Why do I keep reading these books??

This last tome focused on the art of French seduction, how it pervades every aspect of daily life.  Seduction is apparently employed for every social encounter in France, from buying bread at the local patisserie to engaging in the witty repartee required at dinner parties.  Everyone is thin and quick-witted and seductive in France.  (It doesn’t look that way, once you’re actually in that country, but that’s their story and they’re sticking to it.)

But here’s where these books get me, and why I keep reading them:  these authors always offer copious praise for older women, things like the fact that Coco Chanel was 55 years old when considered to be at the height of her beauty.  Fifty-five! You won’t hear that in the good old U.S.A. Oh yeah, sucks me right in.

The chapter on the much celebrated French sense of style is indeed compelling.  On the street, a woman should be extremely well turned-out, even for the most mundane of errands.  This is expected on the avenues of Paris; anything less is frowned upon or, worse, marks you as a (likely American) tourist.  One caveat seemed particularly strict:  Women should not wear pants.  That’s right:  Do not wear pants (sweats are beyond mentioning.  In France, sweats are not considered clothing for anything but exercise.  Indoor exercise, if you must.)

Now I live in Los Angeles, land of fame and fortune, glitz and glamour.  The beautiful people flock here, eager to strut their beauty on the red carpet.  And indeed, it can be a dazzling display.

But then there’s the rest of the city:  Apart from those devastating divas and denizens of cool on the red carpet, the rest of the population tends to dress on the casual side. Very casual — way casual, if you will.  And I’m being generous here.  If I were to be a tiny bit less so, I might use the word schlumpy.  You know, sweats, fuzzy Ugg-type slippers, stretched-out t-shirt and hair in a scrunchie.  The guys?  Flip flops and cargo shorts in summer; flip flops, cargo shorts and a sweatshirt for winter.  Schlumpy.  Comfort is king.  A sloppy king, to be sure.

A recent stint at Jury Duty aptly illustrated this phenomenon (and proved almost scary).  With very few exceptions, this grooming-optional crowd, all of whom had tried to get excused from appearing, which leads one to believe they have some type of employment or other place to be, provided an accurate overview of the LA Casual look.

Last month’s theatre outing however, was what really put me over the top: honestly — sweats at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion??  Not to be judgie-wudgie, BUT…people, come on!  There has to be a little bit of effort extended, no?  (N’est pas?)

There are many complex reasons at work for this dress code.  Forever Young is the watchword of Southern California culture, which begets a quasi-rebellious, I-won’t-grow-up; I’m young and hip at any age; this-baseball-hat looks-good-with-my-suit-jacket attitude, a deeply held belief that’s pervasive in LA.  I saw a woman in her seventies with a white mohawk and tattoos covering every inch of her arms, many inches, as she was wearing a MegaDeth tank top.  This was in Starbucks.  I try not to judge.

Yes, yes, I know — Why not use this time of our lives to dress as we please, to express ourselves?  There’s no reason not to be comfy around the house, i.e., fleece everything.
However, that said, this may also be a good time to step it up a notch (because we don’t have to), maybe even try on the occasional fantasy.

Now I’m always fairly put together:  my mother made it clear that a woman should never leave the house without eyebrows, not even to take the trash to the curb.   I apply makeup every morning and, even if casually dressed, am never sloppy.   My hair is combed, earrings on, nice jeans and blazer.  But dresses?  Nylons?  High heels?? That look is for job interviews in Century City.

Still, I was curious:  Would my days be the same if I looked like a different type of person?  Would I feel more feminine, sexier, a tiny bit French?

I decided to try it.  Pourquoi pas?

My plan:  Every time I left the house for the next week, I would don either a dress or a pencil skirt, nylons and heels.   My goal was to a.) observe the number and type of other women who opted for dresses and skirts in a non-business environment for a compare/contrast ratio;  b.) determine if others, both men and women, treated me any differently when I wore a dress (as opposed to my usual jeans), and, most importantly, c.) determine how I felt moving through my daily round in a dress and heels (heels, because flats with a dress look dumpy on me.)

Would I feel more feminine?  A tiny bit femme fatale?  Be perceived differently?  Instinctively know how to effortlessly knot an expensive silk scarf?

Thus began my stint as a well-dressed Parisienne …of a certain age.

Monday

In Just for Tires, the young mechanic comments on my footwear:  “Nice shoes,” he says.  I resist the urge to tell him these red pumps have been collecting dust in my closet for two years and that I’m wearing them today only as an experiment – my usual way of accepting a compliment, i.e., to diffuse it — and instead smile widely and say simply, “Thank you.”  (I was dying to say ‘merci,’ but worried he would want to prolong the conversation in French, although he didn’t look French but you never know — and then I’d be stuck.)

Still, this is the first time a twenty-something male has commented on my footwear, maybe ever.

Tuesday:

Wearing heels slows you down, and slowing down allows for more opportunities to engage.  As I make my way through the library stacks, I count two glances at my legs.
At the counter, the checkout clerk makes small talk, smiles and jokes.  Something is working.

Wednesday:

Wearing a skirt and heels is make one feel…gainfully employed, possibly with a large corporation.  Wearing a skirt and heels in Starbucks, where many of the customers spend entire afternoons with their laptops, makes me feel like somebody’s boss.  I look like I have a solid medical plan and well-funded 401(k).  Two women check out my skirt, approvingly.

Thursday:

Okay, today in the supermarket I really shone; granted, this particular venue does indeed lower the bar (trust me), but still.  I started to take a mental tally of the women around me:  pants outnumbered dresses, ten to one.  And in terms of chic versus schlumpy, I’d have to put it down to footwear.  If you start with nice pumps, there’s nowhere to go but up; with thick-soled New Balance trainers, you’re pretty much done.

