Vintage Spatula

I love this picture of my mother taken 73 years ago in the apartment on W. 23rd Street in New York where she and my father lived right after they married. She appears to be having fun in the kitchen, and I imagine the neatly hung utensils behind her and the bowl in front of her were wedding presents. Believe it or not, I still have that pancake spatula.

My mother is gone 20 years today. As I do every day, I’ll think of her and miss her. But maybe today I’ll stir up and flip a pile of pancakes in her memory.

A Favorite Blackguard

RIP Malachy McCourt, who died today at 92.

This photo was taken after I heard him speak in Los Angeles not long after A Monk Swimming was published. You can’t tell from the picture, but my face actually hurt from laughing so much as he told tales of his freewheeling, hilarious, and sometimes awful life. He described himself as “human being at large at I have never worked a day in my life.” I’m sure he’s working hard at regaling all the saints and angels right now.

Be Mine

I’ve written here before that Valentine’s Day is my fave holiday. I’m not a romantic, but I do love candy.

And I always appreciate a day that gives us pause to tell the people we cherish how important they are.

Today was life’s customary mix of good and not so good. I’m focusing on the positive.

I hope you all had a lovely day, and that it involved chocolate.

Raise the Candles High

RIP Melanie, who died today at 76. Here is a piece I wrote about her a few years ago.

So, raise the candles high
‘Cause if you don’t we could stay black against the night
Oh, raise them higher again
And if you do we could stay dry against the rain

Gambling on Sunday

Yesterday’s howling winds prevented us from eating lunch outside with my mother-in-law, something we do on Sundays. As her dementia has progressed, she doesn’t engage in much and it’s hard to come up with something that interests her. The hummingbirds  and white roses in the yard usually capture her attention and she enjoys the sun, but since that wasn’t an option yesterday I fished out an ancient deck of Old Maid cards.

I’d guess that this deck is from the late ‘50s or ‘60s, judging from the graphics and the 19-cent price. My friend Julietta, a gifted writer and artist, found this deck on eBay and sent it to me more than 20 years ago, a clever, quirky gift that matched my fondness for children’s books. The deck’s illustrations are based on fairy tales and nursery rhymes.

When I checked yesterday, I was surprised to find that you can still buy new, not vintage, Old Maid card decks on Amazon, an unwelcome reminder that the sexist notion of an unmarried woman as an old maid, the person and card nobody wants, persists.

With a pile of quarters as big money stakes, Bonnie concentrated as carefully on matching the whimsical pairs of Little Boy Blue, Jack and Jill, and Mary Had a Little Lamb as if we were playing high jackpot poker in Las Vegas. She ended up owing the house 50 cents, but we assured her that her credit is good.

Thoughts on Taylor

No, not that one. My sister, who would have been 69 today. My sister’s name was Mary Taylor Colbert, named after my grandmother, whose maiden name was Taylor.

Sometime in the mid-70s, my sister was hired for a job in New York where she would have been the third Mary in the office. Her boss peremptorily declared, “We can’t have another Mary,” and decreed that Mary would have to be known by her middle name. This was nearly 50 years ago, and while Irish Catholic Marys abounded, there were very few women named Taylor.

From then on my sister was known as Taylor among certain groups of people, although she remained Mary to us. At her memorial service in 1988, I spoke about how she loved giving gifts, carefully selecting something that matched the recipient’s interests, choosing dramatic wrapping paper and ribbon, and always festooning her presents with a flourish — a bird figurine, a fresh flower, a feather or a toy musical instrument. I said that Mary had been a gift to us. Afterward two of her colleagues approached me and asked in a puzzled tone, “Why were you calling her Mary?” Even in the crushing sadness of that day, I had to laugh.

My sister had a humorous outlook on life, and I think she’d get an kick out of sharing her name with the now wildly famous and popular singer and claiming that she was Taylor long before it was a thing.

Wins and Losses This Week

In the win column:

I toured the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles, a hidden gem I didn’t even know existed. Our friend Shawn arranged the tour and graciously included us. Clark was once the richest man in the U.S., right up there with Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Huntington. Unlike other private libraries that rigorously restrict who can access their collection, this library’s policy is quite liberal. You don’t have to be a scholar or student to see their collection of 17^th and 18^th century books and manuscripts, and the largest trove of Oscar Wilde material.

