Suzy Says

Dad in Kings Canyon, 1980s

This may be the first year I did not write a post about Dad on his birthday.

I had a hard time with his birthday this year, probably because of losing my Roscoe so recently. I am still struggling with Roscoe’s loss on a daily basis, so I guess thinking of someone else I loved greatly and lost suddenly didn’t help with keeping the flood of sadness at bay.

It would have been Dad’s 85th birthday, a milestone one. I’m not sure if that played into it too. But somehow, I got through the day at work, surrounded by the usual St. Patrick’s Day crap the day always brings, me with my heart aching and everyone else all cheerful. Good thing I’m good at faking it at work.

Thanks to Jonathan’s girlfriend Rio, we had dinner together the day after Dad’s birthday to honor him. When Jonathan checked out my car before I headed to Monterey, I said, “Let’s have dinner soon.” He agreed, and Rio pulled out her calendar, saying “Let’s pick a date, or it will never happen.” So we looked, saw the day after Dad’s birthday was a Friday, and a date was born.

When I came home from work that evening, Lupe and Luna came running up to greet me as usual, and Rio’s car was in the driveway. Inside, I found Rio and Jonathan already cooking in my kitchen(ette), a welcome sight indeed. They had brought everything needed to make Moroccan chicken, a recipe of Rio’s late mother (I’m sorry to say she is now a member of our sad No Parents Club). My brother’s giant cast iron pan was heating on my tiny stove, and he was browning chicken while Rio chopped kumquats.

I put my hair up, opened a bottle of wine, and got out my grandmother Nana’s wineglasses so we could toast Dad and Rio’s lovely mother Gloria. I set to work cutting up apples in the style of that same grandmother (carving pieces off until arriving at the core) to be made into crumble for dessert. I washed dishes while Jonathan made the crumble part, in which the secret ingredient is cardamon. He also puts in a pinch of cloves.

As Jonathan observed, having such a small space to cook in keeps you honest, since you have to clean up to make room to work in. Washing the dishes reminded me of doing the dishes with my much-loved grandfather Hoho* (husband of Nana). He had arthritic hands, and washing the dishes felt good to him. I used to dry, and he’d tell me stories:

These were special moments which I will always treasure.

Rob was already there, working hard at a new shelving extravaganza, and Megan came by after her 14 hour shift with coffee in hand. She has a magical ability to switch from coffee to wine in the afternoon which I admire but couldn’t emulate.

Rio asked to see some family photos. She especially liked this one of Jonathan and Megan in Maine. I’m guessing Jonathan was about 10, which would make Megan 4:

We got so far down memory lane that I almost (but not quite) forgot the crumble, pulling it out of my Easy Bake sized oven just in time. The Moroccan chicken was quite magnificent:

If I made it again, I’d use apricots instead of prunes, and maybe toss in a handful of toasted almonds for crunch, but it was delicious, and we were glad to remember Rio’s Mom along with our Dad. It made me happy to have my house full of the people I love most, all sharing food we cooked together:

It was a wonderful evening.

*So called because of his booming, distinctive laugh. You can read more about him here. He was really something.

A YEAR AGO: Wine and wild turkeys.

It was a dark and stormy morning. I started it off on the wrong foot by putting my bare one into an alarmingly big (and remarkably cold) puddle by the table in the kitchen. That’s what I get for running around barefoot. My late, lamented stepmother found this habit deplorable. To her, only poor people went around with no shoes and it was utterly shameful.

Unfortunately for all of us, she was not around to see me get my comeuppance, or to notice the other big puddle near the sliding glass doors. Feeling like my house was falling apart around me, I went to feed the kitties, only to discover a large and slimy banana slug* in Clyde’s dish. I’m not sure which of us was more concerned. Clyde looked at it in horror (maybe it had bare feet) while I threw caution and the slug to the winds by grabbing it in my bare hands and chucking it into the woods. Why should my feet have all the fun?

