This Is What Democracy Looks Like

Midmorning I lace up my New Balance 860s (size 10 narrow) and head out on a three-mile run. I turn right on D Street past an abandoned truck covered with graffiti and cross the railroad tracks where I once saw a coyote. I head down to 28^th Street where I take another right and eventually end up at Marshall Park. I loop three times around the park and head home.

I run this route at least four days a week, and each time I return home infuriated. I walk through the door seething with anger.  

“When is the city going to ban leaf blowers? Why do I have to run through towering thunderheads of pollen because some idiot is too lazy to pick up a rake?”

Or: “Jesus. There was a really, really, sad scene in the park today. A homeless woman with no pants, no underwear, laying on her back with her knees drawn up to her chest – you can image what was exposed – just screaming at the top of her lungs. Jesus.”

But mostly: “So today I was crossing F Street at 21^st – you know that intersection?” I say this to my husband who’s heard this rant before. “It’s a four-way stop? And I’m halfway across in the crosswalk and a guy in a white pick-up pulls up, sees me, and doesn’t stop. He guns it! He could have hit me!”

My husband is kind and patient and always says the same thing: Why do you run that route? He’s a fan of long walks and his route takes him around McKinley Park – a lovely city oasis with duck ponds and a charming children’s playground and a stunning rose garden. Or he heads a bit north and walks along the American River Parkway, where he has spotted seals (seals! In the Sacramento Valley!) diving for striped bass.

For the record, I run my route (and likely won’t change) because it’s my route – I’ve run it more than 1,000 times. The sidewalks are flat and in good shape, the tree canopy keeps it shady and cool and it’s uncrowded. I’ve run it so often that it’s become a rote route. I’ve seen every house, every tree, every apartment building 1,000 times. I don’t need to look at them now. I don’t need to concentrate much on what my feet are doing. I just run.

The only problem is the high potential that I will be smashed to bits by a car. The Sacramento area is among the top 20 regions nationwide for pedestrian fatalities. Almost 400 people have been killed by vehicles while walking in the past five years.

Midtown is prime human roadkill territory. The neighborhood is circled by freeways at the perimeters, which makes it a pass-through for commuters re-routing off the snarled, always-under-construction highways. At some point in the past, the city tried to address Midtown traffic issues by constructing traffic-calming round-abouts and planted areas called “pinch points.” Admirable, but those measures do nothing to stop people from running stop signs.

Recently our City Council representative Phil Pluckebaum held a neighborhood meeting at the nearly elementary school. I voted for Phil and we posted a “PLUCKEBAUM” sign in our front yard to drum up more support. (I thought it was a crime that his campaign slogan wasn’t “With a name like Pluckebaum, he has to be good!”). The citywide homelessness crisis was the main issue in the election. The incumbent councilwoman had suggested using a popular park along the American River as a city-run homeless encampment. Two other encampments that she championed – one in a park along the Sacramento River and another under a freeway – had drawn the ire of constituents, as they led to tent sprawl into places where people live. She was handily defeated.

The meeting was in the school’s multi-purpose room, where 20 or so people waited to sit down on folding chairs arranged in a circle. There were no snacks or beverages and even handouts or flyers. There was no agenda or sign outside the school pointing to the multi-purpose room. To find out where to go, you had to interrupt two bored looking young city staffers on the sidewalk outside the school and ask them for help. 

Mr. Pluckebaum opened the meeting by saying how pleased he was that so many people turned out.

Low expectations. Noted.

He opened it up for questions and an older woman raised her hand. What was being done about the homeless? She had more to say but that sums it up.

Phil shook his head, signaling that he understood the frustration. He began to explain the city’s budget problems. 

The older woman and her equally elderly friend immediately interrupted his spiel to say that they couldn’t hear him. He was sitting about 10 feet away in a silent room and speaking with a normal volume. “Can’t hear you!” the women said. So Phil raised his voice and repeated what he had said. “Can’t hear you!” they said again, this time more agitated. He stood up this time and tried again. The women turned to each other. “I can’t hear him. Can you hear him?” “No. I can’t.” They shrugged. Phil finished what he had to say and looked around.

