Fragile Industries

Full Disclosure, Chapter 4

In which legal issues are discussed.

Early this year, Athena took the ex to small claims court. She petitioned to collect the monies she had advanced to the ex when they were together, when she expected his fortunes to reverse and his affection to continue, unsullied. As I had, for years. As all his women had. Because Athena is smarter than me, she had the documents to prove it. In addition, she allowed in her claim those small sums he had advanced as partial payment. Her petition to the court reeked of honesty.

The ex actually appeared in court to answer the claim, though he filed no opposition papers nor a counterclaim. I had bet that he wouldn’t even appear. The small claims judge heard Athena’s case, simply presented, and turned to the ex. “Did she give you this money?” “Yes,” said the ex. “Do you owe her the amount she claims?” “Yes,” he said, “But …” The ex claimed he was owed money for handyman work on her property. The impatient judge said, that has to be a separate claim. You filed no counterclaim. In fairness, he asked Athena about the obviously fraudulent invoice of recent invention the ex waved around. She quite honestly responded that she had never seen it before, it had never been presented to her for payment.

The judge banged his gavel, rendered verdict for Athena and called, “Next.”

I was very glad for her, not for the money, it’s not about money, but because someone, finally, had called him to account, called him on his abusive pattern.

Then she told me he had filed an appeal.

Now, Devoted Readers, you may not know my professional background. I blush to admit it, but I am a damn good lawyer. After an honors degree from USC Law, and five years in private practice, specializing in appellate law, I transitioned to public service with the courts. I spent a year as a chambers attorney with the First District Court of Appeal in California, writing opinions for a great justice. I then served a dozen or so years with the California Supreme Court’s Civil Division, ending up as Senior Research Attorney for the Civil Central Staff. I loved my job, the constant writing, being on the cutting edge of the law without having the impediment of being an advocate. My job was finding the true resolution of knotty problems, and recommending to one of the leading state courts in the nation which cases were worthy of their attention. The job required not only keen skills in legal research, writing, and insight, but an appreciation of the politics and personalities of the Court.

The ex had attended numerous Court events open to spouses, and though I rarely took my work home, he had listened attentively when I shared with him some of my challenges at work, both in pure law and the interoffice realities. As I had listened sympathetically to his work stories from an animation studio, when he had a real job. That’s a good part of marriage.

I thought he might have learned something from ten years with one of the best appellate attorneys in the state. Like knowing when not to appeal a dead-dog loser of a case.  Apparently not.

Full Disclosure, Chapter 3

In which I meet Athena.

A few weeks later, I received an email out of the blue from my ex’s most recent ex. It was a long letter, sent to a mass mailing of women gleaned from his email history.

(By way of exculpation for the sender, this was only after she had hard evidence of his abuses.  As, after he broke into my email and computer, I checked the ex's computer, and found not only email evidence of his affairs, but a photographic record, on the desktop, of one of his more anonymous sexual encounters. It proved he had had unsafe sex, exposing me to God Knows What.  During the time I visited my mother over Christmas.  Feh.  His outrage over being hacked is soooooo disingenuous.  Even a year after our split, he was still hacking into my email and erasing messages.) 

As a preface to my letter, this woman, I’ll call her Athena, in mind of her strength and wisdom, said, I know you are not a party to his recent actions, but perhaps you’ll find this interesting, or words to that effect.

Of course, I was skeptical. But as I read this letter, I recognized very old patterns, very old lies, the same ploy of the repentant bad boy, the claims of victimhood, the same damn cycle of financial abuse, told by someone of uncommon erudition and expression. Moreover, I admired the tone. The overall purpose of this communication was not to tell off the “other women,” not to claim victimhood, but instead to tell the straight story of the ex’s relationship with her, what she was told, where he was and when, so that the multitude of other women in his life during that time could compare notes and know the truth. Instead of the ex’s spin. I applauded her chutzpah in doing such a thing. I wished one of his disappointed lovers had done the same for me during my courtship and marriage, when it might have made a difference.

Athena had brought about my ex’s Worst Nightmare: that all the women he was juggling, setting at odds, filtering all information between, would come together and realize the depth of the dishonesty. At long last, he was exposed as a user, a gigolo, who targeted attractive, intelligent, sensitive women who incidentally were women of property.

