the meantime, I have placed Lynne’s ashes out in her room, on the floor beside the bureau, just a couple of feet from the fire-door where her favorite horse-poster used to hang (I took it down because I couldn’t bear to look at it any more.)

September 26 Sunday

One aspect of my sister’s passing which has profound implications for me, and which I am going to have to come to grips with sooner or later, is that it represents a sharp, utter and perhaps final break with the past.

Lynne and I did indeed form a “club of two,” as I wrote to her in a letter about four years ago, and to a great extent it was based on a shared vice. I don’t mean alcohol. I mean something much more potent than alcohol: nostalgia.

I think one of the things that set Lynne and me apart from Carla is that Carla is essentially a happy person, an optimist. Lynne and I were the opposite, a couple of basically unhappy people. Her unhappiness was of course much more profound than mine, and Mom’s death in 2000 multiplied it tenfold. That, combined with her being forced in the aftermath of Mom’s death to witness the spectacle of Joey moving in here and becoming, without having to lift a finger, the apple of Dad’s eye that she always longed to be, was, I think, what forced her final retreat into the brandy bottle. For my part, I have always had a melancholy streak in me, but I also have powerful survival instincts; for example I cannot tolerate the sight of myself getting overweight. It makes me angry, it drives me to the gym. Lynne had no such problem, or perhaps I should say no such instinct. Her unhappiness was so deep that she had no problem with the idea of letting herself go, with the result that she slid into an early grave at 47, down a ramp made of fried egg sandwiches, KFC and take-out pizza, alongside of which ran a river of liquor.

But unhappy people naturally incline toward nostalgia, and nostalgia was the main agenda item of every meeting of Lynne’s and my “club of two.” Home, sweet yesterday: Lynne and I could go on for hours, sharing minutiae about the old days on First Avenue, on Monterey Court and in Spokane. And because so many of those experiences were shared, we could revisit them in a very intimate and detailed way. Now I have no one left with whom I can do that.

For example, I wrote Lynne a letter about two years ago (from my desk at that horrible Taylor Companies place in Washington, D.C.) in which I recalled not just the line-up of Friday night television shows that meant so much to me during the summer I was 10 years old, but even the importance of the commercials that ran before them: the Olympia Beer ad that ran just before “Mr. Roberts” on NBC at 9:30 and stimulated my arcadia-fantasies about the Pacific Northwest; the Seven-Up commercial that run just before “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” at 10:00. Who is left now with whom I can discuss things like that?

The short answer is, nobody. Oh, I could discuss those things with virtually anyone. But the thing is, Lynne understood. We were absolutely on the same wavelength when it came to things like that. And now there is nobody on earth left with whom I share that wavelength. Someone else might remember Mr. Roberts and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., but Lynne, Lynne was sitting on that rose-patterned carpet with me when we watched Friday-night shows like The Time Tunnel and The Avengers. She was there.

6:30 p.m. Had my third surfing lesson this morning at Coronado Beach. I still can’t stand up on the board for more than about one nanosecond without falling into the drink, but this morning we paddled out beyond the breakers for the first time, and floated around waiting for a wave. “To a lot of people, this is surfing, this sitting and floating and paddling around,” my teacher Randy Couts said.

Later I talked on the phone with Berigan for about an hour. Comparing notes on grief, (he just recently lost his dog Lucy) and discussing the horrific logistics of his possibly moving that bookstore he has in his Brooklyn apartment out here to the west coast. But he is “severing ties” in the New York area, to use his own phrasing, and will be back in California “sooner rather than later” according to what he’s telling both me and Araiza.

September 28 Tuesday

This is apropos of nothing in this season of grief, but we certainly have had a long-lived tomato crop this year. Last year the tomatoes started coming in around the beginning of August and were finished a month later. This year, I picked the first ones around July 20. The crop “peaked” around mid-August, but here it is September 28 and I’m still picking a few here and there.

Went to the gym after work yesterday and lifted weights for about an hour. The bursitis is still biting my left hip, but the pain is less intense than when I went in for a cortisone shot a week ago. At Brett Davis’ urging, I have signed up to run in a 10K on Oct.24, the “Arturo Barrios Invitational.” If the bursitis is still biting my hip in four weeks, I won’t be able to run.

Rented Giant starring Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean last night. It’s a portent of things to come: I rented it because the Padres were not playing last night; the film is three hours long and would kill the entire evening. Baseball season ends next week, and I’m going to be facing five and a half months of such evenings to fill. I’m not looking forward to it. And in all honesty, Lynne would not have been much help in that. For the past year and more it’s pretty much been Dad and me in the evenings. Lynne was rarely seen after seven p.m. That is, until 9:12 p.m., when she would often come shlepping in through the back door, stewed to the gills, to make herself a big, butter-soaked fried egg sandwich. My sister killed herself with food, and I was remarking bitterly on that very fact in these pages just three days before she achieved her unexpected success in that endeavor.

And we have a new and ominous development working here: Dad has pretty much reached the end of the line in terms of being able to handle his own finances. He just sits at the dining-room table, bills and checkbooks spread out in front of him, hopelessly confused. It’s like he can no longer make the connection between the checkbook and the bills—he’s forgotten what they have to do with each other. He can’t distinguish between the payment coupons and the crap that comes along with them in the mail, so he panics when I gather up the trash to throw it away, convinced I might be throwing away bills. And his eyesight is so bad that he can’t see what he’s writing on a check. Yesterday I told him he needed to write a check for seventy-two dollars, and then I stood there and watched while he painstakingly wrote, in his shaky hand, “Seventuval and two.” He’s convinced that bills which he still has to pay have already been paid, and he looks at a canceled check in front of him and insists that “all these companies are returning my checks to me.” He can’t pay his own bills anymore. I’m going to have to talk with Carla about this as soon as she gets back from wherever the hell it is she went.

September 29 Wednesday

Again, I have to say that the Padres aren’t quite as important to me as they were a month ago, when my sister was still sitting in that granny flat, watching TV all the livelong day among the garbage, empties and cigarette butts, but was still, after all, my baby sister and alive.

But it’s worth making a note in passing: the Padres really are finished for the year now. In order to keep their scant hopes of playing in the postseason alive, they needed to win all six of their final six games, three against San Francisco and three this weekend against Arizona. Well, last night they lost to San Francisco, 7-5, so that tiny spark of hope has been extinguished. They’re done for the year. They leaped to a 2-0 lead in the first inning, so I was somewhat encouraged. But by the third inning it was 6-2 San Francisco, and that’s when I went off in disgust to watch The Shawshank Redemption on TCM. Dad, left alone in the living room with the unfolding catastrophe, finally got tired of sitting there by himself, turned off the lights and went to bed.
The season is over.

August, 2004

2004-11-27T08:34:00.000-08:00

August 4 Wednesday

High summer is noticeably on the wane already. Although the lawn is thick and green, and the tomatoes are coming in fast and thick, it’s already discernable: at six a.m. it’s a bit darker than it was at six a.m. just three weeks ago. In another month it will still be dark at six a.m. when that dog across the street starts its perfectly-timed yipping and whining, every morning, having been locked out of the house, presumably so that selfish bastard inside the house can get a piece of uninterrupted ass, every damn morning at six a.m., day in, day out.

On Monday afternoon I revisited Southwestern College for the first time in I can’t-remember-when. I think I was there one Sunday afternoon in the early 1990s for one of Carla’s choral concerts. This past week certainly has been the week for me to visit former schools. I went out there Monday to interview Norma Hernandez, the new superintendant/president, who began there as a counselor the year I left to transfer to State, 1975.

The campus looks much the same as it did in the fall of 1973 when I began my two years there. The main difference is that it’s no longer in the middle of nowhere: 31 years ago Southwestern College was way out in the country. Now it’s surrounded by endless ticky-tack, and there’s more coming, more, more, more. In my day, there were two ways to get there: Telegraph Canyon Road (two lanes) or Bonita Road. Now you can take H Street all the way out there, H Street which in 1973 ended at Hilltop High School, and if you want to take Telegraph Canyon Road, it’s now six lanes, not two. There are times when I really wish that I had grown up and come of age in some backwater part of America that wasn’t the place where everyone wants to live.

I didn’t get the job at Copley News Service. The weasels notified me by letter, not phone. Canaille.

My editor, Michael, is half expecting to be fired this month. He and Linda were at it again recently, and he as much as threatened to sue the company if they fire him before he closes escrow on the house he’s buying. But he expects to close escrow on the 15th, which means he may be fired on the 16th. He’s a doomsayer of course, but I don’t know. I hope they don’t fire him and offer me his job, because I don’t want it.

Went out on Elizabeth Scott’s boat with her and some friends of hers, plus her grandson, who has the unlikely name of “Briley,” on Sunday. That was an adventure, more driving than boating. She wanted to go to San Vicente, but when we got to Lakeside, there was a sign saying “LAKE FULL” and a long line of boats waiting to get in. So we turned around and drove all the way back to Otay Lake. Then she got the boat in the water, and the motor wouldn’t start. She had to get a jump-start. It was almost 4 p.m. by the time we began tooling around the lake in her 270-horsepower water-skiing boat. I was huddled in the stern, radio pressed to ear, trying to follow the Padres-Dodgers game, which the Padres lost 2-1 after 11 ½ innings. Not much of an outing, all in all, but again, to repeat this week’s theme, it was a revisitation: I hadn’t been to Otay Lake that I could remember in years and years. Very peaceful and lovely out there, and of course intensely nostalgic. I remember one weekday afternoon in the spring of ’75 when Lucia and I drove out there after classes at Southwestern, in my old green Chevrolet, and went on the swings. The swings are gone, and the old green Chevrolet has been gone for almost 30 years. But I still e-mail Lucia from time to time: over the weekend I sent her my new poem, Rocking Chair after reading it to her over the phone. She found the original ending too harsh, so I rewrote it.

San Diego LAFCO voted on Monday to shut down the Tia Juana Valley County Water District, continuing a stink that I personally stirred up last November when we ran a front-page article in the Star-News about this disgraceful ongoing boondoggle. That same afternoon on KOGO radio, Roger Hedgecock, he of the County Board of Supervisors back in ’79 when I was hanging around, highlighted the story on his radio show. Well and good, but he awarded the laurels for breaking the story to Fox Channel 6, simply because they had been there with cameras that morning. Never mind the fact that I was all over this story eight months ago, the Star-News got loudly ignored.

Postscript on that story: Mike Giorgino called me today and said that Hedgecock, after receiving an e-mail from me complaining about his handing the laurels for the TJ Water District story to Fox 6, apparently went on the air yesterday and straightened the record, mentioning not just the Star-News, but me by name. That’s better anyway.

And, the Padres lost again last night, after losing to Los Angeles on Sunday. This time they lost to Philadelphia, 5-2. The problem is transparently clear: the Padres may have the best bullpen in baseball, with the closing trio of Scott Linebrink, Akinori Otsuka and Trevor Hoffman. But pitching alone is not going to do the trick. You can’t win games if you don’t score runs, and the Padres have NO offense. That’s why I wish they’d been able to acquire Steve Finley, who went to the Dodgers on Saturday. Loretta and Giles are in hitting slumps, and our “big sluggers,” Klesko and Nevin, have been like unto useless of late. Nevin either hits a home run or he strikes out, and lately he’s been striking out 20 times for every home run he hits. The same with Klesko. So the Padres keep coming up short: their pitching dazzles, but they don’t put any runs across the plate.

August 7 Saturday

The Padres got swept by Philadelphia this week, lost all three games. This in the wake of having lost to the Dodgers last Sunday, no less. So they’d lost four in a row when they went into Petco last night to play the Pittsburgh Pirates, and plowed them under, 13-1. Mark Loretta had two homers and five RBI, and Jake Peavy’s pitching for six innings was masterful: he set the tone by striking out the side in the top of the first.

Speaking of the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Mets have traded Ty Wigginton to the Bucs. When he strode to the plate to face Peavy last night, Ted Leitner on the radio said, “Here comes the pride of Chula Vista High School, Ty Wigginton.”

I wrote about Wigginton last year, but I have to say it again: every time I see his face, which has such a strong family resemblance to that of his Uncle Lionel, I’m back in room 406, singing with the Spartan Choir. Lionel Wigginton, CVHS Class of 1970, had been in the choir and used to occasionally come around (he was in a wheelchair for while, for reasons I can’t remember) and sing with us.

I’m staying with my program at Brett Davis’ gym pretty steadily, as I had promised myself I would when I finished that paralegal course last month. Yesterday after work I was over there, treadmilling 5k in 32:51. I’m wearing that rubber “heat belt” he told me to buy as well, the idea being that it makes you sweat more, and thereby lose more inches. We shall see. This morning I was over there at 8:30 and lifted weights for about an hour, again wearing the heat belt. He keeps telling me I’m meeting my goals—according to him, my body fat is down from 35% to 19%. But I have to take his word for it, and he may just be a con man. I have yet to overhear him telling anybody that they aren’t meeting their goals. Came home about 10:00, and, still sticking with the program, threw together a protein shake with soy milk and fruit, which is what he recommends for breakfast. Later, for lunch, I put together some salmon salad and ate it on a pita. Tonight we’re grilling steaks on the grill, our usual Saturday-evening summer repast. With fresh corn and fresh tomatoes from our own garden, man, that is the taste of summer.

Yesterday my boss, Michael, was fully expecting to be fired at any moment. There has been trouble between him and Linda Townsend lately: Linda’s office spies, essentially Jutta, the business manager, and Linda’s niece Chavonne, who works the front desk, had according to Michael been telling tales out of school. Michael, they said, had been going around the office calling Linda incompetent. There was a big confrontation in Linda’s office late last week, and yesterday morning when I got my twice-weekly job alert e-mail from SignOnSanDiego.com, I noticed that the company that owns The Star-News was advertising for an editor.

I passed this along to Michael, and he spent the rest of the day waiting to be fired. When I left at 5 p.m. Linda was standing in his office talking to him.

But he called around 7:30 and said he hadn’t been fired, merely told to mind his p’s and q’s. I think he said that Isaac Cubillos, the basically worthless convicted felon who’s been taking up space in the east county office and writing crap, and I do mean crap, has quit. So anyway, for the time being, Michael still has a job. I had wondered whether, if they were to go ahead and fire him, I might be next. There is a perception at the company that Michael and I are as thick as thieves, based upon the fact that we’re so often seen smoking in the parking lot together. But those smoke breaks are important editorial meetings, whether anyone at the company realizes it or not. Then there is also the fact that Michael and I have been making things unpleasant for Congressman Bob Filner for the past seven months, and Linda likes Filner.

August 8 Sunday

This morning, after my seven a.m. reverie over Harold Bloom’s anthology of poetry in English, (A.E. Housman, Wilfrid Owen, Edward Thomas, E.A. Robinson, Stephen Crane and Trumbull Stickney, leading up to Robert Frost, an old friend whom I will revisit tomorrow) I was sufficiently conscience-stung to go and dig up an old unfinished project: 8:45 and Elsewhere, the cycle of poems I began in the fall of 2001 as a response to the Sept. 11 attacks. It has been hanging fire since around New Year’s Day of 2002.

I’d hit the worst roadblock in all my years of writing poetry: Lyric XIV hung unfinished for lack of a last verse. I wanted a socko ending and could not come up with one, and thus has the poem hung for more than two and a half years.

I took the coward’s way out: to hell with socko endings. I rounded it out with a dying fall and then e-mailed the whole mess to Lucia.

It actually came rather quickly when it came. I pulled up the poem and sat here, stroking my chin and tinkering with the text on the computer screen for perhaps 15 or 20 minutes (while Handel’s Water Music played on the Windows Media Player) before an idea formed itself of how I could construct a final verse to the poem, and once I had that, the working-out with pen and paper took scarcely five minutes. I wrote the last line first and went backwards.

I have advanced at least one theory about why I have written practically no poetry in the past three years. The “no muse” theory seems to stand up against the evidence: looking back, it’s pretty clear that when there’s no woman in my life, as is the case now and has been for three years, I write nothing. Of course that’s an oversimplification, because some women have inspired me to write poetry while others have not. Lucia yes, Jamie, no. Nadya, absolutely: my wife absolutely not. Diane Stelz yes, (despite being fundamentally a moron) Tatiana Floyd no (despite being Russian.)

But there’s been something else at work besides lack of erotic fuel. Lassitude, surely: the old business of why bother when you have no audience to write for? But if you really wanted to do it, you’d do it anyway, so that’s really just an excuse. No, I think there’s been some measure of the old adage about the centipede involved. The centipede was asked which leg he moved first when he started to walk, and was thus paralyzed. If he had to think about it, he couldn’t do it. I’ve just thought too much about it.

And there’s a villain in the piece: Garrison Keillor.

Yes, Garrison Keillor, the middle-brow would-be popularizer of poetry who can be heard spouting it on NPR every morning for about five minutes. In one of his books, (I forget which) he has a funny anecdote about an adolescent wannabe poet who gets up every summer morning and, “after reading a few pages of Walt Whitman to prime the pump,” gets going. Ha-ha. Although I haven’t done anything quite that egregious since I was young myself, I will confess that quite often it’s been the case that I’ll get started on a poem after reading someone else’s poetry. But you see the problem here, don’t you? Keillor made a joke of it, and I didn’t want to be part of a joke. But that’s stupid. I don’t have any particular respect for Garrison Keillor. He’s a buffoon, a midwesterner who successfully transplanted himself to New York City and, proud of that accomplishment, now dines out on making fun of the hicks back home who didn’t manage to become a “sophisticate” like he did. Am I to be influenced by Garrison yukking-up-his-sleeve-at-his-own-origins Keillor, who tries to gain intellectual respectability by publishing an anthology of middle-brow verse with the aw-shucks title Good Poems? No. I am to be influenced by Harold Bloom, who publishes a magnificent anthology called The Best Poems of the English Language, which I have been reading, cover-toward-cover, for more than a month, and am now on page 817, about to revisit Robert Frost, author of one of my favorite poems in all the world, but one which I would and will never consciously imitate: “Come In.” (Josef Brodski’s brilliant exegesis of this poem, published some 10 years ago in The New Yorker, is something that I think should be dropped from airplanes.) I can assure Garrison Keillor that he will find nothing of Robert Frost, but perhaps a tiny dash of Whitman, in my 8:45 and Elsewhere (which he’ll never see in any case.) But what poet since the 1890s has been able to avoid Whitman entirely? He’s like the boulder in the road: you may walk around it, but there’s no not noticing it. Slavish imitation and influence are not the same thing, in fact “influence” is one of the mysteries that makes poetry exciting. So I’ll soldier on, despite Garrison Keillor’s funny little joke about priming the pump. For the record, the dozen or so poems I read this morning while having my coffee had no influence that I can see on the final stanza of Lyric XIV. Perhaps years after I’m dead, some Internet poetry expert will dispute that. In the words of our president, bring it on.

Breakfast this morning at Aunt Emma’s Pancake House with Howard Freelove. He’s now saying that he isn’t at all sure the TJVCWD sleazeballs won’t be able to get the signatures they need to force a public vote on the “waterless” district’s dissolution, and thinks it might be a good idea to go ahead and have a couple of candidates run for seats on the board in November, with a “search and destroy” agenda—get elected and then shut it down. He’s leaving tomorrow to take his wife to New Mexico, but said he would let me know when he gets back if they’ve decided to do that.

After breakfast, we were discussing the fact that I haven’t had sex in nearly three years. Howard thinks I ought to go down to Tijuana and hire a prostitute. Another guy, “Tio,” who works out at with his wife Lisa at Brett Davis’ gym, suggested the same thing yesterday. Either Tijuana or Las Vegas, that was his suggestion. I’ve never paid for sex in my life, and told Howard that while I don’t have any moral qualms about it, I would hesitate to do so. “It’s a pride thing,” I said. “Ah, fuck pride,” said Howard, which I think put the whole thing about as pithily as it could be put.

August 12 Thursday

Ran three miles before breakfast this morning, and afterward, dehydrated, weighed in at 188.
Yesterday I mailed my lyric sequence 8:45 and Elsewhere to Harold Bloom, to see if he’ll even read it. As I told Lucia in an e-mail, I am getting a bit old to be playing that game, the game of tugging at the sleeve of some literary eminence who might do you some good. That’s a young man’s game, and I played it unsuccessfully when I was a young man; in my twenties I mailed off samples of my work to Richard Wilbur, William Meredith and even Leonard Bernstein. In each case all I got was a polite reply. Wilbur wished me luck, Meredith offered some criticisms and pointers (as poetry consultant for the Library of Congress, I guess he thought it was part of his job) and Bernstein didn’t even reply directly, but had his amanuensis Helen Coates tell me I was “a true poet.” Big whoop.

Yes, there is no question but that I am getting a bit old to be playing the literary suck-up game. But as I told Lucia in that same e-mail, I suspect that this may be my last best chance: after 34 years of writing poetry, I think that in 8:45 and Elsewhere I have written my masterpiece, to use that horrible stagey word. By “masterpiece” I don’t mean a heartbreaking work of staggering genius that’s going to establish me on the world stage as a major poet, not at all. I simply mean that I think it’s the best poetry I ever have written or ever will write. I’ll be 49 in two months, I’ve been writing poetry since I was 14, and I think in this lyric sequence I have pretty much finished myself. I don’t forsee ever writing anything bigger or better than this. I may well go on writing poems until I croak, but I think in 8:45 and Elsewhere I really have achieved a personal best. This is the best I can do. And so far it has been utterly ignored by everyone to whose attention I tried to call it, except Lucia. When I posted it on my weblog last Sunday, I sent out an e-mail to about ten acquaintances, announcing that it was there. As far as I know, Lucia is the only one who even bothered to look at it.

