Remembering Mimi

It's been exactly a year since my maternal grandmother, Marguerite Mezbourian, died of congestive heart failure at the age of 99. Her nickname was Mimi, but my sister and I called her Mamy, the most common French version of Grandma. I flew to Paris for her funeral. I was worried that I wouldn't cry, and I didn't. What's more, my sister's kids took great pleasure in discussing my inadequate weeping on the way back from the funeral, with my poor mother in the car.

When my grandfather Robert Mezbourian passed away three years earlier, I was overwhelmed with grief. I took one look at him, lying in his coffin in the drab, depressing little room in the basement of the old age home, and I lost it. I cried for him, for all his dreams and disappointments, for the best parts of my childhood in which he played a leading role, for the loss of a tender-hearted, gruffly charming man who was truly our family patriarch. It was a profound, existential sorrow and there was no composing myself. I was standing behind my grandmother, who sat in a little chair by his side, her tears falling onto the white satin upholstery of his coffin. I could feel her frail body shaking as I held her shoulders. My heart was breaking, and not a day has gone by since that I have not thought of our dear "Papapa".

But back to my grandmother, for whom I monstrously could not cry. She had been a looker in her day. Mimi's mother was a lovely blue eyed blonde Alsatian, and her father, a sad-faced Armenian refugee with a huge walrus moustache. He died of tuberculosis when my grandmother and her older brother and sister were children. My grandfather Robert was also half Armenian - His father ran the family diamond business and employed a slew of cousins and nephews. Robert and Mimi shared a disdain for their immigrant roots and a taste for the Parisian life. They were both small, attractive, ambitious and afflicted with exotic surnames that flagged them as insufficiently French. They wed when they were 21 and had my mother six months later.

My grandparents' lifelong devotion to one another was admirable. Robert brought Mimi breakfast in bed every morning, until he finally grew too frail to carry the big silver tray of hot black coffee, butter and half a fresh baguette. Mimi adopted all of Robert's politics and opinions, read any book he recommended, nagged him about reducing his wine consumption, and never bought so much as a pair of socks without his approval. (Papapa just might have been the only man on the planet who actually enjoyed sitting outside the fitting room and watching his wife try on clothes). When my grandparents got into their eighties, Mimi started following Robert around with a bright red sweater to keep him from getting a chill. After rebuffing her with a dismissive "merde" or two, he would eventually surrender and don the cardigan.

Schooled in the feminine arts by nuns, Mimi was well-trained for the old time domestic life. My Alsatian great-grandmother Alice, a story-book wonderful old lady who just radiated love and kindness, once showed me my grandmother's grade school sampler. It was a masterpiece. Flawless stitching, darning, knitting, crochet. (The manual dexterity gene was sadly not passed on to me or my progeny). As a young woman, Mimi would attend the designer collections, analyze the patterns and go home and make her own knock offs, in the finest quality fabric she could find. All the drapes in my mother's home were made in Paris by my grandmother, expertly packed into large suitcases and brought in to the US as part of my grandparents' luggage. Time has begun to yellow the weighty pearl grey satin, but those curtains still hang perfectly.

When when my sister and I were maybe five and nine years old, Papapa and Mamy came to the States for Christmas. In Mamy's suitcase, impeccably wrapped in white tissue paper, were two hand-made pink and metallic silver rajah costumes in our exact sizes. Bouffant pantaloons with matching puffy-sleeved tops, and turbans adorned with rhinestones and bouquets of exotic of feathers. As a finishing touch, my grandmother had sewn sashes of three long strips of fuschia, emerald and purple muslim. The outfits were intended for playing dress up, but we could have worn them to a soiree at the Ottoman court.



My grandmother cooked classic French food impeccably, the downside of her culinary skills being that one was expected to discuss ad-nauseum the quality of the beef/fish/artichokes as one consumed them. (As a girl, I'd get irritated when my grandparents went on about two of their favorite topics, food and the weather. I have since realized that a fondness for these subjects is a universal characteristic of old people.) Anyway, now I have given Mimi her due as an exceptional and highly tasteful craftswoman so I can also tell you that in many ways, she was not a nice person.

Passive-aggressive digs were my grandmother's specialty. One time we were visiting in Paris and some friends of my parents' were in town. My grandparents invited them for lunch. The wife had on an old navy and white polka dot pajama-like pants suit with a huge discoloration on the top. Of course, my grandmother immediately began complimenting the lady on her "charming little outfit". (Subtext: "Hey females of the family! Can you believe this getup?").  Visiting a friend's country home, Mimi disingenuously remarked that the scene was so bucolic, all they needed was a cow in the front yard. To her grandchildren, my grandmother was never anything but generous and affectionate, but even I was not spared the occasional barb. When I was 15 and finally developing, she turned to me and said "Your breasts are huge. Are you on the pill?" I was years from losing my virginity and shocked that she would ask such a thing.