I was appalled that, all claims to the contrary, my ex had learned nothing, repented nothing, but kept repeating the same pattern, over and over and over again, and hurting other women.

At first, I responded hesitantly to Athena. As our communication broadened, I more and more admired her. I wished I had her confidence and self-possession when it had ended with the ex, to warn others in the spirit of warning, not blame and hostility.

A few days later, I telephoned the ex to give him one last opportunity for explanation. I asked him, when are you going to stop hurting women, good women, who do nothing wrong but love you? He said “It’s complicated,” and hung up.

Shortly thereafter, I went to San Francisco on one of my Culture Whore visits, full of opera and museums and treating myself to good food and better friends. I met Athena while I was there, and liked her immediately. We learned much from each other. She and I were on similar ground -- although their relationship had been of less than a year’s duration, she was still deeply wounded yet finding her feet. I was older news, but after a long marriage, at about the same stage of healing. Beyond our broken yet mending hearts, we found a lovely common ground of intelligence, humor, and strength.  That evening, and a later party at Houston's, was full of laughter and wry wisdom.

The ex, sensing this coming together, sent Athena a revealing email: he told Athena exactly how to seduce me and mentioned that in a few years, she could count on a financial payoff as I was heir to a substantial estate. That was the last nail in the coffin. I could not help but wonder how often he had made the same calculation, speaking sweetly to my wealthy mother as he concealed his disregard for me.

Athena and I maintained our friendship, for a true friendship it was, as her life moved on. I considered asking the ex to be a screening board for my future friends. He had a knack of finding women very much like myself whom I might not have found on my own for friendship.

I heard from other ex-friends of the ex’s and learned that he had even reached out to platonic friendships and had obtained money from them, never repaid, friends of durations longer than mine. He seemed to be veering dangerously out of control, the wheels were coming off. He had engaged in no meaningful employment for years, still clinging to fantasies of his own self-importance and brilliance. When I heard all this, I remembered the words of a long-ago friend who said, when I described the ex’s dreams, “He still needs a day job.” The ex was above that. As long as he could live off women.  And lie.

Another friend said, "When he got money from you, he thought he was clever.  But really, he was just lucky."

While I'm on the topic of memorable quotes, when the ex had me arrested on the night of our final separation, and I was tossed in a holding cell full of prostitutes, we soon established a common ground and were all sharing our female perspectives.  There I was, middle aged, wearing a twin-set cardigan and tasteful pumps, and they in hotpants and platforms.  When I first walked in, trembling, ready for the movie-of-the-week Linda Blair jailhouse rape, one hooker looked up and smiled.  "Girlfriend, you look sooooo INN-o-cent!"  I remembered the famous line from "Shawshank Redemption."  "But we're all innocent, right?"  After that, I was golden.  I told them that I was arrested after I had gotten upset when I learned that the ex had not only fucked the maid, but a co-worker who had been a frequent dinner guest.  The whole collective nodded knowingly.  The youngest hooker pointed to the cement block wall.  "Honey, you could drill a hole in that and he'd stick his dick in it."  We all nodded again, sisters under the skin.

So I was ready for the revelations of Athena, of old friends, of other exes of my ex.  I was only surprised by the levels of his stupidity.

Next: Legal stuff!

Full Disclosure, Chapter 2

In which I share my backstory.

No, not the whole backstory. Not mine. Let’s just say the ending was painful, unattractive and costly. Not only in a monetary sense -- the ex blackmailed me out of a large sum -- but more importantly, emotionally costly. Every Single Thing In My Life changed unexpectedly and dramatically. The ex had planned and prepared for the divorce, but I hadn’t had that opportunity. Quite literally, I experienced vertigo from the change so extreme that sometimes I had to pull my car over to the side of the road before I was safe to drive. I drank and drugged my way through a few years. I got more crazy, not less. After one last stab at True Love, I had a couple of silly affairs with people I knew I couldn‘t care about, and then went into a cloistered celibacy I could only relinquish on the road, away from home. I got better, better meds, good therapist, slowly got my sea legs back, and though my life still seems directionless from the outside, I have plans, good workable plans, for the future.