Allyn Cox, the artist who painted this ceiling in 1926, went on to paint murals in the Capitol in Washington.

Please do not touch indeed.  This 1695 globe is right out in the open, no glass, no rope.

Alabaster light fixture

Our passionate and knowledgeable tour guide, Ari, told us that in the 1920s the library’s phone system was even more sophisticated than the one in the White House.

In the loss column:

I don’t know why I buy lottery tickets only when the pool is bazillions and chances of winning are more infinitesimal than usual. David used to ask me why I just didn’t flush the money down the toilet and be done with it. 

Several friends celebrated birthdays in the last week, so I stuck MegaMillions tickets in their cards, assuring them that I had requested only winning tickets and that I was certain these were good.

Somehow none of these or any of my numbers came up – can’t imagine how that happened.

Could fit either column:

After 3.5 years of dodging Covid, my luck ran out Thursday. I thought I was coming down with a cold, a possible gift from a friend’s four-year-old daughter who was sneezing away. I tested to be sure and was stricken to see the positive result.

I could slot this as a win because:

1. My friend Laurie is coming to visit from Chicago in a couple of weeks and if I have to have Covid, better to get it out of the way before she gets here.
2. I’m fully vaccinated — even had the sixth booster shot in the spring — so while I do not feel well, my symptoms are considered mild.
3. A massive, potentially overwhelming project landed this week unexpectedly. Since I must isolate in my office until Tuesday, I suppose it’s a good thing to have lots of work. The project concerns immunoglobulin A nephropathy, another tough condition, but I’m glad to take a break from gout.
4. Maybe I’ll quit eating so many cookies since I can’t taste anything.

My greatest concern is that I was around a lot of people this week — the birthday celebrants to whom I gave dud lottery tickets, an elderly neighbor I visited to welcome back from a long stay in a rehab facility, my book club, and the group who toured the Andrews Library. I let everyone know about the ugly double line. Now I’m nervously waiting to hear if anyone falls ill. If no one does, and I’m praying they don’t, that will be the biggest, most important win of the week.  

A Quick Trip with a Glimpse of Stopped Time

Nothing like gout to bring you back down to earth.

We’re back from a hasty, almost dizzying trip to the Bay Area. On the way to San Francisco, we stopped to hike in two beautiful state parks we’d never visited, Henry Coe and Castle Rock. Henry Coe was vaguely familiar because I’d seen the Huell Howser segment about it years ago. A bee sting for David and poison oak for me were souvenirs of these hikes, but they were well worth it.

A working pay phone in the park!

I saw my old friends Mari and Sue Ellen, both of whom I’ve known since 4th grade. Our visits are infrequent, but we picked up as if we’d seen each other just last week.

My friend Sue Ellen, founder of Palm Beach Dramaworks

My friend Mari, world traveler and retired pilot

We got together with Christopher and Claire, touring the de Young museum Saturday for two brilliant exhibits: Kehinde Wiley and Ansel Adams. David and I saw Wiley’s “Portrait of a Young Gentleman” at the Huntington a few months ago, and we were suitably awed by this remarkable collection of his paintings and sculptures.

In the ultimate San Francisco experience, we careered around the city in a driverless car that took us from Christopher and Claire’s apartment in Pacific Heights to our hotel near Union Square. Christopher summoned the car on his phone just as you would an Uber or Lyft, except there is no one behind the wheel! Twice during the trip, the driverless car came upon a double-parked car blocking the lane. That seemed to throw it for a loop, and I wondered if it would start beeping “Does not compute,” or something to that effect. A message flashed on the screen: “We are helping your car move out of this situation,” and eventually it did. The ride was a great thrill.

I stopped to light a candle in this church, Star of the Sea. I’m no longer a churchgoer, but I still like this ritual.

This sign below the clock in The Little Shamrock in inner Sunset claims it hasn’t ticked since the 1906 earthquake.