The fun was just beginning. When I turned on the water in the shower, the water stayed persistently cold. It normally takes a while to warm up, and in the winter, I don’t have to add cold water to the hot, but it soon became clear that the pilot light in the flash heater was out.

As you would only expect in a house as eccentric as mine, where the light switches say “NO” when they’re on and you turn them off by flipping them up, the flash heater is located outside. Yes, where they keep the wind and the rain.

I pulled my coat, hat and flowered rain boots on over my PJs and deplorably bare feet and went out to investigate with a flashlight. It’s at moments like this when you realize that no matter how faux, you are in fact a grown up, and no one else is going to fix your flash heater in the early morning rainy darkness. I thought longingly of my brother-in-law Rob, sleeping innocently just yards away, and his ability to fix everything**. He could take care of this in less time than it took me to put on my coat and hat.

I couldn’t make it light by pushing the igniting button, so I went back inside and got one of those barbecue lighters. Then I pressed the gas button with one hand and, leaning back as far as possible, applied the lighter through the hole in the front and hoped for the best. I am pleased to report that nothing exploded and I lived to tell the tale. Also that the flash heater lit and stayed lit, much like F. Scott Fitzgerald.

On the other hand, my bare feet also discovered that Clyde had thrown up on the bathmat. At least it was on the way into the shower.

*When I still lived in the city, I came up here to visit my sister. Her bathroom is off the front porch, and when I went to use it late one night, I discovered a banana slug had wrapped itself around the doorknob by wrapping my hand around the banana slug. I shrieked with horror and I still think I could hear my brother-in-law snickering.

**He’s building more shelves for me! Stay tuned!

A YEAR AGO: Remembering my beloved father on his birthday.

Megan and I decided to take a break from the rainy present to visit the stormy past.

The Kelley House museum in the Village had an exhibit on local shipwrecks, of which there have been many. There were more than 160 between 1850 and 1900. It’s less surprising to me that there were so many wrecks on these rocky shores than that people attempted to sail them at all. And those who did and chose to come ashore here did so on a sort of Victorian zip line:

It’s also surprising to me that this area, still so rural and isolated, was one of California’s original counties and that the Village was settled shortly after the Gold Rush, in 1850.

One of these many wrecks was the Frolic, a clipper ship loaded with luxurious cargo from China, including porcelain (Megan was wearing a necklace set with a piece of patterned porcelain recovered from the wreck of the Frolic), silk, gold jewelry, ivory napkin rings and thousands of bottles of Edinburgh ale, which had already traveled two-thirds of the way around the globe from the British Isles via India. She ran aground near what is now Point Cabrillo* in the (undoubtedly foggy) summer of 1850.

The crew, including Captain Faucon, immortalized by Richard Dana as the good captain in “Two Years Before the Mast”, abandoned ship, and in salvaging the wreck, the redwood forests on shore were discovered. An industry was born.

The owner of the Kelley House was no stranger to ocean travel. He convinced his reluctant bride in Prince Edward Island to join him in the wilds of Mendocino by promising to build her a nice house, which he did:

It still has a stunning view of both the ocean and the Village. He ran the mercantile next door, where his strict Baptist wife once chopped open a barrel with a hatchet, thinking it contained liquor, when it in fact contained molasses.

To avoid further messy confrontations, he built his wife her very own church, which can be glimpsed in the photo above. Mrs. Kelley’s piety was not shared by her son and heir, who had his own son and heir with the family’s maid, marrying her two years after the baby’s birth. The fact that the maid was Catholic was apparently more horrifying to the elder Mrs. Kelley than the rather shocking circumstances of her grandchild’s birth.

We thoroughly enjoyed our little trip into the past. As we left the lovely house and the friendly docents, we passed the duck pond, where it seems the whale watching season has begun:

In the background on the right hand side, you can see Mrs. Kelley’s red church and part of the octagonal privy she insisted on using for her entire long life (she lived to be 90), considering indoor plumbing unhygienic. The very fancy house**:

Mr. Kelley built for his beautiful daughter Daisy’s:

wedding present in 1879 was between the Kelley House and the church, and featured not only indoor plumbing but “sprinkles”, or showers.

