The People in My Neighborhood

I was proud of the many things I did that made me feel independent and self-sufficient. I would visit our friends Jay and Vivian in South Boulder with my family, and anytime we were near their house, I would say, sometimes out loud: “If you blindfolded me, drove me around, and dropped me off anywhere in Boulder, I would be able to find my way home.”

This wasn't true of everyone around me, but my father and I always shared an internal compass that gave us a good sense of direction just about anywhere we found ourselves.

It helped to grow up in a place where the Rocky Mountains are directly to the west. Towering slabs of rock looming over the city? Yep, that's west. The mountain range, which we call the Front Range, in homage I suppose to the pioneers who first met the eastern slope of the Rockies on their westward trek. The Rockies run roughly north to south, with the plains flattening all the way out into the midwestern states. Keep the mountains to your left and you're heading north. With the mountains to your back, you are headed east. Mornings, the sun spills into our living room from the east, and in its evening sink into the west casts its mountain-shaped shadow over us earlier than it does out on the prairie.

By the time I was in my teens, I could walk all over town and feel I knew someone just about everywhere. I didn't spend a lot of time in South Boulder, but in Central and North Boulder, I was always passing houses where my classmates lived, where a teacher lived, where my mother had delivered a baby, where we had friends, where a client at my father's shop lived, or where I'd delivered newspapers.

Some of the friends I remember visiting:

My mother's friend Diane, when she lived in an apartment on Grandview Avenue, at the crest of University Hill, between the University of Colorado campus and the Boulder High School campus. I remember persuading her to buy Count Chocula cereal for the event.

My neighbor friend David, who lived about two blocks away and seemed a little befuddled at being dropped in on by an eight-year-old kid. He was a CU grad student maybe, a little older than the people he roomed with. A black widow bite caused David to go deaf in one ear. That was a shock and changed everything for him. We lost touch after that and later he moved away.

And when I'd come to that Boulder neighborhood and say “You could drop me anywhere and I would know how to get home” was I really wanted to be lost near Jay and Viv's house and have a reason to drop in on them.

It strikes me that I did a lifetime of persuading in my first 13 years. 

What did I look for when I met people and right away tried to gain purchase with them? Only many years later I recognized that's how my father worked. Pour on the charm, and then try to extract proof of their commitment to your shared relationship. It was a very presumptuous model for a friendship and it took me a long time to excise phrases like “You have to tell me how it was!” (no, you don't -– that's up to you) from my repertoire.

Did I pin my huge hopes on these friends wanting rescue? Or distraction from my disasterland full of minefields? I wonder how many calls or visits my parents fielded from people whom I started dropping in on to get me to lighten up. Did that happen? Or am I remembering a couple of mortifying occasions that I've blown up into a character flaw in my narrative?

And now for something completely different that I love: Here's John Common and Blinding Flashes of Light performing (and giving some other folks the chance to perform along too) the groovy song "In My Neighborhood."

Godfamilies are good families

24 years ago today, I learned that our dear friend and former college housemate Erica was in labor. I was living in San Francisco and drove over the Golden Gate Bridge. At Marin General, I learned Erica had given birth very recently. So I got to hold Mark and Erica's tiny baby, named Rachel Stella, when she was just a couple of hours new. It was a joyful moment, especially in light of the fact that Mark and Erica later asked me and my husband to be her godparents. They clarified that a catastrophe for them would not result in our becoming her custodial parents – an uncle was already signed up for that role – but would mean we would be in the circle of friends and family who would become her tribe as she came up in the world.

Sadly we moved away from the Bay Area shortly after we accepted this honor, and it's a little harder to be active in someone's upbringing when you're a thousand miles away. But it's been lovely to become acquainted with our goddaughter over the years, and see her sister grow up into herself too. We've hosted them for a couple of ski trips that we'll always remember fondly.

As a kid, I had a lot of people who loved me and looked out for me everywhere I went, maybe because I was enthusiastic and curious most of the time and willing to chat with people a lot of the time. When I was a teenager, my mother realized she hadn't named a godparent and decided her best friend Marcia was the one. Marcia accepted the honor, godmothering me and my sister. That has become a source of love in my circle many times over as my godmom has two beautiful daughters. Now one of the daughters has three kids of her own, and so the circle keeps expanding to admit more.

As an adult, my circle shifted dramatically away from all those people I grew up with at different times in my childhood – people like Vivian and Hari way back at Olompali, and my family's friends Frank and Phee, Diane, George, Bob and Barbara, Marcia, and many others. There was attrition as people died or moved away or joined different circles, and my circle filled in with other people my age, some of whom have remained close to me. My own big moves back and forth between Colorado and California seemed to exacerbate that.