My grandparents socialized with other couples, usually business acquaintances of my grandfather's and their wives. If a marriage came apart, my grandparents would continue to see the man, and the woman would cease to exist - probably a common practice in those days, but one that Mimi never questioned. She had no close friends and dismissed women in general as "les bonnes femmes" a disparaging term that literally means "the good women" but implies gossipy and small-minded. She felt a rivalry with other females, especially those who were richer, smarter, more educated, or better looking. This perspective infected her relationship with her own daughter. When I was a girl, my mother would tell me horror stories - the hair brush beatings, the name calling, the standing on the low fourth floor balcony, threatening to jump – my grandmother was a drama queen, alright. On my mother's wedding day, Mimi had a hissy because she wasn't happy with her hair. She yanked the combs from my mother's hair, snarling "Ha! HER hair will look good,"

As my sister and I grew to be teenagers and then adults, my grandmother always asked us if we knew anybody "interesting" which to her meant rich and socially prominent. We didn't, much to her chagrin, and our crowd did not pass muster. I once invited two friends up to stay with us at my family's summer cottage. When my buddies were out of earshot, my grandmother referred to them by special nicknames she had coined: the girl, who was about a size 12, was dubbed "La Gravos" - the fat one. The guy fared worse: he was African American and gay and Mimi's special name for him was Bamboula, the French equivalent of Sambo. Somehow, it never occurred to my grandmother that this might not go over well with me.

My grandmother was both a hypochondriac and a food neurotic. She had almost died of typhoid fever when she was four, and was deemed "fragile" her whole life. She milked this alleged fragility for all it was worth. The world was supposed to stop turning when Mimi stopped eating. For days, she would do nothing but pick at her food, complaining of "fermentations", a ladylike euphemism for gas. My grandfather and mother would despair because there would be no peace until my grandmother's hunger strike had ended. As I got older, I'd occasionally suggest to my mother that perhaps they should just let the old girl stay on bread and water and not react, but everyone was too concerned about Her Frailness to call her bluff. "Eat a little fish," my mother would beg. "Try the soup - I made it just the way you like it." This dramedy would continue over the course of several days, with Mimi's daughter and husband in an increasing tizzy over her lack of appetite. I could never understand what they were so concerned about. And I've occasionally speculated that this was her way of keeping her weight down and entertaining herself at the same time. Sooner or later, when she got bored with torturing everyone, Mimi would start eating again.

In truth, until her heart started to go in her 10th decade, Mimi was remarkably healthy and fit. Well into her nineties, she puttered around her Paris neighborhood in her low-heeled Chanel pumps, running errands and window shopping. One time, three young yahoos mugged my grandmother and knocked her unconscious. She was back strolling the sidewalks in a matter of days. I can still see her at maybe 93, dropping down on all fours and crawling under the antique table in her vestibule to show me a hidden repair.

My mother, an only child, felt duty bound to personally care for her aging parents. She left my father to his own devices in the states and moved back in to the Paris apartment her parents had lived in since just before World War II. My grandfather suffered several mini strokes and became increasingly incontinent and incommunicative until my mother could no longer handle the physical demands of caring for him. Meanwhile, my grandmother's angina progressed. At one point, the two of them were in the hospital together. Eventually, my grandfather had to be moved to a home on the other end of Paris. He had stopped speaking and could no longer walk. Every afternoon, my mother and grandmother took a taxi to the rest home to spend time with him and feed him his dinner. I visited him on two occasions and he had no idea who I was, but he recognized his wife to the end. Sometimes, he'd grab her hands and kiss them.

The day after my grandfather's funeral, my mother was stunned to hear my grandmother ask when they were leaving for the old age home to visit him. Mimi's short term memory had been fuzzy for a while, and she refused to believe that her Robert had died. Every day, she would ask my mother when she should get ready to go visit him. My mother would show her the obituary in the Figaro newspaper and my grandmother would start crying as though hearing the news for the very first time. This tragic loop replayed itself daily until Mimi's heart finally gave out.

And so I found myself flying from San Francisco to Paris to attend Mimi's funeral. My conscience was not clear: I hadn't visited since my grandfather's death three years earlier. I had continued to call, but my grandmother grew so deaf she couldn't come to the phone. I got updates from my mother.

I could have written, I could have sent photos. I told myself I would but I didn't. I rationalized that Mimi would forget I had called five minutes after I hung up, which was true. Then again, with her lack of short term memory a single letter could have gone a long way, seeming like fresh news with every reading. But I was on the other side of the world, with problems of my own. The recession hit. I wasn't finding work, our son was in full blown troubled teen mode and our daughter declared she was an East Coast girl and prepared to move back. There was no good news to share, no photos to send, nothing cheerful to put in a chipper little note card. I assuaged my guilt by telling myself I'd take my son to Paris that summer to see Mimi, my sister and his cousins, despite the challenges of keeping the kid in line.

As it turned out, I made the Paris trip earlier than that, with my daughter, to attend my grandmother's funeral. Only a handful of people came, mostly to support my mother – Mimi's contemporaries were long gone. Three years earlier, my mother had asked me to say a few words at my grandfather's memorial, and I had spent hours writing a heartfelt reminiscence. This time, I was in the bad daughter dog house and my mother pointedly did not ask me to speak. I felt ambivalent about that; hurt that I wasn't asked, shamed – as my mother intended –, guilty about my emotional detachment, and relieved that I didn't have to scramble to write a eulogy. My sister said exactly what I would have said, briefly praising Mimi's dedication to Robert, her husband of 78 years. My mother offered up an end-of-an-era speech about Mimi being the last of her generation in our family. There were no sentimental stories, no amusing anecdotes, no fond memories. Mimi was laid to rest in a deep grave, right above "l'homme de sa vie", the love of her life, my grandfather.