So many women checked out my heels today.   I know that look:  “I have those shoes – why don’t I ever wear them?  With a gut-it-out bravado, I pulled the highest heeled pair of slingbacks from my closet for tomorrow’s outing.

Friday:
Lunch in a nice restaurant:

Okay, lunch on the Westside on a weekday raises said bar; women and men in this Westwood café are very well turned out; but a skirt and heels is still a notch above most of what I see.  The maitre d’ is entirely charming; a tiny bit more charming than he would be if I were in jeans and a blazer?  Hmmm.  Hard to say.  What I do know, however, is that I feel pretty.

Saturday:

A quick stroll around the neighborhood produced the following snapshots:  a 50-something male wearing knee-high black socks, granola sandals, shorts. A woman of a certain age wearing jeggings, flip-flops and a top that did not cover enough of said jeggings.  Most commonly seen:  denim, athletic shoes, and a zip-up hoodie.

Which is why a pencil skirt and heels can set a gal apart from the crowd.

And there is this:  I feel slower, more languorous, less purpose-driven.  More open to fall into conversation with a stranger, or stop and browse a window display, linger over a second cup.  There’s something to it.

Now I’ve got to muster that effortless Parisienne scarf knot trick.

Today’s 99-million plus boomers have more time, more resources, and more options than any generation before them.  And while ‘more’ generally connotes better, endless options and myriad choices can also prove overwhelming. And let’s face it:  while we do everything in our power to avoid facing it, the clock is ticking.  We’ve got to spend this time well.

Now What? is the phase that can signal that moment in time when many of us begin to think that maybe, just maybe, the road that stretches before us may not be endless, and maybe, just maybe, we should pack a little more living into our bags as we hit that road. And along the way, a little direction wouldn’t hurt.

Consider:  In the first phase of our lives, the world conspires to give us instruction.  Every possible subject is covered, from how to tie our shoes, brush our teeth, stand up straight, say please and thank you.  We’re encouraged to finish school, take our vitamins, and not have sex on the first date.  There are counselors at every turn to guide us — parents, teachers, employers, all available to dispense advice, impart wisdom and illustrate the peril and potential of the road ahead.

And so we grow up, putting into practice (or willfully discarding) all that we’ve learned.   We continue to brush our teeth and mind our manners and life unfolds, more or less, according to plan.

And then, one day, we’re (a little bit) older.  We’ve somehow made it through Act I, and now the curtain’s rising for Act II.  And sure, we’re experienced, mature, well-versed in life’s ups and downs.  We can take it from here – we can handle it.

But even so, there is sometimes a question in the back of our heads, a small voice that whispers to us now and again, asking, “Now what?”

Now What? can hit at 40, at 50, at 60, at retirement, or much later.  It’s the moment when the thought occurs that it is just possibly maybe a little bit okay to be a hair more self-indulgent, behave a tad out of character, and even go a tiny bit wild.  Yes, wild. (Or, if you’re already wild, mild.)

And let’s face it:  as a group, we’re a different breed.  We’ve long forged our own paths, sought out our own identities.  While our parents may have known exactly how their Golden Years would unspool, either on the golf course or charity circuit, today’s boomers have so many options that it can be overwhelming.  Move to Panama?  Climb Mt. Whitney?  Switch to a Raw Food Diet?

Now What? is the question that 99-ish million of us are currently asking, weighing options, opportunities and direction for this next phase of life.   We need answers, and we’re out looking.   Let’s share what we learn, whether it’s useful,  frivolous, profound or  profane.

There were three kids in the family then:  my brother Paul was nine, Greg was five, and I was seven.   Despite having three children under ten, my mother wanted a larger brood, like the Kennedys.

A good Catholic, she greatly admired the Kennedys.  Like many women in 1961, she basically wanted to be Jackie Kennedy.  Since my father was not the President, she focused on acquiring accessories like Jackie’s, i.e., pillbox hats, white gloves and Catholic children.

The 1960s were not a particularly child-centric time.  Parents did not select schools based on their offspring’s unique talents and abilities; we attended whichever one was closest, and usually walked there.  We had no arranged play dates; there were no summer camps to enrich us.

I went to Napa Street School that year for second grade, another new school.   Shy and nerdy, I got good grades and won the spelling bee with the word ‘psychologist.’  We had a beautiful young teacher that year and the entire class was in love with her; we’d line up to hug her goodbye each day.

Once school was out in June, we were left largely on our own, our only mandate to play outside and stay out of Mom’s hair.  The freedom was heady:  After finishing second grade, that summer in Northridge was ours for the taking.

Our day started early.  After gulping down bowls of Cap’n Crunch, we’d charge out the front door, dizzy with possibility.  The street was wide and the houses large and ranch-style.  Every lawn was brown, the grass dead, plants yellowed by the sun.  By 10:00 a.m., the day was blazing hot.

Kids we’d never seen during the school year would surface one by one, just appear out of one of the houses and join in.  If you knew the kid’s name, you could knock and ask if he could play; there was always a mother inside, but you were never asked in.  Rather, the kid requested would run out, screen door banging behind, sometimes followed by a shout to return at a certain hour.

Our street ended in a cul-de-sac, perfect for roller skating and four-square, no cars to slow us down.  We owned that patch of asphalt, and only reluctantly stepped out of the way for the odd vehicle to make a U-turn on our turf.  We’d play nonstop until someone got hurt; a skinned knee was always good drama.  By noon the heat shimmered in waves on the asphalt, and we were called in for lunch, which was either boloney or peanut butter, always on white.

