Where Truman Capote Never Traveled

 A month before my first Bangkok Thanksgiving, I’d spent time at the infamous Peachy Guesthouse to visit a friend and met the equally infamous Jim Eckhardt. When this gentleman discovered I’d be spending this holiday alone, he immediately took charge of the situation.

“Come and join me at Bourbon Street,” he said, “It’s owned by a guy from Louisiana who used to work on the oil rigs, and he knows how to do this right--turkey with all the trimmings--just like home.”

On the evening of this All-American feast, I was thoroughly unprepared. I’d been living in total immersion for almost three months, with few sights of a Western face and eating Thai food at every meal. When I got to Bourbon Street, the smell of roasted turkey and root vegetables hit me like a hammer. The room I entered was full of western men with no trace of Jim. 

Stopping the only woman in sight, I asked the hostess, “Jim Eckhardt?” “Next room” she barked, in tones that made me think her day job was probably spent as a conductress on a non-air-conditioned Bangkok bus. 

The noise from a crowd of men, all speaking English, and the smells of Thanksgiving were making me feel just a trifle faint and I stepped outside to recover my equilibrium. But the minute I was back in the hot and steamy air, I started walking. I didn’t stop until I found a cart where the vendor sold squid salad. Sitting at a rickety table on a metal chair, I realized Thanksgiving in Bangkok couldn’t possibly be better than this, and I was thankful.

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My friend Victor is Canadian so his concept of meals on the last Thursday of November is undoubtedly far from what I remember and the dinner I shared with him may have been one of the more peculiar Thanksgiving meals I’ve ever had. The minute Victor and I sat down, we were given our beer, a bucket of ice and two little dishes with fresh vegetables and salad cream, which is one of the worst things the British have done to the world—mayonnaise substitute that is a lot like Miracle Whip with five times more sugar. That was quickly followed up by two big plates of potato salad, heavy on the hard-boiled eggs and of course drenched in salad cream. Then came two beautifully arranged plates of sliced white meat (no skin), a generous scoop of mashed potatoes (real--not instant) with gravy (from a packaged mix), stuffing that had never seen the inside of a turkey. All of it tasted like a school cafeteria lunch—except for the green beans which were perfect—fresh and obviously cooked just before they were put on the plate. Oh--this was accompanied by a big chunk of what looked like a baguette but was clearly a portion of someone’s pillow. Dessert was the best part—a slice of steamed pumpkin covered with a caramel sauce.  That was delicious but had been dusted so heavily with canned ground cinnamon that I could smell it long before our servings hit the table.

The lady who owns the restaurant was dressed up, quite gorgeous, and friendly. She had lived in Las Vegas for thirty years and misses the annual turkey extravaganza so she does this every November. She was so proud and happy with what she had prepared that I did my best to clean my plate. I tried not to reflect on the absence of the restaurant’s friendly dogs, who usually come  and linger and look wistfully at what’s being eaten—but not last night. They came, they greeted us, and then quickly left us alone with our steam-table delicacies.

The setting was beautiful, lots of trees draped with lights for the King’s birthday on December 5th, and the beer was abundant. Victor’s friend Tom, who is not a drug dealer, as I’d speculated from what I'd been told. He was a connoisseur of worldwide natural consciousness-transformers and kept the conversation from being ordinary.

He had recently given Victor salvia for the first time several days before—a liquefied form of a variety of the flower that is grown in Mexico and sold online (legal in forty states.) An altered state that lasts for under an hour after three drops are put under the tongue and then melts away with no side effects, it’s, according to Tom, different each time you try it. Victor said he had his eyes closed through most of his experience but when he opened them, the night sky was dark emerald green.

But that, Tom assured us, was nothing. He had just returned from Gabon with a beer bottle full of a powder that was first used by the Pygmies and was brought back home by the Egyptians early on in their civilization. Through it, the Pharaohs discovered Osiris et al. Apparently it led Moses to find Yahweh in a burning bush—and for that alone I think that powder should stay right in the beer bottle. But, Tom says, it is indeed a substance that will make the user find God, in an experience that lasts for three days and evokes past memories so clearly that you experience every detail once again. (No thank you.)

It’s illegal in France, he told us and my respect for the French immediately soared.

This powder is closely akin to another that’s found in the Amazon and is used only by people who want to change their lives. Since I’m quite happy with my life as it is, both the Pygmies and the Amazonian Indians have no reason to fear that I will deplete or desecrate their drug supply in any way but Victor was looking quite intrigued by the idea.