*It would be nearly 60 years before the lighthouse would be built there. I wonder if the Frolic could have been saved if the lighthouse was there on that long ago summer night?

**I happened to be there when I got Megan’s frantic call about Star being towed in Megan’s car in San Francisco. I was delivering a gift basket to Aaron Paul, my crush from “Breaking Bad”. It’s probably just as well for both of us that he wasn’t there.

A YEAR AGO: Some nice surprises in the mail.

Monica’s Shop

My friend Monica is always inspiring and creative. Her store is full of things both beautiful and practical, and the atmosphere is somehow both peaceful and exciting, because you never know what you’ll find.

Monica put her own twist on the First Friday tradition, by opening early instead of staying open late. She was surprised by the enthusiasm of the response: people were lined up fifteen minutes before the store was scheduled to open!

Inside, Monica was celebrating the bees, serving local roastery Thanksgiving’s Bee Bold blend coffee (a percentage of sales goes toward saving bees through Friends of the Earth) along with hand-made apple-ginger scones accompanied by honey-cinnamon butter. To go with the coffee, there was lavender sugar, and for non coffee drinkers, there was fresh spring water infused with berries, which was delicious.

Near the refreshments were displays of honeycombs, beeswax, and how bees produce honey as well as bee friendly plants to encourage local gardeners to attract and feed our endangered apian friends.

The artwork was by local children and was absolutely charming:

I was sorry that this delightful piece was sold, because I would have bought it immediately:

As it was, I settled for a handmade and sparkly bee pin:

You know how I love the sparkle.

A YEAR AGO: A trip into the past.

Hi! It’s 4:30 am! Want to take one guess why I’m up at this ridiculous hour?

You’re right. Of course it’s Audrey.

I tried to ignore her relentless pounding at the balcony door and the scritch of her claws against the glass of the sliding doors downstairs, but eventually, as she knew I would, I got up, put the outside lights on (go away, monsters!) and let her out in the storm that’s been battering the house since yesterday*, hoping that her stripy, featherweight body wouldn’t blow away. Possibly the wind wouldn’t dare to mess with her, though.

As I turned on the coffeemaker and the heater, I was thankful for the power still being on, a bet I would have lost. The winds were furious and the rain was slashing yesterday afternoon and into the evening. My friend and neighbor Jim said that one of his inside doors had slammed shut because of wind blasting through a dog door. Yikes.

So I went to bed resigned to waking up in the cold and dark, which I did, but not in the way I expected.

Um…thanks for the extra-long Sunday, Audrey?

There’s still a chance of a power outage as another storm is set to rage through here today, but I hope not. March has come in like a lion!

Stormy Ocean

My house has sprung a couple of new leaks, which I will have to tell Mark about. One upstairs, and one downstairs. The exact location of leaks can be complicated by the curved walls/roof.

Outside, the orchid has begun to bloom:

We are a little concerned about the orchard over at the family estate, though. There are blossoms on all the trees, so if the rain and wind blow them off, there will be a lot less fruit this summer. Hopefully our bees have been busy pollinating.

*Just emptied four inches of rain out of the gauge!

A YEAR AGO: March madness, in the hated form of Daylight Savings Time. Maybe all my complaining is finally paying off, because a San Jose assemblyman is planning to introduce a bill to Congress to end the madness. As the Beach Boys would say, wouldn’t it be nice?

You know you live in the country – and a rather eccentric part of the country – when things like this appear on the local message boards.

1. Wondering who the new kid in town is:

   Anyone know who the new “man on the street” is?

   The fellow on the motorized unicycle wearing a long black coat and carrying a Red Cross bag?

   Responses were as follows:

   “I think it is Dr. Doolittle. He is now working for the Red Cross as an “Emissary on Wheels”. I understand that he can “talk to the animals”! Listen in on his conversations with the stray cats in the neighborhood. Very meowing. “

   “Mystery solved!

