My Neighbor

Today I go to the funeral of my former neighbor, June Hessing. She died a week ago today in Salt Lake, where she was living for a while with her daughter. June was 91.

June and Jim. I loved them both, especially Jim. He died about five years ago. They owned the land our house sits on, all the land in here. They were prosperous because of Jim, his Chrysler dealership and other endeavors.

June loved Jim, her family, the church, and music. She was about as big as a minute, energetic and, okay, I'll say it, quite officious. Just her way. She had a knee replaced some time before they moved from that big house, or, I must say, were moved out of it by their sons. Jim was NOT happy about that. She struggled with the new knee (her son Jeff, an orthopedic surgeon, did the surgery) until she finally brought it into subjection to her will.

I used to visit Jim and June in the little assisted living apartment they occupied until Jim's death, encouraged, I think, by that place and what his boys had done to him. Their house, next door to mine, is big. They had so much space and a good piece of land and a wonderful view out their big back windows. This little place they were moved to had one small window, one room, in fact, and it was a big come-down for the Hessings. "They didn't even pack a suit for me," he told one time. I was shocked by that, since he was always a church-going man.

The boys cleared the house out, got rid of their parents' stuff, and sold the place. Yes, the people who bought it are good neighbors to me, and I like them. But they aren't Jim and June.

I am trying to write about June. Not quite working out that way. But I will go to her funeral today.

Morning At the Mall, Part 4

But back to the sub-culture idea.

Sub-cultures have practices that outsiders don’t know about, because they’re outsiders. I felt like an outsider that morning, not because I don’t know how to walk, but perhaps because I was alone and most of the other walkers were not, and I didn’t walk as fast. I also felt like everyone there knows this mall, the little crannies and side areas to add distance, and I don’t. They know exactly how far down a side corridor to go before making the turn, and they know where all the restrooms are, and I found out there are more of those than you might think.

Besides, I did not look like them (that is my strong belief). I was not about to tie my sweatshirt around my waist, and I don’t like carrying things, like a water bottle, for instance. Certainly I would not have felt comfortable joining any group at a table, even if I had wanted a mall breakfast. And I don’t drink coffee.

So, yes, outsider. I’m okay with that.

Sub-cultures also have their own languages, their own jargon, which can exclude and sometimes alienate outsiders. I can’t report on that with entire certainty, because I heard nothing of the private conversations of these mall walkers.

However, I think I know what they talk about. Walking, their new walking shoes, their legs, feet, backs, massage therapy, their weight, their health, their last doctor appointment, life outside the mall, why they missed a day walking last week, who has dropped out, and, maybe, who has died. Probably they count laps, not necessarily out loud, and some of them may keep track of their lap times. I’m guessing, of course.

If these subjects and the language used to discuss them do not seem exclusive, I still say this is a sub-culture. And I’m thinking, “It's a group I have never claimed membership in, never wanted membership in. Yet here I am, walking the mall. But not tomorrow. No sir. Tomorrow I’ll be walking outside.”

And I did.

Morning At the Mall, Part 3

When I got back to my starting point on the upper level, I went downstairs, thinking I might find fewer people, because the food places are mostly upstairs, and wondering if there would be an age difference, like younger people downstairs. Yes, to both. So the sub-culture was also divided by floors.

What greeted me immediately was a sizeable group of young women, all with strollers, gathered in front of the permanently closed door of Mervyn’s, now defunct. I counted. Ten of them, and they had a leader. She was saying, “This time I want passionate walking. Passionate. Right? And when we get back to Sears we’ll do our abs.” Off they went.

I said, “Do you have a name?”

The leader said, “Stroller Stride.”

I may have said another “Cool.” I hope not. I know I did say, “Ten of you.”

“Well,” she said, “the number varies depending on who’s sick or whose kids are sick. Like mine,” and she showed me her empty double stroller.

“But you’re here,” I said. What I meant was, “How come you’re here if your kids are sick?” But she thought I was commending her, so she answered, quite proud of herself, “Yes, I’m here,” and she hurried off to catch up with the group.