After lunch we’d head to the backyard.  We didn’t have a pool, but we did have a Slip ‘N’ Slide, a long sheet of vinyl that, when attached to the sprinkler, attracted dozens of kids from blocks away, all eager to hurl themselves along its slick surface.  My mother watched from the picture window, fretting about spinal cord injuries.

In the late afternoon we’d head for the minimart, situated on the main street that ran behind our cul-de-sac and reached via a shortcut along the alley.  The walk along that path was scary — it was isolated, dirty and dangerous, the ground littered with broken bottles and trash.  This was a place where tough kids, stray dogs and bums hung out.  Being able to navigate that alleyway, to leave our yard and walk unaccompanied to the market for a popsicle, was high adventure, better than any daycamp.  We were always amazed when we landed inside the market, unscathed, our allowance still in our pockets.

The man who owned the store was gruff and impatient; he’d pull open the top of the deep freezer, revealing dozens of choices of ice cream sandwiches and popsicle flavors, and slam it down ten seconds later:  you had to choose, fast.  Speaking to him made me nervous — speaking to any adult made me nervous –  so I’d point to whichever one looked the largest and hope for the best.   There were tough kids in there, too, kids who seemed at ease asking for more time to study the selections.  I envied their sherbet Dreamsicles, but didn’t know how to ask for one.  I got a Big Stick every time.

At 6:00 p.m. my Dad made his way up the driveway, returning from wherever he spent his days and setting his briefcase down inside the door.  “Hiya, runt.”  That was his greeting, and aside from the odd bit of wrestling with my brothers, the extent of his interaction with us after work.

On Saturdays he’d come outside to the yard, wearing shorts with dark socks and work shoes, and tackle the gopher problem; my mother blamed gophers for ruining the lawn.  My Dad would feed the garden hose into a gopher hole, turn the spigot on full blast to flush the varmint out and pull up a lawn chair to wait, a shovel in his hand, ready to decapitate whatever emerged.

We made some friends in Northridge, unusual for us; my parents weren’t at all social.  The Schoenborn family lived directly across the street, and my mother had observed them from the picture window for some months before Betty Schoenborn came over and introduced herself.

My churchgoing, white-glove-wearing mother was fascinated with Betty Schoenborn, a carefree redhead with a throaty laugh and four kids.  “Bernie!  Come on over.”  She’d yell across the street, holding the door open while puffing on a Kool.  “We’ll gab!”

Betty didn’t seem to mind that her house was a pigsty.  Her housekeeping style was what reality television might term ‘hoarding.’  Piles of clothing covered most of the floor, over five feet high in spots; counters and furnishings were not visible under stacks of dishes, bags of groceries, piles of books and toys.

My mother’s people hailed from Friesland, a particularly fastidious corner of the Netherlands.  With her spotless home and insistence that trees be whitewashed, she summed up Betty’s house in one word:  ‘rommel,’ Dutch for ‘extreme clutter.’  She viewed the entire Schoenborn family with keen fascination, as if observing behavior of another species.  She was taken with Betty’s friendliness, a bit awed by her freedom.  Betty smoked cigarettes and drove a car.  Her own car.   (My mother, nervous behind the wheel, took and failed the California driving test countless times.  Each time she returned from the Department of Motor Vehicles, driven home by my father, she’d lie facedown on the bed, immobilized for hours.)

Betty Schoenborn’s car was huge and rumbly, a big blue boat; she purred to make it start: “Come on baby, come on.”  When the engine turned over, she would raise her hands in the air and scream, “Yay!” and turn to high-five us kids jammed into the backseat.  Riding with my parents was never this exciting.  My father never turned around, not even when he swatted my brothers.

Betty’s disinterest in housekeeping extended to her car interior.  In addition to piles of food wrappers, dry cleaning and old newspapers, there was a large hole in the floor to navigate.  I clutched my bookbag tightly to my chest as I watched the pavement whiz by between my feet, positioned carefully on either side of the hole.   I was nervous for my younger brother, too, worried he’d be sucked down onto the streets of Northridge on our way to school.  Betty seemed unphased by mess or danger, puffing away on her cigarette and singing along with Peggy Lee on the radio, “Is That All There Is?”

In the middle of summer vacation, my parents made an announcement:  we were getting a new little brother.  They wanted to adopt an orphan from Korea; Asian kids were all in vogue at the time, due to the newly published findings of the widely administered IQ test, the Stanford-Binet.  Asian children far outshone all others in raw scores, and every family wanted to add a little genius to their brood.  But the waiting lists for Korea were long, and so my brother was imported from Italy.

Allessandro was two years old and had been living in an orphanage in Turin before becoming my roommate at our rental house in Northridge.   He had bristly black hair with a double crown, and huge brown eyes.  He carried a shoebox with him wherever he went, kept a good grip on it.  He stored all his belongings in there, small toys, his socks, a banana.   My parents named him Raymond, and he was adorable.

Raymond was terrified of the dark; we had to fall asleep with the lights on for months.  “Buio!  Buio!”  The English-Italian dictionary defined that cry as ‘dark’.  He devoured fresh fruit, would consume every bit of an apple, including stem and seeds.  His favorite place to hang out was in the fireplace, curled up on the bricks, with the shoebox on his lap.

Ray’s arrival was big news on our street.  We were a little bit famous now; a reporter from the newspaper came to take our picture.  Betty Schoenborn cleaned up her house (she jammed the rommel ceiling-high behind closed doors) and threw a party for us.  It was quite an occasion; even my father attended.