Calla Lillies

After several days of non-stop rain, I knew a hike in one of the regional parks would be a mud-fest. Instead of coming home, showering and having a nice cup of tea, I'd have to take my boots and pants off in the garage, hose down the boots, stick the pants in washer and bathe the mud-encrusted dog. So much for the benefits of a walking meditation. So I decided to take the wimpy way out and walk Winston in the paved streets of the Berkeley hills. I did cut through a small park along the way where I came upon this impromptu flower arrangement tucked into a hole in a gnarly old tree. A romantic signal between two lovers, perhaps. Or a tribute to a departed friend. Or maybe just a random act of poetry to delight the passersby.

Metaphorically Speaking

Fifteen, I was. Maybe sixteen. My parents had decided we would get dinner at a pizza joint by Georgetown University, which is walking distance from my childhood home. They loved the Ivy League atmosphere and have always enjoyed people-watching. Of course, I thought basking in the campus vibe for entertainment purposes was dorky as hell. Like most teenagers, I was largely preoccupied with myself – I don't even remember whether my younger sister was with us – and the prospect of sitting at a table with my mother and father at a pizza and beer hole where the average customer was just a few years older than me was absolutely mortifying. So when my parents gave me a quarter for the jukebox, thereby enabling me to get physically away from them for five minutes and fantasize that we did not know each other, I took a long time making my selection. Finally, I punched in the number for I Am a Rock by Simon and Garfunkle. The lyrics symbolized my distance from those embarrassing primogenitors. I returned to our table, grimly chewing my pizza as I sang along in my head, "I am a rock, I am an island..."

As I get older, I find myself increasingly thinking in images. Perhaps it's the brain's way of compensating for the maddening verbal memory glitches we experience in middle age - those pesky attacks of what's it called and what's his name and what the hell's my phone number. I have long since outgrown that Simon and Garfunkle tune and I'd wager Paul Simon hasn't sung it in years. It was already a little adolescent for him when he first performed it. But that tired rock metaphor has a whole different meaning to me now. I no longer see being a rock as a desirable condition. Hard headed toughness doesn't protect you: it shuts you off, limits you, keeps you from growing. Life brings change, and you need the flexibility to adapt. Which is why it deeply pains me to conclude that my son is a rock.

My-son-the-rock is especially challenging for me as a parent, because I am a fountain. Of information. Criticism. Stories. Humor. Nagging. Commentary. Guilt. Affirmation. Advice. Sarcasm. Praise. Blame. Encouragement. I runneth continuously over. I see every experience as a treasure trove of teachable moments. This was the ideal parenting style for my daughter, because she is a sponge, ready to soak up everything you throw at her. Water me, pour it on, tell me something new. I've been describing and explaining the world to her since she first learned how to talk. Now that my daughter is a well-educated and inquisitive adult, I often learn from her. And getting information from a sponge is not hard: all it takes is a little squeeze.The rock, meanwhile, remains immobile, impassive, impervious to the water flowing over him. Who knows? Perhaps in a hundred thousand years, he'll display some hint of erosion.

The problem with trying to raise both of your kids exactly the same way is that they are not the same person. Worse, by the time you realize what worked so well with the first one is tanking with number two, you're dealing with a surly, unmotivated, oppositional and unhappy teenager. The rock called for a different parenting technique, if not different parents. Teaching him to respect authority, whether ours or his teachers', is next to impossible. Explaining the value of education and hard work to him is about as effective as talking to a slab of granite. Convincing him to open up is like squeezing blood from, well... a stone. "For a rock feels no pain. And an island never cries." And if anyone ever manages to get through to that boy, or he matures enough to understand what he's done to his life, I fear he just might shatter.

Let's talk dirty.

I missed the height of the hippy era - I was a kid – but I remember hearing older conservative types venting about "dirty hippies". I always assumed they were using "dirty" as an epithet rather than literally. I didn't see what having long hair and colorful clothes had to do with personal cleanliness. I thought the old folks were a bunch of bigots, which they probably were. But even bigots get to be right from time to time, and when it comes to hippy hygiene, it turns out they had a point.

Here in the Bay Area, there are still a lot of hippies, ages twenty to seventy-something, and they really do have an aversion to soap and water. In yoga class, I have been in down dog next to a couple of fellows who had probably been marinating in their own juices for a good 3 or 4 days. When class gets really crowded, I've hovered above the floor in chaturanga six inches from a pair of feet stinky enough to shame a limburger. One of the instructors appears to never wash her hair - either that or she's doing some kind of conditioning treatment that has to stay on for six months.

My son claims cutting down on the hair washing is a good thing – something about the natural oils. For a while, he had the same theory about brushing teeth, minus the natural oil part. He gets these ideas from some of his more malodorous friends. (There's one boy - Rocky - whose presence I can detect 30 minutes after his departure, due to the pungent cloud he leaves in his wake. Remember Pig Pen from Peanuts? That's Rocky, minus the big giant head). Fortunately, my own kid actually does maintain basic cleanliness and mostly talks like this to get my goat, although he is way behind on his laundry.

What I find most disconcerting is that this benign neglect of one's person appears to often be a conscious life choice rather than a gradual slacking off – not that there's any excuse for that either. A pilates teacher I know was complaining that her friend had ripened past the point of social acceptability since deciding to "go hippy". The woman cut drastically back on her ablutions, stopped shaving her underarms and edited deodorant out of her beauty regime because "it's just not natural". Well now, let's get real here, neither is a back full of tats. And what, exactly, is the philosophical point of forgoing personal cleanliness? If it's saving water you're concerned about, take a damn sponge bath.