I raised my hand. 

“I run through this neighborhood several times a week,” I said, speaking very loudly. The women gave me a thumbs up. “I live right over there.” I pointed in the direction of my house. 

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve almost been hit by a car. Could the police maybe patrol this neighborhood and hand out a few tickets? I’ve only seen one traffic officer in the neighborhood in the seven years I’ve lived here. Or maybe post flashing signs that say “STOP” at intersections?” 

Phil repeated that the city has a budget deficit. There are no plans to increase the police force or buy electric signs. I nodded. I couldn’t think of a good response. I decided I would just go home, having said what I came to say.

But then an older man went off and things got interesting. 

“I was almost hit the other day in a crosswalk while walking my dog and I pounded on the hood the car and the driver told me to fuck off,” he shouted. “This guy said ‘Fuck off!’ And I hit his car with my fist! And he didn’t care that I hit his car. He just said ‘Fuck off!’ I’m going to start carrying rocks! I’m going throw rocks through windshields! I’m going smash windshields and knock these drivers out!”

Phil pointed out that there was an officer in the room that was taking notes (mental notes, apparently, as the cop was just standing there with his arms folded). Phil did not address the fact that this elderly man had admitted to attacking a car and was threatening real violence. He just nodded.

I got up to leave. I was hoping for a “thanks for coming” from Phil but Phil said nothing.

I still run the same route every day and still dodge stop sign-running cars. I still sigh when I see the unhoused in the park and shake my head at the sheer craziness of modern urban living. My husband is, as usual, right. I should run a different route.

Or carry rocks.

The Taste of Metal

I should be the last person to complain about ghosts. I grew up with ghosts and, for a period of about eight years, lived with them. But sometimes their sadness gets in your nose and mouth. It leaves a metallic taste. It tastes like regret.

 

My mother is something of a “ghost wrangler.” Not in the silly Hollywood way. By “wrangle,” I mean she can conjure them to sit a spell, take the load off. It’s because my mom likes ghosts. Yes, she tastes the sadness but she knows how to taste but not cry. I think ghosts appreciate that, appreciate that they can be themselves around my mom.  They can really relax.  By “conjure,” I mean that she tells stories about them, and that opens a door. She talks about what they were like when they were alive – funny stories and scary stories and stories of courage -- and she rarely mentions how they died, which is nice. I know she sometimes embellishes the stories to make them more interesting. I think the ghosts appreciate that, too. Who wouldn’t?

 

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: She has a story – one of my favorites -- about a cousin, or maybe an aunt, named Clara or possibly Emma. (My mom knows these details; I can never remember and, honestly, all the ghosts’ names are somewhat similar.) Clara, or Emma, was playing with some chums and was clapped so hard on the back that her eye fell out. But not all the way. No, there it was on her cheek, hanging from the socket by bloody cords, swinging side to side, like an upside-down Portuguese Man-O-War. Well, her friends were shocked. And you know what this cousin/aunt did? She didn’t miss a beat. She had pluck. She just gently cupped her eyeball in the palm of her hand, lifted it, and patted right back in place. Thhhock.

 

This is why you should never let anyone jump on you from behind even if you have promised a piggyback ride. Also, you should never try to sneeze with your eyes open for exactly the same reason.

 

I visited the cemetery where Clara and Emma are buried and noted that they died the same year – 1920, 12 years before my mother was born. Clara was 45 when she died; Emma just 40. Could they see out of both eyes up until the end? Who knows! 

