July 2007 Archives

It was probably on one of my last trips to the Mendocino coast that I spotted it, off the highway, facing the breakers. There was nothing to it but a strip of rooms, one story. Swimming pool and restaurant were clearly absent. It was a cheap place. Unpretentious, modest and definitely cheap. There were not enough guests for a swimming pool, nor sufficient patrons for a coffee shop. The place was way up the coast, miles north of Fort Bragg. A lonely parking lot, a strip motel facing the breakers. I never forgot it.

I also never stayed there. But somehow it offered everything I needed. As my marriage collapsed, so did my income. When a writer of any stripe, novelist, copywriter, any person who has to come up with words in quantity, gets sufficiently depressed, production grinds to a halt. It grinds anyway if you're writing about the latest in packet switching protocols, but at least it can grind profitably. Things weren't grinding for me in the early 1990s. I couldn't admit that my relationship was drying out faster than a raisin, a marriage destined for the past tense.

And while I was running out of money and running out of options, my first wife and I made a last trip or two up the coast. She liked to stay in Mendocino, usually at the posh and pleasant hotel that had seen us married. My looming bankruptcy was my own secret, such was the level of privacy and communication between us. So she did not know that funds were running out along with conversation. But driving up Highway 1, north of Fort Bragg, right along the coast that shatters like a piece of twice toasted bread, I made a mental note of the Hi-Seas Motel. Right on the ocean, as close to the breakers as any motel should get, it spoke of options, stripping things down to the essentials, the sea experience at low cost and no amenities. An undesirable location, being on the way to nowhere, just outside of working-class, post-lumber-mill Fort Bragg. Just a lonely place on the beach.

In retrospect, I'm not sure what I was thinking about. I must have believed that somehow I could sell my ex-wife on the notion of staying there. She liked to hike, after all. She could walk, I could brood. And our days would pass pleasantly. That era was before the truly portable laptop, and well before the development of effective speech recognition, so I wouldn't have done much writing at the Hi-Seas. I didn't expect to. The place's very simplicity and stark maritime orientation summed up everything I needed, much of what I lacked, including money. And the impossibility of truly sharing my life.

More than 15 years had gone by when I began hunting for the motel on the Internet. It had stuck in my mind like the fisherman's one that got away. Doubtless it was still there, pretty much unchanged, a stucco strip more or less modern, dwarfed by the breakers at its back. Just north of Fort Bragg. Or fairly far north of Fort Bragg. Maybe beyond Fort Bragg, in the next town of Cleone. Or in no town, just Highway 1 motels, Mendocino County north. None of my Google searches turned up anything. The motel had vanished. Or had it? The real problem was I couldn't remotely remember the name. The location, the general appearance, all this was indelible. I kept staring at motels and Internet maps and Chamber of Commerce listings and TripAdvisor reviews, postings about this, guides to that. I couldn't spot it.

Of course, I had been looking at it all along. The Hi-Seas Motel was the object of so much Internet scorn that I had dismissed the place. Bad service, office closed half the time, dirty, overpriced. It never dawned on me that the Hi-Seas was the motel I sought. In the end, I settled for the Oceanview Lodge. It looked downright tacky on the PC screen, but then and now, I didn't care. The place had one of those marvelous north-of-Fort Bragg views, right on the ocean, just north of Pudding Creek, near the old trestle. In fact, the more I added these ingredients in my mind, the more I was convinced the Oceanview Lodge had torn down the old motel and put up their new one.

If I hadn't missed the entrance to the Oceanview, driving north and turning around to head south on Highway 1 for a few hundred yards, I would've missed it. The Hi-Seas was still there, badly blackened, boarded and shut, fire department signs warning the curious to stay away from the condemned and dangerous structure. I joked, turning into the Oceanview parking lot, that I had read about the Hi-Seas, and strongly suspected arson by one of its many disgruntled customers. Secretly, I was disappointed, but revealed none of this to Marlou. I was barely revealing the memory to myself, a time in my life when I felt poor in every sense.

Of course, that was then. Now I can afford the Oceanview. And I have a partner who despite her love of interior decor, loves an unobstructed view of the ocean even more. The proprietors of the Oceanview may not invest heavily in interior design, but they put a lot of money into Windex. Our picture window view of the Pacific is always clean.

As for the decor, because I am usually oblivious to such matters, it seems odd that I should give our room a second thought. It's not that the place is savagely unappealing, more that it will not age gracefully. I would guess that the colors are fairly contemporary or were recently. They go together, the grays and magentas, in a formulaic sort of way. If I had been sent to the library on a mission of interior decoration and researched color coordination, the result would have looked like this.

