Sputterpub's Blog

Cecie’s day starts well and gets better. She has an excellent workout at her club; now that she’s on the other side of 50 she appreciates any day she doesn’t need ibuprofen. When she arrives at work the children are playing musical chairs, but the dreadful CD has been damaged. Instead of the cloying theme from “It’s a Small World,” the kids promenade to a Wallflowers song. Cecie pauses to watch. They’re a well-mixed group right now. Could be a classic Benetton ad. She quick-counts fourteen moppets, girl-boy even, fair, dark and in-between. She smiles as Carmen stops the music and thirteen butts hit thirteen chairs. She strides then into her small office, closing her door so briskly that her CECILIA COLLINS nameplate clatters on its brass hooks.

She has been executive director of the childcare center for a dozen years but she still refuses to let them paint her name on the door. She is fickle about fonts. She remembers a line from an email joke about fortune cookies – he who dies with the most fonts wins – and she tends to agree. She has eight different nameplates that will fit her door hooks, and she changes them when she pleases.

Cecie has just about decided to switch to her C. Collins, Executive Director nameplate when she glances at the pile of mail centered on her desk. Carmen has sorted it so the envelope from the Family Foundation is on top. Cecie forgets fonts for a moment, to open what turns out to be a very sweet announcement. Not only did they get the grant; it came on their terms. It’s up to them to determine how to spend this $30,000. She starts to the door, to tell Carmen and to announce a lunch meeting to discuss this award, but the second envelope in the mail pile distracts her; this time she pauses to open a small one marked “Personal & Confidential.”

What she sees makes her sit. Sigh. Smile.

The front of the card is an impressionist mountain landscape. Inside are twenty words written in Wayne’s upright script: “Living longer without you doesn’t suit me any longer. Marry me, Cecie. Dine with me tonight and tell me when.”

Cecie considers. Shall she lunch with Carmen and Andrea, to discuss the grant money while the children rest? or break away for a consult with Cass about Wayne’s proposal? Her first impulse is to go to her best friend, but that’s quickly followed by the certainty that Cass won’t encourage acceptance; Cecie decides to be a fiancée before a friend.

Of course she’ll marry Wayne. She wouldn’t have joined the matchmaking service if she weren’t aimed at marriage; the enrollment fee was too steep to attract casual daters. Even though her two other attempts haven’t worked out, Cecie is determined to try the state again. “We’re not getting any younger,” she’s told Cassie more than often. “Soon all we’ll be able to attract will be old men looking for nurses.” Cass always rebuts with “Stop treating yourself like a statistic.” Sometimes her advice is more specific and painful. Cecie winces slightly as she remembers her friend’s words. “For God’s sake, wait for your heart to inform you. You married first because you were terrified of spinster status, and second to provide a father to Curt; now you’re seeking marriage because some geriatric clock is ticking. Stop being so damned tactical.”

It wasn’t a hip ambition, but I wanted to be Mrs. Joe. I practiced writing my married name: Angie Greenfield, Angelica Greenfield, Joseph and Angel Greenfield. It’s fun to remember all of this without regret and anxiety. I must reminisce more on powerful analgesics.

I hardly noticed Don back then. That’s not true. I noticed Don. Everyone noticed Don. Don made sure we all noticed him.

Big gawky Donald “Duck” Taylor. His father was on the school board, as he never tired of telling us. He was over six feet tall, over 200 pounds, and stomped around on size 13 feet. Back then, 13 was considered very big feet. He walked toes-out, like the Duck we nicknamed him for, and he had that caricature’s self-importance then and now.

Duck wanted to be liked. More than most he wanted to be liked. He was helpful, interfering, cheerful, interruptive, steadfast, pushy, and true. He was forever organizing activities that no one would join.

And he’s still that person. Involved in every benevolent association in the county, a model citizen, my husband is a loyal, good, boring, awkward gentleman.

I was supposed to marry Joe. Don wouldn’t be more than an anecdote to me if I had.

My head is really starting to buzz. What an apt term: buzz. It’s as if I have bees in there making honey. The good feeling oozes outward. Like that old game when a friend pretended to crack a raw egg on the top of my head. Thunk, goes my friend’s fist on the back of her own hand spread upon my crown. And ooze, go her fingertips lightly through my hair down behind my ears. Delicious sensation.

The night of the senior prom. Joe and I boycotted the affair, per agreement with our friends. We played in Sausalito and on the headlands. Then we most of us drove to Muir Beach, where Chris’s parents had an unoccupied place. Chris promised us coffee and French cigarettes.