By the end of summer, Ray still had his shoebox but stopped carrying it with him; he stored it under the bed now.  My mother, who so longed for a big family like the Kennedys, was delighted to find herself pregnant.  We moved again at summer’s end, on to another house, another school.

Ray brought his shoebox along to the next house, where he shared a room with our newest brother, baby Richard.  I had my own room now, complete with canopy bed. I was still the only girl in the family, but not for long:  Soon my parents would adopt again, a baby girl this time.

My childhood unfolded against the backdrop of mid-century suburban America, a very good time and place to be born.  With the war fought and polio cured, my parents settled down to enjoy life and raise a family of their own.  Ours was the quintessential working/middle-class aspirant model with a Dad who brought home the paycheck and a Mom who made jello molds.

We took deep patriotic pride in our American way of life and simultaneously bore a burning shame for our sins, which were many and frequent, if you count the venial.  As the priest’s weekly sermon made clear, ours was not a feel-good, God-loves-you-and-wants-you-to-be-happy-and-prosper, Joel Osteen-style of religion.  No, this was 1950s Catholicism, dark and spooky, with incense burning and candles flickering to remind you of the hell you’d likely go to.

I grew up with words like novena and penance and venial sin floating around, knew what a plenary indulgence was, could identify what articles of clothing a chasuble, stole, and alb were.  The Church was the center of our family’s universe, the bedrock of our moral and spiritual lives, the reason for my mother to buy a new hat.  My parents blessed us kids each night when they tucked us in, making the sign of the cross on our foreheads with a thumb, like a priest.

Weekly mass and confession were obligatory but there were lots of good times, too:  Baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation meant a party for every kid; we were always celebrating something.

Everyone I knew grew up like that, every family up and down the block.   A wave of Catholicism swept the nation in the 1950s and 60s.  Catholic schools were hot; they delivered excellent education, and there was a waiting list in every parish. Both of my devoutly Catholic parents saw to it that all six of us attended Catholic school.

We learned about our faith from The Baltimore Catechism:

Q:            Who made us?

A:              God made us.

The absolute certainty, the clear ‘yes’ and ‘no’ of these questions and answers was so powerful to my grade school brain.  There were strict rules and firm boundaries and we knew exactly what to expect:  the world made sense.  Further, I was among the lucky ones, the practicing Catholics who would be going to Heaven.  I was baptized.  This gave us something to gloat over.  Unlike my next-door neighbor, Debbie, for instance, who ruined my new Barbie doll because she was jealous, I was already saved.  (Debbie Petrone whose family never went to church, Barbie doll hair-washer Debbie.  Definitely not going to Heaven.)

A parish priest was the official head of the school, but the nuns were firmly in charge of day-to-day operations — they ran the show.   It is hard to overstate the power these women held over us, the place they occupied in our imaginations.  Everything about them was a source of intrigue – the flowing black dress, the sound of their sensible shoes on the polished wooden floorboards, their bearing, their authority.  How did their hands disappear under the habit, and how was that rosary hooked on?  Were they allowed to chew gum?  And did they have hair?  (our chief area of interest).

Rumors were rampant:  Raymond O’Connor’s cousin Gloria had seen Sister Assumpta on a blustery day on the playground, and when the wind gusted, a shaved skull was revealed, smooth and pink.  This story was circulated on the school grounds for weeks and weeks; it was hard to meet Sister A’s eyes when she passed.

Nuns have always fascinated me:  I’ve always wanted to understand these serene, self-possessed women who live at a spiritual remove, inhabit a reality separate from the rest of us.  Garbed in the traditional habit, a nun is an icon embedded in our cultural consciousness.  As Elizabeth Kuhns writes in The Habit,  ”At the same time that the habit serves to shroud the body and to mask the individual, it also dramatically announces its wearer to the world.  The habit has the glamour of fashion while being antifashion; it is the antithesis of extravagance and sexual allure, yet it impresses and arouses.  The sighting of a nun in habit remains for most of us a notable event, because what the habit proclaims is something so counterculture and so radical, we cannot help but to react with awe and reverence or with suspicion and disdain.”

Kuhns continues,  ”From this clothing, we immediate recognize a woman who has decided to commit her life fully to God, to renounce the possibility of bearing children, and to work within the boundaries of a community for some specific sacred purpose, frequently in neglected or controversial areas.  She seems both less than female but greater than human — it was not unusual for schoolchildren on only a generation ago to believe that Sister had no hair, no legs, and no biological parents, for example.”

Convent life seems pared down, shorn of the distractions of husbands, children, money, and yet more complex:  while we humans spend the days fighting to get what we want and seize what we can — be it a job, parking spot or toned abs, nuns are working to attain a state of grace.  They hold the big picture — the really big picture, the one that encompasses this life and the next.

So how do they get there?  Are they born with this yearning for something more than earthly desires?  I have always had these questions, always wanted to understand why a girl would choose to turn her back on the world and all its pleasures and live in a convent.

Like most things, it’s personal.  My mother, the former Bernadette VanderWerf, had once been Sister Mary Richard, member of the Sisters of Saint Francis.

*   *   *

“Who would want to go to a place with ‘death’ in its name!” Trish was aghast.

“Like a final trip? Is that why we’re going? Because we’re too old to camp and this will finish us off,” said Skip.

“Sleep in a tent? Are you demented?” That was my response.

