CORRUPTION BEGINS AT HOME

CORRUPTION BEGINS AT HOME

Here’s the thing about my husband: he wants to save everything. In all our years of marriage, he’s never met the item he doesn’t want to keep (the only exception perhaps being rotten vegetables).  A mantra rings in his head, which I know better than anyone because I hear it so often: “Keep that, Babe. We may need it some day.” 

Thus on his side of our kitchen we have a collection—dozens of used drink cups, both plastic and cardboard, complete in some cases with traces of dried cola. In our garage he stores old jelly jars, empty coffee cans, hunks of Styrofoam, strands of wire, dozens of once-filled vases, endless wicker baskets which once held gifts.  Almost nothing is so mundane he sees the need to throw it away.  

This is the man who once happened to follow a diaper truck onto a freeway offramp. The van took the corner too fast, and its back door flew open and a great white sack flew out onto the shoulder. The van never slowed, but Rob did.  With his usual great reflexes, he brought his car to a fast halt near the fallen sack. Rags! He thought. Dozens of perfect rags.!

But when he picked up the sack a surprise was waiting. The diapers were dirty!  Any other man would have blown out his breath and dropped the sack like a hot coal, but not Rob. Knowing I’d kill him if he brought his load home, he went to the nearest Laundromat and ran the load through twice. Even today he chortles about how he gathered all those great rags.

Today was a kind of test, though. Now a few weeks past our Great Fire, this morning we had a crew of five men digging a trench—ready to replace our burned-up wooden fence with a block wall. About noon I looked outside to see men wheeling loads of dirt up a ramp and into a waiting truck. “Wow!” I cried, turning back to Rob, sitting in his usual chair. “You should see all the dirt they’ve hauled out of that trench!”

A mistake. “Dirt!” he cried, abruptly straightening. “They’re hauling away our dirt?”

“Well, yeah. What else would they do with it?”

“But dirt is valuable,” he said. “You pay good money for topsoil.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “This is a half acre, Rob. There’s quite a lot of topsoil left.”

“When they come to plant, the landscapers will need that dirt.”

I just looked at him. Finally I said, “The landscapers will dig holes. They’ll have their own dirt.” 

He finally subsided. He did not, as I feared, rush outside and order the diggers to leave our precious dirt in great humongous piles.

But dirt wasn’t today’s only issue. Outside near the pile of discarded wooden fence was another pile—several dozen aluminum tubes that Rob brought home in 1978 from our hang gliding company. Over the years he’s said, “Babe, somebody will need them someday.” Since they were mostly hidden by shrubbery, I never argued. But now all that shrubbery is gone. And there they sit.  

Today, as I looked at the fence pile I thought, These tubes must go. We’ve had them long enough. Nobody will ever want them. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of saying to Rob, “When they pick up the fence, they should take away the tubes.”

He stared at me in horror.  “Aluminum is worth money! They should be recycled!”

“How do you plan to do that?”

“I’ll borrow a truck.”

“A truck from whom?  And who will load it? And how much do you think you’ll get?”

“A lot. They’re worth a hundred dollars, Babe. A hundred dollars, easy.” 

Inwardly I groaned.  Ten years from now those tubes will still be there.

Suddenly I had an inspiration.  I’ll tell you what, Rob. If you let the contractor take away the tubes, I’ll pay you fifty dollars.” 

His face softened a little.

Dear Lord, I’m onto something good.  And then I thought, Corruption begins at home. “I’ll make it a hundred dollars, Rob. Let the tubes go and I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”

With that, Rob broke into a big grin. “I’m selling out my principles for a hundred dollars. They should be recycled, you know.”

“But think of the hassle. Let the contractor recycle them. If they’re worth money, he’ll do it. And you’ll have the cash right now.”    

He didn’t argue. He just smiled. But then, so did I. Never have I so looked forward to spending a hundred dollars. As we walked back into the house I thought, I wonder how much it would cost me to clear out the garage?      

  

THE BOOKS THAT DIDN'T BURN

My books are leading a charmed life.

With all the different titles I’ve published—now fourteen—and all the copies I’ve bought to sell at speeches, the miracle of Santa Ana’s October windstorm was that our backyard fire didn’t start anywhere near the garage. If those neatly-boxed volumes had caught fire, it would have taken Noah and his 40 days of rain to extinguish the flames.

But hey, disaster might still be lurking--maybe next month we’ll have a flood.

So now I’m asking, You wanna buy a book? For not much money?

How about $10 each?

You can buy my books three ways:

1) on my website at Maralys.com. See “Store.”

2) On Amazon (look for my Amazon page)

3) Direct from me—autographed, of course: Maralys@cox.net

Charmed life or not, my books are no longer waiting for a Prince Charming with a fat wallet, they’re looking for someone with Ten Dollars. Anything to get out of the garage.