Joe and I parked on the way there. For over a year, we had resisted going all the way. That’s what we called it then. We’d done just about everything but, we thought (hah!), and we’d come close to the ultimate act several times (sweet nastiness of youth), but one or the other of us had always stopped us  Until that night. And what with all the anticipation (I guess), well – the best way to say it is it was over before I knew it had really begun. On the front seat of the car, too.

Joe was abject. I was very careful. I did what I could to let him know it was all right, that we had our whole lives ahead of us. But I really couldn’t say it was good for me too. I was kind of frustrated and, forgive me for feeling it then and again now, Joe was kind of useless. We went on to Chris’s parent’s place but the evening had lost its sparkle.

Don wasn’t around on senior prom night. He wasn’t involved in any of it. Joe and I kept seeing each other that summer but we just weren’t as close as before. Don and Joe and Chris and I all went our separate ways to college, and only saw each other now and then on break. I was home for the summer after my junior year when I ran into Don and things clicked. Joe met Beth at USC, and I remember they got married a year after Don and I.

I wish I had a cup of coffee now. I can see Joe’s profile against the lights of Mill Valley. I wonder what my life would have been? I guess I would have had a child. Or more than one. We know our problem’s Don, and Joe’s son is proof of his ability to procreate…

I shouldn’t think like this. My husband is a loyal lovely man. He really is more handsome middle-aged than he was. He has good hair. He’s portly now, instead of fat.

But I’m a little high. And Beth is dead now three years. Joe’s son lives across the country.  I’ll bet Joe’s lonely.

Funny how the most successful men from our high school group are all Jewish.

There’s so much we could discuss. We hold each other’s memories for most of 1966 and 1967. His computer animation meshes with my photographic collage work. He’d understand what I’m trying to do; Don doesn’t even try.

I want coffee. That’s the other quick alimentary change I made when we moved here: marmalade to jelly and tea to coffee. Lovely dark thick coffee. Energy-packing java. Muddy old Joe.

It was Joe who introduced me to it. The Americanization of Angel. Joe always called me Angel, when we were alone.

We first noticed one another in photography class. We had the same English and History classes that junior year, too, but it was in photo that we could give our humor free rein, so we had to contend with each other.  Joe was always the funny little Jewish guy. Master of exaggeration. High Pooh-Bah of hyperbole. And I got mileage from my accent and my British tendency to understatement. We made a natural comedy team. We fell in love.

Before him, I looked forward to my afternoon cuppa. I’d come home from my new school, and Mum and I would put together a homesick tea. We couldn’t find clotted cream, but we made do with sweetened cottage cheese. We had Chips Ahoy for biscuits. We could get better cucumbers and watercress than we had at home; we made lovely sandwiches.

Joe introduced me to coffee. Sometimes we’d splurge and go to Sausalito or San Francisco for espresso, but mostly we had bottomless cups at The Copper Penny or Lyons. We jokingly altered the phrase from “cuppa” to “cup o’” and we had it with cream and sugar. Actually, we had it with sugar and cream. Joe pointed out that if we added the sugar first, we added it to the coffee at its hottest, and it melted more readily. Ever since he mentioned that, I’ve noticed that everyone who has cream and sugar with coffee adds the cream first. I can’t figure it out. Why cool the coffee before trying to melt granulated sugar into it?

But that was Joe: always thinking differently. My little Shylock. Ooof! That swerve made me move my ankle. The Vicodin must be working, because now I can tell it hurts, and I don’t seem to mind it. That’s the thing about narcotics, even synthetic ones: they don’t take the pain away so much as make it not irritating. But the way Don jerked the wheel made my foot slip off the seat, putting weight on my damn ankle; I’m getting the interesting signal that I did some damage on Steep Ravine. And I made enough of a grunt that now both of them are asking how I’m doing. “I’m okay.” I speak softly. “I’ll make it. What was that?” and my husband tells me he wasn’t expecting an oncoming car around that turn he just took, while Joe reaches back and briefly caresses my upper right arm (oh no! too soft! 33 years! I have no skin tone!) with his left hand.

Joe and I had fun that last year and a half of high school. We were in love. Photography led to yearbook our senior year, which in turn led to photo assignments that took us off campus and into adventures of mutual exploration.

He was too short to be handsome, too Jewish-looking to be a hunk. But he was taller than I, and he was the class personality. He could have been president of our senior class, but he opted instead to be emcee of everything. If Woody Allen and Billy Crystal had a kid…

My name is Angelica Wickersham-Taylor. I was born without the “Taylor,” in London, in 1948. I’m the beloved only child of a nurse mother and pilot father; it took two libidinous post-war years to produce me, and none came after me.

My father left the service when I was born. He became a salesman because he always had personality, and in time we moved to Leeds, where no one was happy. When the opportunity came to relocate to northern California, my parents made a quick decision, never regretted.