So I'm riding on the BART and these two twenty year olds, a guy and a girl, get on with their bicycles. They settle in across from each other by the subway doors and start talking about a guy they know.

"Yeah," he says." You're right, Pete really smells."

"No." she replies, in a you-don't-get-it tone of voice, " I mean he REALLY smells."

"Oh, that whole crew, they all smell. They don't wash much."

"Yeah," she insists,"Well, Pete doesn't wash, ever."

That girl was kind of cute. And if she can help it, Pete will never get within ten feet of her. Oh well, maybe Pete and the Pilates teacher's friend will find each other. Probably by smell.

That Vision Thing

This post is a rerun from my other blog, Snideties. I am recycling it because I am swamped this month, which is a good thing since it translates to paying bills. Also, this post is a better fit for Eucalyptus Way. Hope you enjoy it.




As far as I'm concerned, the nature/nurture debate is over. All you have to do is reproduce and try your best to raise your kids. Just as you come to the realization that your children have inherited all your worst traits, you're hit with another epiphany: you're turning into your parents.

My father is quite nearsighted and has always worn glasses. Without them, he has that telltale soft, myopic gaze and is, if not helpless, definitely challenged. He is a physician and health-conscious, with just a touch of hypochondria, so he wears sunglasses – over his glasses. But because he fears that's still not protection enough against those pesky, cataract-inducing UV rays, he adds on little clip-on shades. Every day is a gray day in the land of Dr. Dad.

Then, there's my grandmother. As a girl, I found her spectacles truly annoying. No, not the frames themselves - the daily drama of finding the right specs when she needed them. She would start by asking my grandfather in their native French if he had seen her "glasses to see far" or her "glasses to see close" , depending on which pair had gone missing. Pretty soon, the entire family would be searching the house, the car, the beach or the restaurant for my grandmother's glasses, which somehow always turned out to be in the first place she'd looked, her purse. My mother does not yet need distance glasses (wish I'd gotten that gene). She only wears readers, but she makes up for it by losing them twice as often as her mother did.

Growing up, I found my father's redundant eye wear and my grandmother's daily vision quest incredibly embarrassing. Surely everyone was staring at my eccentric family, thinking "That poor girl. She's related to these people." Of course, I had 20/20 vision, and I wasn't about to hide my best feature behind a pair of shades. Five presidents and a digital revolution away from middle aged lucidity, I didn't know that with maturity comes a blissful lack of concern about looking goofy.

Fast-forward a few decades.

Don't know if it's from staring at a computer screen for a living, but my eyes went south surprisingly fast. Right around my fortieth birthday, the type on paperbacks began to blur. Menus in dimly lit restaurants became illegible unless I squinted like Renee Zellweger and dislocated my arm. I got a pair of cute little red 1.0 reading glasses which quickly became inadequate. Soon, I needed glasses to look at the thermostat, the dosage on the cold medicine, the needle I couldn't thread. Too vain to go full-grandma and get an eyeglass chain, I started wearing my readers like a utilitarian headband.

I had graduated to 2.0 lenses when I noticed an annoying development at the movies: The projectionists were all too lazy to properly focus the image. Tired of reading fuzzy credits, I'd duck out of the theater and bitch to the nearest theater employee. Eventually, I realized it wasn't the projectionist who had the focusing problem. I got my eyes tested and officially graduated to bifocals, which I have never gotten used to. When it came time to change the prescription, I had the optometrist give me regular distance lenses. Now, I switch back and forth, just like grandma did. Sometimes, I too can't find my glasses, which usually turn out to be on my head.

It's when I go on my nature walks that things get really complicated. I need reading glasses for the trail map, sunglasses to protect my peepers and distance glasses to make sure whatever is causing that rustling in the brush isn't a mountain lion. The distance glasses give my vision a tantalizing clarity. I can see every leaf dancing in the breeze. But the glare can be intense, so I've resorted to wearing sunglasses over my distance glasses.

Just like my Poppa does.

East Bay Ethnography

The jungle shivers with sound as your canoe floats down the Amazon. Monkeys grunt and howl. Exotic birds whistle and squawk. Unseen creatures rustle in the ground cover. You glide around a bend in the river and come upon a cluster of indigenous people sitting by the shore. Adorned in feathers and flowers, the men and women sit together in a circle around a fire, smoking herbs from a long pipe, eating fruit, laughing and talking. They notice you sailing by on your canoe and run to the shore, waving excitedly, beckoning for you to join them.

Instead, you paddle on down the serpentine river, negotiating a couple more curves before you come upon a very different tribe. Covered in war paint and ready for battle, the men dance around a fire, screaming, waving spears and calling for enemy blood. Their women sit back and watch, clapping, ululating, urging the men into a ferocious frenzy. You duck just in time to miss the first spear whizzing by your head. You paddle faster, dodging a few more spears before your canoe slips behind another turn in the snaky river, out of sight and out of reach.

How, your inner ethnographer wonders, can two cultures but a few miles apart be so drastically different?

Anyone who's ever moved from Berkeley to Orinda would have to wonder the same thing. With just a couple of hills between them, the two communities are as culturally different from one another as our fictitious Amazon tribes. Berkeley is edgy, dark and offbeat. Its vast flats range from upscale boho to drab, cold and even dangerous as you near the Oakland border. Its lush hills look straight across the middle of San Francisco Bay. Folks lucky enough to have views can watch the sun go to bed behind the Golden Gate bridge every evening. When the sunset isn't on, they watch the fog roll in.