“If I walk into Orchid Books and find Victor is a man who has found God and abandoned beer, I will find you and hurt you very badly,” I told Tom with a fair amount of sincerity. Victor is a guy who helps to makes Bangkok diverting. A Canadian bookseller from the North, he lost a leg in a brutal motorcycle accident when he was seventeen and has never let that slow him down. He’s lived in Saudi Arabia as well as Thailand and is a grumpy, kind, thoroughly helpful human being. He carries all of ThingsAsian’s books although only three of the titles sell with any regularity, and refuses to let me take the non-performers off his hands, because he says the minute they leave the shop somebody is going to ask for them. (As a former bookseller myself, I know that’s true. I call it the First Law of Returns.)

He’s lived in Thailand for twenty years and has passed the sixth-grade examination for reading, writing and speaking Thai which has me in awe. He’s my buddy and if he takes the Gabon powder and finds God, life will be considerably less fun. Fortunately Tom leaves soon for a ten-day stint of meditation at a forest temple in the South of Thailand and then on to India so perhaps he won’t have time for Victor’s change of life experience.

So—my generation. What happens to old druggies? They just find more exotic drugs in a variety of global venues. Tom was extremely familiar to me the minute he sat down—I used to go to parties on Chena Ridge in Alaska back in the olden days where guys like him were in every corner of the sauna. He’s like a nice version of Hunter Thompson, and he certainly added a whole other dimension to Thanksgiving Dinner Table Conversation.

From a culinary point of view, I tried hard not to think of the Habanero-brined chicken that my son Nick said would feature on his Thanksgiving table as I chewed on sawdust, and although the steamed pumpkin in caramel sauce was good, it will never replace pie with pumpkin from a can. But to find that sort of meal in Bangkok, I’d have to go to a hotel restaurant and be surrounded by expat families—more fun to sit in a garden and drink beer with other eccentrics..

The detail of last night that most surprised me is that drug trips never change—before Victor was given the salvia, Tom tied a Tibetan prayer scarf around his head and tucked two feathers in the headband, one to help him fly and one to bring him back home. Suddenly Don Juan and Carlos Castaneda were sitting at the table along with memories of hippies I have known and I felt thankful that this was a momentary flashback, not a feature of my daily life.

One thing that has changed is the vocabulary—nobody said Wow or Far Out and that gave me another good reason to be grateful.

How Do You Cancel a Dead Man?

 Distractions are essential right now but the current literary scandal seems absurd. A man in his mid-years meets a sixteen-year-old beauty who’s been severely damaged. Her family won’t talk about it and neither will she, even now when she’s in her sixties. Her father becomes violent as a result and she’s put in foster care, where her nubility in houses with unlocked doors puts her in more danger.

She’s a voracious reader and she recognizes Cormac McCarthy. Bringing him a battered paperback copy of a book he's written, she asks him to sign it. McCarthy, not yet in his years of fame, is charmed and attracted to this girl who carries a pistol and knows his work. He begins to write to her and eventually the two of them run off to Mexico, returning to the states after she turns 18. She’s the one who leaves but they continue a deep friendship that's still in place until he dies, even after she sees herself cannabalized repeatedly in his novels.

This has all been revealed in a Vanity Fair article because McCarthy’s archive will be opened soon and Augusta Britt decided to tell her story in her own way before it’s revealed in those papers. She contacted a Substack writer whose take on McCarthy was one she liked and she gave him her story. He, of course, is writing a book about it and judging by his turgid sentences in VF, it’s going to be what used to be called a howler.

This is all being scrutinized by 21st century moral standards and words like “grooming” are being tossed about. Pardon me while I yawn. 

I was a sixteen-year-old girl with a traumatic childhood. The edges in my family were blurred where my father slowly lapsed into full-blown pedophilia. Physical attention and parental love were tangled in my mind and, alone in Manhattan, I yearned for both. As callously as any hunter, I chose someone who would give me that, a deliberate and calculated act.

When I think of Augusta Britt, carrying a book and a pistol, accosting a man lying near a swimming pool, I recognize her. She was doing her best to survive her history and McCarthy helped her when she was in peril. What would have happened to her during two more years of foster care?

In the small town where I grew up, a fourteen-year-old girl whose parents were incurably alcoholic married a man who was in his early thirties. They grew old together, and their love for each other was palpable every time I saw them. This sort of thing tends to erode “moral standards.” Their example has done a lot to ensure that I have none.

And yet, when I was in love with a man who was young enough to be my son, I couldn’t maintain a level of physicality with him. I stopped the affair and cherished the friendship. But that wasn’t a moral decision. It was done out of love. That man would never have a full life if we had gone on together, the life he found afterward with a young woman.