 

My dad is buried in that cemetery, too. Well, his ashes anyway. He has a simple but really terrific headstone that sums it up: Sergeant in World War II, awarded the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts. He was also a husband and a father and he started his own successful business to the benefit of many. But the horrors of war haunted him. He was a teenager from a small rural town and he was brave and he survived and fellow soldiers survived because of him. On the day I swung by to say “Hi Dad,” there were two small American flags, a peacock feather and a union pin by his headstone, which is nice.  The family plot is on a little hill overlooking a little town that caters to tourists who imagine that hippies still live in California. My dad was born in this town and he was not a hippie but hippies certainly did live in that neck of the woods and maybe there’s a few still around. I’m a tourist there so I don’t know. It’s usually windy at the family plot. That’s how the sadness blows in. You breathe it in with the breeze.

 

Here’s another Mom story: When my great-grandmother, Flora, was a girl, she suddenly became quite ill. (Fill in this part with your favorite Victorian illness.) She was so sick, in fact, that she died.  And while dead, she found herself on the banks of a river. It was shallow, and she started across. But from the other side, she saw her mother (grandmother?) who motioned to her to stop. “Go back,” her mother said. “It’s not your time.” My mother the ghost wrangler delivers these lines in a slow, howling tone and, at times adds hand gestures. “Gooo baaaack!” And Flora, who had pluck, turned around as commanded and, just like that, awoke from the dead. What a triumph!

 

I mentioned earlier that I lived with ghosts and this is true. We bought an old redwood paneled house so dark that we had use flashlights to get around at night. Inside. Sometimes at the end of a dimly lit hall I would catch a fleeting glimpse of a figure. Once, I heard someone call out “Mom.” One day a man came to the door and said that many years ago he knew a boy who lived in the house. He said the boy’s father was a Boy Scout troop leader, and that the troop met in the basement, a musty damp place that seemed better suited to vivisection than gatherings of children. But I believed that the former occupant, who owned the house for 56 years, was a Boy Scout troop leader based on evidence found in the house – a silky blue and white Jamboree banner from maybe the ‘60s. The man said the boy’s father was a really terrific troop leader. He said the boy was killed in Vietnam.

 

Even now if I think about that dark, dark house – the redwood paneling, the oak floors, the gentle orange glow of the filament in the dim light bulbs I ordered over and over for my useless vintage lamps, the musty basement, the Jamboree banner – even now, if I think of those things and run my tongue over my teeth and I can taste that metallic ting. It connected me to my mother and to ghosts and to Flora, who lived 63 years in a house with dark wood paneling and a wood-burning stove and mounted deer heads and painted bead board and bats in the upstairs closets. Ghosts aplenty.  I don’t think my grandmother, Mildred, fancied the ghosts much. She sold the house and moved to a characterless “split-level” house with a view of the ocean.

 

My mother loved my great-grandmother’s spooky house, and she raised daughters that love it still. I drove by it after the cemetery and was sad to see that the paint is peeling and the porch looks like it’s held up by two-by-fours. I love that house. And I loved my dark house that was so similar on the inside. I will tell you that it is possible to miss a house, miss how it made you feel, and I miss them both. I am my mother’s daughter. I inhale the sadness. I let it puff up my cheeks and settle deep down I my lungs. It’s damp and warm like the Vick’s VapoRub my mother would slather on our chests when were sick with croup. I like stories of séances and UFOs and smugglers and disease and broken hearts. I like ghosts. Who doesn’t?

 

Here’s how my mom stops tears right in their tracks. I’m not sure where she learned it, but she passed it on whenever there was a need to chop onions. Sometimes you get very strong onions that will make you cry. What do you do? You put a paperclip in your mouth.  There is something, my mother said, about the taste of metal in your mouth.  

Knock Knock Knocking

I was running along Capitol, for my health, for those endorphins. I was running for longevity. I run slowly, listening to funny old songs on random playlists. "Too Many Fish in the Sea" by the Marvelettes or "Monkey Man" by Toots and the Maytals. It helps, running does. It helps stave off the emotional fragility that comes with age and fear. So I was running. And there, on the sidewalk by a boring state building, was this poor dead woodpecker. Beautiful and lifeless. Nothing about him hinted at a cause of death. He had not been mauled by a predator. He looked neither scrawny nor sick. He was more than a block from the tall Capitol Park trees where I've watched woodpeckers pound their beaks into the mottled bark of native sycamores. I ruled out falling.

