Sputterpub's Blog

When I was 9 or 10 years old, the tooth fairy failed to visit.

Before I went to sleep I placed my tissue-wrapped tooth under my pillow. When I awoke I sent my hand right there, ready to grasp a flat spendable quarter. Instead I encountered the wrapped tooth.

I took that tissue package to my father. He was still asleep. I marched up to his side of the big bed (the left), and touched his shoulder. He always woke easily. He showed me his eyes.

“Daddy,” I blurted. “The tooth fairy didn’t come!”

“Ohh!” he said at first. He shifted his torso upward and swung his feet to the floor. “Oh, honey. It’s not that she didn’t come.”

By then he was sitting on the edge of his bed. He removed the tissue from my hand. “She was here,” he continued, “but she couldn’t get your tooth. You were tossing around in your bed and she was afraid you’d wake up. Children are not allowed to see her, you know.

“So she came to me. She gave me your quarter. Now I’m supposed to get the tooth from you, and tonight she’ll come back to me for it.”

He stood and walked to his tall chest of drawers. From the top of it, where he kept his watch and the things his pockets carried when he wore clothes, his hand acquired my coin and gave it to me.

I remember the cascade of my reactions: disappointment when I woke, a little outrage mixed with avarice while I approached him, and at the end: satisfaction with my money and admiration for my father and the slight fading of a tooth fairy’s form.

   When I was 20 I entered Camp Pendleton with Lisa. According to Marine records, we never left.

We were visiting her mother in Laguna Beach that summer week, and we were avoiding her conversation that evening. Lisa borrowed the car keys and we hit the local pie shop. We weren’t ready to return to her mother’s place after that, so we headed in the opposite direction. Lisa unilaterally decided to pick up the two hitchhikers.

They were cute. They were male. They were Marines on their way back to base and we gave them a ride.

We had to register to enter the place. We conversed with two other young guys in an entrance hut and were given a visitor placard for our dashboard. We drove on into the camp.

It really did look like the setting for “M.A.S.H.” After a few minutes on the road our passengers had Lisa make a right and an immediate left and our headlights panned a sea of open tents, each with a scantily clad young man inside. We dropped off our riders and proceeded forward, slowly through the tent camp, off a little ledge and back (left, left) to the road. Except something clunked in the underside of the car when we dropped off the little ledge. And shortly after our wheels reacquired the road our car stopped going forward.

Suddenly we were surrounded by a horde of amateur mechanics. Statements were prevalent and contradictory. Along came a taxi with a driver about our age. Lisa and I got in his cab and left that place.

The cabbie drove us to the bus station but it was creepy and neither he nor we wanted us to leave his car. Lisa’s mother’s phone number was unlisted – we couldn’t call and we couldn’t travel – so we let our hero take us home and put us up till morning.

We thanked him and his roommate by cooking them breakfast. We felt it was the least we could do, especially after disappointing them by being Berkeley girls but not putting out. We almost lost Surf, their three-legged dog, on the way to the store.

As early as possible, Lisa called her stepfather at his job. He left work for us. We had the car towed out of Camp Pendleton (placard still on dashboard) and learned to our relief that it was only a rock in the universal joint. The guy in the garage pried it out like a stone from a horse’s hoof, and the car ran just fine.

We caught hell for not calling Lisa’s mother. We explained that we didn’t have the number. Her parents calmly and contemptuously pointed out that we could have called the Laguna Beach police and asked them to drive by Lisa’s mother’s house with our news.

Wow. I don’t know if it was our age or the revolutionary times, but to neither of us did the idea even occur to call the police, for help.

   When I was 15 it seemed like all I wanted to do was walk around outside. Especially in winter, when the streets were less crowded, especially at night when the scene was more inspiring.

My parents objected. It wasn’t about appropriateness for them; it was about my safety.