Augusta Britt never found that life. She lives alone with letters and memories. But without the love she had with McCarthy, one that prevailed between them after she left, what would her life be now?

A Requiem for Magazines

 

When I went out to look for the Vanity Fair with the article on Cormac McCarthy and the girl he loved, I was certain I wouldn’t find that issue in a bookstore. Anyone who had ever heard of this writer, or saw a movie adaption of one of his novels, or had read even a portion of his impressive body of work, would have snagged a copy of this magazine the second it hit the stands. In a city as literary as Seattle claims to be, I knew better than to expect to find it in Elliott Bay Books or the University Bookstore.

My best bet was probably Hudson News at the airport but because I enjoy a good quest, I decided to take to the rails. The light rail runs between a branch of Barnes & Noble and the airport with those two bookstores located on stops along the way. I could make this a tiny journey and hit all four of these destinations if necessary. I was only sorry that three other primary bookstores weren’t on my route.

It’s a dispiriting trudge from the light rail station to one of the few surviving Barnes & Nobles in this city. It was once in the middle of a shopping center that surrounded a large mall but when the mall died, so did most of its satellite stores. Plans for a park, a sports center, and apartment buildings all halted during covid, leaving fenced-off construction sites that are still empty. It’s a shrine to dystopia with a smattering of chain restaurants and stores that are more depressing than the lunar landscapes of vacant ground.

Barnes & Noble lies near the end of this eerie stroll and it was almost cheering to walk into its light and warmth. Its fame is partially because of its immense selection of magazines and I began to make my way through the looming array of shelves that displayed hundreds of periodicals, catering to every conceivable interest. On one of the last was a double display of Vanity Fair--from the month before. Since we’re now midway through November, finding the October issue in this bailiwick of print was almost as depressing as the area that surrounded it.

Back on the train, I got off at the stop near the University Bookstore and braced myself for more disappointment. This store had been redefining itself and I wasn’t at all sure that they still carried magazines. But there gleaming front and center with Vogue and its counterparts was the magazine I was looking for, which should have restored my faith in human literacy.

But it didn’t. That bookstore serves a large university with a flourishing department of English. It’s been in place for over a century and has a highly literate customer base that is devoted to it. Back when I was still a bookseller, that sort of issue would sell out immediately and we often had trouble reordering it because the same thing happened at bookstores across Seattle. By rights I should never have found what I wanted on that shelf, in this place.

I’m a dinosaur. So is the friend who told me about this article. So are the scant number of surviving magazine stands that lurk in a few bookstores and in airports.

Many of the newer, smaller bookshops don’t carry magazines. The supermarkets and drugstores that still have magazine racks fill them with the cheap, poorly produced variety that have proliferated in the recent past. There is no place in downtown Seattle where I can buy Vanity Fair, or the Atlantic, or the September issue of Vogue. 

I grew up in a house where five different magazines arrived in the mail. I receive one that once was weekly and now comes twice a month, because I’m hopelessly addicted to the smart, snarky journalism of New York Magazine. I used to buy fashion magazines from a stand to cheer me up in the depths of winter and the Atlantic when I felt I could afford it. Now a copy of Vanity Fair is as expensive as the Atlantic or the New Yorker used to be--god knows what a magazine worth reading costs now. 

My desire to read literary gossip cost me eleven dollars. For just a bit more, I could have bought a book that would have sustained me for a few hours, not the matter of minutes that it took to read a badly written article.

No wonder magazine readers have taken to the internet for what they once held in their hands. Next time I may just pay for online access. After all if it’s good enough for the New York Times and the Washington Post, it’s certainly good enough for Vanity Fair.

River Towns

 While drinking my morning coffee and scrolling through Facebook yesterday, I came across a friend’s photos of Bangkok’s river and tears immediately began to prickle at the bridge of my nose. They blindsided me and I couldn’t stop them for almost an hour, not sobbing but brimming. My throat ached with my longing to be on a boat in the Chao Phraya with no destination in mind, simply succumbing to the pleasure of being a river flaneur,drifting on a current, seeing what I could see.

I grew up near a river, in a place so tiny that this was its only claim to fame. From the days of my first memories I was fascinated by its motion. Its currents and eddies led straight to a branch of the ocean, where stretches of sand held shells and seaweed, the only playground in town. 

Every summer our little “wide spot in the road” filled up with people from all over Alaska and beyond, drawn by the king salmon that made their way down the Anchor River to Cook Inlet. The glassed-in refrigerated display case in the grocery store held fish that were often bigger than I was, some weighing in at fifty pounds. Then the dead fish went off with the people from other places and the summer carnival came to an end.