Few of those non-family members know me well today. I loved Judy dearly, and remained friends with her until her very end, but she's been gone for more than four years. I did some of the shifting by moving to California after graduating from high school. At the time I could not fathom staying in Colorado. I knew every nook and cranny of my town and wanted to go elsewhere. I'd never pictured myself staying.

But we have been friends ever since we met our roommate Erica, and she later married our mutual friend Mark. Having been appointed a member of their daughter Rachel's inner circle continues to give me warm feelings. I like knowing I am there not only for my husband and daughter but also for Rachel and her sister as they set out in the world. It feels good to know my godmother and godsisters are there for me, too. And I know my friend whom we chose to be there for our daughter as her godmother will live up to her pledge, no matter what happens between her and me.

We godfamilies are always a place where members our tribe can land. We will always have room for the others. How fortunate we are for these tribes, for loving and being loved by them.

Behaving Badly and B'stila

Sorting through my recipe box tonight, I found a recipe for B'stila from a California Moroccan restaurant called Dar Maghreb that plunged me headlong into a series of memories of an amazing food discovery and some wild nights long ago.

John and Lizzie, from exotic England, had blown into town on a crooked wind and livened our little  Boulder hippie scene right up. They told us about their wild adventures in Morocco and Kenya, unpacking from colorful cloth bags and carved boxes hashish and tobacco and clay chillums, which we all smoked, even me now and then. John and Lizzie were fun and cute and tan and had English accents. What was not to love?

Of course, I, 12 that summer, developed a terrible and obvious crush on John, with his lovely accent, for which he teased me, aping my pouts and such. I loved Lizzie too, so sympathetic and petite and clearly tough as nails but with a weakness for her partner. I still remember her telling me, "You're going to have humongous tits!" (This never came to pass, like a lot of their promises.) Oh, what a complicated package they were, inviting us to fall in love with them and I suspect grabbing anything they could get their hands on.

Fortunately, I was off-limits to John as a kid (my hirsute and tough parent would have pounded him flat) but there was plenty of tension between John and the men in the room over the other women in the room. I felt that same vertigo I felt with my mother with Lizzie, wondering why she went along, and trying to comprehend what this gave them, all the women like my mother and Lizzie, and later my stepmother. Years later I saw my stepmother and she said "I had to leave your father because he couldn't stand to see me be happy." John and Lizzie had come along when things were especially dire; my parents wouldn't be together for many moons after John and Lizzie blew out of town a few weeks later. I suppose my father's controlling fury had something to do with why John and Lizzie were able to come along and get us in their sway, as the Rolling Stones put it in the song. My guess is when they'd wheedled and borrowed and cadged and downright swiped as much as they could get away with, they hit the road again.

Eight or so years later, my mother and stepfather and I had moved out to L.A. We had all been yearning to go to California for various reasons. When I wanted to go to school on the west coast, my parents figured it would be a good time to go too, so we went together. I lived with them for the year, having broken up with my high school sweetheart (and having a fling with our mutual best friend).

Out of the blue, in L.A., we finally got a letter from John and Lizzie. For years after their first disappearance, we wondered where they were. We would think to ourselves, "In prison?" We would say to each other, "Maybe we should print an ad in the Rolling Stone." I think my mother might have even gone ahead and done it once, knowing perfectly well they'd never see it, whether they had landed on the Steppes, the Spanish Steps, or in Stepney. John had shared with us a calling card printed all in blue that read "Expeditions" with their names, John and Elizabeth D____, and bore a printed drawing of a Land Rover loaded with gear on it. Pre-mobile phones, there was no way to keep up with nomads, unless you knew which post office to send mail to their attention in care of General Delivery.

But back to Dar Maghreb, which is what launched this reminiscence. When I was 18 and living with my parents in L.A., guess who should turn up but John and Lizzie, a little older and more careworn, and us a little wiser but no less surprised and happy to see them. We had a blast partying with them. They introduced us to new drug experiences, and told bawdy, titillating stories of getting people to do other things new to them as well. They fascinated me and repelled me, in part because they seemed exactly the same as they had been before, but also like people acting a role. I studied them and wondered if they'd been acting before and I just hadn't noticed, or if their act had grown a little stale to them.

We went to Century City and bought sweatshirts at Heaven after a day lazing in the sun and bodysurfing at Santa Monica Beach. We hot tubbed on the deck in the humid night air, the evening fog permeated with the pyrethrin the landlord had sprayed to control the fleas and keep my mother's Persian cats from being eaten alive.