The move from Leeds to Larkspur was a bit of a culture shock. To say the least. Sure I was coming from Beatle country in 1966, but I was in no wise prepared for the open high school campus, the absence of a dress code, the presence of drugs. Where I’d been, if one’s skirt didn’t touch the floor when one knelt, then one’s hem was torn out. Where I arrived, boys came to school with beards and girls wore trousers. Students could go to their cars at lunch and drive to a restaurant. One could purchase a joint or a hit of LSD on the south lawn between the school and the gym.

I had a fantastic time. My world exploded open. The classes were less rigorous, so I skated by with little homework. My accent made me instantly popular. Within a month, I was dating and going to parties and being asked to help organize events.

I was cute. My small stature was well-proportioned then, my brown hair became curly in the Bay Area humidity, and Americans found all my freckles charming (they sure didn’t charm me, back then, but I’ve come to appreciate their wrinkle-concealing qualities).

My parents always called me by my full name. My new friends called me Angie at first, which I like, and then Gelly, which I hated in the beginning but came to love. I got the nickname when I discovered grape jelly. I came from the land of marmalade and converted to the most childish form of preserves. Welch’s. I also took to the Beach Boys and coffee, but it was the quick-staining purple food that got me my name. And it was my nickname that drew me to jelly shoes, when they came along a few years later. I liked them immediately, and still manage to find them and buy them and prefer them. In fact, I decided to wear my clear, most-enclosed pair today. Which led to this ankle injury. Which is why I’m now lying on the back seat of our car, as Don drives me to the emergency room and Joe keeps us company.

O-o-o-o-o-h! I wish Don would keep his eyes on the road. He doesn’t need to look after me; how typical of him – clumsy and proprietary – turning away from the hairpin road to aim his big face at me in the dark…He can’t see me no matter how much he squints…my ankle hurts but I’m as comfortable as possible, and the Vicodin should take effect soon.

In fact…I think I’m feeling it. Handy that Chris had painkillers with him. Handy and not surprising, when I remember him in high school. I am. I am feeling something. A warm fuzzy easing: it’s like a melting in the top right side of my head, like a pool of warmth radiating gently outward. A slight pleasant dizziness, like the rock of a well-paced gelding as one turns his head to the left and kicks him into a canter.

I remember riding in England. The one time I tried it here, I was placed on a big Palomino, on an elaborate saddle, and two reins were put into my left hand. It was extraordinary! I couldn’t feel the animal through that stiff saddle. I couldn’t post when the horse trotted; I had to just bounce along. I guess it makes sense to have only two reins if one is working on horseback – that way one has a hand free – but the English rig is so much lighter on the animal.

I walked off to junior high that first day feeling like a big kid. I was then just under five feet in height; I was to grow seven inches in the ensuing three years. I was two years away from my first period and ten years away from noticeable tits, but I was finally arriving. I went without my eyeglasses. I considered (and the following year would wear) white lipstick and fishnet hose. I met Jim Sanders.

He was a bit chubby. A few inches taller than me, so that was fine, but he had some girth. Dark hair, golden skin, blue eyes.

The most amazing eyes. They looked right into me and they TWINKLED. His black lashes curled tightly above deep blue, and his eyes appeared to me like humor and love.

I didn’t fall in love; rather, I was drawn and expanded into those smiling eyes.

It was unproductive but it wasn’t unrequited. Jim liked me too; as I was long after to learn, that’s why he twinkled. We were eager and ecstatic at the idea of each other, and we were awkward and embarrassed in each other’s presence. The eagerness was sufficient for several phone calls and a bike-with-picnic date; the embarrassment was so powerful that our little heat could not withstand the freeze of his friends’ mockery. We were sitting on the grass outside the Science Building that Saturday, munching peanut butter and Frito sandwiches and drinking plain water (having decided to save the Lime Fizzies for tongue dessert) when Andy and Ray came along. We started joking around about our English teacher, and I laughed so hard I farted. Loudly. Unmistakably. Andy and Ray whooped it up and I didn’t know enough then to maintain my composure. It wrecked the date. Seemed to humiliate Jim. We retreated from puppy lovers to classmates. I stalked him a little bit, hanging around the golf course with my horsey girlfriends his neighbors, and now and then he looked at me THAT way, but I went Jimless the rest of that year, and had to settle for the tepid attentions of mere boys.

We sparked again after a summer’s absence, at the beginning of 8th grade. But we never made it to the solidarity of good coupledom; regularly we were rocked by peer mockery or our own embarrassment, and I left before conditions were obtained that would have allowed our affection to endure.