THANKSGIVING'S BEST FOOTBALL

THANKSGIVING’S BEST FOOTBALL

            Never mind the Raiders and Cowboys. If you want REAL football, next Thanksgiving I suggest you come to our Ladera Elementary school in Tustin and see the game as it’s supposed to be played. You might even get an email “e-vite” from a college athlete, as we did, or perhaps you’ll simply hear about us on the street.  

Around here football is actually a GAME. It’s fun. Little kids get to “tackle” grownups, (okay, it’s “tag” football), and they learn to kick a football and throw—as long as they can successfully dodge a dozen multi-sized players and the two puppies loose on the field.

The grandparents, and that includes me, sit on the sidelines and watch. Right away I spotted a small blonde girl, about nine, who seemed to be in on every play. To my amazement, Taylor could zigzag like a marine on an obstacle course. With the ball tucked against her pink and white striped shirt, she dodged, in quick succession, a UCLA volleyball player, an orthopedic surgeon, and a young man who’d just won a national tennis tournament. Minutes later, Taylor made a clean, thirty-yard kick.  But that was peanuts compared to the sudden, surprising run by twelve-year-old Elizabeth, who is usually more singer than athlete.

Along the periphery of the field, Lauren, eight, practiced her gymnastics with three   back- flips in a row. While behind her, Davis, ten but small for his age, caught the football just before it hit the ground. He didn’t get far, though. The mother who is the country’s number one fifty-and-over tennis player managed to tag him.

Within a small circle, the game came to a momentary halt when the five-year-old threw a fit.  One of the bigger boys simply picked him off the ground and set him down again outside the boundaries.

For a few seconds I tabulated the various ages. The surgeon, still a Sunday athlete, is sixty-one, the UCLA player is 23, his sister, a landscape architect, is 26.  Still, the youngest player was five. I have no idea about the age or occupation of the man who arrived late, on his bicycle. All I gathered, really, is that his kids are whiz-bangs at sports and so eager to participate that they shortcutted the journey by climbing over the school fence. Actually, so did several others. This is, after all, a neighborhood athletic field.  

With a halftime water break, the game lasted an hour and a half. By the end I had no idea which team won—if indeed, scores were tabulated or anyone could tell who belonged to which squad. At times they knew, but I didn’t. From afar there seemed to be a constant shifting of team loyalties as new participants arrived or others faded away, with large and small people reassigned to achieve some kind of balance.

Balance? Oh come on, there was no balance. Just a lot of sprinting, kicking, and throwing, with a few spectacular performances distributed up and down the age groups. And from us on the sidelines, a lot of wild cheering.

As they departed, everyone was sweaty and most were smiling. Good feelings prevailed. The smallest players dashed away without the need for extra praise. Hey, for awhile they’d been treated like adults. 

As far as I’m concerned, for the rest of Thanksgiving none of the professional games compared, even slightly, with this one.  

THE FOUR-MIRACLE FIRE

THE FOUR-MIRACLE FIRE

            He called my name in a way I’d never heard it before: “BABE!  BABE!!”  The voice was my husband’s, and it penetrated right through the bedroom wall that separates us from the outside, rose above the whirring sounds of our bedroom air purifier, and drowned out the Santa Ana wind blowing outside—a real gale.  

            What I heard beyond the word itself was horror and urgency.  

            Oh my God! Oh my God! What is it?

            Within seconds I was out of bed, tearing through the room and straight out the nearby door that leads to the backyard.

            And there, beyond our bedroom wing, I saw him: Rob standing with a hose in his hand. And all around him . . . FIRE!  Fire in the trees behind and above him, patches of fire among pine needles on the ground, sparks--in that terrible wind--flying above his head. To me, a virtual wall of fire with Rob standing in the middle.

“Rob! Stop it!” I screamed. “Run!”

Instead he stood there, hose moving, but his feet cemented in place. I screamed again, but he never acknowledged me--ignored me as if I wasn’t there, or he couldn’t hear my voice.  

Getting nowhere, I raced back into the house and grabbed the nearest phone. It was dead. I ran to another, and strangely this one had a dial tone. Heart pounding hard enough to kill me, I did what only a half-crazed person might do: I dialed 411.  

All I got, of course, was an automated voice asking for city and state.

Oh, God!  Oh stupid. Stupid.

Ever more frantic, I re-dialed, this time 911. “Our house is on fire!” I cried to the responding woman, and with a restored brain managed to give her the correct street address. Next I called my daughter, once more saying without preamble, “The house is on fire!”

Just then our doorbell rang insistently. Once. Twice. Fists pounded on the front door. “Your house! It’s burning!” cried the woman who stood there. Dimly I noticed she was a stranger, that she was thin and dressed all in black. “Get out! Get out now!”  She leaned in to drag me out.

“I know! I know! My husband’s in the backyard, and he won’t leave.”

“You get out, then!”