I fought back tears as I eventually resumed my plodding jog. I was running to stave off death. I was running for that "natural high." Yet here was death, reminding me that it cannot be outrun, even for the most beautiful of creatures. I had not staved off the emotional fragility that comes with age and fear. I had run smack into it.

I kept going. I circled the park and headed for midtown. I ended the run at a farmer's market where, on a typical Saturday, I would celebrate the end of the run with peaches and strawberries. Healthy, healthy. But on this morning I bought a dozen lumpia doused in sweet red sauce, which I ate while listening to a young man with an electric guitar sing "Royals" by Lorde. Fuck it. Fuck that bird. Fuck an early death on a downtown sidewalk. Fuck Donald Trump (throwing him in for good measure). I'll live a long long time and I'll run real slow and I'll eat lumpia if I want to.

Let me live that fantasy. 

Notes from a Native Daughter

We drove to Lodi last night, heading down Highway 99 just after sunset. Here and there, patches of tule fog misted the windshield. Here and there, too, lightning from a storm in the Sierra foothills illuminated black clouds and a silver sky. In Elk Grove, we drove past the hulking, rusting metal frame of an abandoned shopping center project. In Galt we drove by crop dusters parked at an airport. We drove past trailer parks and dairy ranches and grapevines. In Lodi, we shared a bottle of graciano from local grapes and did not skip dessert.

"To a stranger driving 99 in an air-conditioned car (he would be on business, I suppose, any stranger driving 99, for 99 would never get a tourist to Big Sur or San Simeon, never get him to the California he came to see), these towns must seem so flat, so impoverished as to drain the imagination. They hint at evenings spent hanging around gas stations, and suicide pacts sealed in drive-ins."

I've been secretly stalking (is there any other way to stalk?) Joan Didion since we moved to Sacramento in 2003. I've toured the 7,000-square-foot, 1910 Colonial Revival mansion in Poverty Ridge where she grew up. I taught English and Journalism at the high school she attended. I was advisor to the school's newspaper, The Prospector, where she presumably got her start as a writer. I dug through archives to find her columns from when she reigned as The Prospector's editor. I convinced current Prospector editors to re-run the columns, although I doubt Didion's spirited denouncement of apathy gained her many new fans. I looked up her photo in old yearbooks. I successfully convinced at least one student every year to choose Didion for their Great American Authors project. I read "The Year of Magical Thinking" and reread "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" and "On Keeping a Notebook," essays  included in the Tom Wolfe-edited anthology "The New Journalism."

But it wasn't until today that I read "Notes from a Native Daughter," her 1965 essay about Sacramento.

"In fact, that is what I want to tell you about: what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento. If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here,  because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent."

Now I will put on my giant sunglasses.

Sonnet LIV

I bought it on clearance at Target
When shopping for light bulbs and Tide
Only $11.98 a clerk had marked it
So little money to cover my hide!

I wear it while eating my breakfast
And walking the dog 'round the block
I wear it while surfing on Netflix
And when searching for that long-lost sock.

Its stripes of sunsets and candle flames
Are weird, I can assure you of that
And when I am reflected in window panes
I look like a big tabby cat.

This friend of fuzz and fluff I will never betray
And if I get my wish, I will stay in it all day.

The Public Has a Right to Know

In the 1980s I worked for a newspaper in northern San Diego County. The Escondido Times-Advocate was a small paper but it was well-respected because some terrifically talented people worked there. Many were drawn by the magnetic editor Will Corbin, who was straight out of central casting. Once, when I misused "prodigal" in a story, he threw a dictionary at me. (OK, to me. But still). Another time I was crying in his office doorway because a story I had written about a corrupt public hospital official had resulted in her firing. He said "If you wanted to make friends you should have gone to work for Welcome Wagon" and slammed the door in my face. (OK, near my face. But still).