But I was safe. I knew I was safe. An experienced walker notes her environment and tends to move as unobtrusively as a fly on a wall. Drivers don’t notice her. She can avoid other walkers if she wishes.

So one of my first objects when I left home was to be able to walk without parental impedance. I did it a lot.

I’d say I became a professional pedestrian except that no one’s ever paid me to do it. I learned how to walk well and wherever I wished.

Sometimes I ventured into neighborhoods with unsavory reputations. It wasn’t that I sought them out; I just didn’t always avoid them. Invariably I’d get into a “take back the streets” posture then, walking with a little more force and direction, stride-challenging someone to dare to challenge me. I never experienced a mishap and I was often surprised at the smiles or words I exchanged with other folks.

So I was flabbergasted when I read several months ago about trouble in a San Francisco park. The news reported that a litter of hooligans, unemployed scruffy-looking men some of whom had pit bulls, were taking over benches in Washington Square Park, letting their dogs behave rudely and otherwise rendering others uncomfortable about their presence. Demands were made that the police step up and do their jobs: enforce rules so others could enjoy the park.

My surprise was not about the dozen rude rowdies. It was about the assumption that this was a police problem. People! It’s only a clump of losers! You don’t need the police! Just gather a group of good guys and confront the assholes. What are there: a dozen of them, max? So you get three dozen and go have a talk. 

Nobody’s listening.

 When I was 39, Loma Prieta quaked and stopped the World Series. There were far more tragic consequences, and at the time we heard rumors about roads collapsing, but it was that bit, about the World Series, that made me understand how serious it was. I’m sure I was in some kind of shock.

I felt it, of course. And I have my own little tale of how I got home that night. It’s not as good as Nick’s though; he actually climbed past the Bay Bridge break to get to our kids. See: that was always our biggest fear – that a big quake would occur when we were on one side of the bay and the kids were on the other.

As it happened, our kids were fine (neighbors checked immediately) and our houses were undamaged. We grownups were way more shook than the children.

But here’s the lesson part. What we learned out there on the streets of San Francisco, immediately after that earthquake, was the roads didn’t work. Bridges broke and concrete gave, nothing could be trusted and the byways were clogged with cars. We walked off the broken bridge and came up against closed BART stations (the system couldn’t be trusted until it was checked). We soon understood that cell phones couldn’t get service, and the lines for the few payphones were intimidating. We kept walking, toward the only thing that could work: water.

And we got no news. It was astounding how impossible it became to acquire any reliable information. That was the shortcoming that surprised me.

It seems to me that an event or some are going to happen. Into every life will come emergency or urgency, at times. It’s good to have kits and contingency plans. But I think you’re best prepared if you assume you’ll be donning a backpack and taking a walk.

   When I was 41, Katie was between 14 and 15. She had her own social life and she was allowed to go out at night. We agreed on a curfew time and with one memorable exception (I was expected to believe that all of them fell asleep on Alameda beach), she respected the deadline.

But that didn’t keep me calm. As I learned when I was 20, I may not be hysterical but I am nervous. Invariably I would begin to get agitated before she was even due home. Around an hour early I’d get antsy, less able to concentrate on whatever I was doing, more likely to pace around a bit or tune into the news. If the TV wasn’t already on I’d turn it on, thinking the chatter would calm me.

Not. The news is always frightening. Lately they even try to make an incoming rain cloud seem threatening in their competition for viewers. And entertainment shows, whether police or law procedurals or hospital dramas or even sitcoms: they all seem to agree in portraying life as perilous. My nervousness increased.

You know what cured me? You know the only thing that could then make me easy? Walking outside.

Really. I put my slippers on and went downstairs and opened the door and proceeded up our brick path to the sidewalk. Sometimes I’d go ten feet further, into the middle of the street. I’d look to the left and look to the right and maybe even look upward (hunching my shoulders to protect my neck).

It was Berkeley. Safe. Home. Known. And Katie was quite capable.

After a few minutes I returned to my room and ignored the TV.