During the past five years since I left San Francisco (I will burn a candle on May 10-11^th of this year), the ex and I went through phases of talking and not talking. Unwinding a 10 year marriage takes a while, and little unexploded bombs went off here and there that riled one or the other of us enough to break off communication. The blog post mentioned above. Tax messes I thought he‘d taken care of but hadn’t, resulting in an IRS lien against me of $40,000. Passive aggressive ploys. A few gestures -- such as proposing to his new girlfriend on the day of my 50^th birthday -- and blogging about it, while taking the time to email me his felicitations -- that seemed so pointedly hurtful to both me and an innocent bystander I had to wonder how horrible a person I was to inspire such venom.

Then he‘d send a cheery note or some seemingly concerned comment, such as when one of the cats died, that communication would, tentatively and carefully, resume.

I was spoiled. My prior youthful marriage had ended so amiably. I prided myself on how well I could relate, recover, and move on. So I kept trying to reach that same equilibrium with my more recent ex. What was strange is that, in reviewing my email for the last 5 years, recently, I saw a pattern. Attempting to cure any residual toxins of the past, I had made amends several times, sincerely and after great thought, for the ways I had contributed to the end of our marriage. These amends were accepted with a comment such as, “I forgave you long ago.” This held me for a while, and then a nagging thought would emerge. Had he ever done the same? About every six months, I would ask for the same two things, every time thinking it was the first time: 1) An admission that our time together had not been 10 years of unrelenting misery, but had held some special, magic, moments, and an overall good humor that I still, to this day, treasure. 2) An admission of fault, an apology -- for anything. Anything. Ample grounds for both admissions were plentiful.

Every request was met with silence, at least, always a break in communication for several months, and often, one of the above gestures of enormous hostility.

Until last week, we only had seen each other twice in the four years since I left San Francisco. He passed through My Little Town about 6 months after the divorce, and stopped in to visit me and the cats. I was still more raw than I expected. Watching him walk from his car towards my condo, I felt a deep physical pang. His presence was still Pavlovian to me. His hair remained glossy. The set of his broad shoulders, and his unique stride, was as familiar as my own pulse. It was a civil but uncomfortable meeting.

In December, 2007, I was visiting San Francisco. The ex had recently returned to town and on a whim, I called and asked if he wanted to meet, get a little catharsis out of the way. He seemed eager to do so. I waited in the museum café for his arrival. When he came in, late, he did not see me immediately, and ordered a coffee as I observed him dispassionately. No pang. If anything, he looked unfamiliar, seedy, even. Was this shabby fellow the man I had loved so intensely? Did he always have such bad teeth? Why hadn’t he even combed his hair? It was a valuable meeting, not so much for what was said or unsaid, but for testing my own reactions. By Jove, I felt nothing. I felt distant enough to be gracious. To tell him, truthfully, that I was sorry his latest partnership hadn’t worked out. We parted on slightly better than civil terms.

On the way to that meeting in 2007, I should add, I had valuable insight given to me by others. In the first few years, as I said, when the ex would do something grotesquely hostile, I blamed myself. My personality defects had prompted a reasonable man to behave badly, I believed. I made an oblique reference to this in my blog. To my surprise, my ex’s girlfriend before our marriage, and reluctantly, during our marriage, contacted me and told me I was not to blame. She had been equally misled, betrayed, lied to. She told me for the first time about the level of his betrayal to me, ongoing even during times I thought our marriage had been sound. I learned of the degree of plotting, his glee at discovering my missteps which played into his long-range plans for extortion. I can never thank that woman enough.

I had never really been angry at the “other women” in our drama. They had broken no commitments to me, and I knew how my ex’s charms could seduce good, sensible women. This new information freed my soul, my spirit. I had other insights from others, slowly emerging over the years. I got down off the cross and viewed my ex as a complete, and completely flawed, contributor to our failure.

So I felt magnanimous, meeting him again, viewing him without desire, and could wish him well, wish him his own insight.

On my birthday in 2008, he called, and we spoke for a few minutes, about little, but I thought he was on the road to a complete life, I could leave him to heaven and felt happy to have moved on.

That’s the backstory.

Full Disclosure, Chapter I

In which I start to unpeel the layers of the onion publicly.

I’ve been good, at least I’ve tried to be good, honest I have.