It wasn’t always like this. No. Once upon a time we were young, adventurous, and would go anywhere if there was gas in the tank, when the words ‘road trip’ were all it took to get us packed and into the VW.  We’d chip in for gas, lug the cooler into the back seat and head off down the highway, unencumbered by such trappings as room reservations, schedules, or even a return date; we’d simply stay until we ran out of funds.

Back in the day, Marnie, oh-my-Bob, Trish, Skip, Robin, Philip and others in our barking mad circle would head out on the highway, with no further thought than moving forward. We didn’t bring expectations with us, nor were we weighed down by ‘baggage’:  Jobs never seemed to get in the way, spouses and kids and mortgages weren’t even on the horizon.   We ate whatever we pleased, never giving a thought to transfats or salt intake or caffeine after 6:00 p.m. We drank most anything at any hour of the day, back then.

But things have changed. Trish and oh-my-Bob have parted – he’s someone else’s Bob now. Philip, too busy with business to ever take a real vacation, rebounded after a heart attack; Trish beat breast cancer. Marnie now waged a daily battle with arthritis, but remained adventurous.  Our spirits were still willing, but bodies and minds had slowed a bit.

I know I had.  At the mid-century mark I couldn’t quite picture myself cracking a 10:00 a.m. beer with the gang any longer.  Plus, with no child in tow, I felt I was ‘done’ with certain activities, things like attending theme parks and feigning interest in  softball practice. And camping was definitely at the top of that left-behind list. Five-star hotels — okay, four — with 600-thread count bedding, had long replaced air mattresses and sleeping bags.

But Marnie was insistent: “You’ve got to see this place – it’s magical!” she gushed. I wondered if psychedelics still held an appeal for her as I offered up a litany of excuses — the drive was too long…my back was too twingey. Plus Donald had always set up the tent and he was no longer in the same zipcode. What if I couldn’t figure it out?

I researched the place on the internet, which furthered my misgivings:

“Hottest, driest, lowest… A place of legend…A harsh place of trial.”

‘Harsh’…’Trial’….uh-oh. Not vacation words.

Still, somehow, despite weeks of misgivings and near-constant whining, we packed into Marnie’s van and headed out of town on an overcast Thursday morning. We crawled through the freeway’s graffiti-scarred downtown corridor, then sped through suburban sprawl, a cross-hatch of stucco apartments and minimalls. Car dealerships dotted the landscape; bright orange signs offered storage units for rent, the promise of a fixed address, a sad hopefulness of better times ahead.

“I’d kill myself if I had to live here,” said Skip, staring glumly at the landscape.

“That’s elitist,” countered Trish. “Not all life starts and ends in Brentwood.”

A full-blown argument on poverty followed, with Trish taking the global stance, championing microfinance loans to individuals in developing nations. Skip countered that was useless, delivering an extended screed on macroeconomics in today’s business climate. Marnie and I shared a smile: these arguments had gone on for years, their passion familiar and nostalgic.

We roared up Highway 14, traveling through Palmdale’s high desert terrain, a dusty stretch of Joshua trees and roadside stands offering Homemade Fudge and Date Shakes. Marnie returned from a gas-station convenience store with a souvenir, a waving cactus-man encased in a plastic snowglobe, which she affixed to the dashboard. She loved the stupid things, bought them anywhere she found them. It was more than kitsch value; it was her metaphor for travel and adventure: “Gotta shake up your snowglobe,” she’d say.

We needed two rest stops along the 395 before we approached the final leg of our journey, the nearly deserted Highway 190. We did not pass a single car for over an hour. It was then the stillness began to take hold: it was eerie being so isolated in this vast desert. What if we needed help? Would the Automobile Club come out this far? Would our cel phones work? We had food and water supplies, granted, not to mention a good stash of cabernet, but still, we were on our own. I checked my watch: an hour and ten minutes passed before another car did. The isolation was profound.

It was mid-afternoon when we turned into Furnace Creek Campground, directed by a ruddy woman at the ranger station who seemed very glad to see us; Skip said she was probably glad to see anyone. As we made our way down the dusty path to our campsite, we felt like post-nuclear survivors on the surface of the moon, utterly alone.

We set up camp on a flat, treeless stretch of parched earth; a small tongue of scrub cactus was the only living thing in sight. Trish complained it was too stark to be a real campground. No shady trees, no creek. A ring of mountains circled the valley, but they, too, seemed foreboding.

Skip and Marnie blew up the air mattresses while Philip sputtered beside them, trying to set up his tent. “Stupid piece of junk….” Trish came to his aid with a cold beer and took over the assembly.

The temperature was a mild 70 degrees as we busied ourselves pulling boxes of equipment from the back of the SUV, when suddenly the sun slipped below the horizon. It was just past 4:00 p.m.; by 4:30, the sky was pitch black and we needed the car headlights to unload the last coolers and chairs. Philip started a fire (Marnie accused him of cheating for using a PrestoLog) and we pulled the cork from a nice Australian Shiraz. We ringed our chairs around the blaze and proposed a toast, congratulating ourselves on our still-adventurous spirits, the smell of campfire sharp in our nostrils.

And then we looked up…and gasped.

Someone had lowered the sky, stopping just a foot above our heads, then spiked it with a crazy number of blazing bright stars. This nightscape was so intense, so dramatic, that all conversation ceased as we drank in the majesty. It silenced us — noisy, loquacious bunch that we are, like nothing else could have. I saw Philip reach an arm skyward to touch.  We slept zipped tight into sleeping bags, full from a hearty stew and comfy on thick air mattresses in the cool night air, the laughter of coyotes echoing against the canyon walls.

