In other words, is this blog a dialogue, or am I just talking to myself, and if I am, does it really matter? So what if this ends up being yet another navel-gazing piece of crap, something that should have remained safely ensconced in a Moleskine journal or a Mead three-holer, rather than committed to cyberspace for generations to ridicule, neglect, or misrepresent?

(Of course, I bring up three conditions most would construe to be negative. I strive for optimism, but I am the daughter of a man who says, when asked whether the glass is half-full or half-empty, “What fucking glass?”)

I guess I won’t know until I write a bit more. And I can’t expect my anticipated audience to visit or become involved unless I provide something with which to interact.

My brother has a successful blog that was recently picked up by the Los Angeles Times called Dodger Thoughts. He gets hundreds of comments daily, and I am incredibly proud of him.

Here is his third post, from July 23, 2002 (yes, he started his blog years before people were discussing SEO and keywords and even added value, at least in a blog context):

Having now written that unsolicited ramble, I now confront the question of: Why? Why am I doing this, and who am I doing this for?

My best answers are, for no good reason, and for no one in particular.

Whatever I write here will be with the assumption that the audience might only be one person – me. Admittedly, writing for one’s self on the Web is not unlike talking to yourself in a public place – but though I try to avoid doing that, it’s not like I haven’t done that. There are probably worse things.

And I figure, occasionally, someone else might read this. My brother or sister. An indulgent friend. I don’t know – someone. I’m not sure it matters.

And I guess I enjoy the idea of writing about baseball enough that I’m going to try not to worry about the audience thing too much.

But if there’s one thing I do want to make sure you all know, it’s that I’m not so delusional that I’m thinking big about this site. I’m thinking small. Very small. Just something to have fun with for the time being.

I’m trying to keep his thoughts in mind. The royal “We” will see whether I can ever get comfortable with this, whether it matters even to me, and whether this is not a case of deja vu, which for me has mostly translated to, “Why bother?”

The medicine cabinet was partially open, and two old Ban roll-on deodorants were on different shelves. Each looked to be at least 20 years old, both from their labels and from that hard-to-define gunk that collects on stuff in a bathroom — dust, baby powder, dried deodorant or toothpaste.

In the bathroom’s florescent light I saw my first gray hair. It’s funny what lingers in your mind months later.

-aside-

Of course, Los Angeles isn’t supposed to be humid. I can think of my one thunderstorm growing up. I was ten, riding my bike up the hill toward my house, and the clouds arrived, went black, it rained and thundered really hard for maybe five or ten minutes while I stood there with my bike, marveling at how drenched I was getting, and then it stopped, the clouds moved on, and the sky went orange before fading to that almost white summer sky, etc.

Meanwhile, it was really humid here yesterday, and humidity is fairly common now. It must be the additional million people who now populate the city (vs. 1975), the concomitant water consumption, global warming, fumes from the earth’s crust — theories abound.

-end aside-

Anyway, it did rain that day, and had we left the nursing home even an hour later than we did, we would have found ourselves stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. An 18-wheeler overturned on the Pomona Freeway because of a tornado. I’ve spent a lot of time in Memphis the last several years, and the clouds in the distance looked like tornado clouds, but again, I thought, No way there’s going to be a tornado. We don’t have tornadoes in the Southland…

-aside #2-

I was being a little disingenuous because I remember Mike Davis in his book, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, writes about tornadoes being a occasional occurrence. He wrote something about a big one in Long Beach in the early 1930s, I think…

(I keep getting e-mails from Amazon Associates noting that I haven’t made any money with its program; hence, these links, what the hell…)

-end aside #2-

At one point, while we were wrapping up my grandmother’s Meissen figurines and other breakables, it started pouring rain. Mom didn’t give me too much shit over it (one of her many qualities that make her so lovable), but she hates getting wet. So I suggested she get a coat out of Lucille’s closet. Lucille may have willed most of her things to that woman in Orange County, but according to Lucille’s executor, the woman was mostly concerned with getting my grandmother’s fur coats, which neither Mom nor my aunt wanted anyway. Mom chose a fleece jacket, and the executor, a healthy looking 75-year-old man with a full head of gray hair and clear blue eyes, freed an umbrella from this weird hook thing at the end of the clothing rod.