Oddly, it has two bedrooms, joined diagonally, at their corners. Being the wheelchair-accessible room of the motel, my guess is that one room is for an attendant, one for the disabled patron. Hard to say. But I do take great pride in having guessed at the function of the tall Doric column to the left of the refrigerator. It gurgles occasionally, failing badly at its function of sewer pipe concealment. When the toilet flushes upstairs, the Grecian column sings. Is it attached to the shower, I asked Marlou? Would the Grecian column be conveying the showering man's Grecian formula while his economist wife ponders how much the average Grecian earns? Marlou told me I was unworthy of this Grecian urns joke. Perhaps she's right. I'm going to sit outside, gazing at the Pacific, brooding on my failing eyesight and declining years, glancing northward at the charred motel beside us, grateful for the passage of time.

My mother baked bread. She did so at irregular intervals, perhaps rather infrequently, but the effect was stunning. My afternoon arrival from grade school has, to this day, a queasy and unsettled feel about it. There was no warm and welcoming hearth, just a woman who looked like she was in charge and in pain, nearing the end of her shift and her rope, who now had more customers to confront. Except for the occasional bread baking day.

Perhaps it was the focused Zen-like activity of mixing, kneading and shaping. Maybe it was the aromas, the odd yeasty scent of dough rising, then baking, all of which pervaded the house with something different. Whatever it was, something about the process settled my mother and made her seem less remote. Actually, it may simply have been my own consumer response. The bread was wonderful. It came out of the pan coated in butter, smelling as sweet as roasted nuts. My mother had made it.

According to my father, there was a clinical pattern behind all this. Whenever my mother was disturbed, he told me, she commenced bread baking. I took this in. Still, enriched flour, yeast, butter and milk, even when mixed with a hefty portion of misogyny, were hard to beat.

After my parents' divorce, I had high hopes of life, a new life, with my father. It was hard to like the new home, an apartment in the upper story of his office building. The house always felt like someone else's. But my mother and her frightening eruptions were far away. Eighth grade was right across the street. And for a few months, it seemed life would be better.

But by the middle of eighth grade my father was having eruptions of his own. I had abandoned him during his divorce, he told me, running off to live with my aunt and uncle for six months. Now what was I doing to help him get custody of my sister? Had I no sense of responsibility?

Some weekends, my father did not get out of bed. With school out for two days, there were so many things we could do. Drive up into the mountains. Go to Palm Springs. My father stayed in bed, his curtain drawn, his bedroom dark as a thunderstorm at 2 p.m. on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Dad? He turned his head to me slowly, as though barely recognizing me. He was groggy, and later, at 4 p.m. as he sat in his pajamas at the dinette table, he said nothing, unsmiling, seemingly elsewhere.

My brother or myself was dispatched to Hal's Pharmacy. On the way, I always read the prescription. More Desoxyn. The pharmacist read it too. He sighed, shook his head and disappeared into the back. The pharmacist, all starched linen and medicinal smells, returned to put the bottle in a bag, place the bag on the counter and nod without making eye contact.

While my father was pioneering methamphetamine abuse, I was making my own discoveries at the local bakery. On the way home from school I sometimes stopped in to buy a doughnut. The sugar cookies were good too. The bread was always gone. Where was it, I asked the woman behind the counter? She wore a tight dress, white as a nurse's. Her shoes were white too. A net encased her hair. Sold-out, she said. This presented problems. School started at 8 a.m., and there was no way to buy bread in downtown Banning before class. Then it came to me, something brilliant, the simplest of questions. What time do you open? 6:30 a.m. I looked up at her, she looked down at me. The hour made no sense, but nothing in the adult world made sense.

I really didn't expect to see the place open the next morning, but strangely it was. There were no customers. The woman was not there. But there were sounds coming from the back, metal things slamming, metal casters rolling. Best of all, there was the scent of baking bread. The aroma was not quite as pungent as my mother's version, but it was close. A man appeared. He was wearing a white cap and looked surprised to see me. What did I want? A warm flush rose up my cheeks. Surely I should have been thinking about this. What was I doing there? My eyes darted around the glass shelves. Two of those, I said, no, three. Couldn't I count? Me, my brother, my dad. The baker put the bear claws in a bag. They were warm. I ran home.

Up the stairs, through the door and into the dining area. No one was up. Rolls, I had hot, no warm, rolls. What did you do with this sort of thing? Coffee. That was an unknown, like the Elk's Club downtown. But there was a kid equivalent, hot chocolate. We had a pan, milk, cocoa powder. These things mixed poorly and even once marginally combined, tasted awful. Sugar. Now it was okay, although while I looked around for cups, the surface tightened like a snare drum. I cut through the skin, poured the hot chocolate, put the pastries on plates. Breakfast! Breakfast!