There’s the occasional dig here at my most recent ex, but humorously done, tolerant. It hasn’t been much of a pose, of an attempt to seem blasé or worse, to curry favor (from him, his friends, or The World At Large). Rather, I’ve felt that some private things should stay private. I wanted to honor the good parts of my married past. Also, there is nothing less amusing than a truly bitter, hateful divorcee. It’s ugly, all that bile. Vulgar to endlessly rehash the past. I’ve been around men and women like that, who can drag any topic of conversation around to the nefarious deeds and character of the ex. Boring.

Another reason is that I really, really dislike the role of victim. I don’t want pity. Feh. Ick. The ex, on the other hand, has made victimhood a lifestyle choice, his preferred or even exclusive ploy to make friends and influence people in his favor. It’s worked pretty well for him. Worked on me. But for the most part, at least in our writing (we both write) we kept the dirty laundry in the hamper.

In fact, years ago, I started a separate, anonymous blog where I could go and vent when the bitterness in me demanded expression. I told no one, linked to it nowhere, and as far as I know, it has never been read, a lonely little orphan blog floating in the ether. Did me a lot of good. Haven’t written there in years and years.

In early 2006, about 20 months after our separation, my ex broke our unspoken covenant and blogged very publicly and explicitly about “a friend” who suffered grievous harm at the hands, and hammer, of his insane ex. How his blameless “friend” still had nightmares, was probably irretrievably broken as a result. A child could see through the masquerade of the “friend.” In fact, I knew my ex had told the story, in the first person, to everyone he knew at the time of our breakup. He led tours through the scene of the crime, posted photos in e-mail to those who could not attend in person.

I was livid. Maybe it’s the lawyer in me, but slander (verbal dishing) is very different when it gets in print -- it becomes libel, out there in the public view. Some very tense and hostile emails were exchanged, and the ex said he would pull the post, but wanted all references to HIM out of MY blog.

Though mine were far milder, I agreed, and glasnost reigned thereafter. I spilled a little, recently, in my post about the Oscars, but that was a small and necessary part of a much longer story about something else.

Today, I’ve got a great story and the gloves are off. And it’s not so much about me, or at least not an attempt to be the victim. It’s about vindication, and friendship and karma. Stay tuned, I’m still writing. Over the next few days, I have a story to tell.

Minnesota Double Rainbow

 

This is a Minnesota rainbow, with a hint of double.

Ruth died last Wednesday. 

I said to Mom, when this all started a few weeks ago, "It's so damn unfair.  I've never met anyone with a better heart."  She said, "Then you know where she'll be."  It's still the most comforting thought. 

In Praise of Fabulous Women

I have really lousy family role models for women who can love and appreciate other women. My mother has always had tortured relationships with female … friends? Rarely. Hairdressers. Maids. People she pays. My birth household never held a kaffeeklatch. Mom has loathed, uniformly and without distinction, any woman who marries into her family at any generational level -- wives to her father, wives to brothers, wives to sons … she proclaims an admiration to my father’s (her ex-husband’s) second wife, but they’ve spent about 15 minutes together. Her oldest girlfriends are dead, deep into Alzheimer’s, or beneath contempt.

I have no blood sisters. My stepsister, nearly my age, has tried to be a friend, and I hers, but birth and life circumstances and a completely disparate life view prevents commonality.

It’s no wonder I’ve had to carve my own niche for female friends that are not lovers. In my mid-30’s, and 400 miles away from maternal modeling, I learned and cherished how to enjoy the company of women. OK, I’m bisexual, but I have a very regressive view of sex with anyone, and the women I wanted to know in the biblical sense were not friends. The female friends I’ve made in the last 20 years I have cherished, for their wisdom, their humor, and all those things we can say to one another and no one else. In the last 20 years, these, more than any straight male relationship, I have treasured before all others. Not only are they confidants and support, they are models for whom I would like to be when I sufficiently absorb the teachings of (OK, shoot me now) Jesus. I’m sorry, but He's my buddy, my bro, my pal. I’m crazy about the guy. And while learning His message, I find it best exemplified in women. Strong, beautiful, opinionated women. Flawed women, damaged women, real women who try every day to do the decent thing.

I find my closest friends with gay men because I was born to be a gay man. Hard to explain. But the women have drawn me to themselves because of similarity of experience, of hormonal fluxes, of the sisters-beneath-the-skin kinship that trumps in many ways my attitudinal kinship with gay men.