When I first arrived in Bangkok the Chao Phraya seemed like a carefully guarded secret. It flowed through the entire city but was annoyingly difficult to find, unless you were one of the lucky few having tea at the Oriental Hotel. When I finally found my way to the dilapidated piers and on the deck of one of the many commuter boats that traveled for miles, I felt as though I’d been given the keys to the city.

The Chao Phraya was alive with traffic, all of it utilitarian. Barges, small and colorful cross-river ferries, the longtail boats that were the riverine equivalent to motorcycle taxis and traveled up the canals, and the large, clumsy tubs that went up to another province almost clogged the river in a water parade that I loved.

The last time I was in Bangkok, I stayed at one of the riverside hotels that didn’t exist when I first lived there. The Chao Phraya traffic now included “tourist boats” for sightseers with an abbreviated route that stopped near the Grand Palace, smaller boats made of teak, gracefully taking hotel guests to the upscale shopping areas, the dinner cruise boats that appeared after dark with their flashing lights and blaring karaoke-esque music. The piers were more substantial than before, offering coffee, souvenirs, and touts. The river, always a commercial lifeline, now is a major artery of tourism.

When I first came to Bangkok, there was a story in the Bangkok Post of how an overcrowded floating pier had sunk, carrying a number of commuters to their deaths. Later I was on one of the large commuter boats when a squall blew in from the western bank and every passenger, man, woman, child, and monk rushed to the eastern side of the boat. It listed in a menacing fashion and I got off at the next stop. These events have always made me well aware that once I was on the river, I was at its mercy. I’d lived in Thailand long enough to be positive that there weren’t enough life jackets aboard to go around and the ones that were available probably had holes in them. Since I never learned how to swim, once I got on a boat, I was doomed in any emergency.

But even with that in mind and with the pounding noise of the boat’s engine and the stabbing shriek of the boat boy’s whistle and the smell of the exhaust that filled the air on the rear deck, I would get on one of those boats in a Bangkok second if I were able to right now. And although I flirt with the idea of seeing other countries, I know damned well that my travel mantra will always be Thailand First. See you soon, Chao Phraya–I hope.

Monsoon Satori

 Living in Alaska for the first third of my life has given me an insatiable hunger for hot sunlight. When I moved to Bangkok, I became addicted to its temperatures that typically ranged over the full spectrum between 90 and 100 degrees; only the city’s thick humidity made me stop my walking once the thermometer went past the century mark.

Later when I returned to the States and visited my son in Tucson, the combination of high heat and aridity that greeted me was delightful. In this outpost of the Sonora Desert, 100 degrees felt cooler than Bangkok’s 95. Although it took time for me to understand and appreciate the beauty of this sprawling Southwestern city, its sunlight had me hooked immediately.

Most people head off to Tucson in the winter. Not me. As soon as the weather reports predict temperatures of 100 and above, I start looking at airline tickets. The highest heat I’ve enjoyed there is 108 and I relished every second that my skin was warmed by sunlight. 

People who live there love the monsoon season, with its raging thunderstorms and its gifts of rain. This is mercurial weather that comes without warning and has no predictable duration. Several times I tried to catch it and failed, my attempts filled with dryness and brilliant skies, until the day I walked out of the Tucson airport and found the bright air held weight.

There were no thunderstorms and no torrential rains waiting for me on that visit, although the sky was often sullen and spitting rain teased without delivering any real release. When a friend took me on a little road trip, we stopped the car and stood on the roadside to watch the vicious currents and the deadly rush of a monsoon river,  spilling  over a bed that was usually a dry scar on the earth. But Tucson’s river held only a few mud puddles and the low growls of distant thunder never made it in our direction.

I left with no understanding of why my friends long for the monsoon and with a firm resolve to avoid that time of year. But one of the Tucson people I love best persuaded me to come for this year’s monsoon time. It had recently battered the area with large hailstones and uprooted trees, a dramatic assault that made her invitation irresistible.

Once I arrived, I still didn’t get it. The heat was several degrees lower than what I usually walked through in this city but the humidity made it seem much more intense. The sun darkened my skin after the first day and my phone went black within minutes of exposure to the scalding light on the rooftop terrace. The clouds thickened at the end of the day, allowing only a thin stripe of sunset and obscuring a view of the stars. 

In spite of the moisture held in the humid air, I carried a little water bottle that I drank from every few minutes, like a hobo clutching a jug of Thunderbird. My hair began to straighten and my steps were slow. In a city where it was easy to walk eight miles a day, I couldn’t go beyond five. My favorite cliche came to mind--”What fresh hell is this?”