A couple of years back, when visiting L.A., we had been to this amazing Moroccan restaurant, Dar Maghreb. This had been our first immersive experience with the Moroccan restaurant, a particular form of hospitality with the reclining pillows and the big tray in the middle, the tea poured from astonishing heights without spillage, the sweet mixed with the savory in tender lamb and prunes and in the B'stila, everyone's favorite. B'stila is an appetizer of flaky sheets of filo wrapped around a custardy cinnamony chicken dish that we ate with our hands and wished that's all there was to eat. That and the mint tea, poured by waiters numerous and professional, like soldiers, interchangeable in their fancy trousers all alike.

The first time we went to the Los Angeles Dar Maghreb, we were astonished by the atmosphere and the foods and ate and drank and some people did cocaine in the bathroom and came back for more food and belly dancing. The check was huge but we were with rich people and felt rich ourselves and I wasn't caring who was paying because I was 16 then and still a kid.

When John and Lizzie came to visit us in L.A., a plan hatched to go to Dar Maghreb. We wanted to impress them. Then someone had the brilliant idea: Let's go to Palm Springs for dinner. So we drove out to the Dar Maghreb in Rancho Mirage, where Frank Sinatra used to live, and it dazzled us all over again. And again the B'stila was the best part.

By the end of our epic night, we had eaten and drunk with reckless abandon, people had tucked folded bills into the belly dancers' outfits, and some people had snorted lines of coke from the ornate tray in the center. And we all put in cash for our dinners, even me this time, as I was working 50 hours a week to save money for school in northern California starting in the fall. A minute after we were out the door, John and Lizzie were hustling us toward our cars. A minute later, a waiter emerged, hollering. We had stiffed the waiter. He had found our check with a measly couple of dollars on a check that totaled hundreds. John tried to talk his way around it, but failed. People from our party pulled cash out of pockets to settle the injustice and stop the embarrassment. I didn't have any cash left to add by then.

John and Lizzie left shortly after that, our last visit to Dar Maghreb. I have a vague memory of hearing they were no longer together. I haven't seen John and Lizzie since, but I was ecstatic to find this recipe in Great Recipes from Los Angeles. I have made this recipe once, and since have made a simplified version of it that was almost as good and half the work. This is the original recipe. You will need all day to make this version.

B'stila
DAR MAGHREB

The Chicken:
2 chickens (3 pounds each), or 8 pigeons
1 teaspoon salt
Pepper
1/4 cup olive oil
1 cup butter
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 cup chopped onions
1 clove garlic, crushed
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
1/2 cup chopped coriander leaves (also called cilantro)
1/2 teaspoon safron
2 cups water

The B'stila:
1 pound butter
1/2 cup chopped parsley
1/2 cup chopped coriander leaves
1/2 cup chopped onions
 Pepper
12 eggs
Salt
10 ounces blanched almonds (about 2 cups)
Oil
Confectioners sugar
Cinnamon
1/2 pound clarified butter
1 pound filo (also called phyllo) dough

To make the chicken, put the whole chicken's [sic] breast down, in a Dutch oven, with the giblets, salt and pepper, oil, butter, ginger, onion, garlic, parsley, coriander, saffron, and water (or enough for the liquid to reach 1/3 the depth of the chickens).

Bring the mixture to a boil, and after it boils, turn the chickens breat side up and stir to mix the spices. Bake at 450 F. for approximately 1 hour. Baste the chickens from time to time so they are thoroughly marinated with sauce (if the chickens are still slightly pink, remember they will be cooked again inside the B'stila).

When the chickens are cooked, let the cool, reserving broth. Bone them, leaving the skin on. Separate the chickens into bite-size pieces and put them aside.

To prepare the B'stila, boil the reserved chicken and add the 1 pound of butter, the parsley, the onions, and pepper. Beat the eggs as for an omelet. Pour the eggs into the chicken broth and whip over a moderate fire until the eggs are scrambled to large curds [not certain; my copier omitted some of this]. Add salt to taste.

Heat a film of oil in a skillet and fry the almonds until they reach a deep golden color. Watch them carefully, as they burn quickly. Remove them from the heat and allow the almonds to cool. Grind them coarsely in a food processor. Stir in sugar and cinnamon.

The steps preceding may be done ahead, and the eggs refrigerated until needed.

To construct the B'stila, grease the bottom of a 14-inch skillet with a thick coat of the clarified butter. Place 2 sheets of the filo across the bottom, letting it overhang 6 to 8 inches all around. Spread a ... three-quarters of the eggs. Sprinkle on half of the toasted almonds, then add half of the chicken. Layer on the remaining eggs, then the chicken, then the almonds. Fold over the filo across the top, adding another sheet of filo if the bottom sheets don't cover the top. Brush the filo with clarified butter. Bake at 450 F for 30 to 35 minutes, until the top is golden brown. Remove the B'stila from the oven and flip it onto a large serving plate. Sprinkle more confectioners' sugar over the top and make a crisscross design with 1/4-inch wide bands of cinnamon.