I knew why she was here. She’s the leader. Vital to the cause of passionate walking.

At Sears they were on floor mats, doing their abs, except for their leader, who was standing above them counting and calling out instructions. And they had picked up a man. Full red beard and lots of red hair on his head. He was on a mat, doing his abs. I think he had a stroller, but I’m not sure.

At 10 o’clock I had made my two rounds and so went out to my car, got the shoes, did the return, and determined I’d wait a few minutes then walk the upstairs again. Which I did.

Now the mall was open, all the stores, and I could see shoppers among the walkers. You can tell a walker from a shopper. It’s easy. No purse, and generally the walker makes no stops at the stores, although earlier I did see a walker here or there look in and wave at the workers preparing to open up. These walkers are "regulars."

I did stop at stores, twice. Once at Macy’s upper level to look at sleepwear for my pregnant daughter and once in Sears, also on the upper level, to look at their TVs. Brief stops. No purchases.

When I exited Sears, here came a guy, mid-forties or so, really moving. He had to tip and bank to make the turn without slowing down. His uniform was not complete, no sweatshirt, no water, only pants, t-shirt, walking shoes, but his face and his stride showed him to be an intense walker who did not want to be slowed down. So I stopped him. Sometimes I’m like that.

“Isn’t this hard on your knees?” I asked as he tried to cruise by me. This question I really did want an answer for.

“I’ve had my knees done,” he said, “so I’m okay for a while.” Wow. He looked young to have had his “knees done,” which I assume means he is no longer using the knees he was born with.

Near Macy’s I saw a mother and daughter. They were sweating, and, yes, they both had sweatshirts around their waists and carried water. I stopped them and asked the knee question.

“Oh no,” said the daughter. “This is good for you. I always feel good after I walk every morning.”

“What did she ask?” said the mother.

“She asked if this walking is hard on our knees.”

“Oh no,” said the mother. “It’s good. I asked my rheumatologist.”

“I know,” I said, “but asphalt gives. This surface doesn’t. And I’m just . . .”

“No, no. It’s too cold to walk outside. Besides, my rheumatologist says this is good. She says it won’t hurt the knees.”

Well okay, I say to myself, not convinced because of how my left knee is feeling. And I’m thinking, “Yes, I know walking is good for you. I’ve walked. I could tell you a thing or two about walking, I bet, like four marathons. (So, you had to bring that up, did you, Carol.) But let’s get your rheumatologist down here and let her make five or ten brisk laps a day for a month on this stuff. Then see what she says.”

I didn’t say any of that out loud, of course. I mean, I didn’t come to the mall to make a point about walking surfaces and their effect upon feet, knees, or hips. I didn’t come to have a debate even. I really came to return my shoes.

Morning At the Mall, Part 2

Upstairs, most of the mall walkers were what I’ll have to call elderly. Like me, though I hate to say it, and some even older than that. One woman walked with a cane, but she was walking. Some looked like they needed canes, bent with age. But most were moving right along, doing their brisk daily walk at the mall.

There were groups of women, some talking as they walked, some not. Here and there a single woman or man stepped along, but most of the walkers had companions.

There were couples, more than a few, most looked to be in their 70s or 80s. Some of them held hands, or maybe just held on to each other. Some walkers used their arms to propel themselves. Many people, mostly women, had the sweatshirt around the waist going for them. Many carried water.

Some had done their walking, I believe (maybe I should have checked their shoes), and were taking breakfast at the mall, because although the stores had not yet opened, many of the food places had.

People sat here and there on the benches with their coffee or at the Food Court tables near McDonald’s. Starbuck’s was full. Mrs. Powell’s has eight tables nearby. All occupied. This is before the mall opens, remember. Some people were reading the morning paper. Most were talking. Made me think of those old time cafes in small towns where folks would gather for breakfast. People need a sense of community, I thought as I walked past.