In the morning, a blue-winged Teal perched on the edge of my camp chair, its glassine wing transparent against the rising sun; who was it that said a bird’s wing is proof positive of God’s existence?

The first raw hours of dawn found us humbled by the landscape, a truly dramatic geology of extremes.  Snow-covered peaks tower over three million acres of wilderness, a narrow basin 282 feet below sea level and walled by steep mountain ranges. Streaming sand dunes, majestic canyons, and a salt-pan floor that stretches over 200 square miles contribute to a vast expanse of harsh beauty.  Extremes are the norm; in summer, temperatures can top 130 degrees, and annual rainfall averages less than two inches.
We hiked through Mosaic Canyon, its rugged walls showy as gold, the sky overhead a postcard-perfect blue. We viewed Artists Drive through dusty car windows, marveling over the shades of pink and green in the palette. We ended each day at the same spot, watching the drama of the sunset unfold at Zabriskie Point.  We stared mesmerized as the sky smeared from pastel pink to a riot of orange and red.

Heightened senses made meals unforgettable. The first cup of morning coffee was so delicious I yelled out, startling Trish, still ensconced in her tent. Confirmed foodies all, we took new pleasure in preparing simple food on a propane stove, savoring the taste sensation of scrambled eggs with herbs. We grilled hot links threaded on a skewer, buried potatoes in foil deep under the coals, and ate our dinner wordlessly under the stars, savoring every bite.

We spent just three days and nights in that glorious stillness, hiking through ancient canyons cut into the hills, the violence of geography both frightening and beautiful. We tried to see it all: Stovepipe Wells, Panamint Springs, Badwater, Mesquite Dune, Scotty’s Castle, but the park is so vast this proved impossible. There are a very few hotels and a restaurant at Furnace Creek. My friends called me a nerd for insisting we stop in at the Borax Museum, which commemorates the history of borax mining; there’s a wagon that was used by one of the actual 20-mule teams for which the product is named.  I alone found this fascinating.

There were a few snags:  the kerosene lantern worked only sporadically; Philip suffered a spider bite.  Marnie roamed off on her own the second day, wandering over a sand dune, scaring the crap out of us with worry.  I melted a Nike on the fire ring; Skip claimed he didn’t sleep a wink (but we heard him snore.)

But mostly there was a stillness to our time in the desert, a serenity that enveloped us, falling over our shoulders like a cloak. The days were shaped by the advance of light across the vast basin, our nights dictated by the stars. Each evening as we gathered at the fire, unencumbered by phones or laptops, we drank in the quiet, and the stillness grew more welcome and profound.

On the final day the air pearled with clouds as we packed our gear and headed back to the city. The drive home seemed half as long. Trish and Skip got into it around mile ten. I picked up the thread in mid-argument.

“How can you say that?” Trish sputtered with indignation. “How can you have an opinion on a problem unique to women?”

“Aha – gender bias! My opinion is based on fact, my facts are based on a slow accretion of observed detail. Plus, I’ve been married three times.” Skip folded his arms across his chest, awaiting the next salvo.

As we made our way down the highway, my eye fell on Marnie’s souvenir snowglobe, resting securely on the dashboard, the plastic cactus-man bobbing contentedly, snow settled below him, articulating the position of his cactus limbs. My personal snowglobe had been shaken up, too, the soft flakes resettling into a new pattern. We turned onto the 395 and headed for home.

I’ll be the first to admit that the idea of Lasik surgery, as opposed to wearing glasses or contact lenses, seems a bit much.  Voluntary eyeball slicing is not for the feint of heart.

But in the middle part of life, waning vision sneaks up and betrays you:  presbyopia sets in, and soon you can’t see your cel phone, the newspaper, or the calorie count on a Sara Lee cheesecake box (thank God) without popping on a pair of readers.  You need reading glasses for anything occurring within three feet, over the contacts you need for distance.

Then last month, at lunch with a friend my age, I noticed she was reading the menu sans glasses.  At first I thought, ‘show-off.’  Then she clued me in:  Lasik Monovision was her secret.

Monovision is a procedure that corrects one eye for distance vision, while correcting the other eye for near vision. Because the dominant eye is treated for distance vision, the brain is easily able to compensate for the two different levels of correction.

My eyes were dry, my contacts were killing me and my night vision was fading fast.  I decided to go for it.  Make me Mono-Me.

At the Freedom Vision Laser Center in Encino, I was greeted by a thoughtful attendant who provided a little yellow tranquilizer in a paper cup to relax me.  I passed a pleasant 45 minutes flipping through an outdoor living magazine showcasing elegant Southern Living, where I found an ad for a white cotton duck slipcover that fits over the ubiquitous plastic patio chair, a hideous stack of which lives on my deck.  Every time I try to toss one out, I’m reminded of how durable the damn things are; like cockroaches, I think they could survive nuclear war.  I’ve seen these exact chairs on CNN newsroll footage of war-torn Afghanistan, perched outside a café in Kabul.  The Taliban sit in the same molded plastic design that’s now on sale at Rite-Aid for $8.99.

But the chair covers are gorgeous!  A crisp summer white; an elegant pale blue toile pattern, a sumptuous floral, all with tie-backs to tailor the fit from classic to shabby chic.  I love a stylish solution.

In my medicated state, I was sorely tempted to tear out the page, but reason prevailed; I committed the website address to memory right before I was ushered into the surgical suite.