As for the Padres, that’s best left alone. They’ve lost nine of their last 11 games, most recently last night when the Chicago Cubs beat them 5-1 at Wrigley Field. They are 7 ½ games behind Los Angeles, a team which has won 28 of its last 37 games. If things continue like this, they won’t see the playoffs. My hope for the postseason now lies with the St. Louis Cardinals, who are also red-hot: They’re playing .661 ball, an even better won-loss record than the New York Yank-offs, who stand at .637. The Cards are 12 ½ games ahead of the Cubs in the NL:Central. As I’ve said before, if it can’t be the Padres in October going up against the New York Gazillionaires, I’d like to see it be the Cardinals. My affection for the Cards goes back to the ’64 Series, when they ended the 37-year “first” Yankee dynasty once and for all.
6:30 p.m. same day.

Life With A Drunk, Ch. 47…

The Padres played Chicago again this afternoon, managing to beat them 5-4 in 10 innings. Along about the 10th, maybe 4 p.m (there was a rain delay) Lynne called me at work to vent her latest aggravations with Dad, which centered as they usually do around some outrageously stupid thing he’d said. (He has himself convinced that Kahlil Greene, the Padres’ rookie shortstop, either is Kahlil Gibran or is somehow related to him, and we cannot convince him otherwise.) Anyway, when she called me, Lynne sounded in a jovial enough mood aside from being exasperated with Dad. I asked her “What are we having for dinner?” and she replied, “Oh, I’ll think of something.”

But when I got home after lifting weights at my gym for a while, the door to the granny flat was locked and the a/c fan in her bedroom window was running, a sure sign that she’s in there drunkenly slumbering away. (Jesus, no matter she’s up reading the paper at five a.m. most mornings! I’d be up that early too if I were going to bed in a drunken stupor before sundown.)
What had apparently happened was, toward the end of the game she asked Dad for his ATM card, ostensibly to go to Albertson’s and get something for dinner, but Dad and I agreed some time back that he would stop giving her his ATM card, because that’s how she’s buying brandy: she goes “grocery shopping” and by the way throws a jug of E&J in with the lettuce, cheese, strawberries and hamburger. So Dad (according to what he told me, anyway, and he’s extremely unreliable) told her no, let’s wait until Kelley gets home and see what he might want for dinner. At that, according to Dad, “Her face stiffened, she threw down the paper and she stomped out the back door.”

And is now sulking in her room because her plan to skim Dad for a jug of liquor was thwarted. Oh, well. I went to the store and got us a cold roast chicken, some potato salad and some cole slaw. That will do for supper, and besides, whenever she cooks, she always leaves a ghastly, greasy mess in the kitchen for me to clean up, so I’d just as soon she didn’t.

August 15 Sunday

Well, I’ve had a busy weekend. Yesterday I got up at 6:00, and by 7:45 was out at the Bonita golf course to do one lap around the park—three miles. From there I went to my gym and lifted weights for about an hour.

Later, Lynne and I went to Costco and then, back home, I fixed lunch for Dad and me. In the afternoon I rounded out and posted the first part of my essay “The Music In My Life” on my weblog, which no one has visited yet. I have all this great stuff out there and cannot prompt anyone to go look at it.

At 4:00, the Padres played Cincinnati, and it was a total reversal of fortune. Friday night the Friars mugged the Redlegs, 14-5. Yesterday the shoe was on the other foot: they clobbered us, 11-5. (Today we got our own back: we took the rubber game, 7-2.)

Dad and I watered the tomatoes, as we do every Saturday night, and with the ball game over early due to having been played in eastern time, I put American Graffiti on the VCR and grilled steaks outside. Dad will sit still for this film, I think only because the time-frame depicted in it is 1962, which pre-dated male long hair in America. (Friday night after the ball game I ran The Reivers, in which he also seems to find nothing to scream at.)

Up again this morning early, about 6:25. I’ve reached the end of Harold Bloom’s anthology as of today. I think that now that I’m done with the survey, I’ll focus more closely on some of the poets Bloom loves whom I have neglected in my life, such as Hart Crane (whose collected poems I happen to have) and Emily Dickinson (who has always dazzled and baffled me.)

Out the door before 8:00 a.m., I drove down to Bonita, filled the car with gas and had it washed, plus I bought an extra gallon of gas for the lawnmower. Then I cruised out to Home Depot to buy some more Scott’s Turf Builder for the front lawn, and once I’d done that, it was back here to mow the lawn, with which my efforts have been rewarded and then some this summer: not only did I bring the crackling brown, dead lawn back to verdure, but the grass is growing at such an alarming rate that, even though Dad’s professional lawn care team was here last Monday, the lawn was already looking shaggy again. So I got out there this morning and mowed it while Dad was still asleep, but, as our lawnmower has no grass-catch, I had to gather up the clumps of mown grass from the lawn afterwards. That was a hard job, and in the middle of it I could feel my energy flagging, so I took a break for breakfast and made myself a big plate of steak, eggs and sliced tomatoes with cottage cheese, plus a fresh pot of coffee.

Once I was finished with the lawn, it was time for the game, which came on this morning at 10:15.

Once the game was over, I went to the grocery store, then mopped the kitchen floor.
I don’t feel like doing anything else today. I’m not going to go anywhere or do anything. I’m just going to sit here, listen to music, drink wine and smoke cigars. I’ve had it for today.

August 17 Tuesday

Dehydrated after a prebreakfast three-miler, I weighed in once again at 188.

Yesterday was of course Nadya’s birthday. Knowing that Russians set a great deal of store by a person’s being the first to call with congratulations on a birthday, I dialled her number at 7:45 Sunday evening, which is 6:45 Monday morning in Moscow, only to be told by her mother that she was out of town and wouldn’t be back until the 22nd, I think Nina said.

Perhaps she’s lying on the beach somewhere, in Varna or Sochi. Celebrating her 44th birthday at a seaside resort, as she marked her 35th, nine years ago, at such a place with me.
Somehow, after timing that call so carefully, I was deeply offended.

Hit the lawn with Scott’s turf builder again last night. It looks real good.

Sent a new poem, Husbandry, off to Lucia yesterday. She weighed in this morning, saying she loved it, (but since when has she not “loved” any of my poems?) and claiming that I had achieved “unity of thought and being,” whatever on earth that means.

Padres lost to Atlanta, 5-4 last night at Petco. But I knew the Padres couldn’t possibly beat Atlanta. They’re going to get swept.

August 18 Wednesday

As of last year, when fate brought me rolling back down here to the old homestead, I was adamant: brushing aside any notion of Carla’s that I stay on at this place after Dad finally does die, I insisted in no uncertain terms that we’re going to put this house on the market the day after he cools. No way, no how, am I staying here, was my firm line.

Now I’m not so sure that would be such a smart idea. Maybe I ought to stay for a while.
No one knows how much longer Dad will be around of course, but I saw an article in the Union-Tribune last Sunday morning about how some people are cashing in on this unbelievable real estate market here in southern California. The story told of a Chula Vista couple who sold their five-bedroom house here for $760,000 and moved to a small town in Wisconsin where they could get an even bigger place for half the money, pocketing close to $400,000 in profit.
And then there’s my editor, who just bought a crummy little house out in Encanto for about $350,000, and is tub-thumping with the idea that real estate is the best investment you can make.

Given the size of this place, never mind how crummy it is, and its proximity to downtown Chula Vista, which Jim Pieri is preparing to Trump into downtown Silver Spring, this property could be worth a million dollars in three to five years. (“Easily,” Michael said.) My share of that would be $200,000, which in itself might justify my hanging around for two or three years after Dad finally does die, just to see where the market value goes. Right now the market value of all southern California real estate is screaming for the moon. “Every day you keep that house, it’s shoveling money at you,” Michael said.

I’ll talk about it with Carla when she gets back from her Spanish vacation.

Last night the Padres actually clobbered Atlanta, 11-6. (It was 11-1 until the eighth inning.) The main reason: a kid we just brought up from AAA Portland, Freddie Guzman.
This kid plays center field, and he runs like a jackrabbit. Speed on the basepaths is just what the Padres need, and Guzman delivered, big-time. Hitting a single in his first big-league at-bat, Guzman stole second and then came around to score on a Phil Nevin double. He so completely rattled the Braves’ starting pitcher, Jaret Wright, that Wright gave up five runs in the first inning and was taken out of the game. How often does a pitcher get yanked in the first inning, for chrissakes? Wright was so shaken up by Guzman that the second time Guzman came to bat, he walked him.

I felt sorry for Rod Beck, the relief pitcher who was released to make room for Guzman. But “Shooter” had shot his wad: last year his ERA was 1.78 in 20 saves. This year he was struggling, with a 6.38 ERA. Maybe it’s just time for him to hang up his glove and go enjoy his real-estate investments.

August 20 Friday

Jogged before breakfast again, but didn’t make it to the three-mile mark. My wind just wasn’t there. I managed to round 5th and G, but broke into a walk a few steps later. I was plodding along just barely moving anyway, probably half a block behind Tuesday’s pace. I weighed 191 afterwards.

The tomatoes are almost done for this year. We have a few more to pick and then that will be it. Dad was saying yesterday that, if he’s still alive next spring, we should plant them all the way down to the fence, but in two “phases” so we’ll have fresh tomatoes for two months rather than one.

News from Europe: Carla and company have lost their passports and their cash. That is so Carla. Unfortunately it gives Dad an excuse to fuss and fret and launch into tirades about how it isn’t “natural” for people to take trips to Europe. That hateful little man is so determined to be the center of everyone’s attention all the time that he takes it as a personal affront when anyone takes a vacation, because that means they aren’t here listening to him talk. But if they go to Europe, they’re doubly damned because Europe is both far away and foreign: now they have offended his patriotism as well as his vanity: why would anyone want to be anywhere except in wonderful America? It’s just not natural, he keeps insisting. Yeah, and as millions of people each year commit this “unnatural” act of taking a trip to Europe, meanwhile he’s staying here in red, white and blue Amurrica, doing something really normal: sitting on the porch jerking off over a picture of Joey.

August 21 Saturday

On Thursday, as Michael and I were taking our seats at Ernie’s Diner for our usual Thursday luncheon out after putting The Star-News to bed, I glanced at a guy reading the newspaper at a nearby table and told Michael, “Whenever I see a middle-aged guy like that, I always wonder if it’s somebody I went to high school with. In this place, at this time, I’m always seeing middle-aged guys and wondering if they might be someone I went to high school with.”

Sure as shit, this morning I was out jogging at the Bonita golf course, and just as I was finishing my three miles, approaching the parking lot where I’d left the car, a guy passed me going the other direction who looked familiar. A middle-aged guy who looked familiar. The synapses fired, and I immediately knew who it was was, despite the weathered face. Valens? Valen? I wasn’t 100% sure of the last name. But the first name I remembered clearly. Richard.

“Richard? Richard!” I tore off my Walkman headphones and turned off Beethoven’s 9th.
It was him, all right. Richard Valen, Chula Vista High School, Class of ’73. I hadn’t seen him in over 30 years.

He’s going through a divorce. He has three teenage children. He has some kind of business (Roofing? Landscaping? I forget what he said.) He’s very upset at the breakup of his marriage. His wife, apparently, was CVHS Class of ’75. He attended the ’83 and ’93 class reunions, which I did not. Neither of us, however, maintains much contact with anybody we went to school with. I remembered him as Laura Papish’s onetime boyfriend, but he knows no more about her fate than I do, outside of saying he heard that she had “fallen on hard times,” which doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. I was nuts about her for a while during my senior year, (when I was capable of being nuts about three girls at a time) but she had “potential crack whore” written all over her even then.

After my jog, I went to the gym and lifted weights for about an hour.

Another summer Saturday evening: the Padres play the Marlins in about an hour, (San Diego won, 6-1, last night) and I’m getting ready to fire up the grill and cook steaks outside, with which we’ll have fresh tomatoes and fresh corn on the cob, plus a baked potato for Dad (I don’t eat potatoes as a rule, these days). He probably won’t want to eat much, having had a big lunch: I gave him some leftover franks, beans and sauerkraut from the other night, which I heated up in the microwave, plus the inevitable sliced tomato (we have two dozen of them on the kitchen counter) and then, for dessert, some fresh pineapple and strawberries with ice cream on top of them. For him, that’s a huge meal.

The dog across the street has got to go. There’s a low-life family over there, renters of course, that has a white poodle named “Lucky.” They keep this dog, 23 hours a day, tied up on the front porch of the house, with the door closed. The dog doesn’t like being locked out of the house like that, so he yips, yaps and whines, day and night, night and day. Last night he yipped and yapped for ten straight hours. Like most families of low-lifes, they don’t seem to hear the noise themselves, and don’t give a hot crap if it bothers the neighbors.

Lynne called Animal Control today to complain, and an animal control officer did come by their house, but there was nobody home (just the dog, barking.) I have had it with being forced to close all my windows and turn on three fans to sleep at night because of that goddamned dog’s endless yapping. Tonight I call the police. 11 p.m. is when the noise-abatement ordinance kicks in. If that filthy cur is yapping at 11:01, I’m calling the cops.

Got my grades from paralegal school yesterday. I passed everything, so I should be getting my certificate pretty soon.

August 23 Monday

Animal Control left a note on that door across the street, so now what he’s doing is, he no longer leaves the dog out all night. He sticks it on the porch at 6:30 a.m. when the noise-abatement ordinance is only 29 minutes away from being canceled for the day, and lets it yip and yap its head off all day long while he goes off to work. That bastard. So now I can sleep at night, but precisely at 6:30 a.m. every morning that fucking dog detonates, forcing me to put down my book, close the windows and turn on the fan.

I wanted to go cycling yesterday, but here’s what happened: the tires on my road bike were flat, and I couldn’t figure out how to use the air pump to re-inflate them (they have those tiny, needle-like valves on them.) So I drove out to Performance Bicycle, only to find the place closed (they don’t open until 10:00.) So I come back home. I drive out there again at 10:00, intending to buy a new bicycle pump. The guy tells me, you don’t need a new pump, just bring the one you have out here and I’ll show you how to work it. So I come back home again, get the pump and the tire, and drive out there a THIRD time.

The first salesman I talked to is now busy doing something else, so another salesman talks me into buying a new pump, So I have now made THREE TRIPS to Performance Bicycle, and it is now 11:30. With the baseball game scheduled to start at 1:00, I no longer have time to go for anything like the ride I wanted to take. My plan had been to put the bike in the car and drive out to EastLake or some such place where I could ride in pleasant surroundings. There was now no time for that, but after three trips to Performance Bicycle, I wasn’t going to just give up. So I rode down to L Street, then up to Hilltop, then down to Naples, then up to the old neighborhood on Monterey Court, then circled back. Five or six miles, total. That would have been a good run, but it wasn’t much of a ride.

As many times as I have cruised back to the old neighborhood, and I seem to do it once a year, it never ceases to amaze me how little it has changed in 40 years. It was exactly 40 years ago last week that my family moved to Monterey Court. A few small things have changed: our old house is now painted beige rather than the light green it was when we lived there, and the house across the street, once occupied by the Bogue family (Margene Bogue was my sister Carla’s best friend) now has a wall and a grilled fence around it. But by and large, the neighborhood still looks much the same as it did in the summer of 1966 when my friends and I used to play baseball in “the circle” using a rubber ball for which we paid 25 cents at the TG&Y store. We went through many such rubber balls in the course of a summer, my friends and I—they were brightly-colored, which made them easier to find should one of us hit one into the ivy patch in front of Old Man and Old Lady McHart’s house. (They always screamed at us to get out of their damned ivy.) By the way, the orange tree that my father planted in front of that house at 1002 Monterey Court in 1965 is still there, and still full of oranges.

That was the summer (’66) when a movie magazine fell into my hands, I think at David Todd’s house, one which had a photo feature about a film in which a woman, to her horror, somehow goes from youth to old age and death in a matter of minutes, and it plunged me into a deep August gloom (at age 10): I suddenly became obsessed with the idea that one day—one day soon, apparently—I was going to get old and die. (I’ve always been highly suggestible.) For the rest of that summer, up until school started in September, I was in a state of panic over the idea that one day I was going to die.

That was also the summer that Madelon came to visit, she and Ray having just gotten married and moved to L.A. the previous winter. Strange to think, now, that there was a time when I would get so excited at the prospect of Madelon’s coming to visit that I’d be almost unable to sleep the night before her arrival. I utterly can’t stand her now: she is the vilest hypocrite who ever lived. But at age 10 I didn’t know what a hypocrite was, and the thing was, she and Ray together symbolized fun for me when I was that age—they were my self-proclaimed two favorite people. She came down from L.A. to visit for a few days late that summer, and it was a joyous respite from my death-gloom, which I still revisit every time I listen to the Beatles’ album Revolver, Carla having brought the record into the house at about that same time. Madelon’s arrival for a few days’ visit was such an occasion that I remember scraping together a few pennies and going to the store to see if I could buy her a little welcome gift. I bought what I could afford: it was some kind of a sheer scarf, as I recall. Late that same summer, Mom took us shopping for new school clothes, and I remember being proud, as the “middle” child, that Mom spent somewhat less on my school clothes than she did on Carla’s, but somewhat more than she spent on Lynne’s, Lynne being the youngest. I was particularly proud of a blue-and-white pullover sweater that was part of my new accoutrement for fall: there used to be a picture of me in the family photo album, age 10, wearing that sweater on a late-summer outing to Silver Strand State Beach, sitting on the sand swigging from a bottle of Mountain Dew. (Normally, my sisters and I were forbidden soda pop, but beach picnics permitted such treats.)

Yesterday I had the car radio on, and Cool 99.3, San Diego’s oldies station (which, like so many San Diego stations these days, is actually a Tijuana station) played Sunny by Bobby Hebb, which really brings back that summer of ’66 to me, those long evenings of going out to play in the street after supper, or sitting on the floor in front of the TV, watching reruns of old shows like Bachelor Father which were the staples of low-budget Channel 6, in those days an independent station broadcasting out of—you guessed it, Tijuana. Long since bought out by engulf-and-devour Fox, Channel 6 used to be XETV, no network affiliation, and its low budget gave it real character. Long gone, those “indie” stations that subsisted on old reruns, and the older—because the cheaper—the better.

I could probably reconstruct that whole summer around one evening of which I have a distinct memory. There I am, eating supper in front of the RCA Victor “New Vista Color” TV, our family’s first color TV, which entered the household that summer. So, by the way, did a primitive version of cable: there was a switch on the back of that TV set which, if thrown, would enable you to watch Los Angeles’ seven stations in addition to San Diego’s three. Ten channels, wow! (And, by the way, cable enabled me, in the waning days of childhood, to reach back and “recapture” some L.A. kids’ shows that I had left behind when we moved to Chula Vista in ’62. I remember being thrilled when once again, after an eternity of four years, I was able to tune in Engineer Bill on KHJ Channel 9. Engineer Bill had been a “natural” for me at age 6; by age 11 I was about to outgrow the program, and it shortly left the air anyway.) So we are, the color TV and me: July or August, 1966. I’m 10, and watching Channel 6 while noshing on a cold turkey leg and some potato salad, prior to going out in the street to play with my friends in the long summer twilight.

That was the summer of Carla’s big crush on Robert Mitchum: when Channel 9 ran the movie Man With A Gun five evenings in a row, Carla watched it five evenings in a row. And when Heaven Knows Mr. Allison was on the Late Show, Carla, knowing that Mom wouldn’t let her stay up until 1 a.m. to watch a movie, bamboozled me into sneaking out with her to watch it on the old black-and-white TV, which had been banished to the garage. Carla was too scared to sit in the spooky old garage by herself. So there we were, in the middle of the night, in the dark, sitting on chairs on the cement floor alongside the family station wagon, watching Robert Mitchum on the old Sears Silvertone portable.

And there I was, yesterday, standing astride my ten-speed in the middle of that same street, looking at that house in which my family lived for exactly two years and eight months in the mid-1960s, wondering once again why that period of less than three years when I was between the ages of almost-nine and about 11 and a half, remains, to this day, such a key period in my life.

When we moved to that house, I was quite excited. I was eight years old in the summer of ’64, and we were moving, not very far really, just maybe a mile, but we were moving from Castle Park, which was unincorporated in those days, to the incorporated part of Chula Vista, which meant we were moving from a neighborhood that had no sidewalks or streetlights to one that had both. To me, at age 8, this was exciting—I felt like we were moving from the country to the city. In the backyard of that Monterey Court house there was a pepper tree, and a little ramshackle tool shed to it. This too I found exciting: my fevered imagination took one look at that toolshed and transformed it into some kind of clubhouse, a notion that never got beyond the fantasy stage. But the entire neighborhood was so different from living in the county, so trees-and-sidewalk rather than fields-and-fences, (Castle Park was semi-rural in 1963) that it fired my imagination, and besides, there were children my own age there I could play with: Craig Wilson and the moron David Todd quickly became my chums. As a cul-de-sac, the street was “cozy,” and I’ve always liked “cozy.” (Of course, as a cul-de-sac, it was also a nest of weirdos, the weirdest of whom were the wacky Wards, but they lived down in “the circle,” a relatively safe distance away. My family had an unfortunate encounter with the wacky Wards in 1965, when my father was out of the country,but that came later.)