Here is a photo of some of the breakables that I took on my Motorola RAZR. My mom was adamant about getting these items because they were in her mother’s bedroom. And the executor, seeing that Mom and my aunt only wanted either photos or things that reminded them of their mother (stuff Lucille kept after my grandfather died, stuff she promised to will back to them, but probably forgot about as her mind started to go), signed off on it without consulting this other benefactor.

I don’t know why it’s taken me over two months to write this entry, but I think it has to do with my ambivalence with blogs in general, which (I hope) will be the topic of a future post.

Lucille’s last home was a place called The Village. She lived in a two-bedroom apartment with a Heritage floor plan:

The building itself looked like so many apartment complexes built in the 1980s with its sandstone-colored stucco facade and drive-through portico. The apartments also had that era’s feel, with off-white carpeting, white walls, built-in drawers with oak veneers, balconies with painted steel railing (in this case, forest green), vertical blinds, etc.

The common areas, meanwhile, were decorated in the complementary scheme of a private hospital. The common areas had pink walls, wide hallways with brass railings, forest green carpeting with a repeating bland floral pattern, and watercolors of horses and seagulls. You entered through the automatic doors into a huge multiple-sided lobby with overstuffed side chairs upholstered in polyester pink and green vertical stripes and pots of dusty silk flowers with dull pink blossoms and faded green leaves.

The front desk was white like the floor tiles, tall enough that employees had to stand to be easily seen, and went from the wall to the right of the first hallway, angling somewhere in the middle and ending perhaps a foot and a half from the middle hallway (Lucille lived down the right hallway, FWIW). At the midpoint, a nameplate coupled to an 8 1/2 X 11″ dry erase board read: “Manager of First Impressions.”

I can’t remember what was written on the dry erase board, but it was green like the balcony railings and the hallway carpet. A woman in her 40s or maybe early 50s (she looked older than me, but it could have been the perm and the ultramarine blue suit) stood behind the sign, joking with two elderly male residents.

“I feel like I know you!” said the Manager of First Impressions to one or maybe both of them. I was sitting too far away to tell, the people sitting to the left of my mom, my aunt Judy, and me were discussing potassium and self-defense, the TV was on FOX News, and it had started to rain.

Just a token from the game. Who knew that 20 years later, the Dodgers wouldn’t be anywhere near a World Series…

The last time we visited her in Hemet was almost 20 years ago, and at the time she lived in a little sandstone cottage that was part of a senior development. She kept all the curtains down, possibly to ward off the heat, and it smelled like sandalwood. There were several walls of photos of our family and my grandfather. Most of the photos were in the original frames — some wood, others silver, some faded with splinters — and the photos were ranged from wallet size to 11X14s.

For some reason I picture Lucille’s last living place as being a sandstone version of the army barracks where my great uncle was assigned during World War 2 (being a Jewish guy in his 30s, he was, not surprisingly or stereotypically, an attorney) like this:

and this:

Apparently the convalescent facility has an east and west side, so I see three barrack-type buildings shaped like a horseshoe. Even though she probably lived in an apartment-like the way my Grandma Sue lives, I keep imagining hospital-like rooms with adjustable beds like those in Cedar’s-Sinai Medical Center (my memories crowd out my imagination). I’m sure there’s a window, but it’s probably draped. The room or rooms will be cluttered. Some of the photos hang on the walls, while others lean against them. I imagine most of her clothing still hangs in the closet, some of it lying on the floor in rayon puddles. The sliding door of the closet is only partially shut, and it probably is mirrored.

I know it’ll have a distinct scent — a bit of soap or perfume, the sandalwood, a lot of disinfectant, and some sour sickly notes. I wonder if the bed will be made or if the sheets have been stripped, or if the bed is still there. I imagine that her caretakers stripped her bed at the very least, but I’ll see for myself in about 12 hours.

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death, Lucille, memory, memory token, imagine

I finally gave up — you can only wrangle with someone for so long before you say, Oh, fuck it, it’s still under warranty.

Having had such crappy luck with Sears repair these last few years, I wasn’t convinced the repairman doing my yearly maintenance (an option I was unaware of until this final year of my five-year extended warranty) would be a senior technician as I had requested. After all, the guy was supposed to arrive between 8 am and noon, and it was now 1:30. When he called to say he was leaving Beverly Hills and would be at my house in 15 minutes, his voice, a tenor, caused me to revise my picture a little. The guy was in his 30s tops and had a full head of black hair.