After being made to don the blue hair net thingy, de rigueur for any procedure, I had the opportunity to listen to a member of my surgical team refinance his boat over the phone in an adjacent office.  When the negotiations concluded, I finally heard, “let’s rock and roll!”  Had the tranq not completely worn off by now, I might have summoned more enthusiasm for this party mode, even managed a weak ‘woohoo.’  (Why do all doctors say ‘let’s rock and roll’ when going into surgery?  Is it “Grey’s Anatomy”?  I swear I heard it when going for a colonoscopy; there, at least, I got a little Twilite sleep along with the blue hairnet.  Woohoo.)

Anyway.  The procedure unfolded quickly:  During Lasik surgery for monovision, the surgeon uses a tiny blade to create a flap on the surface of the cornea, the clear front layer of the eye. Then, a laser is used to reshape the cornea so that it will focus light more efficiently. To complete the surgery, the corneal flap is put back into place.  Like I said, eyeball slicing.

The first part involved pressure on my eye socket, and the second required me to focus on a bright blinking light.  The surgical assistant thoughtfully counted down the seconds left for each procedure while I mentally repeated my patio furniture mantra, Dixie-Reinhardt-dot-com, Dixie-Reinhardt-dot-com, and soon I was being helped off the table.  The team heaped praise on me, post-procedure, ‘you did great!’  I took my bows and dreamed of slip-covered plastic chairs.  No pain, just a scratchy sensation soothed by eyedrops, and I could see better immediately.

I can read food labels in the supermarket, pull out my cel phone and dial without squinting.  It’s a giddy sense of freedom when I pick up a restaurant menu and can order without fishing in my purse for readers, or browse through the Bloomie’s sales rack and see the numbers on the price tag.

The important thing to know about monovision is to use both eyes, at the same time.  Sounds like a no-brainer, yes, but when the vision in opposite eyes doesn’t match, it’s extremely tempting to keep checking that difference and comparing the two sides, i.e., closing one eye and seeing a blur, then closing the other eye and seeing distance clearly.  I looked like Popeye for the first few days post-surgery, but am now past the urge to inadvertently wink at everything.

I still keep reading glasses on hand, but only for very fine print or extended reading sessions.  For the average day at the office, my world of Times Roman 12 pt correspondence, monovision works just fine.

And my patio chairs?  See for yourself: http://www.dixiereinhardt.com/summer.html

“Make me one with everything.”

The year I turned eight, something big happened, something miraculous, or else something having to do with my Dad’s job selling major appliances. Suddenly we were rich. I knew this because my Dad stopped saying things like, “You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip,” when you asked him for a dollar; because we went to Disneyland during spring vacation and got to choose two souvenirs each, and because right after that Easter break, he made an announcement that truly shook our world: We were getting a built-in pool.

That’s right, a built-in. We were definitely rich. My mother confirmed it: “Your father’s a District Manager now.” A built-in – that was the dream. (This speaks, I know, to our level of sophistication in the San Fernando Valley of the 1960s.) We might be pasty outsiders from Buffalo, but we were going to have a real built-in swimming pool like every born and bred California family. We were golden.

First, of course, we had to learn how to swim. At the Community Center Pool, Saturday morning lessons were offered, mostly to the toddler set (hey, I could toboggan). My pale brothers and I gripped the stucco lip, white-knuckled, our toes scrabbling for mad purchase on the rough plaster walls. First came kicking; we pumped our legs with all our might, churning up highly-chlorinated wakes. We kicked and stroked for weeks on end, dipping our face into the water as instructed, before the inevitable happened: Time to go underwater. This was a whole different mode of terror. My brother Paul, always fearless, opened his eyes down there; he told me.

As the Saturdays rolled by I slowly, bit by bit, loosened my grip on the pool’s edge. By week three, I could doggie-paddle to the deep end. Two more weeks and I became a sleek seal, moving stealthily under the surface, hands extended so I didn’t hit the wall (I wasn’t about to open my eyes.) My yellow hair turned green.

At home, the bulldozer worked for a few hours each day, scooping large chunks of earth from the backyard, scraping out the spot where the swingset once sat. All the kids in the neighborhood gathered to watch; this was big. My Mom brought out platters of sandwiches and brownies for the workers. Progress seemed slow; it would be forever before we could use our new skills. I practiced holding my breath in the bathtub, just so I wouldn’t get rusty.

And then, one day, the workmen left and the tile was in place, and we turned on the hose. Kids from all over the block came and cheered for our built-in pool. It was beautiful.

Supervision was an issue: My mother was home all day but didn’t swim (and would not consider getting her hair wet, under any circumstance). Dad was at work, wherever that was, being a District Manager. So a chainlink fence was installed around the perimeter and my mother added a padlock to the gate, keeping the key safety-pinned to the waistband of her capris. And for insurance, she installed the grotto.

Rocks were cemented together in a high arch, producing a shallow cave five feet high and two feet across. This was affixed to the cement by the deep end, natch. Once the cement dried, the statue was placed inside.

My family had long relied on the kindness of saints and their intercessionary powers: We called on St. Anthony to help us find lost objects, and prayed to St. Christopher for a safe road trip. Our throats were blessed annually on the Feast of St. Blaise, traditionally believed to intercede in cases of throat illness, especially for fish bones stuck in the throat. (I’m not clear how this was applicable to my family, whose seafood consumption was limited to Chicken of the Sea tuna and Mrs. Paul’s fishsticks, both boneless, on Lenten Fridays, but the broader idea was the guy kept you from choking.) My mother wasn’t a woman who took chances with her children’s survival. So to safeguard a poolful of kids under her watch, she went straight to the top of the venerated heap.