All told, my memories of Monterey Court, which come thick and fast whenever I even think about the street, are good ones, which just goes to show you how children can make good of almost anything. Because it was while we were living there that my parents’ marriage really jumped the tracks. My father was behaving very badly, getting drunk and cheating on my mother, and it was also during our tenure in that house that Lynne broke her arm while roller-skating, so badly that she had to spend three weeeks in traction, which didn’t do Mom any good. I imagine that for my mother, our two years and eight months on Monterey Court, which came to an end with the death of Grandmother Winrow in 1967, after which we moved into this house, remained for the rest of her life a bad memory. But when I think of Monterey Court, I think of Little League Baseball, of baseball and football games in the street with my friends, of skateboarding around the neighborhood, of the afternoon I raced home from school to see Sandy Koufax pitch on television before the afternoon game ended, of the Saturday morning when, looking out the window and noticing that it was a blue-sky morning, I hugged my mother in excited anticipation of that most flawless of childhood idylls, a sunny Saturday. Of all those countless hours sitting and sprawling on that ghastly living-room carpet, with its hideous rose-pattern, watching television, television, television: everything from the Magilla Gorilla and Peter Potamus cartoons we watched after school to those late Friday-night viewings of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. during that very summer I was remembering yesterday.

I stood there, once again, age 48, in the middle of that same street, bathed in that identical August sunshine that’s so indelibly burned into my memory that I see it whenever I hear the songs of that summer: one-hit wonder Hebb’s Sunny; Red Rubber Ball by The Cyrkle; Paperback Writer by the Beatles. The music came back, as it always does. And I could almost see my 10 year-old self run by, either with my baseball glove in hand, headed for a quick game with my friends down in the circle, or my skateboard tucked under my arm, heading up the hill to “shoot” Inkopah Street. It had its share of bad times, our time on Monterey Court, but for some reason I suppose I will go to my grave cherishing that period as no other in my life. And I’ve never been able to figure out why.

August 25 Wednesday

Yesterday I ran three miles and did 30 leg-lifts before breakfast, although on Monday I had had the periodic “droops” which Brett Davis thinks I should consult a doctor about. One day I’ll feel fine, the next I’ll be out of breath, pulse racing, unable to climb a flight of stairs without feeling like I’m about to pass out. I don’t know what’s going on, but I do know that I don’t want to be bothered going to Kaiser Permanente, which I have visited numerous times with Lynne. That place is a factory and I want nothing to do with it.

In the news yesterday: two nearly-simultaneous plane crashes near Moscow, and raghead terrorism is of course suspected. An e-mail from Anya this morning about it. She was so upset she spelled her name “Ania,” which she never does. I

It’s just amazing: here we have those want to destroy civilization and turn the clock back to the 7th century, and the Left, which calls itself “progressive,” is on their side, wedded to its wooly-headed notion of always wishing to favor the so-called "oppressed." But the problem with the Left is that the only “oppressor” it will acknowledge as an “oppressor” is the United States. The Left sticks its fingers in its ears and begins humming if you point out that these “oppressed” are oppressed by their own regimes, which, to keep themselves in power, order their clerics to direct the rage of “the oppressed” against anyone other than themselves, mainly the United States and Israel, but Moscow when it's convenient, e.g. whoever else isn’t them. And the "oppressed," being as stupid as sheep, obey their paid-off, lying ayatollahs. Unbelievable. Well, maybe not so unbelievable.

August 27 Friday

Spoke on the phone this afternoon with Elizabeth Scott, my paralegal friend who is running for Otay Water District board of directors. Since I finally received my paralegal certificate this week, I went and sought her out, because she had said she would speak to some attorneys on my behalf about getting me some hands-on as a paralegal which could lead to possibly-lucrative paralegal work later on. She intends to introduce me, next week, to a pair of attorneys in Bonita, one of whom does litigation and the other, bankruptcy.

It may have come at a fortuitous time. Just today, Michael handed me a letter from a lawyer. We ran a story Aug. 8 about some fucking loser who robbed a 16 year-old girl of her wallet, only to end up turning himself in after her mother and the police posted photos of him all over southern California. It would seem that this loser lost his job once his boss found out he’d been arrested for robbing a 16 year-old girl (imagine that!) and he went out and found himself some ambulance-chasing dirtbag of a lawyer, who is now threatening the Star-News with a libel suit, claiming it was our story that got his “client” fired.

Our publisher, Linda Rosas Townsend, right away took the “customer is always right” attitude and sent Michael an e-mail claiming my story was “badly written” and “not a straight news story,” and that Michael’s editing was also flawed. Now, Linda wouldn’t know good writing, or good editing, if they walked up and kicked her with steel-toed boots. Her idea of a good newspaper is one that puts garden club news on page one and pictures of puppies and kittens on page three, and her expertise on political matters is confined to schmoozing with Bob Filner during the Taste of National City. Now Michael is duking it out with her via e-mail, and once again is expecting to be fired at any moment.

August 29 Sunday

The Padres played this morning, and they defeated Montreal 11-3, taking two out of three from the Expos on the series. That’s after winning four straight from the Mets last week. The Expos clobbered the Padres 10-3 on Friday, but that was largely because our starting pitcher was Dennis Tankersley, who isn’t very good. Today our starter was David Wells, who pitched 7 innings and didn’t walk a single batter. The Padres don’t play tomorrow, and then on Tuesday they open a three-game series in St. Louis, which worries me because the Cardinals have the hottest numbers in baseball at the moment. With a W-L record of 89-44, the Cardinals are playing .659 ball. That’s .31 better than the New York Yankees, who are 81-48. The Padres are going to have trouble in St. Louis this week.

In the afternoon, I decided to get away from here for a while and I went to the beach. As usual, I didn’t go in the water, but just strolled up and down, waded a little, walked back to the car. It was a beautiful day and Coronado was crowded as ever on a summer Sunday.

I love to walk around Coronado on a summer afternoon, even when it is crowded with tourists and Hotel Del guests. Many of the old houses out there are charming, and well-maintained to boot. One walks around imagining what it must have been like circa 1940. I mean, if Chula Vista was a lemon-grove idyll before the war, how much more must Coronado have been when it was quiet and peaceful, being a peninsula-head facing the ocean on one side and the bay on the other? There is a huge victorian house out there, directly across the street from the beach. The house is two stories high, massive, and sits on a large lot. That property must be worth $5 million if it’s worth a penny; I can only imagine that the people who live there now didn’t buy it, but are its third-generation owners. They were sitting on the porch yesterday afternoon and when I walked by, I called out to them that they ought to offer tours of the place. “I’d pay to see the inside of it,” I said.

I walked over to downtown Coronado on the advice of one of the lifeguards whom I had asked where one might pick up a used surfboard. He directed me to a store called Island Surf, where the cheapest thing they had seemed to be about $350, and the most expensive about $1,200. But I think those were new boards, not used. I’m seriously considering taking surfing lessons, and can already see that it will involve a substantial investment. But what else do I have to do?

August 31 Tuesday

Ran three miles before breakfast yesterday, so I didn’t bother this morning. I think jogging every day would be just too hard on my aging knees, so I’m doing it every second day instead. Weighed 190 afterwards. It would seem that that’s where my weight is going to stay: dehydrated, I stay right at 188-190. Well, it’s better than 201, anyway.

I’m scheduled to meet with some lawyers this morning at 9:00. This could be my chance to do a paralegal “internship.” Michael suggested last Friday that perhaps Star-News could play ball with me by giving me a half-day off on Fridays to go do paralegal work.

Also, I’m scheduled to take my first surfing lesson this coming Saturday. I called the instructor, Randy Couts, yesterday and made the appointment. He lives in Coronado, and that’s where my first lesson will take place. When I asked about buying a used board first, he said “Don’t worry about that. I have plenty of surfboards. First we’ll have to figure out if you’re a long board guy or a short board guy.”

Fair enough. Cowabunga. Now watch me fall into a big wave, get completely freaked and just want to go home. I told him about my experience, at age 11, of getting caught in an undertow at Silver Strand and almost drowning, and how, ever since then, I’ve been afraid to go out into the surf above my shoulders. He said we would deal with that.

Got up this morning at 6:00. I’m going to have to get an illuminated-dial watch or something, though, because dawn is now coming later and later, and I can no longer rely on the sun to let me know when it’s 6:00. I’ve been having restless nights, though. As I surf from nap to nap (my night’s sleep has been these many years, not one long snooze but a suite of naps) my mouth gets so dry, lying next to the fan in the window, that I keep having to wake up and take drinks of water to wet my throat. I suspect that the culprit is the late Dr. Alan Dray, the doctor who removed my tonsils and adenoids when I was 9. I think he botched the surgery, and that I still have partial adenoids. I breathe through my mouth a lot, and that’s the only explanation I can think of.

Read in Chaucer over my coffee, the Three Revelers Search for Death episode of The Pardoner’s Tale. Reading Chaucer “in the original” is a bit tricky, but you get the hang of it after a while if you have footnotes to aid you. Don Baird loved Chaucer, so much that he named his son after him. For that reason alone I have been intrigued these many years by Chaucer, but put off by the effort involved. I used to have two editions of the Canterbury Tales in my library, a handsome, leather-bound edition in modern translation, and an old paperback edition, untranslated. When I would think about reading Chaucer, I’d be trapped between two choices: fudge and read the “easy” edition, or take up the cudgels and try the “harder” one? So I did neither. But I think I’m a bit more patient at this stage of life than I was at 26. So bring it on.
I’m also re-reading Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, last visited in 1986. It’s a conservative classic, and I remember reading it, in Warrenton Virginia on the eve of my departure for Frankfurt, at the behest of Lucia’s friend Dick O’Keeffe, who lent me his copy.

Re-reading Modern Times from the perspective of almost 20 years later, I find that what was a right-on diagnosis in 1986 is now a sort of dated pathology. Johnson’s thesis in this book is that the will to power, in all of its guises and under all of its names, was the great disease of the 20th century. That was a withering indictment, in the ‘80s, of tyrants past and present, significantly, of the still-surviving Soviet tyrants. But that’s the point: in 1986 the vile USSR was still today’s news. The lying, murderous Lenin, in Moscow anyway, was still being presented to the cowed populace as God, Jesus Christ and Santa Claus all rolled into one when the book was published in 1983. A huge gap of great events has divided the 1980s from our time, not the least of which is the fact that Lenin is now rotting in history’s trash can where he belongs, Russian historians, ironically enough, having been the first to hack him to pieces when the Soviet tyranny collapsed and the archives were busted open. In 1986 the story of the Bolshevik revolution was the story of today’s injustice a-borning. Now it’s the story of some past catastrophe, something belonging to the last century, as the 20th century might have looked at slavery in the 19th. When I first read Modern Times at age 30, I never in my wildest dreams imagined that before I turned 50, the “evil empire” that Lenin created would be long since dead and gone. My generation assumed that the Soviet Union would be with us always, running labor camps in Magadan, throwing poets into prison, locking up dissidents in insane asylums, spending 75% of its GNP on missiles and tanks while forcing its population to stand in line for five hours to buy toilet paper, and propping up Marxist puppet regimes in the Third World. And always, above it all, like an angelic chorus, publishing and broadcasting the lies, lies, and more lies (all of them fervently believed by American liberals) that kept its steel-toed regime in power.

When I first read Modern Times, I never imagined that less than 20 years later it would be quaint. But I suppose that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing for 20th century totalitarianism to be quaint. In these first years of the 21st century, ideology, by which I mean the implementing in the political sphere of ideas that come out of textbooks, seems to be dead, or at least in retreat, unless you want to call the screaming of Islamic terrorists an “ideology.” Ideology survives only in echoes, as when the Democrats try to get John Kerry into the White House by re-playing their old familiar script, howling up class warfare with their watered-down Marxist bullshit about “two Americas.” Now there’s a laugh: Kerry and John Edwards, a couple of multi-millionaires, demonizing the “evil rich.” What a sham: the Democrat Party is still, after all these years, trying to market the fiction that it’s the party representing the interests of poor little blue-collar Joe Sixpack against the mean old GOP, which, according to the Democrats, represents the interests of that little round guy with the white mustache in the Monopoly game. (In his heart of hearts, that’s the image every liberal Democrat cherishes of every Republican.)

In the real world, the Democrats take more money from rich interests than the Republicans do. Ah, but you see, that’s OK. The way the Democrats and their running dogs in the news media have the deck stacked, “the rich” is that little Monopoly guy, (who is obviously a Republican.) People like Martin Sheen, Barbra Streisand, Alec Baldwin and Bruce Springsteen don’t count as “rich.” Neither, indeed, do the wealthy John Kerry or the even wealthier Ted Kennedy. They don’t count as “rich” because they make the appropriate crypto-Marxist noises, which excuses them for being rich. Hypocrites.

Padres had the day off yesterday, and play in St. Louis tonight. Atlanta beat San Francisco yesterday, which helped the Padres in the wild-card race, but Chicago beat Montreal 5-2, which didn’t help. The Padres are now a half-game ahead of San Francisco in the NL West, five games behind Los Angeles.

But today was a great day for baseball nonetheless: at Yankee Stadium this evening, the Cleveland Indians made history, pummelling the New York Loudmouths by a score of 22-0. It’s the most ignominious defeat in Yankee history, and as far as I’m concerned, reason for dancing in the streets. It almost makes up for the fact that the St. Louis Cardinals pounded the Padres 9-3 tonight. I pretty much saw that coming. But New York’s lead over Boston in the American League East, which stood at 10 ½ games as recently as August 16, has been cut to 3 ½ games.

July, 2004

2004-11-27T07:49:00.000-08:00

July 1 Thursday

A minor breakthrough yesterday: it took her two hours, (so she said) but Lynne persuaded Dad to let me go ahead and take my remaining cardboard boxes and stuff out of that rented storage space and stick them in the front bedroom. She convinced him by getting the message across that I don’t have nearly enough stuff to fill that room, and therefore if someone (and we know who Dad’s thinking of) wanted to sleep on the bed in there, they easily could even if my things were in there. But I think Lynne also convinced Dad that his beloved Joey has no intention of moving back here. He still does come around, but usually only when he knows I’m not here, which is fine with me. Lynne said he was here the other day for six hours. But by the time I came home, he was gone.

Lynne and I both got tapped for jury duty this week. The summonses were in the mail yesterday. I’m going to try and get out of it by telling them that I’m the primary caregover for my 90-plus-year-old father and don’t want to leave him unattended that long. Lynne says that’s the same excuse she’s been using for three years.

Talked with Chris last night. She’s in Washington, and expects to be there until she leaves for Brunei in September.

July 3 Saturday

No trip to the gym this morning. Instead, Lynne and I made our annual visit to what used to be called the San Diego County Fair. When we were kids, Lynne always wanted to go to the fair, but Dad would never take us because he hated crowds of any kind. That’s also the reason why, when we were kids, a trip to the beach usually meant what was then called Monument Beach and is now called Border Fields State Park, because on any given day in the 1960s, that beach would be deserted and we would have the whole place to ourselves. We kids hated Monument Beach because we couldn’t swim there: there was an undertow and no life guards. But there were also no people, so it was my father’s beach of choice.

Once, as Lynne tells it, Dad announced that he was going to take us to the fair, and she got excited, thinking he meant the county fair. As it turned out, what he meant was the Feria del Hogar in Tijuana, to which he took us because he’d been invited by some Mexican crony of his. Lynne, who was about eight years old at the time, was hugely disappointed, although I didn’t learn this until many years later.

Well, we stayed at the fair longer than last year, I’ll give us credit for that. We got up there about 9:30 and stayed at the fair until about 1:00. As usual, we just shopped, snacked and looked at things, we didn’t go on any of the rides or anything like that. I did try the oxygen bar, where you stick a rubber tube in your nose and breathe 90% pure oxygen for five minutes. Didn’t do me much good that I could feel. We ate some fried calimare and later, stopped at the bar where Lynne had a Pepsi and I had a beer. I bought a straw cowboy hat (Lynne kept telling me I looked good in it) and a new Padres T-shirt. And of course it wouldn’t be a trip to the fair without checking out the livestock, so we strolled over to where they were auctioning off pigs and looked at the pigs, cattle, camels and sheep.

That’s about it. Then Lynne got herself a baked potato about the size of a football, and a cinnamon roll for Dad, and we headed for home, stopping at Wal-Mart on the way to buy a few things we needed, including (yet another) automatic coffeemaker.

I had a better time at the fair this year than last, I must say. Last year when we went to the fair, I had no job, no money and no prospects, and didn’t feel much like enjoying myself. We only stayed about 45 minutes last year. This year was a much more relaxed experience, although last year we did go on a weekday, when it was less crowded. You go on a Saturday, especially the last Saturday before the fair shuts down for the year, and it’s going to be a crowded mess by noon, which it was. When it gets to be that crowded, the fun ends, so we packed up and came on home. It was overcast and gray when they opened the gates at 10:00, but by 12:30 the sun was shining. If we have identical weather tomorrow that will be fine with me, because I have a ticket for tomorrow afternoon’s game at Petco Park between the Padres and the Kansas City Royals.

An afternoon at the ballpark seems to me a dandy way to spend the Fourth of July. The last time I did it was exactly three years ago, on the other side of America and in another era.
On the fourth of July, 2001, I had free tickets from RDA to the game at Camden Yards between the Baltimore Orioles and the New York Yankees, and I took as a guest my friend “Chip” from Gold’s Gym, a rabid Yankees fan. He had a good time because the Yankees won, (there was one particular moment when he remarked, as Paul O’Neill stepped to the plate, that O’Neill hadn’t hit a home run in a long time, and O’Neill promptly knocked the first pitch over the center-field fence) and I had a good time because it was the Fourth of July and I had a good job and a good life (I was dating Tatiana Floyd that month) and Camden Yards was a beautiful ballpark and just seemed like the perfect place to be on such a day. Around the seventh inning or so, the weather began to threaten, as east coast weather will, but I looked at my watch and said, “We don’t have anything to worry about. It’s after six. If it hasn’t rained by now, it’s not going to.”
“You’ve adjusted to the area quite well,” Chip said.

Since I’d gotten us in with complimentary tickets from my employer, Chip bought me a hot dog and a beer, and there we sat in the concourse-level seats that RDA always got, enjoying the afternoon and the game, totally unaware that just miles from where we sat, some of the September 11 plotting was going on at practically that same moment, with infamy 67 days in the future. That’s what I mean about it being another era.

This afternoon, after we’d gotten back from the fair and I’d had a chance to have a cup of coffee, Lynne and I went down to the storage facility and hauled numerous smaller boxes of my stuff back here, which we stacked in the front bedroom, formerly “Joey’s room.”

I’ve unpacked about four boxes worth, though I have to use discretion because I have very little room to put anything around here. Most of it is videotapes, which can stay where they are. (And, by the way, what could be more characteristic than my reluctance to let go of my “rerun archive,” including tapes of Nick at Nite that date back as far as 1988?) But some of it was stuff like glassware and flatware, which we can use in the kitchen, so I unpacked some of that, washed it and put it in the cupboard.

As part of that effort, I had the pleasure of being reunited with a few old friends: my grandfather’s old china navy mug for instance, which I’ve had since I was 12 years old. Also, the decorative Russian coffee cup which my housecleaning lady, Ludmila, gave me for my 38th birthday in 1993, and two souvenirs of Munich: my 1996 Kriskindlmarkt mug which held hot gluehwein the night I went to the Munich Christmas fair with Nadya, and a lovely blue-and-white coffee mug which I bought in Munich on a later occasion. Fortunately, thus far anyway, nothing seems to have gotten broken.

When Lynne and I were at the fair this morning, we had our handwriting “analyzed” by a “computer:” for two bucks, the guy has you sign your name and then he feeds into an electronic gizmo with many decorative lights on the front of it. A moment later, it spits out a series of flattering observations about you which could probably apply to anyone. Here were mine:
1. “You have a generous nature.” 2. “You find it annoying to be rushed.” 3. “You set very high standards for yourself.” 4. “You are sensitive and easily hurt by criticism.” 5. “You are a good learner and an equally good teacher.” 6. “You are reliable, honest and others depend on you.” 7. “Your levelheadedness gives you the ability to handle situations well.” 8. “You are idealistic and impressionable.” 9. “You do not take chances and like to forsee every step of the way.” 10. “You are selective in choosing your friends.” 11. “You put the finishing touches on everything you do.” 12. “You are somewhat wary of new things and people.”

Of these 12 statements, I’d say the closest to being on-the-mark are 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10 and 12. The least accurate is 7.

July 4 Sunday

Up at 6:30. Read some more in the Bloom anthology: Andrew Marvell and George Herbert, although I confess total ignorance as to just what a “trope” is, and apparently I made some very bad decisions, back in Maryland, when I was deciding which books not to keep: not only did I jettison my compact edition of the OED, but even the trusty Webster’s I bought back in Frankfurt days. I seem to have gotten rid of the beautiful edition of Baudelaire that I had for years, but I kept Timothy Steele’s book on the death of meter. What was I thinking?
Went to the Bonita golf course this morning and ran six miles. Afterward, as was the case the last time I ran six miles, I found that I had lost about four or five pounds in water weight—I tipped the scale right at about 191.

Once I had gotten cleaned up and changed, I hung out the flag. I’m with those who think one should fly the flag on the Fourth of July.