Although clocks may halt, time waits for no one, so today I’m back to work on my project on gout. The fact-checking kept me focused, preventing me from dwelling on how fast the visit went and how long it might be until the next one. And, it also made me very thankful that I do not have gout.

Lynx Jacket

This is from a 1983 diary excerpt written in a Clairefontaine notebook in aqua fountain pen ink, the handwriting tiny and crabbed. I have 53 years’ worth of these volumes that I’m slowly skimming and purging.

Yesterday Mme. came home with a lynx and mink jacket. Since she has been complaining of money problems, I naturally assumed it was an imitation and asked if it was rabbit. She gave me a withering look. Subconsciously, I suppose I did it on purpose.

At the time in 1983, I was Madame’s servant, taking care of her 3-year-old daughter while she worked every day at the Banque Nationale de Paris, and cleaning her apartment in the 12^th arrondissement. I didn’t do a very good job of the cleaning, but I was good at telling the little girl fairy tales, even in my fractured French and my honking American accent.

I called her Madame in my diary even though she was only 2 years older than I and insisted that I call her by her first name, as if we were copines, which we were not. Sometimes she would be rude, even cruel to me, telling me that my French should be better by now, that drinking Coke causes boutons, and when the child came down with a cold, blaming me for not dressing her warmly enough the day before.

She and her husband didn’t really have the money or the accommodations for a servant, but there I was as their au pair. They wanted to try to look more successful and yuppieish – that was a real term in 1983 – and I needed a job and a place to live, like thousands of people living in Paris without papiers.

I slept on a fold-out canape in the living room. In the morning I folded it up and the room looked like no one had been there. I erased myself every day.

What would I have known from lynx jackets, me with my puffy midwestern down jacket, not a foulard in sight, and a pastel wraparound skirt from LL Bean that, Madame hastened to inform me, had a stain on the back? I had fled to Paris thinking I’d refashion my life, but all I did was shatter it even further.

Forty years hence I remember that I’d been adrift and lonely, but until reading these desperate diary entries again, I’d blocked out just how bad it had been. I realize how self-indulgent that sounds – oh, I was living in Paris, anyone’s dream, but I managed to make it awful.

There were lessons in Paris. If you try to wear a down jacket to the opera on a cold night, an imperious Frenchwoman will take it off of you and insist that you wear her pearl gray wool coat, cut too slim for you. You will descend in the ascenseur and emerge in the rue Claude de Caen, crying with rage and humiliation. The French word for pimples is the same word as for buttons. Moving a continent away in a dramatic flourish changes nothing – your heartbreak will be crouched there, waiting for you.

Learning About My Father

I knew this photo of my father and mother was taken in San Francisco in June 1963, when they were about to board a ship for Honolulu to attend that year’s U.S. Conference of Mayors. I didn’t know that John F. Kennedy spoke to the mayors at the conference that year. I learned this only a year ago when my brother unearthed an audiotape of an interview my father gave for a University of Kentucky history project. In that interview, my father talked about Kennedy’s speech to the mayors, in which Kennedy stressed the urgent need for U.S. cities to join federal efforts to address racism.

I had absolutely no idea my father had heard John F. Kennedy speak. That fact is one of many I’ve come across slowly in the more than 30 years my father has been gone.

Note the camera in my father’s right hand. Once idly looking at some old census data for Lexington, Kentucky, where I was born and where my father’s family lived for generations, I was astonished to see my father’s occupation listed as “photographer.” He never worked as a photographer to my knowledge but may have aspired to. If he did, he never mentioned it.

Father’s Day brings perpetually mixed feelings — great gratitude that David is a wonderful father to our son and an annual return of sadness about the wreckage of my father’s life and the damage his alcoholism inflicted on all of us. Every year I waver between distinct sets of feelings: resolute, forced acceptance of who he was along with internal commands to get over it because nothing can be changed, and deep, terrible regret.

If my father were around today, I’d ask him about his recollection of JFK’s speech that day 60 years ago. I’d also want to know if he had any memories of photos taken in Honolulu with the camera he’s holding. If the photos ever existed, they’ve vanished.

Wishing all fathers a delightful day, and all sons and daughters sweet memories of their dads.