I love several, Ginny, Jaryn, Paula, Adrianne, Anna, Marlena, Lori -- for an abundance of reasons, but mostly because we “get” one another. I don’t need to approve or disapprove. Nor them to me. We grok one another.

I didn’t expect to love Ruth. Nor was there any good road map to loving Ruth. She married, as a second wife, My First Love. In that role, she was (before meeting, simply by situation) something of a speed bump between me and My First Love on second (or third, or whatever) acquaintance. I wanted to believe my first impression prior to meeting. I wanted to believe that she was hopelessly codependent, a lamprey, an obstacle to my search for union with My First Love whom I, for one brief shining moment, hoped would be My Lifetime Love. I hung on negative things reported. I compared myself, for better or for worse. I was thinner but not as competent, I was more lovely, but not as allied with the commonplace of the life of My First Love.

I gave it all up to God years ago, and then met Ruth. She had no reason to love me either. I was some mystery someone newly appeared. I probably was vaguely threatening, even though I had fought and paid a quarter of a million dollars to deflect any knowledge of just how threatening. (You either know that history or you don’t.) I appeared in her life well past any point of actual threat, and though was terrified, I don’t know what she thought.

I loved her. Pure D loved her. She is smart, funny, insightful, deeply caring, and the best helpmeet I could imagine for My First Love. If I followed the words of My Buddy Jesus, and looked for what was the best for those I loved, I could not have possibly imagined anyone more perfect to make MFL’s life complete and fulfilled. She was a loving mother to his children from his first marriage, an artistic partner, she smoothed over the rough patches left by MFL’s social awkwardnesses, she loved to cook as much as I did and understood the connections made by the table, and she worked like a plow mule on their farm.

Over the last few years, something odd happened, as I came to know her better, I came to love her beyond the role she played for MFL, but just in who she is, standing naked before God, I think I admire her more and would hope more for her better opinion, than that of MFL. I can’t explain this.

The last year has been awful for her. Breast cancer, a mastectomy, and within weeks, the death of a stepson. She stands tall, bowed, bloodied, not unmoved by these tragedies, but still very much herself. And she wanted something from me when last we met. I was humbled that she thought I had anything to give. She wanted me to be a better friend to her husband, my MFL, so that he could express to me the horrors of the past year, in ways he could not express to her.

Now that’s class.

I have heard that the cancer has returned. I can barely stand this further tragedy. Before this year, my grief would have been primarily for MFL. Now he’s secondary. I grieve for her health because I love her for whom she is and I don’t want to lose her. She is gifted, a shining ethical light, a quiet source of softness in a hard world for everyone who knows her.

I ask your prayers for her healing. Please don’t let the world be a poorer place without her.

RIP: Bettie Page, 1923-2008

 

A goddess has fallen.  Good night, sweet princess.

Copenhagen

I've just watched the PBS version of Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen.  It recounts a version -- actually multiple versions -- of a historical collision between two particles in 1941.  The particles, two men, the two key physicists of their generations, had already forever altered the known universe, with the accent on "known."

Niels Bohr (Steven Rea), a Danish theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner, worked together in 1920's Copenhagen with Werner Heisenberg (Daniel Craig), a younger German physicist with a more mathematical bent, shortly after Einstein's relativity theory had shattered human concepts of fixed reality by demonstrating that it all rather depended on where one was standing.  In the wake of that revelation, Bohr and Heisenberg bounced theories and ideas on one another, arguing passionately for several years, yet developing a close father-son relationship at the highest levels of their rarefied field.  Together, they developed the earliest forms of quantum mechanics, Bohr's brilliant but more general theories shaped by Heisenberg's meticulous mathematics.  Another theory developed, in Heisenberg's mind, to critical mass in the late 1920's: his famous Uncertainty Principle.  The shorthand description of the Principle (now, all you many physicists among my Devoted Readers, I won't get this perfectly, but it's the best I can do with my extremely limited grasp)  is that an atomic particle cannot be observed without changing that particle.  It takes a collision of two particles -- a photon striking an electron, the electron hitting another particle in the cloud chamber and leaving a trail, to reveal where the electron was.  That collision will alter the course of both particles.  We cannot know the fundamental location and qualities of matter without altering it.  Heisenberg humbled the very field he served by demonstrating its limitations.  And the limitations of what we know about anything.