My brother ran out in his pajamas, sat down and began eating. He didn't say anything. I didn't expect him to. It didn't matter. My father was the one I wanted to impress. Breakfast! I knocked on his door. What is it? Breakfast, I said, quietly. He emerged, as though summoned to a medical emergency. What was the matter, he asked? Nothing, I said. Breakfast. He sat down heavily, stared at the pastry, sighed and took a bite. He sipped at the cocoa. My brother dashed into the bathroom. Behind us, the sun rose behind Mount San Jacinto. It was an enormous thing, a sheer 11,000 foot peak, to which I never gave a second thought. My father was looking in that direction, sun beating on his face. He shaded his eyes and ate silently.

I stared at the table. I vaguely knew something was wrong. It wasn't quite right, hot chocolate and sweet rolls, but the problem eluded me. In retrospect, there was doubtless too much sugar in the breakfast fare. Something hadn't worked, though I had worked hard. It was time for school. It was time for a lot of things that weren't going to happen. I kept going back to the bakery. I even kept making the hot chocolate. It was, after all, what we had.

When my mother turned 70, I was in my first marriage, the nation was in its first Bush, and we were in California's first capital. Benicia, a riverfront town that in 1990 still had a pleasant funkiness about it. A spate of condos had spread along the yacht harbor, but the rest of the town quietly petered out along the Sacramento River. At water's edge, the buildings and parks just gave up. No piers, no dogs-on-leash paths and public greenery for frisbee throwers. Just a barely paved road out a jetty and broken bits of concrete from demolished this and that, lapping at the waters. This riverfront dilapidation made it easier to imagine the old ferry to Martinez and the paddle wheelers heading upstream to Sacramento.

In short, it was a place that absorbed history, even its origins as the first capital of the state. Benicia's small capitol building, open only at odd hours, had few visitors. Civic events tended not to occur there. My mother's 70th birthday party took place at an old hotel, probably near the water. I can't recall. I've washed part of that day's events out of my memory.

Naturally, my mother insisted it was no big deal, living for seven decades. Naturally, everyone ignored her. And it was wonderful to behold. Everyone who could be there was, and even the absentees pitched into the planning and preparing. We knew that my mother had, if nothing else, survived a fair amount, and she was still there, and so were we. And this may have been part of the celebration, unconsciously. A recognition of mutual survival.

The guest list. Well, there were assorted relations, like the surviving widow of my mother's Los Angeles cousin. And her children, her sister and brother-in-law. Did they all turn up? I think so, but many details have become blurred. I do recall the hotel reception room, though I couldn't swear to the hotel part. A public room somewhere. With guests. Some of whom were strangers to me, people from my mother's working life. Like an Irish nurse, a good friend of my mom, whom I'd never met.

Once the room was ready, the guests arranged, my mother was led in. We had had her waiting outside. The party was no surprise, but it seems to have had a surprise element, perhaps the scope of the thing, the decoration of the room, perhaps some unexpected guests. I can't remember. I also can't recall if I led my mother into the room, but it was likely that I did. One of those eldest son things. Yes, I either led her into the room or was close at hand when someone else did.

Did we all greet her with "surprise!"? It feels like we did. Maybe it was a surprise party. Why is this so hard to recall? Because the real surprise was unfolding before me. My mother entered the room crying. She was not only sobbing, but hunching. She looked around the room bewildered, eyes downcast, frowning. Could she have been angry? It seems incomprehensible, but the whole thing was incomprehensible. My mother approached no one, hung back, clearly wanting not to be there. She stared dumbly at friends and family who had traveled distances, spent money and energy to make the thing happen. My mother turned and made for the exit.

Someone, perhaps her sister Libby, took my mother by the arm and led her forward, into the room. She looked up dumbfounded. Someone was shaking her hand, wishing her well. Congratulations. She managed a weeping acknowledgment, something dragged from her recesses, pro forma. Thank you. She still wasn't smiling, and the more people approached, the more she cried. Surely this wouldn't go on and on. But it did. Even after the sobbing had stopped, she kept trying to retreat, to stand at the edge of the room, as though the goings-on were directed at someone else. People approached her tentatively, unsure as to what was troubling my mother and what was required. My mother nodded, looked at the floor, pained and barely enduring her own reception.

I felt her unease. There was her sister, the touchstone, who was safe and kept talking to her. At that moment, no one else was to be trusted. Meanwhile, the event unfolded. Happy birthday was sung. The cake and candles thing must have gone down somehow. I recall being social and chatty, all the more so as the hour deteriorated. I can't believe it lasted much more than an hour. My mother, teary-faced, pained and continually shrinking toward the exit, never emitted a smile. She barely spoke a word.

I recall being embarrassed. My mother hadn't embarrassed me in many years, not severely. But on this occasion I couldn't stop secretly cringing. I was old enough not to take it personally, but I did. The whole thing seemed inexplicable. Tears of joy would have been wonderful. Lots of tears of joy would have been splendid. But not this. At her 70th birthday party, my mother couldn't take it, clearly didn't like it. And I didn't like her.