Padres won against Kansas City again last night, but for two nights we’ve seen what I would call uneasy victories. Adam Eaton had a no-hitter going into the seventh last night, but then it got blown, and K.C. scored four runs in the eighth inning. If the Padres hadn’t already had five runs on the board, they might have lost the game. The same thing happened on Friday night: the Padres were ahead 7-1 going into the ninth, then K.C. promptly scored four runs in the top of the ninth. Final score 7-5. This is being saved by your insurance premiums, and it’s not the kind of baseball that pleases me.

We’ll see what happens, live and in person, at Petco Park this afternoon.

7 p.m. The Padres swept Kansas City, final score 7-1, despite their bats remaining sound asleep until the fourth inning. KC’s were, too. A home run in the top of the ninth was the only time KC managed to get a runner across the plate.

I got down to the ballpark and back on the San Diego trolley with no problems.

But I had a surprise at the trolley station. A derelict walked past me. He was awful-looking, in seedy clothes, with a big, bushy gray-white beard and long, scraggly hair tied back with a rubber band. But something about him was familiar. I turned and took a second, long look at him. The seedy clothes were unfamiliar, as was the hasidic beard, but there was no mistaking that schnozz.

It was Armand.

I last saw Armand in 1991, last communicated with him by phone about five years ago.
About that time, I finally gave up on him. I’m reluctant to give up on my friends, especially old ones, unless they give me some reason, and Armand, I felt, had given me reason. I’ve known him since we were in our teens, (I was 15 when we met; he was 18) but I finally gave up on him. Diagnosed as schizophrenic years ago, he was living in a flophouse in downtown San Diego when I last communicated with him. Like many schizophrenics, he refused to take his medication and hence, lived in a phantasmagorical world of delusion piled upon delusion. He was convinced that someone was trying to alter his behavior using microwave radiation. Every time I called him, this was what he wanted to talk about. I couldn’t talk any sense into him, so finally I just stopped calling him.

He looks just dreadful, like a lost, defrocked rabbi. When I asked him where he was living these days, he said he was “kind of homeless.” When I said I was going to the baseball game, he said he wished he could come with me. He also said he sometimes reads my stuff in the Star-News, but hadn’t called me at the paper because “I was afraid you’d hang up on me.” Well, I told him I wouldn’t have hung up on him. Obviously, however, little has changed with him except that he no longer has a flop. He’s as screwed-up as ever. Worse.

July 5 Monday

And he showed up on my doorstep this morning. He came over in a taxicab and rang the bell about 9:30.

“I told you that was a mistake,” Lynne said of my having told him it would be OK to call me at work.

I let him in the house, but by the kitchen door, because if Dad were to see him, I would have more explaining to do than I want to be bothered with.

We sat in here and chatted for a few minutes, but I was uncomfortable and wanted to get him out of the house. So I finally said, “Let’s go have some coffee” and I took him to the Flamingo Cafe.

We had breakfast, and he talked.

He’s nuts. I mean, completely nuts. I’ve known that for years of course, and now I really have a problem. It was one thing when I was living on the east coast, but now that he knows I’m back here, he’s liable to start following me around like a lost puppy.

How nuts is he? We were sitting at the Flamingo, and, over coffee which he had to sip through a straw for fear of spilling it in his beard, he asked me if I were interested in microbiology, and showed me some xerox copies he had made of an e-coli bacterium. He remembered that I had once told him “Science is your faith,” a remark I don’t remember making, but since he’s probably remembering 1971, maybe I did say it. He encouraged me to rekindle my childhood enthusiasm for science: “You always knew a lot about astronomy,” he said. Sure, when I was 15.
He grumbled about his criminal brother, whom he despises. I haven’t seen Adrian in over 30 years, but even though I never liked Adrian, as crazy as Armand is, I have to wonder if Adrian is as bad as his brother makes him out to be. Armand’s chief complaint against Adrian these days is that he supposedly has the whole family reluctant to let Armand come around, including his mother, who must be in her eighties by now. But as wacked-out as Armand is, I would guess that his mother’s “starting to cry” when he asked if he could move in with her might have had as much to do with that as with any coercion from Adrian. Adrian lives with Anna, and maybe doesn’t want his nutso brother in the house. Armand is angry at his whole family for being unwilling to take him in off the street, but if I were his brother, I might be as well.
By the way, Armand’s father is still alive, but he said that his “understanding” is that Molly, his father’s second wife, and Bill Piersky, his mother’s second husband, are both dead. The cemetery of Armandism is getting real crowded: Ron, Barbara, Fred, Randy, Molly, Bill.

But Armand lives.

He’s not dangerous, he’s just nuts. I’m not afraid of him, I’m just concerned that he could become a major nuisance. He has my phone number, and he has known for 34 years where this house is.

When we had finished breakfast, I admonished him not to come to the house again, and for the very reason I just gave: that it would require too much explaining. I told him he could call me at work, but again, with a disclaimer: “I’m very busy most of the time.”

He’ll be around.

July 8 Thursday

I haven’t heard from Armand since Monday, but I know he’s lurking out there somewhere, just waiting to become a nuisance. He told me how he spends his days: he waits until his brother has gone to work or wherever it is Adrian goes in the daytime, then he goes over to his mother’s place (she lives in an apartment on Flower Street) and gets a few hours’ sleep. He has to vacate before his brother returns, and then he stays up all night, either sitting at Dennys or riding around on the trolley, or both. His meager possessions are in storage somewhere; I guess his mother pays for that.

Armand always was a nocturnal sort. I remember one summer night, circa 1973, when Armand was still bouncing back and forth between his father’s basement on Arizona Street and the back bedroom at 1053 Oaklawn, next door to the Bendels. It was late, probably around 11 or 11:30 p.m., and Randy and I were fooling around at his house. Randy poked his nose out the back door and noticed the light in the back bedroom next door was on. “Hmm. Armand’s burning the midnight mold,” he remarked, and I laughed.

Somehow, Armand has fulfilled his destiny. He was strange at 19 and he’s strange at 51. When we were still teenagers, it should have been obvious to anyone that Armand was going to end up on the street, bedraggled, bewildered and lost. My sister noted that his hands are as soft as a girl’s—he’s obviously never done a day’s work in his life. Well, that’s not exactly true: in the early 1970s Armand decided he wanted to buy an open-reel tape recorder, so he took a job working at long-gone Ratner’s down on L Street for a while to earn enough money for the Ampex TR he had his eye on. As soon as he had the money he needed for his tape recorder, he quit. As far as I know, that’s the only job Armand has ever had.

How odd that Armand should have outlived Randy, and by so many years, no less.

July 10 Saturday

Went to the gym this morning, but didn’t get on the treadmill. For one thing I had left my Walkman at home, and treadmilling is just too too boring without music, and for another, someone else was using the treadmill when I came in. So I lifted weights for about an hour and then came on home.

Joey was driving up when I arrived. I don’t know what he’s up to, but he came in, went out and then came in again. All told, he was here for about an hour, schmoozing and sucking up to Dad. Well, whatever it is he’s up to, it’s a safe bet that it’s going to cost Dad money.

I have to give credit to Nicole Cretelle, though. We had lunch together yesterday, and as we were walking into the restaurant, I told her about how my father has a homoerotic crush on his own grandson. Rather than run screaming into the street, she went ahead and had lunch with me.

My journal is what I have instead of a hobby, and now, I guess, so is my weblog. I’m working on another posting for my weblog, The Music in My Life. The idea was suggested to me a few years ago by Charlie Berigan. Lots of people have written about the books that influenced their lives; Charlie suggested I write something similar focusing on music, from my perspective as a non-musician who has never had any relationship with music beyond that of fan and collector, but for whom music has nonetheless been of supreme importance. I began writing this posting yesterday afternoon, and have about 1,400 words so far.

The Padres have lost three in a row, and in about ten minutes they will shoot for four. Last night Trevor Hoffman blew a save, and we ended up losing 6-5 to the Colorado Rockies, who are supposed to be the worst team in the National League. Well, they’ve beaten us twice in a row now, and before this series began, we lost a game to Houston. The Padres were in first place for exactly one day; now they’re on their way back to third.

July 11 Sunday

They have arrived. The Padres lost to Colorado yesterday, again. They have now lost four in a row, and are in third place.

July 14 Wednesday

I tried to journalize both Monday and yesterday, but both times the fucking computer crashed, completely froze up after one or two keystrokes. Had to be unplugged. I got so angry that I went out to the internet and tried to order a new computer from Dell, but that effort was thwarted. Now, as I sit here at 7:30 in the morning, some Vivaldi in the background playing in a vain attempt to drown out the yapping dog across the street, I’m waiting for the keystroke that will make this thing freeze up again. I have to get a new computer.

The Padres managed to beat Colorado on Sunday afternoon, by the way, and thereby managed to avoid getting swept before the All-Star break. In so doing, they snapped a 4-game losing streak. If the best thing I can say about the Padres at the All-Star break is that they just avoided getting swept by the worst team in the National League, and thereby snapped a 4-game losing streak, that does not augur well for the rest of the season.

Speaking of the All-Star break, the All-Star game was last night, and the National League lost 9-4. For the past decade and more, it seems like American League wins every year. What happened to the All-Star games of my youth, when it was the other way around? I remember what the senior circuit had going for it in the 1960s: foot-speed. Foot-speed and pitching. The National League, from about 1950 on, recruited young black talent much more aggressively than the American League did. The Brooklyn Dodgers brought Jackie Robinson up in 1947, but it wasn’t until several years later that the Yankees somewhat reluctantly followed suit and broke their own color barrier with Elston Howard. Largely because the National League had so much more young, hungry black talent than the American League did in those days, by the mid-1960s there was a distinct and discernible divergence in style between the two leagues: the NL was characterized by baserunning and base-stealing, as embodied in basepath jackrabbits like Maury Wills and Lou Brock. It also had pitching going for it, in the likes of Sandy Koufax, Juan Marichal and Bob Gibson. (By contrast, AL aces like Whitey Ford and Warren Spahn were aging.) But the base-stealers were the touchstone, the descendants of Robinson, as fleet-footed and aggressive a base-stealer as ever lived. But because the American League had been slower to integrate, by the mid-‘60s, when I was a boy, it was still playing flat-footed “home run ball” as embodied in players like Harmon Killebrew and Boog Powell, big white guys who could knock the ball over the fence every now and then, but were slow on the basepaths. And in those days the National League won the All-Star game almost every year.

But it would seem that water has sought and found its level: integration is no longer an issue in baseball, in fact non-white players now outnumber whites, so there’s no longer an edge anywhere consisting of hungry young black kids who can run like deer. So what’s the formula that gives the AL the edge every year now? I honestly don’t know, but I hope to heaven it’s not the DH, a stupid institution that I have detested for 30 years. I got home from school last night in time to watch the eighth and ninth innings; Eric Gagne pitched the 8th for the NL and Mariano Rivera shut the game down in the ninth. Which of them is the better closer? I have no idea. Last night was an extreme off-night for Roger Clemens, in fact “extreme off-night” is putting it mildly: he got shelled, giving up six runs in the first inning. But that doesn’t explain the fact that the American League is 13-3-1 in the All Star Game since 1988.

It also means the American League will have the home field advantage come the World Series, again. For years people complained of the All-Star game that it was “meaningless” because it didn’t “count,” e.g. if had no effect on the standings. Two years ago some propeller-heads figured out a way to make it “count:” the winner gets the home field advantage in the World Series. Bud Selig, the owners’ happy little marionette, went along this idea, and so, once again, the AL will have the advantage come October. Still, I’m not sure how much value that has, ultimately. It means the NL may play a potential Game 7 on the road, but the last four World Series have been a rhyme scheme: ABAB. Or perhaps ANAN. Having the home field advantage doesn’t necessarily guarantee victory, not in a game as dicey as baseball.

Last night at school, about half the class left at the 7:50 p.m. break, including me. You can sure tell we’re in the home stretch.

July 16 Friday

It’s probably because I was a 13 year-old “space nut” at the time, but on this date each year I always remember that it was on July 16, 1969 that Apollo 11 began its historic voyage to the moon.

Today is also Armand’s birthday. He’s 52. When we first met, he was 18 and I was 15. Now I’m right back where I was living then, and he’s wandering the streets, carrying around a photocopied picture of an e coli bacterium. Come to think of it, if I had thought, in the spring of 1971, where Armand might end up, precisely that scenario might have occured to me. Not the part about me living at home at age 48, but the part about Armand wandering around bewildered, desperately hoping that science will impose a little order upon a world that he’s never been able to come to grips with.

Ominous rumblings: Lynne informed me on Wednesday that Joey has announced his intention to move back in here “a couple of days a week” in the fall, presumably while he takes one more class at Southwestern College.

Joey's plan, transparent to any idiot except my father, is to take one class per semester as long as he can continue to run this “going to college” scam on Grandpa. As long as Joey can show his grandpa evidence that he's "going to college," even if it's just a class here and a class there at the local JC, something he can continue doing for years, my father will continue shoveling money at him.

Yes, Joey's plan is transparent: continue taking one community college class per semester as long as this gravy train keeps chugging along. If my father lives until Joey is 30, (which would make my father 97) Joey will be going to Southwestern College until he’s 30. But if my father should die suddenly, Joey is going to be SOL, because it’s damn sure his mother won’t give him a dime. That explains why Joey hangs around here all the time: at home nobody gives him money. Over here, all he has to do is plant a big, wet, disgusting kiss on my father and all of a sudden it’s raining $20 bills.

Well, I might have something to say about this. I gave Joey the bum's rush in May by switching rooms on him. Tomorrow I’ll go down to the storage place and load up my car with more of my things. I intend to so thoroughly stuff that front bedroom with my personal effects that there will be no room in there for him. If he thinks he’s going to move back in here and resume the life he enjoyed before, stinking up the house, eating everything in the refrigerator, smoking marijuana in the living room, sticking his smelly 50-pound feet all over the furniture, selling drugs out the back door and planting wet kisses on my father to keep his wallet open, well, I am going to make him feel just as uncomfortable and unwelcome as I possibly can.

July 17 Saturday

Well, I had a busy morning. Up at 6:00 a.m. (The neighbors’ dog was barking and whining at 2:30 a.m. and it woke me up—I’m going to get the phone number of that house, and if this happens again, the selfish, pus-gutted son of a bitch who owns that damned dog is going to an obscene 2 a.m. phone call.) Read a few more pages in the Bloom anthology. I’ve just arrived at Byron, having skipped through the last of Coleridge. The Ancient Mariner has a certain contrived charm, but I couldn’t face Christabel. I’ll come back to Dejection: an Ode another day.

I have an ingrained prejudice against Coleridge, and as is the case with many of my ingrained prejudices, the source of it was Donald S. Baird, 30-some years ago.

Coleridge’s Kubla Khan is one of the most popular and often-anthologized poems in the English language. In fact, I think somewhere along the line, someone (it may have been Armand who told me about this) figured out a way to quantify the measure of aesthetic perfection, and that the opening stanza of Kubla Khan had been adjudged the most beautiful passage of poetry in English, or words to that effect.

Don Baird would never have tolerated such rubbish. To him, the Romantics were by and large a joke, and Kubla Khan was nothing but a nonsensical druggie outburst of the sort we were seeing plenty of in the early 1970s. “It’s just sort of like a big AAAAARRGGHH!” he told us in class. And when a student asked him to read it aloud, he refused point-blank.

The poem’s origin was in fact an opium dream that Coleridge had had, and no doubt by 1974, coming off the druggie 1960s, Baird was more than sick and tired of being approached by his long-haired hippie students and offered “poems” that they had written while stoned. Possibly he resented Coleridge for being the onlie begettor of this nonsense—he bore a similar grudge against Hermann Hesse for Steppenwolf, another work of literature that had engendered a great deal of campus foolishness in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

I had a love-hate relationship with Don Baird for years, but at heart I’m a Bairdean, as surely as Maggie Smith’s pupils in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie were “Brodie girls.” I suppose I will always look askance at Coleridge, even though, every time I read the opening lines of Kubla Khan, I remember that someone once adjudged them aesthetically perfect.

By 7:30 I was out at the Bonita golf course, where I clapped on my Walkman and, accompanied by my best jogging tape, (Jean-Luc Ponty’s Fables) I jogged three miles. That done, I came home, got a drink of water and changed into a dry T-shirt, and went over to Brett Davis’ gym to lift weights for about an hour.

Then began an odyssey. I have decided to air-condition this bedroom. I saw an ad in the newspaper which said that Frye’s Electronics was having a sale, including a one-room a/c for $64. Sounded like a good deal, so once I had sgotten showered and cleaned up, I drove all the way out there (it’s the other side of Mission Valley) only to told “We’re sold out those.” Given how hot the weather has been for the past few days, I probably should have called ahead first. Air conditioners have no doubt been selling like blini this week. I drove all the way back to Chula Vista, went to Wal Mart, and discovered that Wal Mart doesn’t sell air conditioners. Then I went to Sears, where I found one for $69. For an extra five bucks I could have saved myself a 40-mile round-trip to Frye’s. My new air conditioner is now sitting on the floor. I’ll install it tomorrow. I’m too tired after all that running around, and besides, the ball game starts in ten minutes (1:05 p.m.)

Speaking of ball games, last night’s was a classic. The Padres were playing in Houston, with Jake Peavy our starting pitcher. Going into the 6th inning, we had a 5-1 lead. But then Peavy started to run out of gas. In the bottom of the 6th, the Astros loaded the bases with nobody out. The potential tying run was coming to the plate in the person of Jeff Bagwell, who is dangerous to say the least. Bochy yanked Peavy and sent in Scott Linebrink in relief. Linebrink took the mound with the bases loaded and nobody out...and retired the side. The Astros left three runners stranded, and the score remained 5-1, which is how the game ended: the bottom of the 6th was Houston’s one and only rally, and it failed. It was a classic “save,” and one of the TV commentators said to the other, “Jake Peavy will no doubt be buying Scott Linebrink’s dinner tomorrow night.” Great game, and the victory was all the sweeter for the fact that the losing pitcher was Andy Pettite, late of the New York Millionaires and for that reason alone to be despised.

July 18 Sunday

Today’s game, by contrast, was an exercise in nausea. Houston shelled Brian Lawrence—he gave up three home runs alone—and (predictably) the fucking Padres couldn’t get anywhere with Roger Clemens. It took them until the 7th inning to get a run on the board. By the end of the 6th inning it was 3-0 Houston. The Padres pulled within range in the seventh, scoring two runs, but Houston promptly turned around and scored two more, so it was 5-2 going into the bottom of the 8th, which is when I decided I’d had enough. Final score: 5-3 Houston. I knew the Padres couldn’t sweep anybody, much less the Astros when they have Roger Clemens as a starting pitcher.

I’m supposed to attend a baby shower for Brett Davis and his girlfriend this afternoon in Bonita. I went to Target this morning and bought myself a pair of shorts (the weather continues quite warm) and a baby gift: an electronic gizmo that supposedly lulls baby to sleep with nature sounds. With my luck, one of the “nature sounds” will be that dog across the street, yip-yip-yipping for hours on end because he’s been locked outside again.

Got up early again this morning, about 6:30, and after my coffee and some Byron and Shelley in the Bloom anthology, got busy trying to install an air conditioner in the window of this bedroom. I did my usual half-ass job, cutting corners and ending up with three or four extra parts, but the a/c is in the window and humming away. If nothing else, the job I did was an improvement over the last time I installed an air conditioner on this property, in the summer of 1972. The problem then was that the guest house windows have no windowsills, nothing to put brackets on. So I just sawed off a board about six feet long and propped the unit up with it. It’s 32 years later now, and my sister still keeps an a/c unit in that same window the same way, although it’s not the same unit for which I paid $150 at Montgomery Ward that summer when I was pumping gas at Shell and Nixon was seeking re-election as president.

Ric Aboud came over this morning so we could work together to finish our last assignment for Bankruptcy class. We got our work done, although it was hot and sweaty working in the dining room, and he stayed to watch the first couple of innings of the ball game with us.
I’m not usually given to recording my dreams. Dreams are boring. But I had another dream last night in which Nadya made me jealous, and once again it hit me, as soon as I was awake, that had I been awake, I wouldn’t have been jealous. It wasn’t such a wild dream: I was in Moscow and found out that Nadya had a boyfriend. She spoke of having gone out somewhere with him, then told me that the two of them had gone back to her apartment to have dinner. Nothing much more than that. But I was roiling with jealousy. Until I woke up, that is. Then I didn’t care so much.

July 19 Monday

Yesterday afternoon, after the Padres’ disgrace, I drove out to Bonita to attend a “baby shower” for Brett Davis and his girlfriend Sarah. She’s due in September, though to look at her you might think she was due next Thursday. They are not married, by the way. They would like to be, but Brett’s wife is giving him a lot of trouble over their divorce.

I stayed nearly three hours, which is a lot longer than I had planned to stay. But they had lots of beer and lots of food, so I hung around. To fend off boredom, I tended bar along with “Robert,” another friend of Brett’s. One of Brett’s buddies had slipped in a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and between the Jack Daniel’s and the Heineken we all got pretty well oiled. But by 6:30 I’d had enough, and I slipped out before they opened the presents, stopping on the way home to rent the third part of Band of Brothers to watch with Dad since there was no baseball last night.