   He is a healer using many modalities, (hence the Red Cross bag) and lives in several different countries. He is visiting here for a few days to enjoy our “Scotland-like weather”.

   That’s the report from downtown!”

2. Another mystery involved the owner of the local bookstore:

   When I arrived this morning and unlocked the store, there was a friendly German Shepherd inside. He’s hanging with me now. So … did anyone forget their dog here last night?

3. Chicken giveaways (though you have provide your own housing – maybe there is no such thing as a free hen):

   4 chickens free to good home or stomach. We can eat’em, cause they were our pets. Just finished molt, so they aren’t laying right now, but when they do, we would get 4/day. They are free range. We are keeping their coop.

4. An attempted pig giveaway (or at least, attempted pig owner location):

   Three not so little pigs are in my fenced pasture, about a mile up X Rd. I think they spent the night in a neighbor’s yard. One black, one black and white and another smaller black one.

   Anyone lose 3 pigs?

While I don’t know if the pigs were ever reunited with their rightful owner or if the chickens found a new home (hopefully vegetarian), I do know that I came to work one day and found that my coworker had gifted me with a dozen eggs which she had collected from her hens that morning:

You can’t get fresher than that. It was a nice surprise.

A YEAR AGO: A less nice surprise.

My culinary errands were not 100% successful. I found myself unable to face the line at Swan’s. Even at 10:30 am, the line was a block long and my patience wasn’t. I also struck out at Bob’s Doughnuts, where they were sold out of old fashioneds, so I settled for two cinnamon cake doughnuts. Of course Victor’s never lets me down, and I bought a surprise pizza for Megan and Rob to thank them for their cat sitting while I was away.

It was a bright, sunny day as I left the city, the Bridge gleaming International Orange in the sun, the white sails of boats dotting the blue Bay and the pastel houses tumbling down the hills. The hills closer to home were the deep green of winter, but starred with California poppies, daffodils, and calla lilies. The vineyards slept, but around them trees were hazed with green leaves and clouds of pink and white blossoms. Weeping willows dipped their long fronds into rivers that are rivers again instead of trickles.

Through the tall, dark, and handsome redwoods and out to the ocean, which was showing off for me. For the first time in three years, I missed my brother’s Polar Plunge, where he jumps in the freezing water to benefit Special Olympics, usually after singing a song while in costume. This year, it was “Under the Sea” from “The Little Mermaid”, and Megan was there to cheer him on and send me this photo of our merman after the jump:

I am so proud of him!

Arriving home, I was greeted by Luna and Lupe, wagging their tails and jumping for joy as I petted them, and Megan, who happened to arrive home at the same time. Megan was much more helpful at unloading the car than the dogs were. Pets, I have noticed, never feel that they need to lend a paw with the housework.

Megan’s delight at the unexpected pizza delighted me. And it was nice to have unloading help. As we worked, we caught up on what had happened during my short absence.

Clyde came running to me, meowing his distinctive ClydeSound(TM), and I picked him up and cuddled him while he purred and pressed his head against me. Audrey, of course, does not permit such indignities as Being Picked Up, and she kept swatting me every time I passed her. I’m not sure if she was asking for attention or letting me know how annoyed she was at my absence, but hey – it’s Audrey. She also chased Lupe and Luna away with her tail all puffed up and giant.

My house seems amazingly quiet after Monterey and San Francisco, with their traffic and sirens and people yelling and honking. All I can hear are frogs peeping and cats purring. I’m really glad that I listened to Megan’s advice and came home on Saturday, so I have all of Sunday to relax and get ready to jump back on the hamster wheel on Monday.

The dreaming spires of Monterey

I’m coming to you from San Francisco, where the foghorns are singing their sad song and the wild parrots are crying out harshly as their green and red wings clatter overhead. And there will be Lemongrass (delivered) for dinner!