But most people in the mall were not eating. They were walking. And most were heading in the same direction. That is, they walked counter clockwise so that most of their turns would be left turns. Left turns are easier when you’re walking. Anyone who is part of this mall-walking culture would know that.

One pair of walkers caught my eye, mid-thirties, holding hands as they walked. He was a big guy and she was small, but he shortened his steps to match hers. Nice. I saw them upstairs, and I would see them again downstairs, still holding hands, still walking step for step together. Did my heart good.

Morning At the Mall, Part 1

If you go to the Towne Square Mall before the stores open—and I can’t think why you would—you’ll likely find what I found there last Monday. I don’t usually go before the stores open. I don’t usually go at all, but I did that day, Martin Luther King Day, which thing I forgot until I got to the credit union, found it closed and knew then that the Post Office would be closed, too. Duh. It's on all my calendars.

So I headed for the mall. I would pass the time, do some walking, until J C Penney’s opened and I could return the shoes that don’t fit.

What I found when I got there was a nice little sub-culture.

I entered the mall. Two women—water bottles in hand, sweatshirts tied around their waists—came toward me, then made a U-turn and headed away from me. Serious walkers. I could see that, but I stopped them anyway.

“Do you walk every day?” I asked.

They answered in chorus, “Yes.”

“Do you know the distance?” not that I needed to know, but I could see they liked being asked, and I am a nice, friendly person. Usually.

“It’s about a mile, upstairs and downstairs,” said the older one, “a little more if you take all the side corridors.”

“Both floors together make a mile?” I asked.

“No. Each floor is a mile.”

“Cool,” I said, wishing I had chosen just about any other word, and they were off.

I followed but couldn’t keep up. I didn’t expect to. I’m kind of out of shape. I determined, though, that I would walk the upstairs, then go down and walk the downstairs. I could surely do that in the 25 minutes before Penney’s opened. And I did.

I was not alone.

I mean, I expected to see walkers here and there, but the place was crawling with them, so to speak, not that I counted. But, trust me, there were a lot of people walking the mall, and there were divisions of them, too. That is, the sub-culture had sub-groups.

All of this is neither startling, I suppose, nor world-shaking, but I found it fascinating, a look into life in Boise, Idaho. At least life at the mall in the mornings.

Rock Skip

My brother Sterling taught me how to skip rocks across the water. I think it's pretty easy to skip rocks across a lake's surface, but we lived near the ocean, and there's a particular challenge to skipping rocks across the ocean's surface. It moves more. I got good at it.

Wayne was a good rock skipper--we grew up in the same town, you know--and I was very glad of it. I don't know who taught him, but he sure looked good doing it. That's not the reason I married him, but it's in there.

Anything Goes

There's an old song by that name, by Cole Porter, which puts it in the 30s or 40s.

Here's what the lyrics say.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
Now, heaven knows,
Anything Goes.

Good authors too who once knew better words,
Now only use four letter words
Writing prose, Anything Goes.

The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today,
And black's white today,
And day's night today,
When most guys today
That women prize today
Are just silly gigolos (And I wonder how many kids today know that word.)

And though I'm not a great romancer
I know that you're bound to answer
When I propose,
Anything goes.

Well, those lyrics seem a bit innocent to me. And I thought of them today in the mall as I passed the calendar kiosk and saw this: TRUEbLOOD

It's a calendar with a front picture that I found repulsive, if not shocking. Because it's getting harder and harder to be shocked these days because, truly, anything goes. Take a look at Lady Gaga.

But back to the calendar. The picture shows a young woman's face. She's pretty. Her tongue is sticking out of the corner of her mouth to lap up the blood that's dripping from inside her mouth. It's a color picture. I can only imagine what the pictures inside reveal.

I thought of those lyrics because Cole Porter no doubt "saw" a lot in his day, but I'm thinking he maybe didn't know what "anything" was. I mean, was anything like this part of his anything?

I thought of Wayne and wondered what he would think of all this vampire crap, or if he would pay any attention to it at all. If he did, I'm pretty sure he'd think it was crap.