Makes 12 servings.

NOTE: B'stila is eaten with the fingers in Moroccan restaurants. Use only the right hand, and just the thumb and first two fingers, pinching a bite at a time. But be careful, the filling is steaming hot.

Mind-body resonance: The opposite of cognitive dissonance

It occurs to me that I don't know whose idea it was to live in the town where we landed after the blitz of losing my sister 40 years ago, just before I turned six. We had left California within days of her death for Colorado, to settle in the liberal enclave of Boulder, which would be better than the cowtown that Denver was in the 1970s since the Beats had all hightailed it for the coasts. Now I see the wisdom of it. I see it could be in part my father's way of handing down something he was himself given even though the values he espouses have always tended to involve total freedom from the strictures of money and status. His gift, the gift of growing up in a safe and secure enclave, a place where I could - and did - sink roots, came at no personal cost to him, an added benefit in his eyes I am certain.

But growing up in idyllic places didn't necessarily shelter me from the evils of the world. I lost a sister and a substantial portion of my innocence to the brutality that plagued us from His Favorite Chair throughout my childhood in my laid-back college town. The times I tried to bring my grievances to the perpetrator of this violence in my life, he's pulled a Ronnie Reagan on me and disclaimed any memory of alleged events. He's never seemed particularly contrite or sorry about not knowing how to parent and not trying hard to do it when he had the chance. In recent years he has asked me to paper over all that – what he calls forgive – but I haven't felt the love that would inspire me to forgive. That's what it comes down to. I've felt the obligation conferred by family roles, but I have not felt a deep and unconditional love for who I have been and who I have become, nor for how I have chosen to live my life.

Also, I can't ignore the din of that weird and constant superliminal tallying, his continuous attempt to leverage as much influence as possible so as to claim you on his list of Friends I Drop In On When In Town (FIDIOWITs).

Thing is, you might be surprised at two things about him: the steadfastness of the FIDIOWITs who will see him year in and year out, who will let him sleep in their guest rooms and allow him to commandeer their kitchens to make coffee with great ceremony at various times of the day; you might also raise your eyebrows at the high turnover rate among his FIDIOWITS, as some recognize a certain modus operandi and turn away from its strange fascination.

Many a friend of mine has laughed at me when I yearned for coffee on the sluggish slope of an afternoon, but those times are also when I also recall my father’s rhythms – inevitably accompanied by memories of how he imposed his cycle upon everyone else. On one infamous rafting trip a few years ago, my father stripped to nothing in the middle of camp and proceeded to set a skillet on a stove and roast and hand-grind his coffee beans, then boil water and drip a pot of fresh coffee. I had stopped going rafting with him years earlier, when I'd realized I never again wanted to be dependent on him, especially in a car with him at the wheel. (If you’re going on rafting trips, there are always shuttles involved, and so it’s usually unavoidable to share cars a couple of times during the trip.) It helps that my dear husband is shy of whitewater rafting, too, so I figure we may as well all heed those instincts. With every passing year, I feel less of a need to pursue great risks for exciting payoffs, as I feel more invested in my life and loves. (And my acquisition of mountain biking skills in the past five years has suffered grievously as a result.)

To my sister, my father called my adamant feelings toward him a "grudge." There's a kernel of truth there: No, I haven't let go of everything. Especially not if letting go means pretending nothing ever happened. I haven't let go if letting go means ignoring all the scars, those dense, fibrous barriers that exist between us even now.

I'm still pissed off about some of this ancient history to call him "my birthfather" when I talk about him. One of the reasons for the endurance of this anger is the deprivation his presence imposed on the rest of us when I was growing up. There's a long backstory, but he didn't exactly fulfill the potential his parents saw for him (another detail that makes the Gilmore Girls' story familiar, except theirs is ultimately secure, funny, and loving instead of chaotic, violent, and disturbing). So much of the time he seemed to resent us, his family, for holding him back personally and financially. He has been squirrelly about money as far back as I can remember. My mother had to beg him for enough money for the absolute basics to run the household; he used every ounce of his power to persuade her that she should not have a job of her own.