July 21 Wednesday

There was an article in the newspaper yesterday about it being the 35th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, and of how the space program is currently sort of nowheresville. Bush has talked about returning to the moon by 2015, and of proceeding on to Mars, but that’s going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars, so it probably won’t happen. Meanwhile, I was sitting here just this morning pondering how I went about deciding which books to jettison and which to keep when I left Maryland last year. One of my bibliophile prizes was a vintage copy of Norman Mailer’s Of A Fire On The Moon, a long essay about Apollo 11. I got rid of it. But I kept Edward Mendelson’s Early Auden, even though my W.H. Auden archive was already well represented by three volumes of poems and one of essays, not to mention the Tribute, edited by Stephen Spender in the mid-70s. How did I make some of these decisions?

Small matter, I suppose. The rebuilding of my library is proceeding at such a brushfire pace that the IKEA shelves I bought a few weekends ago are already full, and I’m going to have to go to the Goodwill store and look for some more. In a true sense, it is re-building that I’m doing: with both hands I’m re-acquiring titles that I got rid of last year: Baudelaire. Dante. T.E. Lawrence. Alan Moorehead’s two books about the Nile. Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, etc.

The Internet has truly been a godsend in all of this. In the old days I would have been poring over book catalogues, writing one snail-mail letter after another. Now it’s just point-and-click, point-and-click, point-and-click. Abebooks.com is the world’s largest used bookstore, and I can have a half-dozen book orders pending within seconds.

Well. Tomorrow night is my final exam in Bankruptcy, and assuming I pass the test, (which is somewhat in question: this idiot has been blabbering for a month and I haven’t understood a word he’s said) the paralegal class I’ve been taking at the University of San Diego will be done, finished, finito, complete. In a few weeks I’ll get a certificate in the mail proclaiming to one and all that I’m a “paralegal.”

And that’s it, brother. I’m done. At age 48 I am proclaiming to one and all that I will never again, in this lifetime, take another vocational training course. In the past two years, since I got fired by that big-bellied, mincing faggot Ralph Taylor in September of ’02, I have gone through no less than five vocational training courses in a desperate attempt to make myself “employable.” I’ve gone to real estate school, teach-English-as-a-Second-Language school, truck driving school, bartending school and paralegal school. I’ve spent more than $8,000 on all of this, and I’m no more “employable” than I was two years ago. I’m living with my father and making $9.25 an hour, plying a trade that I learned when I was a kid. No more vocational schools. I’ve had it. From here on out, it’s me vs. life and whatever’s in my quiver, that’s what I have. Instead of fucking around with all these job training courses, I should have been working on my Master’s Degree, 25 years late.

That’s next.

July 23 Friday

The eternal hands-around of my life: last night I had my final exam in Bankruptcy class. Paralegal school is done.And at the very moment that I was reflecting on that fact, and ticking off on my fingers the number of vocational training courses I’ve taken in the past two years, announcing my determination never to take another...the phone rang.

C-1, that sleazy truck-driving school in Indianapolis that I attended early last year when I was at the end of my rope, has tracked me down. I’ve been requested to to call them “about my account,” which means of course they want to dun me for money they think I owe. I might owe them $500; I believe that was the obligation you took on if you quit or were sent home. But if their intention is to try and collect the full $5,000 tuition from me, which it was my understanding was to be paid by the trucking company you signed on to work for, contingent upon your finishing the course and getting your CDL, then they’re going to have a fight on their hands.

We have entered upon that time of year around here, here meaning the coast of southern California, that I call high summer. High summer, in my book of works and days, runs roughly from July 1 to August 15.

High summer is characterized, here, by days that begin softly. It gets light around 6 a.m., but unless there’s a high-pressure system on the area, which there currently is not, the days start out gray. The marine layer lends an early-morning softness to the light. It’s a good time to read poetry and listen to Elizabethan lute music, and by the way, sleeping with all the windows open is almost like sleeping outdoors. All of the trees, vines, flowers and weeds are in full summer blossom, (this place is, admittedly, going to seed now that my father is too feeble to tend the grounds as he once did) and I think of Nadya’s proud boast about her own seedy Moscow neighborhood, “I live in a park.” (The best thing she can say about that crummy clump of crumbling Soviet apartments she lives in is that it’s surrounded by trees.) Our summer tomato crop has already begun to come in. Last week’s spate of hot weather gave the tomatoes behind the tool shed a giddyup, and I’ve already picked about a dozen big, red ones.

I love this time of year. There’s baseball, (the Padres just beat San Francisco two games in a row and are now in second place, 2 ½ games behind the Dodgers, whom they play tonight) and there are these soft mornings, so conducive to that most achy-breaky sweet of all my vices, nostalgia. Perhaps not coincidentally, yesterday morning I got a call at work from Ed Brand, superintendent of the SweetwaterUnion High School District.

Brand informed me that Gary Chapman, who was my homeroom teacher in high school, is going to be the next principal of Chula Vista High. Chapman has been with SUHSD for 35 years, all but four of them at Chula. When I first sat down in his classroom, a pimple-faced, almost-15-year-old kid in September, 1970, he had been teaching for all of one year. Now he’s a gray-haired guy on the verge of retirement, about to have his Goodbye, Mr. Chips moment. As I typed out the news item for our Around Town column, I couldn’t help thinking back over the years. I never liked him particularly. When I knew him, he was a young, inexperienced teacher, but worse than that, he was a man with a lot of growing up to do, an arrested adolescent. I don’t know if he ever has grown up. He has been a neighbor of the Berigans these many years, down there on Kittiwake Lane, and Charlie has reported “some dark stuff” going on with him. But no matter. I can’t help but wonder what must be going through his head. I’ve read of the old days, when there were people who were born, grew up, lived out their lives and died within the same five-mile radius. In a sense, that’s Chapman’s life. Chula Vista High School, which for me is but part of the dreamy, gray, sweet, distant past, my youth, my youth, is for him his entire life. He graduated from Chula, class of ’64 I think, went to San Diego State and then came right back to spend most of his adult life teaching at the very high school he graduated from.

When I was young and cocky, I used to think about him from time to time, and think that he was just about the most pathetic individual I could imagine. I certainly would not want to have lived my life the way he lived his, but I guess not everyone sees things the way Berigan and I did when we were young, and our mantra was “Rise above your environment,” meaning “Get the hell out of Chula Vista and see the big world out there.” But I’m older and less cocky than I was in the days when Berigan and I dreamed together of bright lights, big city. There are plenty for whom living out their days in their home town, growing up, raising a family and blithely growing old close to home, is La buena vida. Who knows, maybe Chapman doesn’t share my crippling sense of nostalgia, and for him this is just a good end-of-career move. I know Ed Brand did tell me that Chapman was on the verge of retirement, and they were going to have to get some commitment from him to stay on for another three years before he would be offered the principal’s job. But frankly, with my sense of the interconnectedness of things, I don’t see how Chapman possibly could have resisted such a superb chance for a closing-of-the-circle moment. If I were he, I would have done the same.

I have an interview this morning for a copyediting job with Copley News Service. More in a moment.

July 25 Sunday

It’s been a good weekend for everything except baseball. The Padres are in Los Angeles this weekend, and this afternoon will in all likelihood finish getting swept: they lost 3-2 Friday night when Rod Beck gave up a home run to Adrian Beltre in the bottom of the ninth to break a 2-2 tie, and last night was even worse, a total rout. Beltre hit a grand slam this time, and the final score was LA 12, SD 2. Dad and I didn’t even stick around for the ignominious end: when the score got to be 8-1, we segue’d off and watched Henry Fonda in Mr. Roberts, which just might be my all-time favorite movie. The Dodgers’ offense is the hottest in baseball right now, and the Padres, even with their better-than-average bullpen, are no match for it.

Worked out hard at the gym yesterday morning, lifting for about an hour. Brett was there, and I told him now that I’m finished with that paralegal course, I’ll be coming to the gym more often. Lately I’ve only been going on Saturday mornings.

Before the gym I had an interesting errand: although I don’t usually work on weekends, the Metropolitan Transit System was staging a fake “terrorist attack” at the Bayfront trolley station, complete with police, fire, “bombing victims” made up all nice and gory by a professional makeup artist, and of course, TV cameras from every which way. I decided The Star-News should at least have a picture of all this for next Friday’s edition, so I went down and snapped a few digital photos, then went over to city hall, where my friend Liz Pursell, PIO for the City of Chula Vista, was coordinating fake “media alerts.” I brought her some coffee and a bear claw from Yum Yum Donuts, but her office is unbearably stuffy so I didn’t stay long.

Yesterday afternoon the Crossroads II gang hosted a “Tardeada,” an afternoon lawn party. They like having the press at these things, so I was invited to come and was exempted from the “please bring a dish to share” requirement. I had already knocked off a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck with my lunch, and there was plenty more wine at the party, so by the end of the afternoon I was fairly befuddled. But I went ahead and grilled a steak outdoors for Dad and me to split, along with fresh corn on the cob and of course fresh tomatoes from our own garden, which are coming in with a vengeance after the hot weather earlier this month.

This morning I was out at the Bonita Golf course jogging again. It was my intention to do 10K, but I didn’t make it. The sun was warm and I was probably not fully recovered from yesterday, and I pooped out at about 4 ½ miles and walked the rest of the way. I was listening to Beethoven’s Ninth on my Walkman; since the symphony runs just about an hour plus a few minutes in length, I figure if I jog through the entire symphony, I’ve done just about six miles. This morning I made it as far as about ten minutes into the choral movement before I broke down into a walk.

When I got home I weighed myself. Stark naked and dehyrated, I weighed in at 188. Of course that accounts for about three or four pounds of water-weight loss; later today when I’m “hydrated” again, I’ll be back up to 192.

July 26 Monday

Weighed in at 191 this morning after coffee. There was a time when I was chubby at 191, but I think Brett Davis may be right: it’s not about weight-loss, it’s about reducing body fat. Mine is down from about 35 percent in February to about 26 percent in early June, and with my shoulders and upper arms built up a little bit from lifting, I can carry 191 as I once could not. I still would like to lose another six pounds, but at 191 now, I’m not chubby, although the double-chin still haunts me.

The computer just crashed again—it does that twice a day now. But I find that if I save my work after every paragraph, I don’t have to do much re-entry.

Sitting here at 7:30 a.m. listening to the James Galway CD The Celtic Minstrel. Rather odd to be listening to this CD at this time and in this place. I originally added this CD to my collection in 2000, when I was living in downtown Baltimore, and it was one of a group of CDs I kept on my desk at RDA to play softly at work. In the weeks and months after my mother’s death, I was listening to this CD a lot at the office, and it made me think of Mom, for no reason other than the fact all of its tracks are soft and sweet and some of them are melancholy; it’s good “mourning” music. Forget the “Celtic” angle—yes, my mother was half-Irish, but she was ashamed of it, preferring to stress her British heritage. All her life, she echoed her father’s stupid, bigoted attitude toward the Irish, and would genuflect reverently whenever anyone mentioned England. Yet here I am, listening to this CD again, and remembering those transcendantally melancholy weeks that followed my mother’s death, here in what used to be my her bedroom, now, temporarily, mine.

Sunday pulled the weekend out of the fire vis-a-vis baseball: the Padres beat the Dodgers 3-0 as Adam Eaton pitched a masterpiece, giving up only one hit in seven innings, and Phil Nevin and Brian Giles both hit solo homers. (In the sixth, Giles also made one of the greatest catches I’ve ever seen: running like crazy, he snagged a towering 350-foot drive off Cesar Izturis that looked to one and all like it was going to be over his head for extra bases.)

Then came the cherry on the Sunday: Dad and I tuned in the 5 p.m ESPN game of the week, in which the Boston Red Sox beat the New York Yankees 9-6. The game started out badly: Boston committed a string of dumb errors which allowed the Yankees to take a 2-0 lead in the top of the first, but then the Sox’ bats came alive and they began knocking the Yankees starting pitcher, Jose Contreras, all over the place. Contreras apparently does badly at Fenway: his ERA is over 20 when he pitches in Boston, which makes me wonder why Joe Torre had him start the game, and pitch into the sixth inning, no less. The Revolting Loudmouths rallied when Hideki Matsui hit a grand slam in the 7th, but happily, it wasn’t enough. New York does retain a 7 ½ game lead over Boston, but it’s still only July, and in the past, it’s often been the case that big leads in July don’t mean much.

July 28 Wednesday

Yesterday, for the first time in more than 30 years, I walked up and on to the grounds of Chula Vista High School.

I was on assignment to get a newspaper interview with my old home room teacher, Gary Chapman, who in the twilight of his career has been named principal at CVHS. Him, and also Wes Braddock, who has been tapped for the same job across town at Sweetwater High. Chapman has been in the Sweetwater Union High School District since 1969: 35 years. Braddock’s been around roughly half that long. When I first ambled into his classroom in September, 1970, a pimply kid on the eve of his 15th birthday, Chapman was a greenhorn teacher with one year of experience under his belt. Now he’s older and stouter, but he’s still Chapman: I was amused at the level of locker-room repartee that went back and forth between him and his friend Braddock. Chapman was always a jock, and he’ll die a jock. When I was a kid, it caused friction between him and me, his perpetual gridiron swagger. Now I just find it amusing.

Chapman and I rode over to Sweetwater in his pickup truck, and I spent about an hour interviewing these two guys. I’ll file my story tomorrow morning, in time for this week’s edition.
I parked on K Street and just ambled up on to the campus. School was out for the day and there weren’t very many people around. There were the old familiar sights: the senior lawn, (open in my day, fenced, gated and locked now) the band room, the ramp leading up to the administration building, at the head of which my friend Dan Ramet and I stood to have our pictures taken for the school paper in 1973 when we were writing articles about music for the Spartan Spectrum, whose moniker had been my invention in campuswide balloting during my sophomore year.

I entered the corridor of the Administration building, which I do not think I had visited since graduation day, 6/15/73, although I do recall going back to Chula once, during my first year of college, at the request of my former speech coach, the late Jack Nolen, to help out at a speech tournament. (I was supposed to be a judge, but I ended up sorting evaluation slips instead.)
There were the musty old stairs leading up to the second floor, where I suffered Consumer Math with Mr. Oliver during my sophomore year, and English 11 at the hands of Mr. Harris in 1971-72. There was the nurse’s office, where Randy and I used to hang out at lunch time. There were the old counseling offices, now converted to other uses, where I was summoned in ’72 to be told that Mr. Weed wanted me taken out of the choir for my rotten attitude. (I got back in a month later, but in the interim was in Mr. Chapman’s psychology class.)

The open foyer that used to greet visitors in my day has been walled up and fitted with lockable doors—the legacy of Columbine and other changes in society since my youth. But I went in there and noticed, on the walls, two glass cases housing the Spartan Hall of Fame: a rogue’s gallery of distinguished grads. Needless to say, I’m not there, and neither is Berigan, but Berigan’s old pal from Rotary Interact, Joe Schilling (Class of ’74) is there, as is County Supervisor Greg Cox (Class of ’66) and numerous others.

But the distinguished grad whose middle-aged photo caught my eye, and set memory aflame, was a guy I never knew and think only met once or twice: Bill Roush (Class of ’70.)

When I was a student at CVHS, Bill Roush’s photo hung on another wall, in another building, part of another rogue’s gallery. He had been ASB president during his senior year, and there his sullen, unsmiling senior picture hung among those of every other ASB president at CVHS, going back to the school’s founding in 1947. (If memory serves me, Chula’s first ASB president was some guy named Marvin Anderson. His was the only photo in which the subject was not wearing a bow tie, and he looked every bit as sullen as his successor from 22 years later.) I remember that distinct feature of Bill Roush’s senior picture: some teenagers smile in their senior pictures and some manage to look either serious or contemplative (I’ve liked to think, down all the years, that in my senior picture I looked contemplative.) Roush, in his senior picture, looked downright glum.

Overachievers will be overachievers, and although Bill Roush graduated the spring before I started at CVHS, was aware that he went on to UCLA, and now that I have seen his (smiling, years later) color photo in the Spartan Hall of Fame, I know that he went on eventually to become a professor of chemistry at the University of Michigan.

But who is he to me? Well, it so happened that when I was a sophomore at CVHS, the year after Bill Roush graduated, I met and fell madly in love with a girl named Roberta Hauk (Class of ’71.) In those days I was capable being madly in love with three girls at a time. Anyway, the since-graduated-and-gone-off-to-UCLA Bill Roush was at that time Roberta’s steady boyfriend. (Roberta was one of those girls who just HAD to have the ASB president for her steady; it was a status symbol among certain high school girls of that era to be dating a Big Man On The Campus.) Also, as speech squad mentor David Hirsch (Class of ’71) explained to me one night at a motel in Claremont when he had accompanied the speech squad to an out-of-town tournament, he had seen other girls in their senior year do precisely the same thing Roberta had done: claim as their “steady” a boy who had already gone off to college, thereby exempting themselves from having to go out on dates during the senior year, without losing on-campus face on account of it. It should therefore come as no surprise that when Roberta graduated 1971 and went off to UCLA herself, the first thing she did was dump Bill Roush like a sack of overripe turnips.

All of this would have mattered not one whit to me but for one thing: I was crazy about Roberta. But Bill was a hard guy to be jealous of. He was a shadowy figure for one thing, offstage all the time. The first time I saw him, at a festival of silent comedy films in the high school gym during the spring of my sophomore year, all I saw was the back of his head (and Roberta hugging and kissing him.) Later I saw him once or twice at Roberta’s house. But he was sullen, unsocial, uncommunicative. He apparently just wanted to be alone with Roberta and didn’t want anyone else around. Eventually she began using this against him, when she was setting the stage for his dumping. And he could see the way things were going: the next time I saw him at Roberta’s house, he made an attempt to be friendly. But it was too late. His fate was sealed. Roberta moved on to other boyfriends, eventually marrying some guy named John Howard circa 1976, and that’s where she disappeared from my radar screen. I’ve never heard tale nor trace of her again. Howard Freelove, (Class of ’71) my friend down in the Tia Juana River Valley, told me that had seen her at their 30-year reunion in 2001, but didn’t get a phone number or an address, so he doesn’t know where she’s living these days, with whom, or what she’s doing.
After this all-too-literal plod down memory lane, I fully expected to have that awful recurring dream where I’m back in high school again, being summoned by the bell to face math, science and social studies, not to mention that ghastly regimentation all the livelong day that made high school such a trial for me. But, whatever her reasons, Mnemosyne decided to spare me that.

July 31 Saturday

I guess I didn’t get the job at Copley News Service. No phone call by yesterday, and they said they were going to make a decision by the end of the week.

Drafted a poem this morning, my first since last October.

Called Lucia. I was afraid she might be dead, seeing as how she hadn’t answered my e-mails in two months at least. Well, she had been in the hospital again, but says she’s OK now. Blood-pressure medicine was apparently the cause of the trouble.

My reading in the Bloom anthology has proceeded to Tennyson. I didn’t read this morning because I was drafting a poem called Rocking Chair on a yellow legal pad. But as of yesterday I was reading passages from In Memoriam, which I had not read since college.

“I’ve always had an aversion to Tennyson,” I told Michael.

“Oh, I hate him,” Michael replied.

Howard Freelove dropped by the office yesterday to pick up a copy of the paper. We got to talking about my interview this week with Chapman and Braddock, and I told him to go check out my latest posting on my blog, “A Homecoming.” That led us to the subject of Roberta Hauk. Seems Howard and Roberta knew each other in elementary school, at F Street and Vista Square Schools. (My own mother went to F Street School, torn down circa 1963.) In those days, Roberta towered over all of the boys on the playground. Once, Howard said, the boys on the playground dared him to beat up Roberta. He took the dare, and apparently hurt her; he punched her in the arm or something. Fast-forward about 35 years: Howard and Roberta see each other at the class of ‘71’s 30-year reunion, and apparently Roberta has never forgotten Howard’s beating her up the playground. Howard has never forgotten, either, nor has he ever stopped feeling bad about it. Howard gets down on one knee and begs Roberta’s forgiveness for having been so mean to her when they were children.

Evidently he received absolution, but didn’t get an address or a phone number.
I had vowed that when I finished that paralegal course a week ago Thursday, I would spend more time at the gym. So far I’ve kept that promise to myself. After running at the golf course last Sunday, on Monday I lifted, on Tuesday I treadmilled, on Wednesday I lifted, Thursday I took off, Yesterday I treadmilled five kilometers in 32:47 and this morning I lifted for about an hour. So I’ve been to the gym five times this week. After the gym today, I went to Henry’s Market and bought some strawberries, pita bread and lecithin.

After routing the San Francisco Giants three games out of four, the Padres faced the high-flying Dodgers last night...and got creamed. Adam Eaton, our best pitcher, opened the game, but despite Eaton, we lost 12-3. So Los Angeles now has a three-and-a-half game lead over the Padres in the NL West, and by the time this weekend is over and they have finished sweeping the Padres, their lead will be five and a half games. Then today comes the news that Steve Finley has gone to the Dodgers, and not to the Padres, who once traded him away to Arizona but this week were trying to get him back. Apparently L.A. offered him more money. So Finley, whose bat has bedeviled the Padres even though he has been playing for the basement-dwelling Diamondbacks this season, is now a Dodger. That’s just what we needed, going into the second game of a three-game series against them tonight: Finley’s bat in their lineup. Tonight it will probably end up 24-3.