I say it's crap. I say it's stupid. I say it's shortsighted, at least, and stupid (I think I said that already) to have vampire fangs implanted into your upper jaw, which thing is now the rage. And which thing is not cheap.

And do the kids who are involved in such practices have parents? Or are the parents doing it too? I don't know.

What is the deal? Somebody tell me.

And will it go away?

Today . . .

is the day. Seven years ago today. In a way, it doesn't seem that long ago because I still feel the pain of it. Not all the time, though.

We don't celebrate this day, but we mark it. We live through it, keep busy, run our errands, complete our tasks--or try to. All the while our thoughts may be elsewhere, wrapped in memories, not only of that day seven years ago but of Wayne on other days, in other settings. At least I hope we do. I think we ought to.

He had brown hair, nice hair, and a natural part on the right side. He was tall, like Andrew and Richard, 6'3" about, but with a slender, runner's build, like Wayne and Paul. He spoke Spanish and pretty good English, too. He taught high school math one year in Middleton and one semester in Caldwell. He was smarter than he knew, like all of his children.

His eyes were big and his eyebrows thick, his ears close in to his head. His nose looked like his mother's nose, only straighter. Ann's nose is like his. So is Wayne's. He had a good smile. Lola's smile is like his, I think. He was a handsome man. Are we not a family of handsome men and beautiful women? Oh yes. Thank your dad.

In winter he almost always wore his coat in the house. Remember? I mean our house and I mean like every day, all winter, and I mean zipped up. And if we would go to visit someone, he might keep his coat on the whole time, like he wasn't planning to stay long, which may have been true also.

He could play "Lord, Dismiss Us With Thy Blessings" on the piano, his one and only pianistic accomplishment, as I recall. He gave up the saxophone before junior high. I don't think he liked to practice.

He had faults.

His wit was quick, like Alyce--like all his children. He liked a joke. He made up many. He could make us all laugh and sometimes groan at what he thought was funny.

He was a cautious driver. He liked to sing. He liked to watch football on TV. He liked to play basketball.

I remember his handwriting. I got letters from him when he was in South America for two and a half years. Those were good days, when a letter would come.

He had a mole on the second toe of his right foot. I think. It troubles me that I can't remember for sure.

His hands were big, like Richard's, his calves thin, like Paul's. He was not hairy, as Wayne is not hairy. He could remember facts and figures. So can Alyce and Andrew and Ann. He was honest, and so are his children.

He was often overwhelmed by the strength of his own emotions and did not know how to show his feelings. Who is that like? I think of Lola at Christmastime, what she said to all of us. How real and honest and perhaps hard to do. I hope her dad heard it. I think he too would have bought it, Aaron.

He was fundamentally good and kind. Who is that like?

He lived within himself, as we all do, but I like to think I knew him well.

The Widow Speaks . . . Again

I know something about death because my husband died. It’s seven years this month, in fact. The truth is we can know something about death, but little, really, of its process and nothing of how it feels until we ourselves die, and no one I know who has died is coming back to enlighten me about all that. I’ve always wished someone would, like my mother or my dad, but they didn’t. Then, I thought, maybe my husband would. But no.

I mean, I could see death happening to him, and truly it broke my heart. I can report something of its process as I witnessed it, but I’ve done that. Now, of course, I’m thinking of me and death. My death, not that I think it’s near, but come on, death is one of the real, universal, perplexing, whatever other words to describe it, topics in this world. A person simply must address it, in thought, and in writing.

This line came into my mind today. “Death was near, he surely knew.” It’s from an essay I wrote, “Age: Perspective from An Artichoke Farm.” The topic was aging and the focus was my dad, who had died a few years earlier. I thought I knew something about aging then and its relationship to death, but I was in my forties when I wrote it, thinking that time was slipping away. Now I’m nine months from being 70, and I think I know more about the topic because time is slipping away.