The class war is alive and well in Berkeley. UC Berkeley students look down on the towny skateboard kids that grew up in the flats and pepper every sentence with "hella", as in "I'm hella tired". People in the flats despise "the rich" that live in the hills. In truth, there are plenty of middle class people up there, such as my hair dresser who's lived in the hills for twenty years, with her four boys and fireman husband. There's money in the hills too, but it's considered bad form to flaunt it.

Downtown Berkeley is haunted by every manner of street person, some sad, some scary, some with skin conditions you didn't know existed. The city has a classic art deco library, a newly renovated art house multiplex, a nationally renowned repertory theater and the University's Zellerbach Hall, where you can see everyone from Hillary Hahn to Laurie Anderson. Berkeley is home to Michael Polan of The Omnivore's Dilemna and John Yoo of the Justice Department torture memos. The town has understated wealth and serious crime. A world-famous university and a nightmare of a high school. Chez Panisse and soup kitchens. Upscale boutiques and vintage clothing stores where your purchase comes with a free case of scabies.

A trip to either of the huge Berkeley Bowl grocery co-ops is like a game of humanity bingo. Here, a pair of professioral European intellectuals in moth-eaten sweaters. There, a price-conscious Chinese dad with his wife and kids. To your left, a dignified Indian grandmother in a purple and gold sari. To your right, a neo-primitive couple in their twenties, tatooed, gauged, pierced, dyed and about as far removed from their baby pictures as humanly possible. Right behind you, a pair of hippy grandparents, the tips of their long hair still sandy, the roots gone white. Bingo, middle eastern mother and daughter, inspecting the zucchini. Bingo, butch lesbian couple giving each other good-natured grief by the seafood counter. Bingo, two brown grandmas in their Sunday-go-to-church hats. Bingo, Bingo, Bingo. Snooty college prof! Smiley yoga teacher! Microscopic, much-mascara'd Japanese babe! Bingo! Glitter-bedecked madwoman! College kid on a beer run! Dread-locked, wire-rimmed, vegan Afro-nerd!

Four miles from Berkeley and just six subway stops from San Francisco, Orinda is more like a supply station for the tony suburbs surrounding it than an actual town. The merchants are clustered around two small shopping strips, Orinda and Orinda Village. There are a couple of gas stations, a handful of restaurants, two pharmacies and some sociologically telling businesses, like the riding store that caters to the horsey set, and the two overpriced resale boutiques (clothes and furniture) where the well-to-do can unload their gently-used possessions.

There's no class war in Orinda - other than a few small pockets of modest housing and apartments, everyone's upper-middle class. If you're going to play humanity bingo at the Orinda Safeway, you'll have to sift through subtle variations of white people. Little ladies with headbands. Old guys who don't need a pitchfork to look like American Gothic. Suburban moms smug in their conviction that they're living the perfect life. Drivers of BMW SUVs. Eaters of processed food. Wearers of perfectly matched golf and tennis clothes. Orinda is so white that when we see an African American person at the grocery store, my husband always says "There's the Orinda Black person! Let's go introduce ourselves." Even the store merchandise is different. The Berkeley Bowls overflow with a cornucopia of exotic greens, organic produce and unusual fruits that look like they could grow on James Cameron's Pandora. You can find Indian bread, grass fed beef, local sand dabs and all manner of exotic food supplements that don't do a damn thing for you. The Orinda Safeway is a throwback to the days of better living through chemistry, featuring oversized hormonal chickens, a variety of cheese logs and a dizzying array of processed foods.

Sometimes I wonder if all those people at the Orinda Safeway are plants. I have no clue where they are coming from, or where they go after they've paid for their groceries. I have never seen a human being on our circular street and it is entirely possible that the people next door aren't people at all. For all I know, they have grey skin and slits for ears and six long fingers with an extra knuckle. The other day, I was on the phone with my mother. She was telling me about my sister's mother-in-law, a dignified lady who is sinking into dementia. My mother thinks the poor woman's increasingly vegetative ennui is exacerbated by living on a street "where nobody ever walks." Oh, I thought to myself, like MY street.

Anyway, I have a couple of theories about the Orinda Stepford vibe. One is geography. The valley is relatively narrow. You are cradled by the horizon-less landscape. To me, that is claustrophobic, but it's quite possible that people who grew up in that environment are lulled by the hilly embrace and feel insecure without it: When we were looking for an Orinda rental, everyone we spoke to had lived here their entire life. My other theory revolves around the giant electrical towers that criss-cross the landscape. Humming, looming metal monsters. You see homes with manicured gardens and a massive tower or three in the back and you wonder what living next to all that electromagnetic radiation can do to you.

Years ago,some friends invited us to Thanksgiving dinner. The other guests were an Israeli couple, both physicians. Over dinner, the male doctor described the three other doctors in his practice: a Jew, a half-Jew and a non-Jew. He explained that he related the best to the Jew, second, to the half-Jew, and lastly, to the gentile. He said he couldn't help it – he felt most at home with his own tribe. As a half Jewish mutt, I had to speak up. I pointed out that my diverse group of friends looked beyond this tribe stuff at everyone's common humanity. The good doctor nodded. "And that," he replied, "is your tribe."

We are not born burb-dwellers: We moved to Orinda for the school system. Yet another desperate, ultimately unsuccessful attempt at a fresh start for our problem child. The weather's lovely and the home we are renting is a huge improvement on the crazy Japanese house we were living in in Berkeley. But as pleasant as Orinda may be, there's no one around from my tribe.