Afterwards, amidst the cleaning up, I do recall talking to my sister-in-law, Debbie. I asked what had happened. In retrospect, it seems significant that I didn't ask my wife. The latter was a transitional figure, it seems now. She would have offered little insight into the sad afternoon and not much support. Debbie was a different matter. My brother had emerged from our family experience with more emotional maturity than I, and one could see it in his wife. Your mother, Debbie said, had a rough time with all of this. She looked me in the eye, smiled and shrugged. I sighed and breathed deeply, taking in the reminder that this wasn't my fault. And, perhaps, on some deep level, noting the difference between a woman who was emotionally present, and one who wasn't.

So the details have disappeared, but the essence of my mother's 70th birthday party seems stronger than ever. Until then, I had never grasped how deeply unworthy my mother felt. She could barely receive love from anyone, even her sister. No wonder she had such a difficult time giving it. Self-loathing, a closed and stern demeanor that took over at the wrong moments. She was scarred and broken beyond anything I wanted to conceive.

And yet there was a party. The chief celebrant could not rise to the occasion, but the occasion arose around her anyway. I feel more now than ever that we had done the right thing. No, the experience did nothing to buoy my mother. It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to. It's my memory, and I'll smile if I want to.

Joy, ecstasy, getting high on life doesn't happen every day of the week and rarely happens to two people at the same time, so this sort of occurrence deserves to be honored. Perhaps, even worshiped. Why not? But first, why?

Well, we went to the opera. Which is not without precedent and, while typically enjoyable, rarely enlivens me, sends me into the San Francisco air feeling clarified and enobled. So what was it about Der Rosenkavalier?

I had last seen the opera 30 years ago. I recall its length. I recall the performance at the English National Opera with my adopted parents-in-Britain, German Jews who knew the work up, down and sideways. I do recall the familiar Strauss melodies. Aside from that, I don't recall that the opera was very funny or very anything. The evening was, in fact, one of those broadening experiences. We give something a try and we like part of it. The rest may follow. Or it may not.

In this case, it did, but 30 years later. Seeing the opera's aging heroine, the Marschallin, lounging about in post-coital languor with her boy toy, Octavio, seemed briefly titillating decades ago in London, and it seemed to go on too long. Yesterday in San Francisco, it could not go on long enough. Such enjoyments in my own life are to be savored. And they are often tinged, as in Der Rosenkavalier, with intimations of mortality. One senses that neither opening character can get enough of each other, but the reasons for this are marvelously, lyrically opposed. The odd timing of human biology makes an older woman and a teenager right for each other. But briefly. Until life's unfolding makes it wrong. And with Strauss's soaring music, we feel the loss and the joy of this all at once. Joy? For me, that's part of the mystery.

The setting, the aristocratic remove from life's burdens and mundanities, elevates the experience. The turbaned servant boy, the airy elegance of rococo spaces, days afloat on a sea of butlers and maids, all of this opens characters and audience to the opera's sensual observancy. It's all fleeting, of course. Everything is. Everything is blossoming, fading and withering at the same time. On the way up and on the way out. No moment lasts forever. The Marschallin can lounge and frolic if she wants, but those might be her husband's shouts outside. We never see him, of course, but he's never far away, the Marshall. It's on the gritty howling battlefields that the rubber meets the road for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and he's one of the guys who makes it happen. It's all out there, outside. Der Rosenkavalier's scenes are all interiors, the life inside.

Coarseness comes from inside, too. Baron Ochs, for example, he's one of us, one of our own aristocratic circle. If there's heroism in Der Rosenkavalier, it has much to do with discernment. Everyone's got money. Only some know what it can't buy.

Interestingly, tradition does not belong to the old. Who knows how long the supposed custom of delivering a silver engagement rose has gone on? Generations, certainly, perhaps many. Yet, Octavio leaps at his chance to be the silver rose delivery guy, shipment address unknown. This gives us a sense that ritual is fresh, life-sustaining, a natural for the young.

Yes, life is full of the petty and base, but never mind, for in Der Rosenkavalier, the highest music celebrates the lowest behavior. Baron Ochs gets the waltz. The Italian schemers-for-hire get the laughs. Life gives us the best of everything, regardless of what it contains, simply because it is life.

And simply because I happen to be married to someone who is equally receptive to all this, it was an invigorated, yes, ecstatic, couple that wandered out of the opera. We were met by the sons of British friends, two young London men in their 20s in between university studies, in between everything, visiting San Francisco. We took them out for a simple Italian meal. What else? Something hearty and hardy. For Marlou and me, our spirits were now frothy and buoyant enough. It was time to celebrate dinner and generations and wine and the fact that we were together and alive. And the fact that there will be more operas.