Before I left the balmy shores of Monterey, I stopped by Del Monte Beach. I was charmed by the dunes dotted with wildflowers:

and the fact that there was actual sand. I’m used to the rocky shores of Mendocino and San Francisco, so it was delightful to walk along the shore with my feet sinking deep into the soft sand:

Murres and oystercatchers rode the waves, and they were joined by a fellow surfer:

As I drove away from the beach, I noticed several people either changing into or out of their wetsuits, so it must be a popular surfing location.

My route to San Francisco took me through farmland, dotted with what my friend Janice calls “contented California cows”, but also thick groves of spiky artichokes. I stopped at a farmstand, where they were working the fields right behind. I loved the cut outs by the highway:

I came away with some early strawberries and of course artichokes.

Traffic was kinder to me leaving Monterey than it was getting there, and tomorrow I will head home after running some important culinary errands: Swan Oyster Depot, Bob’s Doughnuts, and Victor’s Pizza, not necessarily in that order.

Beautiful Monterey Bay

I woke up to the shouts of seagulls and a beautiful, sunny Monterey day. It was hard to believe it was February as Wednesday and I headed to the famous aquarium. I even took off my thin sweater and had the windows down. It would have been a perfect convertible day.

My friend Richard, who has friends everywhere, finagled a free pass for me to the Aquarium, a breath-taking savings of $40. The last time I was there, I went with my father, so it’s clearly been several years, and I think it was around $25, which seemed like a lot at the time. Even if I’d had to pay, it would have been worth it.

The Aquarium is located on Cannery Row, made famous by the great John Steinbeck. Little remains of Steinbeck’s gritty, hard-working area where women worked 14 hour days canning sardines caught in the bay, though the Aquarium houses some of the boilers which ran night and day to aid in the canning efforts:

And sardines swirl in silvery shoals in the kelp forest:

Fearsome lion fish, who are poisonous yet striking:

lurk among coral and brilliantly colored sea stars. Also poisonous – and striking – are the jellyfish:

They pulse gently as they waft through the water, looking so delicate and otherworldly that it’s hard to believe they are real. If I had to choose my favorite thing among all the marvels, the jellyfish would probably be it, though they get pretty stiff competition from the sea otters:

They are so utterly adorable, swimming around with their webbed paws spread wide, coming right up to the glass as if to say hello, and generally being little goofballs romping around underwater. They are like big underwater Clydes, and I love them.

It was as delightful to visit there now as it was so many years ago, and I walked into the sunny day feeling like a kid again, with a sense of wonder and joy. Now, that’s priceless.

You guys! I actually left the County after a year and a half. Alert the media!

I’m coming to you from Monterey, where it’s warm enough to have the door of my motel room open at 7:30 pm as I await the delivery of Chinese food.

While I love food delivery as much as – well, probably more than – the next girl, and suffer from slothitude in about the same way, in my defense, I left the house at 10:00 am and got here at 4:30.

Granted, it’s 260 miles, including a long stretch of winding, narrow country roads, and I stopped for lunch in San Francisco, but still. Traffic was pretty bad in some parts, especially for a for a girl whose idea of “traffic” is waiting for two trucks to turn onto the highway or being stuck behind tourists driving 15 miles below the speed limit. I amused myself by watching people desperately switching between the two available lanes on this highway, as if this would make any difference whatsoever. Glacially paced traffic is glacially paced traffic, my friend, especially when it stretches as far as the eye can see. It was that mystery traffic, too, where there’s no accident and no particular reason for the slowness, or for it picking up the pace again.

It was a little daunting to see the arrival time on the GPS keeping getting later and later, and I mentally revised my plan of doing some shopping on arrival to having an adult beverage and calling for delivery food after unpacking.

At least I know everything is fine back home. Rob came by before I left this morning, so I could give him last minute instructions and he could tell me about his latest woodworking endeavor which he will be working on in my absence, ingeniously combining cat sitting and home improvement.