My family moved to a place called Kentfield in a beautiful county which is named Marin and whose residents want to call it just the County. I missed my friends but I flourished in the rising Bay Area culture of 1966.

And so on. We each lived another three decades. I married and got a job and had the kids, moved to San Jose, divorced, married, divorced and settled in Oakland.

Meanwhile Jim married and moved to New Mexico, had his son and lost his wife to a woman, tried the Sacramento area and job-by-job migrated west as far as Walnut Creek. Kept active. Stayed fit. Dated but didn’t settle down again. Had a stroke.

It happened last month. A Transient Ischemic Attack, or TIA, sometimes called “local anemia.” Something temporarily blocked an artery in the left side of his head, and for eighty-five minutes Jim was paralyzed on his right side and couldn’t speak. He says it scared the shit out of him, not being able to make his body move, not being able to make words. He says he thought he was dying.

The doctors don’t know why it happened and can’t find any clots in Jim. They have him taking aspirin every day to thin his blood, and they’ve made him promise to come in for more tests, now and later.

Jim grew depressed about his health. He was ecstatic to live, of course, and determined to make more of his life, but the stroke shook him, to say the least, and while finding no clot was good, finding no reason was not. He started obsessing about it happening again, it happening when he’s alone, it happening worse.

I guess that’s when he remembered that he had loved me. I have an unlisted number and I use my married name, but my parents still live in the house in Kentfield. Jim found me through them.

So here we are, getting old and getting together. Sometimes we regret the missed years, but then one of us theorizes that it’s not a big loss. Memories of adulthood are glossed by time’s speed and dulled by nostalgia; Jim and I still have our shared pungency. Every once in awhile I look at him and see the young man in there. As he can see the girl in me. His hair is graying but he’s not bald; I’m not fat. His eyes still twinkle now and then; sometimes I still dance.

Jim describes his stroke as the first time he died. I tell him that’s the wrong end of the telescope. I say this is another of his times being born. He counters that I should say “other end of the telescope” instead of “wrong end.” I tell him he shouldn’t say “should.” Then I get a bit irked at him and don’t want to see his twinkling eyes. I go for a walk.

The first time I was born was 1950. That was a bigger deal for my parents than for me. Sure, I was starting my extra-uterine life then, but what did I know? Transitioning from hugged guppy to ’possum-without-a-pouch… My parents were PEOPLE, and it was their advent as parents.

It’s hard to describe what I remember of it, because I didn’t have words then. My ears were accustomed to rumbles and rhythms, my thoughts were inchoate and unselfish. The strongest image is one of compression. My eyes sometimes opened to wet darkness. There’s a reason we all like the ping of sonar and the action of a carousel. I knew nothing.

The second time I was born was when I came out of the ether in 1955. Tonsillectomies were standard operating procedure then, and my parents went along with all the pediatric recommendations. They didn’t even tell me what was going to happen. I woke out of a bright spiral nightmare to nausea and fury. I realized during the long throat-burning night that Mom and Dad could make mistakes. As could doctors and nurses. I decided I’d take care of myself. I knew something.

The third time I was born was charming. It was 1961 and I loved. I was going to say I fell in love – started to say it, in fact – and I took it back. Fell, fell: what is this “fell?” That’s not the way it was.

We were in seventh grade. This was back in the days of split sessions and football and junior high. Now kids only learn about football from fathers and television; soccer is the big field sport. Now kids go from elementary to middle school and enter high school in 9th grade; when I was young only the parochial high school started then, while the rest of us, without uniforms or catechism, went to three-year junior highs and entered the big scene as sophomores.

It was kind of a deal to go to junior high. Students from four different elementary schools merged into our 7th grade, so my middle class tract-home cadre met the rich kids from the horsey unincorporated area and the poor dark-haired bilingual kids, too. We all went from the coddling of 6th grade, where the only breaks from our teacher were the twice-weekly visits from the art instructor and the music coach, to a schoolday that consisted of six separate classes with six different teachers. Backpacks then were for hiking – no one carried them to school – so we used lockers, which we decorated and abused and infiltrated just like the big kids. And we had PE, with short white bloomers and additional lockers. Everyone hated PE. Everyone STILL hates PE, which hasn’t really changed since then, even though kids have been getting fatter and less fit during these decades, conclusively demonstrating the inefficacy of PE programs. We had PE, with regular opportunities to register each others’ menstrual cycles (if any), breast size, nipple shape, and other inadequacies. Daily we were made aware of our bodies in that comparative way and yet our parents’ culture tried to hold MUSIC responsible for our subsequent actions. Our post-war parents must be the most romantic/delusional generation this nation has produced.