Amphibian Encounter

Mt. Diablo looms above the clouds.

Unusual "champignons".





You know you're getting a little new-agey when you accidentally step on a cow pie during your nature walk and feel a flash of pleasure at its squishiness. This happened to me today. It's Winter in Briones Regional Park, and that means it's been raining for days. The hills, which I had gotten to know in their yellow, dried-out summer incarnation, have turned emerald green. Erin go Briones – I wouldn't be surprised if a Leprechaun tapped me on the calf.

Finally, the forecast says we just might get through a day without downpour. My butt's getting numb from sitting at my computer and I'm determined to go hiking. I've stashed a waterproof poncho in my backpack just in case the rain returns. It's in the upper fifties and the mist is everywhere. I'm walking through it, breathing it, feeling its coolness on my face. The fog-filtered hills roll out in ever paler greens until you're not sure if you're looking at a distant crest or a fully saturated cloud. Quiet reigns. The only people out today are humidity freaks, and we are a rare breed. One passes by me on his way back to the staging area. "Perfect weather for a walk", he remarks. I nod and we look at each other like a couple of fetishists acknowledging our common perversion.

As the trail starts to climb, things get a little challenging because the land is unstable.The shifting Briones landscape is defined by mud flows, sink holes, vernal pools and large cracks in the ground. Although we are in earthquake territory, these fissures are not fault lines: they are places where the water-saturated earth is starting to slip down the hill. I trudge up trenches of slick mud, doing my best to avoid puddles and nascent streams. Had I worn my sneakers instead of hiking boots, I would have a hard time staying vertical. I have my eyes locked on the ground, trying not to slip, when I notice a slimy, merlot-colored amphibian - the unimaginatively named California newt, known to scientists as Taricha Torosa.

Shitty shot off yours truly's cell phone

Beauty shot off the web


Don't let the lizard body fool you. Newts are not reptiles, but amphibians, and members of the salamander family. This particular specimen was likely out looking for love: mating season runs from December to early May. Prior to the annual booty call, the newt is technically an "eft", living on land and hiding under logs or fallen trees. When the Winter rains begin, the eft becomes nostalgic for its watery origins and heads back to the pond of its birth to make new newts. This involves an aquatic mating dance which culminates in the male mounting the female and rubbing his chin on her nose. She releases a thick mass of seven to thirty eggs, all stuck together in a hard, toxic gel which attaches to some hard surface in the pond – roots, rocks, debris – whatever sticks.

Winston, my super-sized Yorkie, appeared completely disinterested in the newt, so I figured I could safely take a picture. I fully expected the creature to skitter away once I started hovering over it with my cell phone, but it kept crawling along at the same leisurely pace, as unconcerned with me as the dog was with it. Perhaps the sluggish newt was sick or injured? Later, I learned why Taricha Torosa was so laid back, and it had nothing to do with being from California.

Glands in the skin of this species secrete a toxin hundreds of times more deadly than cyanide: tetrodotoxin. This is the very same poison found in fugu, the puffer fish that, when improperly prepared, kills between seventy and a hundred thrill-seeking Japanese gourmands each year. Tetrodotoxin works by blocking the transmission of nerve signals from the brain to the muscles - including those signals from the autonomous nervous system that remind your heart and lungs to keep going. The California newt is so lethal that it has no natural predators, at least until someone introduces it to a sushi chef.

It's not a good idea to pick up Taricha Torosa. The creatures are fragile, and although the toxin has to be ingested to be lethal, you could be exposed through a cut in your skin. Still, you really have to go out of your way to experience death by poisonous newt. But it happens. One drunken young man in Coos Bay Oregon swallowed a California newt on a dare. Despite emergency hospitalization, he died the next day of heart failure. A victim of tetrodotoxin, alcohol and a form of stupidity unique to the male of the human species. (Yes, I know women who are stupid. I know women who are drunks. But I'd be hard-pressed to find a female who would swallow a live amphibian just to prove her moxie).

So there you have it, my latest Briones adventure. I did finally have to break out the rain poncho, about 20 minutes before making it back to my car. Poor Winston got completely drenched and left perfect muddy paw prints all over the front seat. Next time, I am going to veer off the trail a little and go check out some of those ponds up close. Maybe I'll even take a real camera and see if I can get pictures of some live newt dancing.



This diagram shows limb regeneration in a newt. Not only can these amphibians grow new limbs or a tail, they can also regenerate damaged parts of the heart or liver!

Links
http://www.californiaherps.com/salamanders/pages/t.t.torosa.html

http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/toxin2.shtml


Do not disturb!

Female Trouble.

Men, what more can I do to dissuade you from reading further? What I am about to relate will make you squirm and alter your image of the eternal feminine. I bid you go watch football and we'll catch up later.

Ladies, now that we are alone, let me say that I have endured much biological unpleasantness of late. I had been having breakthrough bleeding since Christmas, for going on three weeks. This happened to me once before, a year ago. Back then, my doctor prescribed a progestin to right my waning cycle, and it jolted me back into another year of normal, relatively regular menstruation. This time around, my doctor was off when I called and I was rerouted to a nurse practitioner whose training apparently empowers her to prescribe medication. I know all about these nurse practitioner types from writing pharmaceutical advertising. Several of my clients won't let me use the word "doctor" in their marketing materials because so many people don't end up seeing one when they come in for a check up. Instead, they see a "healthcare practitioner." Could be a doctor, yes, but could also be a specialized nurse, or, who knows, a shaman. Thus the catch all phrase, "Just ask your healthcare practitioner if (INSERT DRUG NAME HERE) could be right for you."