The senior technician (he really was a senior technician) did have a full head of black hair, but it was tinged with gray. He was big enough to have played football and had a round face. He’d been a technician for almost 30 years and admitted that he had been one click away from buying an unlocked Nokia 95 smartphone the night before.

He took apart the lower spray arm to find bits of plastic wrapper and black schmutz clogging the filter. He cleaned the filter, fixed the latch, checked the wiring, and even checked the water temperature (ideally the water should be at 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and mine was only 120). He also told me it’s better to ask for a 1-5 pm appointment rather than the morning one because technicians are usually overbooked, and they’re required to take and log their 15-minute breaks and one-hour lunches.

In other words, he was an excellent technician, a kind man, and looked nothing like my mental picture of him.

But normally, people, places, what have you, rarely end up the way I imagine them to look or seem. The few times they have, I’ve really been surprised.

But then are there many people who guess correctly more often than not? To what extent do past memories color future recollections?

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memory token, preconceived notion, Sears repair, dishwasher

While older brains may seem less acute than whippersnapper brains, they apparently have a much better ability to absorb and process information better than the baby brains and can view words, ideas, situations, thoughts, you name it, from a broader context.

Here’s a quote:

Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute [says] “[F]or older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”

Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

It reminds me of what someone told me about the Chinese language: Every fluent speaker may understand more or less what is being said, but as the speaker grows older, he or she know more of the nuances and historical references emitting from these words. It’s like having ready metadata in your brain’s language center — or at least that’s how I interpreted it.

Technorati Tags:
memory, memory token, New York Times, brains, older brains

Lucille was cremated, and her ashes were sent to somewhere in Orange County. “Why Orange County?” I asked my mom.

“I don’t know why Orange County,” my mom said. She repeated the last three words as I did.

“What does it matter?” I heard my dad say in the background.*

I said it didn’t matter, but it was curious. Why did Lucille stay alone in Hemet those last years? Why did she refuse to come back up to Los Angeles? Was she having an affair with my grandfather back in the 1940s, when she was hired to be my mom’s younger sister’s nurse?

It’s odd that the only photo I have of Lucille is this one. My mom is standing at the right with the cute white overcoat (this may have been around the one time I know of when Los Angeles had bona fide snow). She’s about eight-years-old. My aunt Barbara, a year older, looks like she could be Lucille’s daughter, but Lucille looked like a goy version of my Grandma Birdie — tall, thin, minimal chin. This photo was taken of Birdie at Santa Monica beach sometime in the 1930s.

On Thursday, I’m going with my mom and her younger sister Judy to Hemet to go through Lucille’s things for photos and anything else “that has a memory,” as my mom put it.

* * *

* This comment was unsurprising. Back in 1994, Dad failed to tell me my grandfather (his father) had been in the hospital for two weeks and was dying. If I may quote myself…

I missed Rosh Hashanah and my first week of film school classes to attend the Telluride Film Festival Student Program. The following weekend, distracted by my classes and the relentless heat, I made a U-turn into a mini-van and gashed up my head. I didn’t want to worry my grandmother, so I ignored the Post-It note on my desk written in black sharpie that shouted, “Call Grandma and Papa!” until my mother came over for the duffel she had lent me two weeks earlier.

Mom pointed at the note, which by now had a dozen other things scribbled around it, and said, “I’ve been meaning to call Sue myself.”

I dialed. Speaking with a brightness that goes in tandem with guilt, I said, “Hi, Grandma! How are you? How’s Papa?”

“He’s at Cedars,” Grandma stammered. “Didn’t Walter tell you?”

I looked at my mother as I said, “No, he didn’t.” Stupidly, I handed the phone to her. They spoke briefly, a conversation that had no relation whatsoever to the news.

“You didn’t know about Aaron?” Mom said cautiously as she hung up.

“Dad didn’t tell me.”

“He’s been there for almost two weeks,” Mom replied as if the length of Papa’s stay had placed the onus on me to be omniscient. “I’ll make sure that Greg and Jon know, in case they don’t.”

Two days later, my younger brother Jon called, voice cracking, asking if I knew Papa was dying. “No one told me he was even sick. How long have you known?”

I phoned my parents. “What were you guys thinking?” I yelled at Mom, who was unlucky enough to have answered. “After what happened with me?”

“I’m not going to call every goddamn person just because my dad’s dying!” Dad raged in the background, as if three phone calls to his three children would lead down a slippery slope to everybody.

Technorati Tags:
Lucille, memory token, Robyn Weisman, memory, death, conundrum