With the failure to re-acquire Finley, my hopes that the Padres would make the playoffs this year just flew out the window. I have one slender reed of baseball hope still to cling to: the St. Louis Cardinals, a team I’ve always rather liked even though I can’t really call myself a fan, is walking off with the National League Central division. They have an eight game lead over Chicago. If the Padres have no hope of October, perhaps the Cardinals might. And I personally would have no problem at all with a replay of the 1964 World Series, and may it come out the same way it did then.

June, 2004

2004-11-26T17:46:00.000-08:00

June 1 Tuesday

Well, I don’t understand what the fuck is going on. Saturday morning I tried to run and damn near passed out; Sunday morning I tried to run and damn near passed out. Yesterday, which was a holiday, I didn’t even bother trying.

Today, stubborn as is my habit, I hit the street at 7:15 to try again, and...no problems. I flew like a bird. Two miles, my wind just fine, and could have gone farther but I ran out of time.

What in the hell is going on? One day I’m having shortness of breath and tachycardia spells; the next I’m just fine and can run two miles before breakfast. I probably should go to the doctor.

This usually means stress. The last time I was having shortness of breath and tachycardia spells was in the summer of 2002, when I was working at The Taylor Companies in Washington, D.C., a glorified secretary in the outer office of hell.

The thing is, I know myself to be “throat-reactive:” all my life, whenever I’ve been under heavy stress, my typical reaction has been to develop some kind of breathing problem. That’s obviously what’s going on here, but what am I stressed about now? I’m living rent-free at my father’s and have a very cushy, if low-paying, job. There’s been some tension in the family lately about this bullshit with Joey and the lodging situation, but I wouldn’t think that would be enough to bring on the vapors.

Yesterday I tried to go to the beach in the afternoon, after Dad and I had watched the Red Sox get trounced by the Baltimore Orioles, 13-4, on ESPN.

Now, there was a fool’s errand. Trying to go to the beach, I mean. On Memorial Day, with the mercury in the 80s, no less. Everyone and his Aunt Gertrude was at the beach. There wasn’t a parking space in all of Coronado, and the line of cars waiting to get into Silver Strand State Park was backed up for half a mile. I went to the Chula Vista Marina and walked around for a while, then came on home.

The evening was little but a repeat of the morning: the Padres, back in town off a two-week road trip, got trounced by Colorado, 7-1. The day’s two baseball scenarios were actually somewhat similar, in the sense that in both cases you had a first-place team getting whacked by a team that’s way down in the standings: Baltimore is 6 games behind Boston in the AL East, and in the NL West, the Padres are in first place and the Rockies are dead-last, having until last night lost 10 of 11. But the NL West is a terrible division this year; just last week Nick Canepa was writing in the Union-Tribune that the Padres might have what it takes to win the division: “They’re dead-flat average,” he wrote. “In this division, average is like being the ’27 Yankees.”

June 2 Wednesday

Failure. Managed less than one mile. Tightness in my chest stopped me at the corner of 2nd and C. I had to turn around and walk home.

I think it’s time to face facts: this is nothing more or less than old age creeping up on me. When I can fly as far as I want on Tuesday, but don’t have the wind to go one mile on Wednesday, it’s time to admit that I’m just getting fucking old.

I’ll tell you one thing: the weather has nothing to do with it. It was a nice, cool marine-layer morning today and I was plodding along, puffing and wheezing like a 90 year-old man. How can I run so well on Tuesday and be unable to go one mile on Wednesday?

Last night I played hooky from school in order to watch the Padres game.

I might as well have gone to school. It was so bad that even Dad, who usually stays with the game until the end no matter how badly it’s going, gave up and was trying to change the channel around the sixth inning. Colorado was up 7-0. We watched John Wayne in Hellfighters instead. Final score: 7-1, and the Padres’ tenure in first place lasted approximately one day; Los Angeles, who beat Milwaukee on Monday, is back on top.

Meanwhile, my reading has taken an unexpected turn. My curiosity was piqued (this is how my reading often takes a turn) by an article in the on-line Moscow Times last week about a literary symposium in Moscow on the subject of the much-vaunted Soviet “classic” Tikhi Don by Mikhail Sholokhov. (Its English title is And Quiet Flows The Don.) This is apparently the one undisputed “masterpiece” to come out of Stalin’s Russia, and Sholokhov won the 1965 Nobel Prize for Literature, chiefly for this one book. But there seems to be some question about its authenticity. Some Russian critics have claimed that Sholokhov plagiarized the whole thing, offering as evidence the utter banality of everything else he ever published. Curious after all these years, (I’ve been aware of the book since high school, but have never bothered to read it) I checked it out of the CVPL.

I’ll say this for it: it’s an easy read. I’ve pretty much skimmed the first 170 pages without losing anything important. But that’s about all I’ll say for it. If this is Sholokhov’s best, I won’t bother with the successor volume, The Don Flows Home To The Sea. Hemingway said of Dostoevski that it was remarkable how he could write so badly and make you feel things so deeply. And Dostoevski was writing largely of saintly characters like Prince Myshkin, or haunted, guilt-stricken souls like Raskolnikov. Sholokhov, amazingly enough, is writing about these remarkably violent, brutal people, the Don Cossacks, and manages to make you feel nothing. The last time I remember being this unimpressed with a “classic,” it was Romain Rolland’s bloated and overblown Jean-Christophe. This is a Soviet “classic?” This thing doesn’t deserve to be on the same shelf with Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

June 3 Thursday

After failing miserably to jog in the morning, my wind giving out, forcing me to walk back from 2nd and C, I went to Tan N’ Fit at 5 p.m., got on the treadmill and pounded out two miles with no problems at all.

I think I may know who or what the culprit is. It might just be my morning coffee.
I’m a little out of breath as I type these words, and I haven’t exercised at all this morning. What I did do was what I’ve been doing every morning for nearly 40 years: get out of bed and slam down three mugs of black coffee.

It could just be that, getting on for 50, I can no longer pour a lot of coffee into an empty stomach and then go out and run five miles. I used to be able to do that, in fact it used to be the coffee that gave me the zip to get going. But perhaps I’ve reached an age when the coffee, instead of giving me the zip to get going, merely speeds up my heart to the point where I’m on the verge of being out of breath when I step out the door. If your heart is already racing when you start to jog, it stands to reason you’ll be out of breath pretty quickly.

So I’m facing unique challenge this weekend: will I be able to make myself roll out of bed and hit the street...without coffee? I don’t know. That kind of motivation just might be beyond my will power.

We got our final examinations back in Estates, Wills and Trusts tonight. I scored 40 out of a possible 60, probably the lowest grade in the class. At this point I just want to get this shit behind me. I’ve pretty much decided that I don’t want to be a paralegal, but I paid $5,000 to take this course, so I’m going to finish it.

Today is the 10-year anniversary of the death of my old friend Mike Baker. Ten years already since I was standing there in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, unaware that a hammer was about to fall on my head, and got the news by telephone from Lynne that Michael had succumbed to cancer. What an awful month that was, June, 1994. It was like a long, waking nightmare. Michael’s death, followed four days later by the springing of the filthy little “surprise” that the greasy, subhuman, shit-eating sewer rats of DS had been cooking up while I was on R&R leave here in California. Ten years ago already.

June 4 Friday

Well, I’ve had success with one project in the past week, anyway. I’ve called it “Bringing Back the Lawn.”

My father has had some silly farmer notion for years that it’s a good idea to let the lawn “die” during the winter months. From Thanksgiving until he decides to start watering it again, he doesn’t water it and just lets it turn brown.

The problem is, his short-term memory is so poor now that he can’t remember much of anything, including what day of the week it is, or what time of year. As of last week I don’t think he had watered the lawn since late last summer. In other words, it hadn’t been watered in about nine months, and it was as brown and ugly as could be—it crackled when you walked over it.
By last week, I’d had enough of looking at the contrast between the Van Nostrands’ lush, manicured lawn next door and this brown, crackling, Munsters mess that we had just sitting just adjacent to it. So I hit the lawn with the sprinkler for a couple of nights running while my father was watching the ball game, and then went to the Home Depot last Sunday and bought some liquid Turf-Gro with which I hit the lawn for a couple more nights.

Now it’s coming back fairly well, except for a few patchy places that obviously need some more fertilizer. In fact it’s coming back so well that within the next few days I’m probably going to have to mow the damn lawn.

I guess it had to happen. I’ve been back home for just about a year now, and I’ve taken charge by default of both the lawn and the annual tomato crop.

When I got home from work, Lynne was in her room with the door locked, the fan whirring away (what’s new?). She just came shuffling back in here for about five minutes, and now she’s back out in the guest house with the door locked and the fan whirring away. I guess that means I get to fix Dad’s supper tonight. It’s SUCH fun living with a goddamned drunk. But I have to admit that it is so nice having Joey off this property. He still comes around two or three times a week to suck up to my father, but by and large we don't see much of him.

June 5 Saturday

Good workout at the gym this morning, although my now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t wind remains a mystery. Did five kilometers on the treadmill with no problem, and then two upper-body “circuits” plus five sets of leg-lifts on an incline. The whole workout takes about 90 minutes. But my weight is holding rock-steady at 195: it won’t go down an ounce.

5:30 p.m.—the news broke this afternoon that Ronald Reagan has died at 93. The poor man has had Alzheimer’s for the past 10 years, so I’d say for his family it’s probably a welcome release as well as a sadness.

I remember his election in 1980. I was a young reporter working in El Centro, and had gone home for the day, but his victory was declared so early in the evening that some people, including Managing Editor Bob Liggett and my late friend Virginia Horn, a rabid Democrat who despised Reagan, were still at the office. The story I heard the next morning was that when Virginia got a phone call informing her that Reagan had already been declared the winner, she dropped the phone and screamed “LIGGETT!” I wished I’d been there.

I also remember, very well, his landslide re-election over Walter Mondale in 1984. By that time I was a newscaster at KUIC in Vacaville, and had cultivated yet another rabid-Democrat female acquaintance (this one was also a rabid, man-hating dyke) named Anne Forrest. Anne was president of the Solano County chapter of NOW, and she looked every bit the part: testosterone definitely had the upper hand. She had been cockily sure that her boy Mondale—but more importantly, his female running mate Ferraro—would be swept into power by the supposed hordes of Americans outraged over Reagan’s insistence that self-reliance was better than soup kitchens, and that the way to deal with the Communists was to stand up to them, not to practice knee-jerk appeasement. On election night, when Reagan once again bowled over his opponent, I went to Annie and said, “I told you so.” Unwilling to be a good loser, she launched into a tirade about how Reagan’s victory was supposedly a victory for the forces of “greed and selfishness.” Yeah, yeah. We had to listen to a lot of such limp-wristed left-wing whining during the Reagan years. That was one of the best things about them.

June 6 Sunday

Spent part of yesterday afternoon assembling bookshelves that I had driven out to San Diego and bought at IKEA for $128 earlier in the day. That chore done, I drove down to the storage facility on C Street and retrieved most of my books. I got the rest of them this afternoon. So now, the remnants of the once-mighty KD Library, 126 volumes of a collection that at one time numbered close to 1,300, how stands on two stacked-up shelves in this pink bedroom that was once my mother’s.

I also got out of storage the rest of the compact discs that I had saved. I did a little better there: I jettisoned about 500 CDs when I left Maryland, but still have perhaps 250 left, including numerous complete opera recordings and my sets of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky symphonies. So that’s a good thing.

Padres beat Milwaukee 8-3 this afternoon, so they took two out of three in that series. The other good news is that Arizona beat Los Angeles 6-4 today, which leaves the Dodgers just two hundredths of a percentage point ahead of the Padres in the NL West. Still more good news is that today’s game was the last time the Padres will face Milwaukee this season. It’s not that Milwaukee is such a devastating team, but they have a shortstop, Craig Counsel, who, when he goes to bat, insists on looking like a dork: a left-handed hitter, when he’s awaiting the pitch, he stretches his whole body skyward, waving the bat over his head like he’s trying to touch something six feet above him with the end of it. He looks like a goddamned stork performing some kind of goofy mating dance. We won’t have to look at him and his stupid batting stance again this season.

No game tomorrow, and then they fly east to spend the rest of the week playing the Boston Red Sox and the revolting New York Millionaires, who now have a 2 ½ game lead over Boston in the AL East. Nothing good will come of that, and to add insult to injury, I just fucking HATE this stupid interleague crap anyway. It adds nothing to the game except more revenue for the fat hogs who run it. And it takes much of the excitement and mystery away from the World Series: in the old days, part of the thrill of the Series was the realization that these were the best teams in the two leagues facing each other for the first time. But now, when The New York Millionaires square off in October against Ted Turner’s Tycoons, they’ve already faced each other three times earlier in the season. Where’s the mystery there?

June 8 Tuesday

The annual “June gloom” is on us with a vengeance: it constantly looks like it might rain, but it’s only very heavy marine layer, and it doesn’t lift later in the day, either.

No game last night, so I went to the gym after work and ran five kilometers on the treadmill, then did some leg-lifts and came on home. For what it’s worth, I improved my speed a bit, finishing the 5k in 31:22. That’s about two minutes faster than I usually do it. But my weight is rock-steady at 195. It won’t come down an ounce.

Doctoring myself is a parlor game at best, but I’m beginning to think that my problem with my on-again, off-again wind may be tied in with how dehydrated I let myself get. Naturally, after running more than three miles yesterday afternoon, I drank a great deal of water, and then more during the night as I usually do. This morning, although I’m not trying to run because I did it yesterday, I don’t feel particularly out of breath; I probably could run if I wanted to. So maybe there’s a connection there.

With no game on last night, Dad and I watched The Man Who Would Be King. I have seen this movie probably eight or ten times since first viewing it on DVD at Mark Chalkley’s apartment in Bonn a few years ago, and it is making its way into my mental archive of all-time favorites. Every time I watch it, there are another two or three lines that make me laugh.

June 10 Thursday

Well, as of Tuesday, I have been back at 235 Madrona Street for one full year.

Actually, much has changed in the 12 months since I pulled up at the curb in my ’90 Geo Storm after a trek across America and a two-month sojourn at Lawson’s Happy House of Hypocrisy in Reno, Nevada.

When I pulled up here on June 8 of last year, I had no job, was relegated to sleeping on the couch out in the guest house amongst Lynne’s trash and empties, (I did make an effort to keep the “living room” half of that place as tidy as I could) and was literally living out of a suitcase. My nephew ruled the house: he occupied the front bedroom while his partner in the drug-dealing business flopped amongst his own trash, dopily sleeping 12 hours a day in this room, which had been my mother’s clean, tidy bedroom for so many years. The two “Joeys” had turned this place into a drug house, capitalizing ruthlessly on my father’s age, blindness and the fact that the old man has a blind spot when it comes to his grandson.

In those early days, a year ago, I would get up in the morning and come into the house to have coffee, sitting in the living room with my book, and along about 7 a.m. would have to hear, wafting in from the front bedroom, the dulcet, a capella and off-key tones of Joey’s homely girlfriend singing some Mexican folk song to him: he had recorded her singing and was using it as the alarm on his alarm clock. No question about it: this was Joey Guido’s House, and had been ever since my scheming sister moved him in here in October 2000, before my mother’s body was even cold: I got a sonic reminder every morning that this was Joey’s House.

It seemed at first glance a hopeless situation. In fact when I was still in Reno and began to see the handwriting on the wall, that I was most likely not going to be able to settle in northern Nevada and would probably have to come back here, I told the Happy Hypocrites from Hell that perhaps, if I were re-installed at 235 Madrona, I could “do something to change the situation there,” not really believing my own words, as the situation here seemed, from my conversations with Lynne on the telephone, to be quite hopeless. Nevertheless my bravado got a hearty “hear-hear” from Lawson, I think chiefly because he wanted me out of his guest room, the redneck son of a bitch.

So. Sisyphus began pushing the boulder up the hill. I got a sort of job at the newspaper. I got into it with Joey and threw down the gauntlet: “Please hit me, you son of a bitch, because as soon as you do, it’s back to jail for you.” After that, Joey knew he had better steer clear of me. I enrolled at the University of San Diego. Then Lynne and I began, slowly, O-so-slowly, working on Dad to get Joey's pot-smoking buddy out of the back bedroom and out of the house. Around Christmas, we were on the verge of accomplishing that, with me scheduled to get off the guest house couch and into the front bedroom, and Joey to move into this room. Then Joey pulled a fast one and got his buddy a reprieve by working on Dad to let him stay a few more months. The two Joes began sharing (and trashing) this room while I occupied the smaller one.

Then we swapped th bedrooms, moving me into the larger one, and Joey promptly got mad and flounced out the door to go bunk up with his drug buddies.

So, progress has in fact been made in the last 12 months. And here is its loveliest symbol: Vivaldi is once again being heard in what used to be my mother's bedroom, not Snoop Dogg or The Notorious P.I.G.

June 11 Friday

I’m back to a nightly habit of listening to music before I go to sleep. I was out of that habit for a good many months since moving back home.

Last night I got home from school about 8:30. Class ran short because we have a final exam in estates, wills and trusts on Tuesday. The baseball game was long since over, (the Padres have been playing back east all week—yesterday they got thrashed by Boston 9-3) so there was nothing to do but give Dad his supper and watch another segment of Lonesome Dove.

I went to bed around 10:00, as I usually do, and decided to listen to Paul Simon’s Graceland on the CD player. But I took it off before the first track was over and switched to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Hard Promises.

Listening to music late at night, particularly when I’ve ingested a bit of alcohol, has been, these many years, all about the oldies. As far back as my teens this was true: many a Friday night when I was about 19, I would down a few glasses of burgundy and then lie down in darkness to cue up Something New,listen to the Beatles and remember childhood days on Monterey Court.
Not much has changed in that respect. But I found last night that Graceland was bringing back memories I didn’t care to revisit.

On October 12, 1986, my 31st birthday, when I was living in Frankfurt, (West) Germany, I bought a vinyl LP copy of Graceland as a sort of birthday present to myself. It still brings back vivid snapshots of that fall in Frankfurt when Chris had just moved in with me and trouble was looming on the horizon vis-a-vis my recently-concluded summer dalliance with Jean Blatz: there was all that stuff I’d written about Jean in my journal, which was about to be invaded by Chris.

Revisiting Frankfurt, ’86 was more than I wanted to deal with, so I switched to the Tom Petty album, which has memories of its own, but somehow less painful ones: its first track, The Waiting, invariably evokes the late summer/early fall of 1983, when Jamie and I were still living in Benicia and I was still getting up at 3 a.m. every day to deliver newspapers.

I was on the verge that early fall, after 20 months of unemployment, of being offered a job as evening reporter and weekend news anchor at radio station KUIC.

There is one particular moment burned in my memory from that time: it must have been September or early October, and I had just lay down on the living room floor for an afternoon nap, as I often did in those days, as the paper routes had me keeping crazy hours. This is how crazy they could be: my first two weeks at KUIC, I had not yet given up the paper routes and was on morning drive, because they had not replaced the morning-drive newscaster. I was getting out of bed at 0100 to to go and deliver newspapers, then racing home to change clothes and report at 0500 to the radio station for the morning news shift. Morning drive wrapped up at 0900, but I wasn’t allowed to leave: I had to stay and do “production” until 1200, when I would go home...and collapse.

In any case, that afternoon I awoke from my brief snooze, made some coffee and put on this particular Tom Petty album. I can still see and feel the warm afternoon sun streaming in from the kitchen as I sipped my coffee and listened to The Waiting. Those last few months in Benicia had their share of bad times, but there was a feeling, that early fall, that things were starting to come back together again, at least in terms of my extended period of unemployment coming to an end and my getting back into journalism at some level. I was doing fill-in work at Quick-95 and freelancing for the Vallejo Times-Herald. The job at KUIC would be my 28th birthday present. In the still of night I can live comfortably with those memories, but memories of Frankfurt, ’86 are for some reason too sweetly painful to deal with, at least in the midst of post-cocktail befuddlement and the desire for sleep.

Ray Charles died yesterday, and today, in Washington, a state funeral was held for Ronald Reagan.

Meanwhile, Philip Brents, the Star-News sports and entertainment editor and an avid amateur astronomer, returned late last night from a four-day trip to New England which he and two of his buddies took, expressly to observe the first transit of Venus since 1882. It was not visible at all west of the Mississippi; apparently the best place in the world to observe it would have been the Middle East. But Philip couldn’t afford a trip to Abu Dhabi, so he settled for Boston, where the transit was visible for a few hours anyway. Actually, they rented a car, drove up to Vermont and watched the transit from a Rite-Aid parking lot.

He was discussing his trip this morning in the office with Linda, and it suddenly occurred to me that my own last vacation was three years ago this week, when I flew to Paris to spend a week there with Nuria Galliulina. I haven’t had a vacation in three years. Maybe that’s the source of the mysterious stress that has my wind giving out when I try to run.

June 12 Saturday

Hard workout at the gym this morning, but such hard workouts are only going to do me any good if I can manage them more than once a week, which, given my schedule, isn’t likely until I finish that paralegal course next month.

I treadmilled my usual 5 kilometers, but whereas I managed to do them easily, in 31:22, on Monday, today it took me 33:58 and I was really struggling, had to slow down at one point. But I finished the 5k, then proceeded to do two circuits of upper-body lifting and four sets of 15 leg-lifts. About 90 minutes, as usual. If I could do this three times a week instead of once, I’d probably see some results. Meanwhile, when I came home, I got on the scale and found that I had gained two pounds: 197. Of course friends told me years ago that when you’re “hardening up,” this is what happens. If you’re just doing cardio and dieting, you’ll lose weight. I’m not losing weight because I’m toning, slowly converting flab to muscle. And muscle weighs more than flab. Brett Davis himself told me, “We’re not about losing weight here, we’re about reducing body fat.”