The T-A was an afternoon paper. Working for a PM meant getting up early to make the 10 a.m. deadline.

Early and I are not friends.

Will had been tipped that local dignitaries were in secret talks with the US Olympic Committee about locating a training center in Escondido. The city already had Lawrence Welk Village mobile home park and Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap. (Escondido, by the way, means "hidden" in Spanish.) But the training center would put Escondido on the map. The map of San Diego County.

I was assigned to attend a 7 a.m. meeting in downtown San Diego about the training center. The paper was holding a spot on A-1 for a story. It was a 45-minute drive from our apartment so I got up at 5 and got dressed and drove to a donut store for an extra large coffee and a cinnamon roll. I was extremely nervous. I did not want something thrown or slammed in my presence for failing to get the story.

I made it to the conference room just as the assorted government officials and chamber-of-commerce types were filing in. I marched in right behind them and sat down at the big table. Introductions began. There was a city councilman and a county supervisor and a car dealership owner and others of that sort.   I had the feeling they all knew each other and were just waiting to find out who I was. When they did, they didn't look happy. In fact, a nice-looking older woman said "Please leave now."

I couldn't believe my luck. I was getting kicked out of meeting! Every reporter longed to get kicked out of a meeting so you could make the speech about the public's right to know. The speech was printed on the back of these pocket-size press freedom primers we all carried around. Many reporters never got to make the speech their whole careers!

Excited, I stood up and cleared my throat. "I believe the public has a right to be represented at this public meeting!" I said, doing my best to imitate Jimmy Stewart in "Deadline USA." "The public has a right to know what's going on!"

It took less than 30 seconds for someone to politely point out that it wasn't a public meeting. I could tell they felt bad about bursting my self-righteous bubble. If anything came out of the discussion, they said, someone would definitely give me a call.

Outside, I ducked into a restroom. I was crestfallen and tired and I didn't want to have to call Will and tell him I was a flop.

I looked in the mirror.  My cheeks were coated with cinnamon and sugar from the donut. There was a coffee spill on my shirt.

I looked down. My fly was open.

They never built that Olympic training center in Escondido, which, to this day, remains hidden.

Zucchini and Tomatoes, Willow and Jaden

One of the nicest things about fall is that many backyard vegetable gardens are dead.

In the fall, I don't have to say "Stop giving me your zucchini and tomatoes."

I've never said "Stop giving me roses." But Generation Xers don't seem interested in growing cutting gardens. No, they want to grow food, which, as many Baby Boomers know, is readily available in restaurants.

The food-growing fixation is part of Gen X's larger DIY ethos. Other elements of the Gen X zeitgeist include reminiscing about "Friends," defending tattoos, wondering aloud about Melissa Joan Hart, and posting fuzzy photos from Dave Matthews concerts.

The DIY part is the most troubling because they can't just keep their tomatoes to themselves. They apparently need to share. Oh, what Sesame Street has wrought. (The Three Stooges. Now there's appropriate entertainment for pre-schoolers.)

I know, the tomatoes are a gift from the heart. But let's break it down.

Homegrown and handmade gifts really are the best.
Unless you consider the really great stuff sold in stores.
And cash.

I'm not big on shopping during the holidays. So it occurred to me that I could pretend to be a Gen Xer and make gifts this year to avoid the whole thing. Here are some projects I'm considering:

• An abstract watercolor symbolizing "organic" painted on a repurposed paper grocery bag
• A haiku ode to flannel written in crayon on a napkin
• A bust of Dave Matthews made of gluten-free muffin crumbs.

The best scenario would be a culture skip-over: We go right from Baby Boomers to Millennials. It will be like Pax Romana -- decades of the Will Smith family reigning over everything. As Jaden told the New York Times:  "Something that’s worth buying to me is like Final Cut Pro or Logic." 

The future is going to be great.