I found the answer to that on my second afternoon when I set off on a pilgrimage to what may be one of the best photography galleries in the U.S. I took a wrong turn and walked farther than I needed to. As I retraced my steps, the sunlight tightened around me like a vise and the final blocks were an endurance test. When I reached the gallery, I sat in the merciful coolness of air conditioning for at least ten minutes before I began to explore the photographs. This heat was beyond anything I’d ever felt before, a threat and a punishment.

I left the gallery a couple of hours later, bracing myself for more time under a scorching sky. Instead I walked out into the pale grey of heavy clouds and a strong breeze touched my face. As I walked, I was certain I felt a raindrop and I longed for that to be true.

The clouds thickened and the humidity was like an anvil. My friend and I both wilted under its weight, wishing  for the clouds to burst, and retreating to the relief of air conditioning. “Text me if you see lightning,” I begged before I went to bed.

I awoke a couple of hours later to the noise of thunder directly above my room. Kneeling on the bed to look out the window that faced the mountains, I saw thin slivers of lightning cut through the darkness, jagged and almost cartoon-like. Greedily I stared at them until one came so close that I was positive a spark of it touched my windowsill. After that I watched flashes of light on the wall while lying on my bed, wincing happily with each thunderbolt. Suddenly there was a new sound, one I hadn’t heard since Bangkok. A tropical rush of rain torrented in a curtain of noise and when I looked outside all I could see was a cascading veil of water.  

And then I understood what comes with the monsoon. I left Tucson with a reverence for its gift of relief and when I woke up to rain in Seattle after my return, in a city where this is a frequent and often annoying occurrence, I felt grateful. It took a taste of the desert’s monsoon to make me honor rainfall and recognize the sacrament of water with its renewal of life.

Sacred and Profane

 Tall golden spires sprouting from tiered concrete domes jutted above the ramshackle border of New Petchaburi Road, and the thought of a temple’s beauty and tranquility made me yearn to find this one. Google gave me a name, Wat Phasi, and an address which I gave to one of the motorcycle trio on a morning when a thin but determined veil of smog hung over the city and the air was flat and sluggish. He looked puzzled for a minute and then corrected me. Google had given me an address that didn’t exist. Once he’d cleared up that misconception he took me on a short motorcycle ride to a corner of the city that existed out of time.

Temples in Bangkok almost all follow a set pattern of curving rooftops with eaves curling into serpentine shapes, bristling with white pillars and painted in brilliant shades of blue, red, and gold. The buildings in Wat Phasi were butter yellow with dark brown trimming. Their heavy, blocked shapes turned into graduated tiers.  Carved wood rose to the peaks of their roofs which were crowned with the golden spires that had lured me here.  They reminded me of the Iron Temple, Loha Prasart, in Rattanakosin, where the buildings were patterned after ancient temples in India and Sri Lanka. 

The trunks of decapitated trees, massive and tall, surrounded the temple buildings. They held a wild clutter of objects that had been placed against them, small Buddha statues, wooden apsaras, clouds of plastic orchids, tiny lanterns, spirit houses, figures of lovely girls poised in the grace of classical dance, an army of fierce little figurines dressed in clothing from a past century,  a scattering of brightly colored prayer flags. Gold statues of the Buddha and revered monks were scattered about with what looked  like haphazard abandon and a statue of Phra Phi Ganet was prominent among them, sitting on a throne and flanked with life-size statues of white cows flanking him. He was jet black.

A school lay on one end of the grounds, with a sign saying it was bilingual--English and Thai.. Following a driveway on the other side, there was a little barnyard, with chickens, a rooster, and a roofed enclosure that held at least four white cows. A sign told visitors not to feed them rice, bread, or roti because that made them bloated and  sick. 

I left enchanted by this sacred and rural secret in the middle of relentless ugliness. And then I remembered what my best friend had told me about the heart of his city, “It’s not for travelers.” Wat Phasi was a refuge for people who lived and coped and struggled with Bangkok every day. To walk within it, I needed to earn it and that wasn’t going to happen in a few weeks. 

At the end of my stay I went to Silom Road which  been spared the blight of shopping palazzos and high-rise condos. It still had wooden shophouses and shopping centers that rose only a few stories above its sidewalks. There was even a sprinkling of street vendors and a few surviving food carts spread down a block that had once been thick with an exuberant banquet. A clump of tables near an umbrella-shaded cart made me approach with tentative optimism and there I ate one of the two meals that made me happy--gao mun gai, chicken rice with a sauce that had more flavors than I could pinpoint, eaten on the sidewalk in the company of strangers. 