As that line from my essay ran through my mind, I said out loud, “Yes, he surely knew, but even if we know, we don’t want to give up living because of it.” That’s true for most us, isn’t it? Well, it’s what I think, anyway. I mean, don’t we want to live until we cannot avoid death any longer? I do.

I thought for a while that I had not understood my dad, but when I reread what I wrote back then, I think I did understand him. I did understand, at least in my head. The older I get the nearer I come to understand in my heart. That’s obvious, isn’t it, because it becomes more real, occupies my thoughts more often.

Here is the section from the essay where the line appears.

In the last year of his life, his 90th year, he wanted Mama's green 1967 Dodge back from my teen-aged son. Daddy was going to move to Watsonville, California, and buy an artichoke farm. He would live the rest of his life there.

Watsonville. One of the many places Daddy fell in love with in his earlier travels up and down California as a soft-sell life insurance salesman. Wherever Daddy would go, he'd get the paper and check the Want Ads for real estate buys. That's why he had property here and there—not vast holdings, but a house or 5-acre farm. "Income property," he called it. He had a place in Santa Cruz, near the Begonia Gardens; a small farm in Oceanside, southeast of the Rosicrucian retreat; and a cluster of rental houses in Lancaster, on the Mojave desert. Daddy didn't own property in Watsonville, though I often heard him and Mama speak of the place fondly. And he loved artichokes.

But my dad had no driver's license in the 90th year of his life. Cataract surgery on both eyes had left them only partly seeing—those terrible thick glasses he wore made his eyes look bigger than eyes ought to look but did not make them see. He couldn't sit, rise, or walk unaided. He didn't dress himself. We all knew he couldn't move to Watsonville or drive or raise artichokes or do anything but stay right where he was and let us take care of him. And when we told him, he knew it too, likely had known it all along. He said, "I know. But I want to."

Maybe these were his attempts to keep living. Death was near, he surely knew. These were ways to turn his back on it, ignore it. Maybe then it would go away. Maybe then he would be young again.

Back then, that last paragraph was pretty good, I thought. It had a rhythm to it and the ring of truth. Today, I understand it and know it is true.

HB, Richard

I do not have a theory about this, but I will say that when Richard was born--37 years ago today--he had lots of hair. Today he hasn't much. What ought to follow here is a story about someone born bald who now has lots of hair. I have no such story.

About Richard, however, he was beautiful at birth and is still handsome--dark eyes, dark hair.

He also has lots of brain and he knows how to use it. Someone once told me that babies come with hair or brains. Someone who most likely didn't really know but was just repeating one of those silly sayings, something she'd heard. I'm pretty sure we all knew Richard had good brains before he lost his hair.

He has lots of goodness in him and a loving heart. I know this to be true.

He has a good bit of wit and wisdom, an artist's way of seeing things, an eye for detail, a great deal of talent, and a sense of humor that betrays his penchant for the outlandish. If I were on Facebook, I'd get to see more of his outlandishness.

He has opinions. And why not? He's 37. And, oh yes, he too is a natural-born teacher.

He has the unstopped and unstoppable love of his mother.

The Taxing Nature of Taxes

This is something I should chronicle, even though I am weary at the very thought of it--the thought of writing it and of having to find my way through it. Those were the days, when Wayne just did the taxes while I did something else. My job was to provide a 1099 or two and my signature on the tax return and to endure some scolding from him because I had earned a little interest.

So here's what's going on that is making me tired. I have received a letter from The Idaho Tax Commission saying that I owe taxes for 2006. I've been searching, phoning, telling myself to just pay, and so on. But I do not understand where they got all their numbers, and I have asked why it took them so long--like three years--to notify me and why I should pay interest for all that time. I mean, if you don't ask, the answer is always no. Right? And so on and so forth again.

I guess $300 to them is not much. Well, it's enough that they're coming after me for it. To me it's a lot of money. Don't misunderstand. I will pay it if I owe it. Of course.

Yes, my plan now is to wait until they tell me where they got the numbers, then I'll just pay.

That's enough details.