The shelves he recently built for me were such a success:

that he is going to build more for me. Maybe with a cabinet underneath with sliding doors. We’ll see! I am looking forward to it.

It was also good that he came by when he did, because Clyde had thrown up on the quilt, so I had to wash it. I did not want to leave it wet, or leave it in the propane dryer with its scary open flame, so it was good knowing Rob was there to keep an eye on it. Also to pet the kitties. Clyde has never been without both Roscoe and me at the same time, and Audrey is not exactly cuddly, so I know he will need pets and fussing from Rob. Even Audrey likes it when Rob pets her, so I imagine they will all keep each other company.

Dinner’s ready, and tomorrow is another day. I am planning to visit the famous Aquarium. I believe I can walk my traffic free way there. Stay tuned…

A YEAR AGO: I seem to be living my very own Groundhog Day. A year ago Rob was working on my house, and I was battling Audrey’s fleas a year ago, just like I am now. Hmmm…

And in the “some things never change” department…

I spent most of Saturday in a concerted effort to get rid of a secret flea invasion which has made Audrey scabalicious once again. Clyde and I are bite-less, but the delicious Audrey is apparently the French Laundry for fleas, being a destination location for discerning siphonaptera.

Or else one or two of them sneezed on her or walked by, since her intolerance for the presence of fleas is about the same as her intolerance for everything else, from canine passers-by to being kept inside against her will.

I am always surprised that there is a flea siege in the dead of winter, but a perusal of my blog shows that there was one the same time last year, so I am a little slow on the uptake.

The day was spent in washing all the bedding, sprinkling diatomaceous earth on the carpets, working it in with a broom, and vacuuming it up after it sat for a while, as well as applying Revolution to the napes of my annoyed cats’s necks. Unfortunately, it comes in packs of three, and not having to use the third one reduced me to tears.

After a long day of lachrymose housework, it was good to have dinner with Lu and Megan before going to a reading at the theater.

I had never been to a reading before, and didn’t know what to expect. I thought the actors would sit on stools and read from scripts, but there were sets (who knew you could do so much with a folding screen?), props, and costumes, and some of my favorite actors. The reading was a trio of reimagined Grimm fairytales, each grimmer than the last (a stepmother kills her troublesome stepchild and feeds his stewed body to his father; a father is forced to chop off his daughter’s hands by a devil). Despite the gruesomeness, we all enjoyed the acting and it was a great evening. I hope they do this again during the new season.

A YEAR AGO: Fighting the flea fight. Again.

The kitties and I were yanked out of our (in my case) much-needed beauty sleep last night by a wild and crazy storm. At times like this, I wish my house was not quite so well equipped with acres of glass and skylights, since I felt like I was right in the middle of the storm, with the thunder shaking the house, rain and hail blasting the roof/walls and lightning flashing every which where. The ocean was pretty active this morning, dashing itself spectacularly against the rocks, so I don’t think we’re out of the woods (or storms) just yet.

It’s a dramatic change from the past few days, when it’s been close to 70 degrees F (around 20C), warm enough to leave the doors open. Cherry and pear trees are in full bloom, and there are drifts of calla lilies* and daffodils on the side of the road. Spring has definitely begun to spring.

I went to pick up some work from my old friends at the jobette (they have had a difficult time successfully replacing me, so I have picked up some of my old duties on the side), and as I was heading back to my car, I heard a voice call out, “Is that my friend?” It was Monica, heading home from work with Stella’s son Joey sitting in the passenger seat, his distinctive and ever-comic ears streaming happily in the wind as they drove past.

On my way home, I stopped by Erin’s house to admire her plush new carpet and have a glass of wine (which I managed not to spill on the new carpet). It was great to catch up with her and her family. Her son is learning to play the piano, so he provided some music as well as making me an origami Yoda. He also gave me the mistletoe this past Christmas.

As I headed home, I thought of how lucky I am to live here, surrounded by friends and family and, well, love.

*For some reason, I associate calla lilies with funerals. Also carnations. Calla lilies grow like weeds here.