Then at the end of the street where Silom dissolves into a subway station, was a tiny stall festooned with signs handwritten on pieces of cardboard, both in English and in Thai. “Tough time create strong men.” “Be humble. You won’t stay fresh forever.” “The world is full of nice people. If you can’t find one, be one.”

A man wearing a face mask, his eyes smiling, stood behind a little table that was covered with metal Buddha images, amulets, tiny Phra Phi Ganets, and many little animals. Long ago I’d seen those same animals in the window of a Bangkok antique shop--opium weights--and didn’t have the money to buy them. Now, as I picked up a little brass cat, I felt that same heaviness and was instantly overjoyed. Someone had cared enough to find the molds for those weights and replicated the figures, with detail and care. 

I chose one for me and several for my family, each figure carrying what I loved about this city that once was my home, where I was now a stranger.

May the Force Be with Us

 November is usually my favorite month. There are three family birthdays within it, one of them mine, and it holds a holiday that’s devoted to eating good food with people I love. What could be better?

I used to count Election Day as one of the events that made November special. Not anymore--this year, as was the case in 2016 and 2020, anticipating that day has me hyperventilating and close to tears. 

November 5, 2024 is the worst. We’ve seen what Americans were capable of on January 6, 2021, and this year, with fires set in ballot drop boxes in two different states, contains no hope that violent insurrection won’t happen again. Lies have been spewed in campaign speeches and insults have been hurled with abandon. Promises to dismantle the Departments of Education and Health have been brandished and one of the richest men in the world has been buying votes on a scale never seen before.

In 2016, nobody knew what Trump was capable of and there were some who were certain he would rise to the dignity of the Presidency. In 2020, we believed decency would prevail. In 2024 we know better. He’s back, with the strength of a cult behind him.

Until this week, I was hopeful and optimistic. I wrote postcards, I made donations, I listened to debates, interviews, and speeches. Now I’m in a morass of PTSD. I know I don’t have the strength for what will come if we have four more years of Trump. 

I remember him launching an attack on Syria while having dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Xi Jinping. I remember him refusing to give my state aid during a horrendous summer of forest fires because our governor had opposed him in the past. I remember him denying intelligence from the CIA in favor of what he was told by Putin.

Now the Supreme Court has given US presidents immunity from acts they commit while in office. There is nothing to stop this man from doing whatever he wishes. 

In these final days before November 5, I no longer see the glass as being half full. What I see is a 50-50 chance that we will go through four years of hell, with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

And the best I can think of is the possibility of becoming a revolutionary at the age of 76. Appropriate, yes? The Spirit of 76 is better than living in fear and depression--make that cocktail Molotov, please.

Never Enough About Eve

I was still in my teens when I met Eve Babitz. I was babysitting for a couple that subscribed to Esquire and Eve had an essay in the issue I picked up. After I read it, I too became an Esquire subscriber. Like so many others who encountered her, on a page, on a bed, or anywhere she damned well pleased, I was thoroughly seduced.

I’d never read a voice like Eve’s. It placed her before me as though she were a hologram, speaking only to me in offhand candor with her clusters of vivid stories. By the time Eve’s Hollywood was published, she had become my friend, the one who made me long to go to Los Angeles, who made me laugh with her story of the girls who peed in the guacamole. She gave me a whole new definition of decadence when she told me how Jim Morrison’s girlfriend shot up with a huge amount of heroin so she could lose weight before going to the Oscars and woke up post-overdose in a hospital bed days after the ceremony was over. Eve’s Los Angeles was a world of street food long before that term was invented, where the taquitos were so good she licked the paper plate to get every last drop of the sauce. Her hometown was a place where a cop would bark “Can’t you read?” to a group having a picnic near a sign saying picnics were forbidden, a party that included Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and Igor Stravinsky. She lived in a city that embraced irony and she wrote about it in a 20th Century voice that made everybody else’s seem stodgy. 

Eve owned the last half of that century. She was never meant for any other time. When she set herself on fire, alone in a moving car, the part of her that wrote died. She probably should have too, because after that she became an artifact. 

The girl who moved through the world clad in the armor of perfect teeth, gleaming skin, and indomitable confidence became a heavily scarred woman who welcomed invisibility. Considering how ravenously she pursued and was pursued from the time she hit puberty, this may have been restful. She could eat in the Farmer’s Market undisturbed, swapping stories with the alter kockers, the old Jewish guys who hung out there too. She could roam through her city without feeling the compulsion to reinvent herself in another book. For the first time in her life, she could live without spectacle. She belonged solely to herself.