Heisenberg returned to Germany amid great acclaim, eventually winning his own Nobel Prize.  Then with the rise of Nazi power, he was at the outset of the war secretly appointed to head the Nazi research into atomic power.  By 1941, Denmark was occupied by Germany, its citizens, including Bohr, a Jew, fearing eventual crackdown and deportation.  At some risk and difficulty, Heisenberg returned to Copenhagen to meet with Bohr in September 1941.  They went for a walk to talk privately.  Bohr returned home suddenly, furious, and never spoke to his protege again.  No one knows what was said during that conversation.  Great speculation existed that Heisenberg was trying to determine from Bohr, who remained in touch with Allied scientists, whether Britain or America had a nuclear program.  Heisenberg's later descriptions of the meeting were rather unclear, but his main point was that he wanted Bohr to know that the Germans had such a program, that he, Heisenberg, was at its helm, and that as the two key scientists in the field, they had an obligation to slow down the process on both sides so that a nuclear bomb could not be made for use in combat.  However, there was almost certainly an element of Oedipal bragging, of the son showing the father his greater power. Heisenberg could not have been authorized to reveal the German atomic secrets, and probably would have been executed if it was known that he had done so.  Bohr never publicly told his version of the meeting.

In the event, Heisenberg proceeded slowly but steadily for the Nazis, building a reactor to produce the necessary plutonium.  The fine points of the bomb itself were never realized by the Nazis before they were defeated.  Heisenberg was denounced as a Nazi stooge and spy and was isolated from the scientific world thereafter.  In 1943, Bohr escaped Denmark and went to work on the Manhattan Project.  At Los Alamos, he contributed the theory (again, he was a big idea guy, but not into fine tuning) that developed into the trigger for the bomb.

The play Copenhagen tries to answer the question of what happened between the two men that night.

Whew.  That's a lot of exposition, and it nearly derails the first half of the play.  But if you bear with it, all these collisions, all the uncertainty, all the moral questions start repeating and reflecting and as one nucleus explodes, other ideas and shifting realities trigger more and more until there is a critical mass of understanding. Like the theories the men worked on, they go over and over the events of the evening, getting closer and closer to the truth. The play, as is fitting, raises more questions than it answers.  If there is one overarching message out of all the glittering particles of this demanding work, it would come back to the Uncertainty Principle.  Freyn in the Epilogue to the DVD says his point was to show how unknowable our own positions and reasons and plans and purposes can be to ourselves, until we collide with another person, and then that person's reactions and trajectory tells us about ourselves, at least who we used to be.  I also felt, and this was never stated explicitly, but it follows as a corollary, that our own moral compass or path is unknown to us until we are deflected.  We know ourselves best when we have erred, when we have strayed. 

After the collision in Copenhagen, 1941, both men strayed.  Bohr, the moral absolutist, ended up actually being part of the creation of the worst weapon known to man.  And yet everyone who ever knew him said he was a kindly father-confessor, deeply caring.  Heisenberg, reviled as a Nazi collaborationist, a man who had compromised his highest principles for the safety and security of a life in his homeland, was by no means a freedom fighter, part of the Resistance, there was no Schindler's list for him. Heisenberg produced just enough progress to keep the Nazis on the slow track. They were, by the time of Germany's defeat, very very close. For some reason, he never performed a certain calculation necessary to the creation of the bomb, a calculation so basic that afterward other physicists were mystified.  He may not have known, himself, why he failed.

Whether Freyn's play accurately recounts actual events (and he makes no claim that it does), it is a brilliant puzzle, a moral and psychological conundrum of what we can and cannot know.

P.S. I confess I rented this just because I have a Daniel Craig fetish.

Sunday Morning O.J.

Interviewed yesterday by the LA Times, O.J. Simpson protests his most recent legal woes, under suspicion for armed robbery in Las Vegas:

"I don't hang out with gangsters, I hang out with golfers."