Went to Henry’s Market and dropped $50 on food, wine and vitamins. And I must say again, it is SO nice having that revolting bottomless pit Guido off this property: I can buy such goodies as cold cuts and swiss cheese, and now I don’t have to bring them home and hide them in the back of the fridge to keep them away from him. Ever his mother’s son, he always assumed that whatever he found on this property, he was entitled to just take it and walk off with it, (as he did last week with my vacuum cleaner) and whatever he found in the refrigerator, he was entitled to grab it with his paws and gobble it up, regardless of who might have bought it and put it there. (It goes without saying that he never contributed a crumb of food to the household himself, other than now and then bringing home a sack of pastries that he got free at work, which usually went straight to the trash can after they’d sat in the kitchen all day.) Now, with him gone, I can stick things in the box without bothering to hide them, and I know they’ll be there when I’m ready to eat. Oh, yes, and we can keep ice cream in the freezer for Dad again. Lynne and I had long since given up on buying ice cream, which Dad likes, because any time Carla’s 300-pound Baby Boo-Boo happened to find a half-gallon of Rocky Road in the freezer, he would sit down with a tablespoon and eat it at one sitting while watching Japanese cartoons on TV. God, it’s nice having him out of here.

The baseball game came on at 1:05, but only on the radio, not on television. This presented a challenge, in that Dad can’t hear the radio: it’s just a roar to him. (He can’t hear the television either, but at least he can see some shapes moving, although he has trouble telling which side is up to bat, and he asks me throughout the game what inning it is because he can’t see those little numbers either.) So what I did was, I got out the pair of big Grundig headphones that came with the shortwave radio I got rid of last year and hooked them up to my Walkman. With those headphones on, he was able to hear the game.

Such as it was. The Yankees beat the Padres 3-2, and it wasn’t so much a case of the Yankees winning as of the Padres losing: they got just two runs on 13 hits. When you’re getting that many hits and can’t get runs across the plate, you pretty much deserve what you get. Brian Giles, our best hitter, went down looking at strike three, a Mariano Rivera fastball, in the top of the ninth, and I’d say that’s about as emblematic a moment of today’s game as any I could think of. Tomorrow is the rubber game of the series, and it will be a must-see: our starting pitcher will be David Wells, a San Diego native who was a New York Yankee until last winter when the Padres got him in a trade. He’ll be pitching against his former teammates, and I can just imagine what the crowd will sound like, New York fans being the gorillas they basically are.
At Henry’s I bought some salmon, and for my own lunch, while listening to the game, I had baked salmon with sliced tomatoes and a bottle of Riesling. I don’t eat like that all the time of course, but like to treat myself now and then, and Brett is always going on and on about how salmon is just about the best thing you can eat, aside from oatmeal and yogurt. For Dad’s lunch I fed him one of Artemio’s homemade tamales with some chili, and then a bowl of ice cream for dessert. For me, coffee and a cigar afterwards, to accompany the waning moments of what was truly a disgusting baseball experience. Two runs on 13 hits. Give me a break.

Since there is no baseball tonight, I rented the movie “61” for Dad and me to watch. I’ve seen it before, of course, but it’s a good movie; Ted Leitner remarked on the radio just yesterday that Billy Crystal had done “a good job” in making it. I’ll go along with that, even if it is all about glorifying the fucking Yankees.

June 13 Sunday

I ran 10 kilometers this morning, if you want to call that running. It took me close to an hour and a half, and I was on a plodding pace that was about a step and a half faster than walking, in other words, far, far slower than the winged flight of ten years ago. But I crossed the “finish line” at Fourth and F without having broken into a walk once. The last time I ran 10K was in the spring of 2001, more than three years ago.

When I got home, I got on the bathroom scale and weighed 190. But of course that was all water: I had lost five pounds in water weight running 6.2 miles. Within an hour and a half of returning home, what with drinking several glasses of water and my usual whey protein shake, my weight was back up to 195.

But there was a price to pay for running 10K. I was already suffering, once again, from the lower-left back “sprain and strain” that I give myself on a regular basis these days, just backing my car out of the fucking driveway. Turning around in the seat of the car to look behind me as I back out, I feel that “cluck” in my lower back, and two days later I’m back at the chiropractor’s. Well, apparently nothing will aggravate that condition like the relentless pounding of jogging on asphalt and concrete, and by the time I got cleaned up from my run, I was just about crippled.
The pain in my lower back is excruciating. Tomorrow it’s back to chiropractor, again.

This will not, however, stop me from attempting another 10K as soon as I feel up to it.
The Padres lost today in what was not so much a heartbreaker as an infuriator. Playing the detested and detestable Yankees, they had a 2-0 lead going into the bottom of the 9th. Then our usually rock-solid closer, Trevor Hoffman, took the mound and promptly gave up back-to-back home runs. That was when I got into the car and headed for Coronado; I couldn’t watch any more. I learned later that the game had 12 innings, and the Padres, with Rod Beck pitching now, had re-taken the lead 5-2, only to lose it again in the bottom of the 12th. Final score 6-5. Boston beat Los Angeles last night 4-1, (and according to the announcers, the Dodgers were playing in Fenway for the first time since 1915) which should have been good news for the Padres, but they are now two games behind the Dodgers in the NL West.

June 16 Wednesday

Bloomsday 100, although I learned in picking through some of the journalism that’s preceded the event that the term “Bloomsday” was never used by Joyce; it was apparently coined in 1954 by a couple of guys who wanted to use the event as a hook to sign people up for guided tours of “Ulysses Dublin.”

So it was 100 years ago today that James Joyce saw Nora Barnacle for the first time. Had that not happened, he probably wouldn’t have created Molly Bloom—or would he? That snotfaced lesbian Brenda Maddux, whose books I wouldn’t touch with a flagpole anymore, wrote a hagiography of Nora Barnacle a few years back which implied that James Joyce was merely a bit player in the drama. She had to be reminded by certain critics that, had it not been for the fact that she was married to James Joyce, no one would give a shit who Nora Barnacle was. Probably if Joyce hadn’t met Nora, someone else would have been the model for Molly Bloom.
Time for the ballgame...

June 18 Friday

Let’s try to forget the ballgame. The Padres just got swept by the worst team in the American League, Tampa Bay. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who have been resting comfortably in last place in the American League East, just beat the Padres three games in a row at Petco Park.

June 19 Saturday

...And lost again last night, this time to Toronto.

To the gym this morning for close to two hours: 5K on the treadmill, finishing in 31:28, which is fast for me. Then about forty minutes of lifting and leg-lifts.

I’ve spent much of today working on an essay about growing up in the 1970s, to post on my weblog. So far I’ve written about 3,100 words. It ought to run about 5,000 words by the time I’m finished.

Jim Provenza called, an interesting coincidence as the essay I’ve been writing has had me thinking about him off and on all day. He’s planning to come down some time after the Fourth of July.

We’re grilling carne asada outside this evening, I’m watering the tomatoes at this very moment as the sun descends in the west, and not feeling particularly sanguine about baseball tonight.
Lynne and I went to the Flamingo Cafe for lunch today. Patty melts, coffee, Bob Seger on the jukebox. Why do we keep going back there?

June 21 Monday

Yesterday morning, early, I met Brett Davis at the golf course to go jogging, and pooped out, my wind utterly gone, after a mile and a half. I felt lightheaded in the car on the way back, and when we got back to his gym, I nearly passed out at one point. I have felt like all day today: out of breath, tired, my heart racing. Brett is telling me to go have a check-up. Well, I haven’t had one in over two years. Maybe I should. I just don’t understand this: Saturday I’m flying, Sunday I’m dragging like a 90 year-old man. Brett asked me if we have any diabetes in our family. We don’t that I know of.

Got up early this morning. Read some Chaucer in the Bloom anthology. Got started on another profile for Credit Today, but didn’t manage to finish it before having to leave for the newspaper office. Had intended to finish it after work, but I just didn’t, and don’t, feel up to anything tonight except watching the Padres lose again, this time to Arizona. I haven’t had any energy all day—doing telephone interviews was sapping the life out of me, though I did manage to go and get a haircut around midmorning.

June gloom was rock-solid this afternoon. When I came home for lunch and stepped out on the porch after eating to smoke a cigar, the sky was gray and it was even a little bit windy. Lynne said she felt like she ought to go buy a Thanksgiving turkey.

June 26 Saturday

No events of much note between Monday and today but perhaps one: starting yesterday and finishing today, Garry came over here and completely repainted this back bedroom. As much as I miss Mom, and as determined as I am to honor her memory by keeping this place clean, (which is a snap now that Joey is gone) I just didn’t like sleeping in a pink bedroom. Garry put the finishing touches this afternoon on painting the bedroom, entranceway and bathroom white. Between the supplies and the labor, it’s going to cost me $250, but if Dad lives another three or four years, that means I’m going to be in this bedroom until I’m 51 or 52 years old at least; I might as well have the room a color I’m comfortable with. So I now have a white bedroom.

Speaking of Joey, it seems the lovers are having another spat, or at least, the lover is angry at his beloved again. Lynne had put aside an old clothes iron that Joey said he wanted, and for several days that clothes iron, along with certain of Joey and his drug-dealing pal Malafronte’s mail that is still coming here, sat beside the front door waiting to be picked up. Joey never came to get it. Finally, Dad, furious that his 300-pound Sweet Babboo hadn’t come around in days, angrily took that iron and flung it into the front bedroom, where Lynne found it on the floor when she went to clear Joey’s shit away so I could sleep in that room on Friday night while the paint was drying in here. (Most of Joey’s crap is now crammed into the closet, and I really ought to rent a truck and take it to the dump.)

But with that room now all but empty, I approached Dad for a second time with the suggestion that I go ahead and take the rest of my cardboard boxes out of storage and stack them in that front bedroom, saving me $75 a month in storage fees.

But he’s resisting the idea. And why? Because he’s still hoping his lover will come back, and wants to keep “Joey’s” room reserved for him. He understands that once I start using that room for storage, that shuts down any idea of Joey ever living here again. I understand that too, which is another good reason why I want to do it.

“Well, you have a problem there,” Dad wheezed and spat. “I told Joey that he could live here, and he could have that room, until he finishes college.”

“Finishes college.” Joey, who will be 23 on Sept. 1, hasn’t even transferred to State yet. He’s still fucking around at Southwestern, taking a class here and a class there. He’s about as interested in “finishing college” as Lynne is in going to A.A.

“Dad, Joey isn’t going to finish college until he’s 30, if then,” I said. “Meanwhile, nobody is using this room. If I could stack my cardboard boxes in here, I could save $75 a month.”

“Well, let’s just hold off on that for now,” he wheezed. “You see, I’m testing,” he said, with great emphasis on the word “testing.”

Testing?

“You know, he hasn’t come around in three days,” Dad said, making it sound as if three days were the voyage of the Argo. “I have a feeling that he never intends to come around here again.”

The spurned lover, sulking.

“Dad, he probably just went somewhere,” I said. “You know, he and his girlfriend go on trips now and then. Maybe they went to San Francisco or something.”

We couldn’t be so lucky as to have him stop coming around here altogether. No, he’ll be back.

This is curious. Last Sunday I wanted to take Dad to Galley on the Marina for Father’s Day, to have some lunch, drink a little beer and watch the Padres on high-definition TV. Initially receptive to the idea, he changed his mind at the last moment and decided he didn’t want to go. Privately he told me that he was afraid of the possibility that he might suddenly be hit with the urge to have a bowel movement, in a public place. I assured him that Galley on the Marina has perfectly adequate restrooms, but one of his lifelong neuroses has to do with taking a shit: he was constipated for decades because he can’t stand the idea of taking a shit if there’s a woman within 100 yards. He’s mortally afraid of public toilets. (And women.) For years he was stove up; now he’s afraid he might have an attack of incontinence in a public place, and so he doesn’t want to leave the property.

That’s not the curious part, though. The curious part is, after declining to go to a restaurant with me last Sunday out of a fear of getting caught short in public, last night while we were watching the baseball game, he surprised me by announcing that he suddenly had a “yen” to take another car trip to Sacramento like the one we took together way back in the summer of 1991, when he was 13 years younger and in much better shape than he is now. “Well, if I had some vacation time, we could just rent a car and go,” I said, but thought it very odd that after declining to go as far as the foot of J Street a week ago, now he says he has a hankering for the open road.
Well, I read something on the Internet a week or two back, to the effect that people near death often talk of getting ready for trips of various kinds. Of course, that article concerned people who were in the delirium of genuine near-death, but I found it an interesting coincidence that Dad, who, when I asked him last Sunday if he intended to just stay here and never leave the property again, replied, “I’m just waiting for the end anyway.” Lynne has expressed concern in the past week over his sudden lack of interest in going to the library for more large-print westerns. According to her, he used to climb the walls if he didn’t have anything to read. Now he seems to have lost interest even in reading, and spends a lot of time just sitting in that damn chair, staring straight in front of him. In point of fact, he is enjoying the dog-eared copy of Bunts by George Will which was my somewhat-disappointing birthday present to him, (I thought I was getting him a nice hardcover copy; what I got instead was a discarded paperback from the Seattle Public Library) but when I asked him myself last week if he wanted to go to the library for some more books, he said no.

My usual hard Saturday-morning workout at the gym today: 3.1 miles on the treadmill followed by about 40 minutes of lifting. But working out once a week isn’t going to do me much good: I’m still thick around the middle, and weighed in at 192 when I got home; I’m sure that was just water weight, and now that I’m re-hydrated, I’m back up to 195. Garry and I went to Carl’s Jr. about 1:30. I had the low-carb cheeseburger, that number which they wrap in lettuce instead of serving it to you on a bun, but of course I had fries with it, which defeats the purpose. Yesterday he and I went to La Bella’s for lunch. I had a torpedo sandwich, and ordered a large beer, which, when it arrived, certainly met anyone’s definition of large: it was like one of the mugs you get at Oktoberfest in Munich, which contain a full liter. This might have been more than a liter. I’ll remember not to order a large beer the next time I’m at La Bella’s. They take you very seriously.

June 28 Monday

Insomnia last night, something that doesn’t happen to me very often anymore. I awoke somewhere between one and two a.m. and that was it, brother. By 3 a.m. I was sitting in front of the Munsters marathon on TV Land, trying to swozzle myself back to sleep with Scotch. The next thing I knew it was 4 a.m. and the next thing I knew after that, it was getting light. It occurred to me that today marks 27 years since we lost Randy. I wonder if there’s a connection. Randy has now been dead five years longer than he was alive.

Finished, and posted on my blog yesterday, the 5,200-word essay I was working on last weekend and this weekend just past, about growing up during the 1970s. As soon as it was up on the Internet, I alerted all my wired friends via e-mail that it was there, and by the way, also e-mailed Jonah Goldberg at National Review magazine to see if he might be interested in looking at it. So far I haven’t heard from anybody. Same thing happened when I published Tower-102 nearly four years ago: I made the big announcement to the world, and heard crickets in reply.
Padres beat Seattle yesterday, to take two games out of three. They came out of the slump they were in 10 days or so ago, and have won I think six of their last eight. Adam Eaton pitched a masterpiece for seven and two-thirds innings before turning the ball over to Steve Linebrink, who pitched an inning and a half, then the game was closed by a new kid named Blaine Neal, a right-hander who is impressive. He throws hard and he throws strikes. I think Bochy felt comfortable letting someone else besides Trevor Hoffman close because the Padres were up 5-1, the final score. As of this morning, they’re playing .527 ball and trail San Francisco by three games. The D’backs tonight, whom we just played last week.

Sent Garry a check for $175 this morning to pay him for painting this room.

June 29 Tuesday

I
This week my subscription to National Review magazine, ordered about two weeks ago, kicked in.

In yesterday’s mail I received NR’s special commemorative edition on the recent passing of Ronald Reagan.

I was reading it last night in class, to prevent myself from falling asleep out of sheer boredom during the first of a months’ worth of lectures on bankruptcy, the final section of a paralegal course I’m taking at the University of San Diego. Every essay in this issue is dedicated to some aspect of Reagan or his legacy.

I found something in one of the essays thought-provoking to say the least: I reflected on it in the car all the way home from school.

Among the authors who contributed encomiums to the late president was historian Paul Johnson, author of “Modern Times,” one of the best books on 20th Century history I ever read, by the way.

Describing the situation Reagan inherited when he was first elected president in 1980, Johnson wrote:

“The 1970s had seen a president forced to retire in disgrace, and an unelected president with no mandate, beaten in turn by a feeble Democrat from the south who had no obvious policy or coherent view of the world. In Washington, a triumphant but leaderless Congress usurped executive authority, allowing a triumphant Soviet Union, and its surrogates in Cuba and Vietnam, to do what they willed in Africa and Asia. America’s apparent decline as a great power was symbolized, in a terrible moment early in 1980, by a shocking military fiasco in Iran.”
I could add my own lugubrious memories of the 1970s to Johnson’s: gas lines. The Chevy Vega and the Ford Pinto. Stagflation. Unemployment soaring toward 10 percent. The U.N. transformed into a Third World debating society, with America blamed for every problem on earth. Mason Reese.

And Johnson didn’t bother to mention, but I will, the spectacle of Americans clinging to helicopters to get out of Saigon as the situation in Vietnam finally collapsed on April 30, 1975. (On that same subject, I also remember the 1975 Academy Awards show on television, at which the anti-American film "Hearts and Minds," about Vietnam, won the Oscar for Best Documentary. As if that weren’t bad enough, when two of the hip-and-trendy left-wingers who had been involved in the production got up to accept the award, they crowed to an approving audience of how South Vietnam was about to be “liberated.” In Hollywood anyway, little has changed.)

As for roller disco, polyester leisure suits and big, ugly medallions, well, to paraphrase Mark Twain, we’ll draw the curtain of charity on that.

It’s hardly surprising that Jimmy Carter, when he sought re-election as president in 1980, had to resort to desperate scare-tactics: Democrats pitched a vision of Reagan as a bug-eyed, right-wing maniac who would abolish Social Security with one breath and mash his thumb on the nuclear button with the next. There wasn’t a single thing in his own record that Carter could point to as evidence that we should re-elect him, which left his campaign with no strategy except to demonize Reagan, which is all it did, and to no avail, because by 1980 America had clearly had enough.

In November, 1979, when our embassy in Iran was overrun, (it was just a month later, by the way, that Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan) things had been sliding steadily from
bad to worse for six years, starting with the Watergate mess in ’73, and there was very little expectation amongst Americans that they would ever get better.

Tom Wolfe famously called the 1970s the “Me" decade, but the catch-phrase I remember much better from those years is “lowered expectations.” The Oscar for Best Picture of 1976 went to Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, a movie in which a from-nowhere prizefighter is offered a miraculous shot at the heavyweight title, only to realize before the fight even occurs that he has no chance of winning, and announces that he just wants to “go the distance,” in other words, he’s willing to settle for second best. Willingness to settle for second best had never been an American core value, and perhaps Rocky reflected the era’s malaise in much the same way that the film which followed it as Best Picture the very next year, Star Wars, reflected a concomitant thirst for pure escapism. In 1933 Americans crowded into theaters to watch top-hatted Fred Astaire dance with slinky Ginger Rogers and thereby escape for a couple of hours the horrors of the Great Depression. In 1977 they crowded into theaters to watch Luke Skywalker dance with Darth Vader, probably for much the same reason. I remember well the fanfare that attended the appearance of "Star Wars," the runaway summer hit of that year: “It’s the return of...ENTERTAINMENT!” The reviews trumpeted, and all summer long, John Williams’ stirring orchestral prelude to the movie blared from radios all over the country. In the long view off the caboose of the train, all that hyperbole and fanfare seems a collective sigh of relief.

In short, the 1970s were a very bad decade for America, and Reagan, according to Johnson, affected an almost miraculous turnaround in the nationwide, and worldwide situation during his eight years in office. He restored our national confidence, stage-managed the destruction of the Soviet empire and brought America back to a role of pre-eminence on the world scene. The ‘70s were the disease and Reagan was the cure.

But here’s what got me thinking: those godawful ‘70s were also the decade in which I came of age. And despite all of the introspection I’ve been doing in my personal journals for more than 30 years now, I have never really made any serious attempt to come to grips with my own relationship to the era in which I grew up, and how it may have affected my entire life. I’ve written at length of how my father, who came of age during the Depression, let that traumatic experience shape his attitudes and behavior for the rest of his days, but I have written little or nothing of how my own experience of being a “‘70s kid” might have profoundly influenced the kind of man I became in the ‘80s, ‘90s and right up until today, as I write this at the age of 48.
Surely, some of the most important years of anyone’s life are the period between their teens and early twenties. Goals, dreams, ambitions and attitudes that will last a lifetime are forged between early adolescence and the time when you’re launching yourself on the great world as a young adult. On January 1, 1970 I was 14 years old. On January 1, 1980, I was 24. I graduated from high school in 1973, from college in ’77. If anyone can legitimately claim to be a product of the 1970s, it’s those of us who were born around the end of the first Eisenhower administration, circa 1955. Our parents came of age in a time of national economic disaster and psychological pain, and we in turn came of age in a period of national economic lassitude and psychological numbness. (By the way, I’ve mentioned the fate of the Soviets a couple of times; it’s a curious fact that Russians tend to view the 1970s in much the same way we do: the years of Leonid Brezhnev are referred to in post-Soviet Russia as “the period of stagnation.”)