Although we never stood in the same space at the same time, when I first saw the gold and deep blue radiance of a Los Angeles twilight, I thanked Eve for pointing me in that direction. When I was contacted by one of her friends because he saw my name in an essay about her, a man who introduced me to a writer who had also known her, with whom I had a platonic love affair until he died, I thanked Eve for sending me her men when I needed them.

I never wanted to meet her. She was too close to me for any conversation other than the ones I found in every book she wrote. That her skill diminished as she grew older didn’t matter. Her stories were still there, and she’ll always be there, as she chose to be--eating ice cream in her leopardskin bathing suit on the Sunset Strip at thirteen, dancing tango in a San Fernando Valley dive, blazing her own trail through an endless forest of fast company.

 

Weaving My Life

 The day is emerging in the same damp gloom that characterized yesterday but with rain in the mix. The gulls are happy. Mulrooney is not. Me? I’m working hard at acceptance, a word I’m just beginning to understand.

“Some people think acceptance means giving up,” a friend said yesterday. I used to lean toward that definition with the phrase “Just accept it,” one that I usually accompanied with a shrug. This fell into the category of “Offer it up,” an admonition that told little Catholic children to emulate Job. Bear your misfortunes with equanimity and thank God you’re alive. Since this is a difficult achievement for a seven-year-old, which is when one becomes responsible for one’s sins and faults, it was easier to sink into an imposed form of resignation that reeked of defeat. As a rebellious child, I developed an aptitude for change, rather than acceptance, and this skill was well  sharpened by the time I became an adult.

Change is a word I’ve always welcomed, with its connotations of self-determination and fresh beginnings. And I’m not alone. It’s the American Way. We’re a country built by people who were unhappy and sought to change that fact by crossing an ocean,  pushing into a new continent, and then forcing our way across it. Although history praises the settlers, if it weren’t for the ones who looked for change, we’d all still be living in the original thirteen colonies. It was those who refused to “settle,” to “accept,” who made Manifest Destiny a truth, not a concept. 

Now that there’s little new territory to light out to, we’re still divided into the ones who settle and the ones who are driven by the thought of change. In fact even the settlers embrace that thought which is one that drives our economy. Change propels demand. Don’t like your house, buy a new one. Tired of your automobile, visit a used car lot. Hate your hair color, buy a new shade. It’s a fact that if acceptance was enshrined as a virtue in the same way that change is, our stock market would plummet in a millisecond and the whole world would lose the lifestyle that it yearns for.

Then Covid-19 came to town, an unchangeable truth that forced acceptance as the only form of protection. All over the world, people chose isolation over death. Staying home, avoiding others, wearing masks that concealed smiles and muffled speech, forestalling travel, even on a city bus--these habits became so pervasive that they threatened to turn into behavior  and when they were no longer necessary, they still had made acceptance an ingrained part of human life. 

I’m one of the millions of aging people that populate the world and for our demographic, Covid was a thief. Although it took years of possibility from everybody, it brought me and others of my generation closer to a sense of mortality. Death is no longer abstract. It’s a certainty.

This is a lot like being crammed into a time machine and spat out into the future. While my mind still was adjusting to the fact that I’d turned seventy, my body was well on its way to the next decade. Minor illnesses hit me with greater force, an accident on a city street made me think of buying a cane, flagging eyesight forced me to wear eyeglasses, my sags and wrinkles were impossible to ignore, and my body had gleefully accepted the law of inertia. 

These are changes that I don’t welcome and am unwilling to accept. Although the past years pushed me into unknown territory, I’m trying to find what is a realistic way for me to live and what is simply absurd. I swallow pills that might forestall cardiac problems, limited eyesight, and fragile bones. I’ve bought an airline ticket that will take me across the Pacific and back again, with the promise of more travel to come after. I make plans with friends that will propel back into motion and the world at large. 

But I’m halfway toward eighty. My Covid habits have become comfortable and my physical alteration inexorable. There’s a degree of acceptance that lurks under my need for change and I’m struggling to understand what that means. 

Since I’m a person who turns to reading when I’m puzzled, I’ve begun my search for meaning there. “Lose what I lose to keep what I can keep,” May Sarton advised in a sonnet on what she called “this strangest autumn.” The resignation in this wasn’t a welcome signpost and I moved on, floundering until I came upon Abigail Thomas’s Still Life at Eighty.