As it turned out, this healthcare practitioner had no bloody clue - OK, poor choice of words - what was right for me. I described my situation over the phone and she agreed to phone in a prescription for a once-a-day progestin. "Wait a minute," I said. "The last time, the doctor (as in the person who actually went to medical school) put me on something that I had to titrate." "Oh no," the "healthcare practitioner" replied with chipper confidence. "I'm looking at your chart now. This is what we gave you last time."

Well, what do I know? I'm perimenopausal. My brain's getting fuzzy. Sometimes, I call my son by the dog's name. Sometimes, I tell the dog he can't have the car keys. Recently, I lost the car keys. Permanently. So I figured my recollection was faulty and started taking the medicine. Within a matter of hours, I began bleeding to a terrifying degree. After day two of hellacious blood loss, I called my doctor. She thought it was weird but suggested I give the progestin another day to work. I gave it three because I was too busy. I couldn't really leave the house, for fear I'd find myself too far from a bathroom, and I was working on three radio spots I had just written for– are you ready for this?– a gynecologic surgery group. So I holed up in my home office, bleeding and looking at estimates, bleeding and rewriting, bleeding and casting, bleeding and making music selects.

By the day of my recording session, my hands and feet were a little tingly and my energy level was way low. I took the BART to San Francisco, but rather than attempt to walk the ten blocks to the recording studio, I sprang for a cab. Once the session was underway, I managed to remain totally focused on producing the spots, coaching the voice talent on the proper way to say "laparoscopic hysterectomy", patching takes together and wringing my hands at the difficulty of finding the right music, all the while hemorrhaging non-stop.

I went to the bathroom and called the doctor's office, leaving a message that I was bleeding to death but please not to call back 'til after two so as not to interrupt my recording session. (The doctor later told me that when she got the message, she thought "This woman is crazy." But hey, we had a media buy and a budget and you gotta do what you gotta do.)

My i-phone, which has crap reception indoors, never rang, but I eventually noticed that my doctor had called back and left me a voicemail stating, essentially, "Get thee to a hospital."

I resolved to go to the emergency room as soon as I finished my spots. My session was going over - over an hour over. I had originally asked for five hours of studio time, but I had also pressed for a reasonable quote. The studio rep had probably cut the time back to four hours to get the quote down, assuring me that four hours would be plenty. Against my better judgement, I had agreed. Ultimately, the poor engineer had to finish the mix on his own time, after completing the session that followed mine. Two lessons to learn from this: 1. Don't let anyone else tell you you can do the job in less time than you are comfortable allocating. And, 2. Don't skimp on the charm. A few choice comments like "If there's one thing I've learned, it's trust the sound engineer" and you have bought yourself a reservoir of good will. But I digress.

At 3 pm, they kicked me out of the studio - the next client had arrived and they needed the room. I took another taxi, dragged my increasingly anemic carcass onto the subway and eventually made it home. My husband and I went immediately to the hospital, where I spent five hours getting examined, IV'd, catheterized and ultra-sounded. Eventually, the ER doc called my doc to confer, and they decided to try a different progestin rather than do a D&C. I took the first dose before I left the hospital, with instructions to see my doctor the next day. My husband and I stopped to pick up a takeout burger, medium-rare, e-coli be damned, to boost my dwindling iron levels. I got home in time to listen to my spots and email the sound engineer instructions for some last minute tweaks. (The guy, bless his heart, actually came in an hour early the next day and made adjustments on his own time without billing me).

By the time I got to my doctor's office at 4:50 the next day, my radio spots were safely trafficked in time for airing, and the bleeding had subsided to a trickle. As we formulated a plan, the doctor assured me that she had made a note not to put me on that other progestin ever again. Turns out synthetic hormones are like anti-depressants: How you respond depends on your body chemistry. "Strange," I said,"That drug worked so well the first time around". At which the doctor, who was adding my recent travails to my electronic health records during our conversation, suddenly exclaimed,"No wonder. Looks like the last time, I prescribed the same thing we put you on at the hospital."

Which brings me to that darn healthcare practitioner/nurse/witch doctor/slacker/cow. Obviously, she never looked at my chart. Worse, she lied to me over the phone when she claimed she was looking at it as we spoke. I realize there are corner cutters and competent folk in every field. I apologize in advance to all the healthcare practitioners out there who would have actually read the chart. But the moral of the story, ladies, is get your prescription from a doctor. Period, no pun intended.

Diss-morphia

You've heard of dysmorphic individuals. People who pursue an impossible body aesthetic which they can never attain. I have a dysmorphic family. But their dysmorphia is not self-directed. It manifests itself in deconstructing the appearance, and more importantly the weight of everyone they encounter.

I am French, Jewish and Armenian. As far as the Jews and Armenians are concerned, a cushy little reserve of body fat might be a good thing. When a raping, pillaging hoard of saber-wielding Cossacks or pitch-fork bearing Turks descends upon your village, there's only one thing to do. Disappear. Hole up in a cave. Head for the hills. Melt into the woods. Be thankful for that bit of extra padding - it's survival of the fattest.