It’s an accepted principle that our capitalist, free-market economy runs in cycles of boom and bust. Perhaps the national mood follows a similarly cyclical pattern. The malaise of the ‘30s was corrected by World War II, which in turn ushered in a period of such confidence that many were speaking of an “American Century” beginning in 1945. Our sudden postwar affluence resulted in a burgeoning middle class whose satisfaction with its newly-found prosperity shaped the 1950s, a decade (perhaps unjustly) characterized as a spiritual and intellectual wasteland, whose contrary symbols were the gray flannel suit and the beatnik T-shirt that was a response to it. The confidence in their own and America’s future which was instilled into babies born during the war and nourished by the optimism of the Kennedy years, led in turn to the waves of college-campus idealism of the early 1960s. That spirit promptly found fertile ground in the Civil Rights movement, and created a general confidence among the younger generation that they could change the world for the better, which was then dashed to pieces by the Vietnam war. In response to the war, the hippies, who were the younger descendants of the beats of a decade earlier, turned on, tuned in and dropped out as the country watched war, assassination and inner-city rioting explode all over its TV sets. My older sister once characterized the 1960s as a period when, for ten years, “the whole country threw up.” Pop culture, so often a good reflection of the time that produces it, telescoped the experience of the decade quite neatly as it came to a close: Woodstock engendered Altamont in short order. In the words of one commentator, the counter-culture “went from flower-power to death-tripping in a manner of months.”

Tired of the constant turmoil and upheaval that the years of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson had brought with them, in 1968 America turned to Richard Nixon, and the rest is not just history, it’s my personal history, mine and everyone else’s who was born about the same time I was. Nixon was elected for his first term on Nov. 4, 1968. Reams have been written about what a tumultuous year ’68 was; I won’t get into that here. The important thing is, on the night Nixon was elected, I had just turned 13. I was primed and ready to become a ‘70s kid.

II

I don’t even have to think very long or very hard to come up with an example of how I was sideswiped by the 1970s in a highly personal way.

As the decade began, I was a teenager with understandably little perspective on what was happening with the country or the world at large. We were Republicans and conservatives in my family; on the morning when Nixon was declared the winner of that very-close ’68 campaign against Hubert Humphrey, my father got up and hugged my mother. It was good news in our household: after eight years of chaos ruddered by Democratic presidents, the country would now get back to normal. So we thought, anyway. I was of course aware of Vietnam as a child, and at our house we supported the war effort; as a Republican family we believed that the crusade against world Communism was rightly America’s number-one priority. Social issues could wait until the Communist hydra had been slaughtered. Of course, as the war dragged on, even my parents’ perspective on it began to change. My father, as staunch a Republican as you could ask for, declared some time in the early ‘70s that he was “By-God beginning to understand how the young people in this country feel” about the war. Clearly, even his patience with it was beginning to wear thin, and My Lai certainly didn’t help, although my father was with those who felt that William Calley was just a patsy for the higher-ups. I had no inkling of it at the time of course, but I think now that, as 1973, the year in which I would turn 18 and become eligible for the draft approached, my father was beginning to worry about Vietnam getting its clutches on me.

As it turned out, I was spared by inches: the last American to be drafted into the armed forces was inducted on June 30 of that year. I turned 18 on October 12. Draft registration was still required of course, and I dutifully went over to city hall and filled out my draft form. I promptly received a notice in the mail that I had been classified “1-H,” a holding category. They were no longer drafting anyone. Two years later the draft was formally abolished.

In that summer of 1975, I was visiting Jim Provenza These days Jim is a middle-aged lawyer with college-age kids, but in those days he was a young firebrand of the left, ardently loyal to and active within the Democratic Party, who dreamed of becoming the next John F. Kennedy and changing the face of America. It was Jim who informed me that summer day that I no longer even needed to carry my draft card in my wallet.

We quickly organized a little ceremony. "Hey, everybody!" Jim called into the house. "Come on out here! Kelley's going to burn his draft card!" To the huge amusement of Jim and his family, I took the card out into the Provenzas' driveway, got out my trusty Bic...and set that sucker aflame. Burning your draft card in 1970 would have gotten you tossed in jail, but by 1975 it was about as inflammatory an act (no pun intended) as saying “The south will rise again.”

My father not only changed his mind about the war, but as time went on, he changed his mind about Nixon. In fact, Richard Nixon accomplished something that I don’t think anyone else on this earth possibly could have: he turned my father into a Democrat, albeit for a short time. By 1974, with Watergate clearly about to become Nixon’s Waterloo, my father got so mad at Nixon that he went out and changed his voter registration to Democrat. He remained a Democrat for several years, in fact after his retirement from the Immigration Service, my father did a stint as an administrative assistant to a Democratic state senator in California. That turned him back into a Republican.

I had just finished my junior year of high school when the Watergate burglars broke in. Again, I watched TV news and read the papers now and then, so I knew what was going on in a general way, but I was too busy being a teenager to worry about it very much. In the summer of ’72 I was more interested in ogling Olga Korbut, the excruciatingly adorable little Soviet gymnast who was the darling of the Munich Olympics, than I was in anything I was seeing in the papers about Nixon or McGovern. (I signed up to do campaign work for Nixon that fall, but again, being a teenager won out: I think I only showed up at campaign HQ one time, then lost interest.) Come to think of it, the same was true of such issues as the energy crisis and the gas lines of 1974; by then I was using the family Chevrolet to attend junior college, but my dad was paying for all the gas: what did I care if it had just reached the outrageous price of 50 cents a gallon? (I pumped gas in high school for $1.50 an hour. At that time, gas cost about 32 cents a gallon. When I tell that story to today’s twentysomethings, their jaws drop at BOTH numbers.)
By 1976 I had finished community college and transferred to San Diego State University to do my upper-division studies. I loved history and wanted to make that my major subject, but I could see that my father was uncomfortable with my getting a liberal-arts degree. It was the Old Story of “What can you do with that?” Many of my classmates were struggling with the same dilemma: the Class of ’77 was loaded with Business Administration majors who would have preferred to be English majors but had to worry about finding a job. I had decided, early in college, not to major in English myself, though I had considered it. At 19, I allowed myself to be swayed by a purely romantic notion: I loved poetry and literature so much that I decided not to allow my love for these things to be poisoned by a lot of academic BS. Somehow I had the idea that a literary degree would take the fun out of reading Yeats, Shakespeare and Tolstoy, so I decided against it. History was a subject I also loved, but not with the level of passion I had for literature. Besides, history is all about scholarship: classrooms can’t hurt that.

Still, I had to face the Old Story, and so I struck a compromise with my dad and with myself. Since the age of 16 I had never wanted to be anything but a writer, so I decided that an acceptable halfway measure would be to double-major, in history and journalism. I entered the College of Liberal Arts to pursue a major in history, and then walked across campus to the College of Professional Studies to pursue a major in journalism. I had no notion of becoming a history professor; I simply liked the subject. After college, I figured, I could go to work as a reporter on a newspaper or magazine. What the heck, my 21-year-old self figured. It was all just time-serving anyway, until I managed to explode upon the literary scene with my first big novel. Yeah, right.

Setting aside the nonsense about big (or small) novels, little did I know that my decision to major in journalism had put me on a collision course with history, or at least with cultural trends. Talk about bad timing. And Nixon, appropriately enough, lay at the bottom of it all.
I made the decision about going for a journalism major during my junior year at State: 1976. The year of Rocky.

But it was also the year of All The President’s Men. The movie version of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s adventures as Washington Post reporters bringing down the President of the United States hit the silver screen that year, with rugged Robert Redford and handsome young Dustin Hoffman as their nowhere-near-as-good-looking real-life counterparts. (Why does Hollywood always do this, by the way? One thinks also of unbearably-glamorous revolutionaries Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton in Reds. In real life, John Reed and Louise Bryant were a couple of two-baggers.)

I heard it said, back around that time, that at the moment in the film when Robert Redford bats his beautiful orbs inquisitively and utters the line, “Who’s Chuck Colson?” 250,000 college students immediately ran out and changed their majors. Suddenly, with All The President’s Men, journalism became cool. Everybody wanted to be the hotshot investigative reporter who goes around pulling down the establishment. From the release of the film until the end of the decade and beyond, the nation’s journalism schools were chock full of wannabe Woodwards and Bernsteins, and I, who had no Watergatey pretensions at all, (remember, my plan was to become Scott Fitzgerald, not Bob Woodward) found myself standing in a field swamped by heavy traffic. Everybody and his dog wanted to be a reporter, and every newspaper opening in the country had 50 people (some still fighting pimples) lining up to interview for it.
Needless to say, it took me a long time to get my foot in any sort of door. In fact, it wasn’t until February, 1979, more than a year and a half after getting my B.A., that I managed to glom on to a tiny position with a tiny, independent news service in San Diego that was the very definition of “shoestring.” (In the meantime, I had worked at a series of minimum-wage jobs, including security guard and 7-Eleven clerk.) The County News Service of San Diego covered the city and county beats, and the courthouse, for subscriber weeklies countywide that did not have the resources to cover these beats for themselves.

How shoestring were we? The era was not only pre-Internet by more than a decade, but pre-computer by maybe three or four years. I would cover a meeting of the County Board of Supervisors, then type out my stories on an ancient Smith-Corona portable. At the end of the day, whoever’s turn it was to do the mailing that week would gather everyone’s copy, determine how many copies needed to be made using a chart of our client list, then drive over to radio station KGB-FM, with whom we had a trade-off agreement: in return for tip service, they let us use their Xerox machine.

Once the copies had been made, the “mailer” then had to drive them over to the main post office (not a branch, that would slow things down) and drop them in the mail to our clients. (Yes, we ran a news service using “snail mail.”) We had complimentary subscriptions to all the client newspapers, and once a month we would all get together with pencils and rulers and go through the tear sheets, measuring in inches how much of our copy they had used. We then billed the clients $1.00 per column inch. Each reporter got to keep 60 cents on the dollar for whatever we managed to get into print. The other 40 cents were set aside for overhead, basically envelopes and postage. No by-line, and 60 cents a column inch: that was payday. (We had a joke amongst ourselves: “Welcome to County News Service: 60 cents an inch and all the pride you can swallow.”)

For the rest of that year, I went back and forth between home and downtown San Diego, by car, by moped and sometimes by bus, to put in eight-hour days for what was usually somewhere between $250 and $300 a month. To supplement my meager newspaper income, I went back to minimum-wage work as a part-time security guard, spending my Saturday and Sunday afternoons and evenings walking a beat at a local tuna cannery. My father, who initially threw up his hands in despair at my 60-cents-per-column-inch gig, went along with this: I think he understood that I viewed this as my last chance, at age 23, to get into the newspaper business, and if I were willing to work seven days a week to do it, that meant I was serious.
By December, (just about the time those Soviet tanks were rolling into Afghanistan) I managed to land my first real newspaper job, on The Imperial Valley Press, a daily newspaper of about 15,000 circulation in El Centro, California. The “Woodstein” crowd notwithstanding, I got the job through an acquaintance who covered the county beat for the now-defunct Escondido Times-Advocate, had worked on the Imperial Valley paper previously, and still knew the managing editor. That inside track helped, as did the fact that nobody in his right mind would want to live in the Imperial Valley, where the average high temperature between June and September is somewhere between 110 and 118. (For my European and Russian friends, that’s 43 to 47 Celsius.) But I wanted to be a journalist, so off I went.

And that’s where I was the night in 1980 when Reagan was elected: I was living in a one-bedroom apartment in El Centro, for which I was paying $180 a month rent out of the roughly $850 a month which was my full salary. (I started at $720, but the managing editor liked the cut of my jib, so he gave me a raise.)

And I wasn’t expecting a whole lot more, which is my whole point in telling this story.
My father, who turned 20 in 1934, spent the rest of his life expecting the Depression to come back and pounce on him again at any moment, and he lived his life accordingly. He set his sights low, seldom dared to dream, and even when he did dream, for example of buying a farm, he talked himself out of it. He insisted, sometimes loudly, that job security and the guarantee of a retirement pension were the highest things anyone had a right to hope for. He worked 30 years for the Border Patrol and the Immigration Service, retired and spent his dotage sitting on the front porch watching the world go by, boasting of the size of his retirement income, but inwardly seething with resentment, convinced that life had somehow cheated him.

My outlook at 24 wasn’t as extreme as my father’s at the same age, for a couple of good reasons. For one, as bad as they were, the 1970s were not the 1930s, and for another, I had had the advantage of four years of college, something my father never got.

Still, like my father, I had come of age expecting little. The Nixon-Ford-Carter years were conducive to that.

Reagan and his team did, in eight years, gradually manage to turn things around. The change didn’t come quickly, in fact 1982, the second year of Reagan’s first administration, was a severe recession year, one in which I had the experience of being unemployed—for me, the ‘70s seemed to be continuing. But we all know that economic upturns and downturns both tend to lag several years behind changes in economic policy: the positive effects of “Reaganomics” didn’t really start to bear fruit until after he had left office, and after his successor, George Herbert Walker Bush, continued those policies into the 1990s. The Clintonistas tried to take the credit for the 1990s economic boom, but it was not theirs to take. They bashed the memory of Reagan’s administration while basking in the benefits of his economic legacy. (Later, Democrats tried to lay the blame for the 2000-2003 recession on George W. Bush, changing the subject when anyone happened to mention that it began in March, 2000, on Bill Clinton’s watch.)
The change in attitude between my generation and the one that followed it is hard to ignore. When I talk to twentysomethings, and even thirtysomethings, nowadays, I’m amazed at how high their expectations are. Babies born after 1970 have grown into adults who, I would not be at all surprised, scratch their heads in bewilderment at the willingness of Rocky Balboa to settle for second best in 1976. I was a federal employee from 1985 until 1999, and until I left the federal work force and went back to the private sector, I didn’t know what a corporate recruiter was. I’d never heard of one. Imagine my surprise when a corporate recruiter e-mailed me in 1999 and asked if I might be interested in a job writing for the marketing department of a custom software company. The idea that a company might hire people, and pay them salaries, simply to hire other people, was beyond anything in my experience. And yet when I talk to college students today, their expectation is that corporate recruiters will be looking for them upon graduation. Their expectation (happily unrealistic, even in today’s world) is that they’ll walk away from their college graduation ceremonies and be pulling down 75 thou a year the following week.

Talk about a generation gap. The war babies and their parents didn’t see eye to eye over Vietnam, long hair, rock music and drugs. Now the generations may differ over rap, tattoos and body piercing, but I think there’s also a divergence on something fundamentally more important, namely, what they expect as regards the quality of life. I don’t have any children, but friends my own age who do are amused—-and sometimes understandably annoyed—-by the way their high school and college-age children seem to expect so much more coming out of the gate than we did. We ‘70s kids, for the most part, expected to start out humble and slow. I don’t say that to try and make us sound more virtuous than our progeny, it was simply a fact, a reflection of the era in which we grew up. Today’s college grads want it all, and they want it now. And they expect to get it, too.

It all came along too late for me, unfortunately. I’m getting close to 50, and the idea of even owning my own home is something I have only recently begun to think about. When I was young during the Carter years, interest rates stood at 21 percent. I assumed you had to have a huge pile of money to buy a house, and since I never raised a family, I never really thought I needed a house, so my thinking on that subject never changed. By contrast, I have a 26 year-old acquaintance who is aggressively buying and selling one house after another even as I write these words, claiming he’s going to be “the next Donald Trump, but a nice one.”

A few weeks ago I interviewed an 82 year-old World War II veteran, a man who had been at Normandy, for a newspaper story. While he poo-pooh’ed Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation” applause for himself and his contemporaries, he nevertheless echoed Brokaw’s implied message about today’s young: “They have too much stuff and they got it too damn easy,” he said with genial scorn.

Well, the grumblings of the old about how soft and easy the young have it are themselves as old as the pyramids and then some, I’m sure.

But after interviewing this friendly, loquacious old vet, and realizing that it was people his grandchildren’s age that he was talking about, I surprised myself by realizing that my own attitudes aren’t that much different from his. My 22 year-old nephew drives a teal 1994 Honda Civic, fully loaded and souped up for drag racing, (I hope the cops nail him) that his grandfather bought for him for $4,500. My niece, 21, has a late-model Saturn. The only time my father ever bought me a car, it was a ’72 Chevy Luv pickup that cost $1,300, and I had to pay him back. That same nephew, by the way, is talking about opening up his own business as soon as he finishes college. (At the rate he’s taking classes, this should be around 2023.) I saw a newspaper article a few days ago about students at an affluent high school in California whose parents reward them for getting good grades with Jeep Cherokees, Lexus sedans and the like.
Today’s kids have too much stuff, and they got it too damn easy.

Like it or not, Reagan lies behind all of this. When he was reshaping economic policy in the early 1980s, the lefty-liberal crowd alternately worked themselves into a state of high dudgeon, and when that didn’t convince the country that Reagan was evil, beat their breasts and moaned about how this non-compassionate old meany was taking money from the poor, unleashing the forces of greed, glorifying selfishness, etc. etc. Yes, this non-compassionate cowboy who didn’t love the poor was determined to change policies that had given us 21 percent interest, 13 percent inflation and 10 percent unemployment. The bastard. Because Reagan was sworn in as president the year he was born, my nephew can now go around talking about opening up his own business when he finishes college.

Oh, and by the way, like many of his contemporaries, my nephew proudly sports a Che Guevara T-shirt. Times may change, and attitudes may change, but kids will always be kids.

As for me, my editor at the newspaper, who is about the same age as me (and facing his fourth marriage) has his eye on a little fixer-upper over in National City. Three bedrooms, two baths. $350,000, as reasonable a price as you’re going to find in San Diego County these days. He thinks I should take the plunge, too. But I’m not taking that old fart’s word for anything. I think I’ll go and have a talk with my friend who’s planning to become the next Donald Trump. He’s 26, so I’m sure I can count on him to give me good, practical advice for the 2000’s.

June 30 Wednesday

Randy “Big Unit” Johnson (if you ask me, the “B.U.” appellation could just as easily stand for “Butt Ugly,” but let’s not be petty) clocked his 4,000th career strikeout last night against the Padres in Phoenix.

But fuck him. Let him have his lousy strikeout. We won the game, 3-2, that’s what matters. The Padres have now taken two out of three from Seattle and two in a row from the Diamondbacks. And last night we had a new starting pitcher on the mound, Brian Sweeney, who was pitching his first major league start after eight years in the minors and a stint last season with Seattle. Sweeney was impressive in that he showed no fear; he went after the D’backs aggressively for six innings before they took him out when Arizona began to threaten with a run across the plate and a double in the sixth. Kahlil Greene actually clinched it for us with a home run in the eighth. He should get rookie of the year, Greene, but he won’t, because he plays in San Diego and not in New York or Philadelphia.

I skipped school last night. Coming off insomnia the night before, and under tremendous pressure at the office because as of yesterday morning I had generated no stories yet for this week’s Star-News and therefore had to really hustle, (I’m still behind, on Wednesday morning, with deadline eight hours away) by the end of the day I was too tired to think. I called Rick Aboud, my friend from class, and asked if he would make an extra copy of his notes for me, and then I just stayed home and watched the game with Dad.

Taking a break from the Yeats marathon of this spring and summer, I’m picking my way through Harold Bloom’s latest opus, an anthology called The Best Poems of the English Language. (Check that: not the “Best-Loved” Poems, but the “Best Poems.” And I trust Bloom’s taste in such matters as I would trust few others.) In so doing this morning, I stumbled across the answer (I LOVE stumbling across answers!) to a question that’s been on my mind for years: where in the world did that bloodless New England limp-wrist Joyce Carol Oates, for whom I have not a shred of respect, ever come up with such a great title for a short story as “In The Region of Ice?” I suspected it had to be Shakespeare, but who has time to plow through the Bard’s entire canon in search of one line?

It turns out that my suspicions were correct, and I stumbled across the line this morning in Bloom’s anthology. Oates had paraphrased old Will: the line comes from Measure for Measure: “To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside/In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice...”

Now if I could just find someone who knows all the words to Louie, Louie...

7:30 p.m.—Went to the gym after work today and ran 5k on the treadmill. Passed the two-mile mark at 19:11, a personal best, and the 5k mark at 30:53. For me, at age 48, that’s fast. Weighed in at 193 afterwards.

Life with a drunk: yesterday Lynne announced that she had bought some catfish and some scallops, and intended to cook up a big fish fry. No dice: by evening she was snoozing drunkenly away, and Dad and I ended up eating leftovers. The fish stayed in the refrigerator.
Today I asked her, twice, “Are we going to have the fish fry tonight?” and both times the answer was “Yes,” including the second time, which was as late as 6:30. “What time do you want to eat, 7:30?” she asked me. “Yeah, fine,” I said, and went back into the house.

7:30 has now come and gone. The porch light on the granny flat is on, and the door is closed and locked, which means that that goddamned fat, useless drunk has toddled off to bed once again, her arms wrapped around her best friend, the brandy bottle, forgetting that just an hour ago she said she would cook supper. No fish tonight. Dad gets a frozen chicken pot pie, and I’ll eat leftovers again.