These short crisp essays were written during the imposed isolation of the Covid years, a period when Abigail worked to put her truncated isolated state into words that made some kind of sense. Her enforced confinement led her to the word “acceptance,” which seems to have been as alien to her as it is to me. Even though her life has been one of sensuality and connection with the external world, she was raised in a household of scientific inquiry and rigorous thought and her mind has been shaped into a habit of research. She turned to the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots and delved into the words that gave birth to what we call “acceptance.”

“A thread used in weaving,” was the meaning of one of the words it’s derived from, she discovered, and when I read that, acceptance made sense to me in a way it never had before. With this as part of its root system, acceptance, instead of hope,  becomes the opposite of despair. While hope is a flame that needs to be tended to stay alive, while acceptance is an active task that weaves a thread into the fabric, over and over again.

Handwoven textiles are one of my passions and it made me happy to see my life as a piece of Thai cotton stretched out on a loom as a work in progress, rough and sturdy, with a bright and colorful pattern. I was the one who placed each thread and if I wove one into the fabric sloppily without caring, the piece was marred in that spot. If I stopped altogether, feeling this was  pointless,  the cloth would never grow beyond that point, staying frozen in that one place. Picking up a thread and weaving it into the whole, with care and thought, even at times when I disliked the color---that was essential. Taking what I have and making a full life from it when I have no choice but to use that particular thread is at the heart of acceptance. 

Recently I put on a pair of prescription eyeglasses that showed me vividly what I’d  been missing in clinging to my impressionist point of view. It was like walking through Disney’s Fantasia with colors that popped, even on a grey Seattle afternoon  and shapes so sharp that they made me wonder if my glasses were 3-D. Expressions on the faces of people who walked past me were as fascinating as an entire novel and architectural details on buildings I’d dismissed as bland became artful surprises. Then I came home and looked at myself in the mirror. 

Without the instant facelift that I’d been given by my bad eyesight, every wrinkle was as obvious as the Grand Canyon. Crow’s feet and crevices--there they were, all mine, along with my blurred waistline and my thighs dimpled with cellulite. 

It was too late for Botox, even if I could afford that option. These things were inexorably part of my appearance, and as much as I’ve denied it, they clearly showed who I am, an old woman. As I saw this truth carved into my face, I made my choice. I accepted. I smiled. 

And now with that thread in place, I’ll go on weaving, carefully, in my own pattern, with all the colors that come to hand.

. 

Three-Quarters of a Century? What the hell?

 After weathering the vast shock of turning forty-five, a process made easy by moving to Bangkok where I instantly reverted to the status of a clueless four-year-old, I've been skipping heedlessly through the following years without paying attention to the increasing numbers.  Not even hearing a tactless little brat who passed me on a stairway in Hong Kong and announced in horrified tones, "Mommy! She's so old!" made me stop and ponder where my latest birthday had taken me. Wrinkles? So what. A vanishing waistline? That was part of the American Way of Eating, regardless of age. Lost hair color? Grey was fine with me. 

Not even the inertia of the Covid years made me pay attention to entering a new decade. Seventy felt no different from sixty--until I reached the halfway point of my septuagenarian years. 

This birthday was different. Two months earlier my youngest sister died, swiftly and unexpectedly. Soon after this, I tripped over an errant rolling duffle bag, broke a little bone in one hand, and had cuts and bruises on my face for three weeks afterward. Two days after I turned seventy-five, I went in to have a cataract removed and observed all the strictures involved with that procedure for much too long. Suddenly aging and mortality weren't just staring me in the face, they were in my face, or to be more precise, on it. A healthy crop of freshly developed lines had come to stay and with my newly improved eyesight, I couldn't ignore them. Perhaps they'd been there all along, I realized with a surge of horror, and I simply had been too vision-impaired to notice them.

Today, after brushing my teeth, as I assessed my face's creases and crevices under the unforgiving light of my bathroom, another thought burst into life. The toddlers I once babysat when I was thirteen are now preparing to enjoy the blessings of Social Security and Medicare. We're almost contemporaries at this point, all of us receiving sales pitches from AARP.  There's nothing comforting about this at all. Nor am I soothed in any way by the knowledge that my oldest son will be getting those same missives in two more years and in that same time period his younger brother will hit the half-century mark. If they are approaching the dubious privilege of senior citizen discounts, then I must be perilously close to being ancient.

In years past, any time I felt as though age was catching up with me, I packed a suitcase and grabbed my passport. In the beginning of this coming year, I'm going to do this again. I'm hoping that a transpacific flight will work its usual alchemy and I'll return with a mindset that has no time to dwell on birthdays and their advances. God, I hope so. I really don't want to let the truth that next year I'll be closer to eighty than seventy get in my way of having a good time with the rest of my life.