My mother found her at Green Thumb Nursery, in the pottery section, beside St. Francis of Assisi and assorted garden gnomes. Mary was four feet tall, beautiful and serene in a blue plaster robe, her Immaculate Heart emblazoned in bold ceramic red across her chest. Her delicate feet crushed a snake beneath her, much as she would crush any danger that came our way, e.g., untimely death by drowning. We kept her vase filled with plastic flowers.

“Say three Hail Marys for a safe swim,” my mother called from behind the screen door each day after releasing the padlock. We’d rattle them off at an auctioneer’s pace, Hail-Mary-FullofGrace-TheLordIsWithThee-BlessedArtThouAmongWomen-AndBlessedIsTheFruit-OfThyWombJesus-HolyMaryMotherofGod-PrayForUsSinners-NowAndAtTheHourof OurDeath-Amen, deep breath, repeat, deep breath, repeat, and then cannonball in, giddy with excitement as we broke the surface, sending furious waves lapping over the cement deck.

The first sharp jolt of chlorine hit the back of my throat, a jab to the sino-nasal cavity: pure bliss! Nothing could smell better. My mother watched us from the living-room window, and the Blessed Virgin from her grotto perch.

Summer days were always hot in the Valley, a constant triple-digit heat that left a white sheen on the air. We would spend all day in the water, emerging with wrinkled fingers and toes, then dry in minutes on beach towels spread on the cement. We’d lie on our backs, baking in the heat, leaving wet imprints of heads, bums and calves on the pavement, listening to the music blasting from my older brother Paul’s bedroom window: In the early years it was surf music, Herman’s Hermits and the Dave Clark Five; later came harder stuff, Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf, Led Zeppelin. “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” played nonstop one summer. The air smelled of cocoa butter, chlorine, and oleander; as my brother moved through his teens, it smelled of incense and pot.

Swimming left us famished. I’ve never been that hungry since, and food has never tasted better. Wet towels, bleached colorless by June, were hurled over the chainlink fence before we headed indoors for tuna with Best Foods spread on white, barbeque potato chips, and orange popsicles. After lunch came the warning: you had to wait a full hour before going back in the water, or you’d get a cramp, meaning sink-like-a-stone-and-die. My brothers and I would endlessly discuss the probability of making it to the side of the pool with a cramp, pondered the likelihood of pulling ourselves up and out to survive, but knew we’d never risk it. To pass the time we watched “Father Knows Best,” ‘with Eleanor Donahue, Billy Grey, and Lauren Chapin,’ a half-hour long, and then begged to go back in, but my mother made us wait the full hour. She wasn’t taking any chances: Even Mary couldn’t save you from a cramp.

Our afternoons in the pool were fraught with danger: a dragonfly alighting on the surface was a dive bomber wielding a nuclear weapon; our capsized plastic boat became a sunken submarine, fast running out of oxygen; the Santa Ana winds picked up sudden strength, churning the hot breeze into a tornado-strength funnel of terror.

My oldest younger brother Greg was prone to nosebleeds. His nostrils would gush without warning, and if it happened in the pool, if so much as a thread of blood was spotted in the water, we’d all jump out, panicked and screaming, blood! Sometimes I’d say three Hail Marys to make his nose stop so he could return to the water and play. He also managed to step on bees with regularity, resulting in a series of swollen foot episodes.

Greg and I spent one entire summer trying to keep a plastic boat upright with the two of us inside, paddling madly, without flipping. “Just hold it still!” I bossed, blaming him for every upset. “Stay in the front!” Now and again we’d manage a run of a few feet, both rowing madly with our plastic oars before we capsized again.

On weekends we would beg and plead until Dad joined us in the water. We’d launch ourselves off his shoulders, pushing off and exploding upward as he rose to his full height in the shallow end, hitting the surface in a huge cannonball. How patient he was to do this for hours on end (he wasn’t known for his patience), launching kid after kid, including the neighbor’s. “Okay, runt!” he’d yell, sending another one of us airborne.

“Don’t rough-house, Bob!” My mother worried about spinal cord injuries; I don’t remember who we prayed to for that. St. Jude, maybe. My brother Paul would ham it up to scare her, doing the dead man’s float face down on the surface, arms outstretched.

The rare appearance of Mom poolside produced a chorus of excited “Watch me!” “Watch this,” cries. The littlest stood rooted on the steps, their arms ensconced in bright orange floaties, clinging to the rail. My mother sat in the lounge chair, wearing shorts and a halter top, her hair held up with combs. “Bob loves my hair up,” she confided. I resolved to have an up-do of my own one day, definitely by the time I was married.

“Don’t let the air out!” My father turned on the air conditioner begrudgingly, only on the hottest of heat wave days, and then closely monitored that cool air he paid so dearly for, reminding us that money didn’t grow on trees. We kids crept in and out the back door stealthily, sliding through the smallest crack so the cool air wouldn’t escape.

Bougainvillea bloomed along the backyard wall under the hot summer sun, a riot of pinks and oranges. I declared majenta to be my favorite color. It matched my sunburn: getting ‘a little color’ was considered healthy then, even if it involved turning lobster red and peeling. We never thought of sunscreen. Yet my siblings and I all survived those long summers in the water, sunburned, bee-stung, green-haired and waterlogged. No one drowned.

Mary had our backs.

Welcome to my blog, which I understand is a now-crucial component of having a web presence (which I sincerely hope will entail much less effort than keeping up a real-life presence, which is fairly exhausting at this point).   I shall attempt to stick to the task at hand, i.e., sharing thoughts and notions to create a cogent, compelling narrative, which may nonetheless occasionally resemble a grade school essay, returned face-down, labeled ‘Strays From The Topic’ underlined twice, in red.