The French have less tolerance for body fat, although that is changing with the influence of immigrant populations and the spread of fast food. My Parisian grandmother, who passed away in March of 2009, was a lithe little thing and my grandfather liked his women slim. Occasionally, he would comment humorously on some chubby lady's girth, a part of their marital ritual that my chic grandmother visibly enjoyed. The fact that she was a size two and therefore superior to those weak-willed, corpulent Amazons, was a given.

My mother, like her mother, is a petite, fine-boned woman. She monitored our eating habits with laboratory precision. When I was five, I was invited for a play date that included lunch. Upon returning home, I made the mistake of telling my mother we'd had PB&J and ice cream. She called the other mom and lectured her on what a fatty dessert ice cream was, and how an apple would better balance out the meal. Never mind that my mother was right: that little girl never invited me over again. After that, when asked what I'd been fed at another child's house, I edited out the taboo foods and substituted apples.

I had a tendency to overeat and my mother was on me all the time. One summer when I was 12, we were in Paris visiting family. My great aunt had a tea for the children of some of her friends. While the adults were chatting, the kids sat around the dining room table enjoying soda, juice and pastries. I quickly gulped down four mini fruit tarts while my mother's back was turned. Unfortunately, the tarts came nestled in cute little paper linings. I steeled myself when my mother saw – and counted – the telltale evidence on my plate. She let loose and shamed me in front of the other children, pointing out that the other girl my age had eaten only one fruit tart. That girl grew up to be a model - no joke.

My childhood summers alternated between going to France with my mother and my grandparents visiting us in the states. Over the years, we made several family road trips in a rented van, criss-crossing America at various latitudes and looping into Mexico and Canada. Inevitably, we would encounter obese people. Sometimes morbidly obese people. This would fire up my family like a smoldering cigarette in the tall, parched weeds. "Oh my God, it's not possible. Look at that fat thing." "Monstrous. Monstrous." "No, I think we've seen worse." "Are you kidding? She's by far the fattest yet." If I my adolescent attitude was up, I'd occasionally point out that they had seen overweight people before and should know by now that the hinterlands are full of corn-fed folk. Invariably, I was told that the current discussion was justified due to the exceptional heft of the chunky person in question. As long as some imaginary fatness record was being broken,commenting was perfectly kosher.

There was much motivational weight talk as I progressed into adolescence. I remember we were on a family vacation in Rome, dining at the terrace of some Trattoria. Standing in the front of the cafe across the street were two stunning young Italian women, in tight white pants and pastel summer tops, waiting for their beaus. As I stared at them in awe, my mother murmured conspiratorially "If you lost ten pounds, you'd look just as good." Now that was a high order compliment. My father, who is not French at all, also liked to hit me with the occasional inspirational spiel. When some comely but zaftig girl would walk by, he'd point her out and murmur "Too bad. If she lost...(hesitation as mental calculation is made) ...twelve, maybe fifteen pounds, she'd be quite good looking."

The message was clear. No one will call you baby 'til you shed your baby fat. I worked at it, briefly flirting with bulimia until I found out all that puking could rot your teeth. Even without kneeling before the porcelain throne, I got pretty small for a while. 5'5, 120 pounds – 114 at my teeniest. I took up aerobics and found a man who loved me despite my fleshy thighs. Eventually, I had two kids, which, as my parents still like to remind me, is no excuse for weight gain. I moved to Cleveland, stopped working out and put on about twenty pounds. In the Summer, I would take my kids to see my family at my parents' Cape Cod cottage. The first family beach outing was always mildly traumatic - I wasn't trim enough, I could never be trim enough. And I knew the scrutiny would never cease. I remember passing on blueberry pie at dinner, telling my beloved grandfather I was watching my figure. He shook his head sadly and replied "It's a little late for that." It was kind of late: I was forty years old.

My children had their own pre-pubertal weight issues, especially my son, who was exceptionally unathletic with couch potato tendencies. His sweet tooth was insatiable. At 13, he was thirty pounds overweight and wearing extra-large men's T shirts. I regularly searched his room for contraband candy and once chased him halfway around the block to retrieve a movie theater-sized package of skittles. 780 calories according to the nutritional label, not that there's anything nutritional about skittles. I purged the house of all sweets. I asked restaurants for calorie counts on their menu items just so I could prove to junior that he was about to devour an entire day's calorie allotment in one sitting. I had sworn not to micromanage my children's eating habits but I found myself getting increasingly frustrated, angry and bitchy as the kid kept shoving sugar into his face. Eventually, puberty hit, vanity kicked in and the boy started working out. Of course now he delights in reminding me how evil I was to him and claims to be scarred for life. As he says to his sister, "It's mom's fault I go to the gym all the time." Let me hasten to say that he has never taken my advice on any other subject.

As for my daughter, she outgrew her baby fat. She is healthy and lean and doing yoga. She lives in the same city as my parents and has dinner with them at least once a week. Her grandparents' preoccupation with her weight is a source of great amusement to her. One week they tell the girl she's underweight and her thinness emphasizes her wide hips. The next week they protest that she's eating too much. She reports back to me with the latest fat forecast. It is but a section of a more detailed critique involving my daughter's hair, eyebrows, lipstick application technique, clothing, speech patterns, excessive avocado consumption and hobby of going out at night with her girlfriends.

Once the checklist has been covered, they converse.

SEASON'S BLEATINGS.

Bah.

Bah. Bah.


Baaaaaah.

Baaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Bah. Bah.

Bah. Bah. Baaah.

Bah. Baaaaah.

Humbug!