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.