Grandma's Dishes

After 16 years of hauling around this enormous (122 pieces!) set of Franciscanware Desert Rose china, I'm selling it on eBay.  A representation of just a few of the 30 serving pieces is to the left. It's my first step (and an unexpectedly laborious one) towards stripping away the STUFF.  The stuff in the garage that remains in unopened boxes since my move here two years ago is a good start -- if I haven't needed it in two years, I don't need it.  The cake stands.  The old drapes.  Useless Kitchen Stuff: the breadmaker, juicer and lots of deep fryers.  I'm hanging on to: my beloved 1954 Wedgewood stove, big as a 1954 Buick and with more chrome -- I don't care where I move next as long as I can use that stove; my collection of 40 eggbeaters; the old blown-glass Christmas decorations; two beautiful huge rugs (I will rip out any wall to wall in my next residence so I can walk on these again).  That's it.  Everything else, damn the sentiment, is going.

These dishes were a blessing and a curse.  They belonged to my father's mother.  Grandma -- wow, where to start? -- was a character.  She too was a blessing and a curse, depending on who you were.  She was a feisty, independent woman with little education, who defied her deeply Catholic Italian immigrant family and divorced her sullen, alcoholic husband in her early '30's.  Then she set out to make a living for herself and her adored only son, Tony, my father.  She went through beauty training -- "I sweated bullets, honey," she said to me once about the difficulty of going back to school, barely knowing how to read -- and graduated to become a hairdresser, which she continued to do well into her 80's, with a 1930's style.  "I was the best in my class in finger waves," she said modestly.  She did my hair in a perfect marcel -- pure Jean Harlow -- in the '70's the afternoon before I went to a Bette Midler concert.  She didn't know it was camp.  Her other attempts on my hair (The Perm From Hell) were less pleasing to me, but perfect for her aging clientele. 

She was the ultimate Italian Mother, devoted to Tony with a frightening intensity.  When I went through Daddy's photographs after he died, there were at least 20 or more professional portraits of her with her son from the age of 4 to 40, posed more as lovers than as mother and son, cheek to cheek, romantic lighting.  I looked at these and said to my mother, who was helping me clear out his place, "It's a good thing neither of them read much Greek tragedy."  When my mother entered my dad's life (she was 18, he was 24), Grandma went with them on the first date and sat between them in the front seat of his car.  Mom should have read the signs.

Here's a wedding photo.  Note how Grandma is poised between them, tilting her head to edge in even further and force my mother into an unnatural position.  That remained the pattern though their marriage.  Grandma never liked my mother and made her life hell for nine years.  Now when I came along, her only grandchild, I was treated like visiting royalty.  She spoiled me rotten, and would have tried to poison me against my mother after my parents' divorce, but my mother finally put her foot down.  It was the first time I saw Mom, a gracious and unassertive woman, enraged.   She was quiet but firm, and was trembling while she held me and confronted Tony about his mother's meddling.  I didn't understand the reason for her rage, and it made a huge impression -- it's one of my earliest memories.

After that, all was well with our relationship.  I knew Grandma could be a dragon lady, but she always treated me with love, that bottomless Italian abbodanza of adoration for grandchildren.

Here I am at about 4 in her lap, wearing an atrocious black eyelet dress with a hot pink petticoat and yards of pink ribbon threaded through the holes.  A gift from Grandma, who thought black was fine for toddlers.  This was the single time my mother let me wear it on the street.

So of course, she wanted me to be the recipient of her most prized possession, her enormous collection of Desert Rose China.  It was the one luxury this thrifty woman allowed herself.  She well knew the value of a dollar, and had scrimped and saved to buy a sweet Craftsman bungalow in Pasadena.  She was canny enough to buy a house with extra bedrooms, and rented them out to students attending Pasadena City College a short distance away.  Even in her last years, she was proud of her ability to earn and save every penny, take every advantage.  She never had a checking account or invested her money in anything other than a passbook savings account at Pasadena Mutual Bank, swiping all their ballpoint pens on every visit.  Everyone in the family had hundreds of them.  She also stole sugar packets and silverware from restaurants.