The sure signs of the prism through which he saw the world were the first accusations he hurled at others from drunken lips, just after that slam of the glass of whiskey onto the table signifying the moment his inner alcoholic stew had roiled to a sputter and fume, spilling over its pot. Deceitful! Secretive! Selfish! he would cry, lashing out while we women and children ran for cover. Hours later it would be like sifting through the wreckage at a battlefield, however subtle the revelations of the landscape. We were always on high alert as we scanned for broken things or worse, bruised or broken people. We didn't know who would come back to the house and the chair in the living room and the dinner table and the whiskey bottle that night or the next, whether that man would be angry or contrite, whether the wounds inflicted this time would be visible damage to a face or emotional lacerations. At any given time the odds always seemed about equal, with one option appearing far worse and more potentially destructive than the other.

And everyone wondered why I was falling asleep in my classes after lunch all through junior high and high school. I was finally relaxing a little by then every day, catching up on my rest before I had to steel myself once again to face home.

I find it odd now that our father now appears to think we as his children are interested in what he has, when to me it's only stuff. He has nothing that I feel belongs to me. It feels a bit ironic, though, in that he always accused his father of attaching strings to every gift, requiring hoops to be jumped or barrels cleared for every contribution he was expected to put up for school or anything else. Now my father seems to be grasping for that power himself, but I see him coming up empty-handed again and again, his hooks still baited.

We might have gone on being tolerant of one another for years but I threw the wrench into the works a couple of years back when I realized I did not trust him not to say or do something offensive around me or my child. I told him that his fundamental disrespect for women was incompatible with how I am raising my kid. Nothing I see or hear about him convinces me that has really changed in this respect (or disrespect, as the case may be). And there's the he's-doing-his-best-with-his-limited-set-of-tools argument, but even that's worn awfully thin. I see how far my mother and I have come in our adult lives, and I know many more who have risen above or gone beyond their family's or even their own expectations for themselves and made themselves better and more loving people.

For me, another evening spent propping up a myth of family closeness indicated by the time spent sitting through another recital of a many-times-told travel anecdote is not enough. I deserve more than that from my friends, and I give more of that to my friends.

Furthermore, I don't see an obligation to take care of him someday no matter what simply by virtue of his being my elder. He spent so much of his life trying to disclaim responsibility for me as quickly as he could that I feel not allowing him close enough to me to treat me in that way again is a justifiable and proportional reaction.

The great news from this side of the familial divide: refusing to engage and "forgive" doesn't mean I need to act any differently from how I truly feel. I continue to feel that honoring my own truths has been among the most healing things I have ever done. I give myself a nice pat on the back for this. Thanks, me.

At-one-ment

Some thoughts for this Tuesday morning (this post is dedicated to my friend Charlotte):

I had a survey Western civilization course at Berkeley, 20-some years ago, where the woman who taught our discussion section was absolutely brilliant and yet had no clue about popular culture. She knew the Greeks and the Romans inside and out, from scientists to historians to politicians to warriors, and explained wonderful things like "hubris" and "hamartia" (missing the mark, a great concept) to us relative neophytes. One time she was explaining Yom Kippur and the idea of atonement, which she broke down into At-One-Ment and I have always read it that way since. In the worldview she described to us, the concepts of atonement and becoming as one were completely intertwined. Yet when someone said, "May the Force be with you" and we laughed, it went right over her head. (Note to Charlotte: I haven't read McEwan's book so I don't know. But your posts make me want to read it very much, and I will.)

That's one of the things I admire about my friends, though: they do think about the big stuff and the little stuff. As my friend recently pointed out on her blog, a lot of people are preoccupied with the little stuff to the absolute exclusion of international relations, politics, law, etc. A frat house near the university in our town was shut down last week because of health and sanitation violations (you know things are bad when they have to say "health" AND "sanitation" in that context). Authorities said the boys had been living in "substandard conditions," surrounded by overflowing and broken toilets, vomit, and "loose garbage" (another evocative elocution that calls to mind a scene from Trainspotting or something). From the front, the "house" is just a somewhat shabby brick building, like many of the buildings that house students in that neighborhood. It's three stories high and has some greek letters adorning the front. You can't tell from the outside that there were eight people living like animals in there. And what were they doing? What were they thinking? Did they know anything about the Supreme Court's decision about granting habeas corpus hearings to suspects being held at Guantanamo this past week? Do they know who they are going to vote for and why in the coming election -- or are they planning to register to vote at all? What was on their minds before the inspectors and cops came to close their residence down? I am sad for these young fellows, yet also continually heartened by my friends and glad to know we're all out there thinking and waging our own little battles against apathy and ignorance, working at staying human.

This just in: The BBC radio report this morning cited a study in Sweden that showed remarkable similarities in hemisphere sizes of the brains of (get this!) straight women and gay men, and between the brains of gay women and straight men! I just love this bit of information! It just seems to absolutely confirm something I have long felt.