Even so, she and her sister Mae spent nearly every Saturday through the '50's taking the long bus ride to Atwater and the Gladding-McBean factory, which made Franciscanware for half a century. It's still manufactured in England, but is far inferior than the original Californian product.  She'd buy as much in the Desert Rose pattern as she could carry home in her lap, and had a silent competition with her sister in acquisition of the best deals, the greatest quantity, the most unique serving pieces.  Often, she'd gaze proudly at the collection displayed behind the built-in glass cabinets in the dining room, and say to me, "Honey, someday all this will be yours."  I was torn.  I knew Grandma loved the pattern, but it was never me.  I'm just not a pink person.  Why not Apple, or Ivy?  Desert Rose was the most popular pattern of its time, perhaps of all time.  For once in her life, Grandma was in the mainstream.  Everyone's mother or grandmother had a set.  But Grandma won, she had the most.  Dinner service for 12, even though I never remember more than 6 people in her home at a time.  And only used on holidays -- the rest of the time, we ate spaghetti off Melmac she probably got free in boxes of detergent.  Not only dinner plates, but salad plates, bread and butter plates, teacups, three kinds of bowls, and funny crescent shaped dishes to sit next to the dinner plates, harking back to the Victorian tradition of a separate plate to hold discarded bones.  I doubt she knew their purpose, I certainly never saw them used.  A baby plate for me.  Then there are the serving pieces, enough to hold food for a crowd, say the Italian Army.  Again, not just the usual set of salt and pepper shakers and single platter.  Tureens, turkey platters, fancy tiny open roses for individual butter pats (she used them as ashtrays), every kind of divided dish and platter offered in the pattern, celery dishes, giant water pitcher...  yep, she won.

Grandma died in 1990 at the age of 85. (In an eerie link to their weird karmic bondage, Daddy died ten years later to the day.)  This is the last picture of her, taken weeks before her death, the two of us on the same porch thirty years after the above picture.  (And I'm still badly dressed.)    I loved her dearly and was sad to see her go, sadder for the emotional devastation her death wreaked on my father.  Her bequest, the dreaded Desert Rose, was shifted to the attic of her house where Daddy lived for nearly all the rest of his life.  When Daddy moved to assisted living, there was nothing for it, I had to take the dishes home.  I still was torn: there was definitely a sentimental attachment.  Just looking at them, I could smell the spaghetti sauce.  I intended to sell them eventually.  Eventually turned into six years of storage on top of the ten years my father held them for me. 

You see, Grandma wasn't completely gone.  She haunted the house when Tony was in the last stages of his decline, looking for him, turning on lights.  Seriously.  The ceiling fixture in the room where I stayed while caring for Tony and later during his move and the sale of the house, would click on in the middle of the night, over and over.  Finally, I unscrewed the bulbs, but I could still hear the clicking.  I called an electrician, who pronounced the wiring sound.  This went on for months.  I could hear clicking down the hall, too, where other switches remained to light fixtures removed when Daddy remodeled.  During the time the house was on the market, the realtor called me to ask whether I'd been at the house in the last few days.  I was in San Francisco, 400 miles away.  "Then I can't figure it out," said the realtor.  "I know I turned off the lights when I last showed the place, but today, every light in the house was on."

So I hung onto the Desert Rose, with as much superstition as sentiment.  Finally, I realized that with Daddy now gone for six years, she had what she wanted.  Whatever the afterlife holds for us, I'm sure they are together again.  And she would be delighted if I made money on the sale -- satisfying her innate appreciation of a dollar earned -- especially if the set could go in a single lot to another family that actually liked them.

I hauled the six huge heavy boxes into the house and went through the laborious process of inventory, finding and listing every perceived flaw, and photographing them all.  I have 12 photos of different sets on my eBay site, with a link to over 70 photos posted on flickr.  Without visual evidence, no one would believe one person could own all this crockery.  I'm selling it in a lot, hoping a family gets it.  However, the real money is to be made by dealers who can then resell each piece individually at a markup, and I made that a strong selling point.  I don't have the time or energy -- there's more crap in them thar garage needing to be strip mined.  In less than 12 hours, I've had five bids, over 100 clicks, and the item is being watched by 15 people.  It hasn't reached my reserve price, yet.  The reserve is ridiculously low given the current market value for vintage, mint condition Desert Rose.  It has as many fans as ever if not more.  Entire websites and discussion groups with hundreds of members are devoted to these dishes.  I had a sense of what Grandma would consider "real money," and that's what I'm happy to get.

It isn't about the money.  I don't really need it.  It's merely self-protective capitalism in action.  As for the next owners, I don't think her presence will follow.  But now and then, no matter what they're cooking, a faint aroma of garlic and oregano may linger in the room.

(P.S. Just noticed that this is entry #200.  My god, I do go on...........)