But I was in my nightie, and left her standing there while I rushed back to our dressing room for clothes. In seconds I was wearing the nearest shirt, the most grabbable pants. Shoes in hand, I ran back to the patio. With every fiber in my being I screamed at Rob to leave, but he ignored me. His hose turned one way, then another, while more trees flamed and embers flew. And still he refused to budge.

More neighbors came and literally pulled me outside. One of them went out back and tugged on Rob—a useless effort. Meanwhile, on the front walk I was bent over, trying to put on my shoes, trying to breathe. Where are the fire trucks?

“My husband!” I gasped. “He won’t come!”

Our driveway was now full of neighbors, then a policeman . . . then, finally, three huge fire trucks.

It was the firemen, about fifty of them the newspapers said, marching to the back in their thick yellow suits that finally made Rob surrender his hose.

For hours I was furious with my husband, couldn’t stop being angry that he’d risked his life.

As a devoted group of us, neighbors and family, sat on a small retaining wall across the yard watching firemen douse the trees . . . an adjacent woodpile . . .  a wooden fence . . .  our wooden patio cover . . .  and yes, the house, I could hardly speak to Rob. “Look at your shirt!” I cried, pointing to the charred holes across his shoulders.

“I shook a few embers out of my hair, too,” he said.

He stood up and paced restlessly, then told us, his small audience on the wall, how it all began:

“It was just before eight, and I was up, letting in the cat. Suddenly the cat stopped in the patio doorway and froze. All four paws were splayed, and he was staring toward the back. One long look and he streaked away. I wondered, What’s he looking at? A squirrel? But his reaction was so extreme, I took a second look and saw what he’d seen: a pine tree in back, near the fenceline, was totally aflame. The flames were headed down, lower and lower. Luckily, I had a hose on the patio, already turned on, and I rushed back there and began spraying.”

Rob’s efforts had clearly kept the flames from doing their worst.

Even as we watched the firemen, a sudden explosion of sparks sent them all jumping back. An electrical wire had fallen to the ground, and over by the bedroom wing the live wire had to be cordoned off with yellow tape.

Suddenly Rob said, “Babe! Tell the firemen to stay off the roof! They’ll break the shingles.”

I ran around to the front. Too late. Five yellow suits were already up top, stomping around and throwing off concrete shingles.  

The man from Edison who arrived later to retrieve the live wire told us what had happened: thanks to the fierce wind, a huge tree branch had fallen across the wires, knocked one against another, and produced enough sparks to ignite the pine tree. The wild wind did the rest.

            Later that afternoon we recounted the miracles:  Miracle One: That the fire did not start at two in the morning, with both of us asleep. We might not have known until the flames were right outside our bedroom.  Or even inside.

Miracle Two: That Rob was up early—usually he isn’t—and that the cat had flashed a warning.

Miracle Three: That Rob had a hose all ready and kept the house doused until  the firemen got there.

Miracle Four: That our huge bedroom picture window and adjacent wing windows were all double paned. Directly confronted by flames from below and from blazing woodpiles six feet away, the outer panes shattered but the inner ones held. “If both panes had broken,” a fireman said, “the wind would have blown the flames straight into the bedroom, and down through the house. I doubt we could have saved it.”

As it was, for two days we had no water, no electricity, no gas, no internet, no TV, no workable solar panels. Worst of all we had no phone, and my cellphone did not work anywhere near the house and never has.  Which meant we couldn’t call or be called by any of the dozen groups we needed to start restoring us to normal. 

What we did have was a house in which every room in the bedroom wing reeked of smoke, making it too toxic to live in.

Thank God for our nearby daughter, Tracy, and husband Brad Hagen, who invited us to live in the “Hagen Hotel.”

Happily, our insurance company, State Farm, reached from Tracy’s house, responded immediately and with all the right people. They brought a contractor to drag away charred debris and a burned-up shed and fence, an interior crew who wiped down and cleaned every object in the bedroom area, including the walls, another bunch who took away all our hanging clothes to be cleaned, and yet another contractor who sealed off the bedroom area and set up an ozone machine which ran all night for two nights with the express purpose of killing odors.  

A week later it was obvious that the rugs in that area needed to be replaced. The smoky smell had partially returned, meaning something was still giving off unlivable vapors.  

It was Rob, though, who emerged as the original mixed blessing.  For risking his life as he wielded the hose near our bedroom he was clearly an idiot. But for standing his ground and saving our home he was definitely a hero. 

A STRANGE PLACE FOR DRAMA

A STRANGE PLACE FOR DRAMA

           

            You never know what will happen at the post office. Often in a slow line I’ve struck up conversations with people—both men and women--and ended up giving them my card, or sometimes even a book. Or I’ve stood there doing a crossword puzzle and had the person next to me lean over to help. Hey, we’re glued here together, we might as well talk!       

Post office stories come in good and bad flavors. The really bad ones were the times a knot of protesters camped just outside the door . . . two or three men with a table and signs in big black letters, “Impeach Obama!”  Underneath, hanging from the table, were photos of the president defiled by a Hitler mustache. I’ve been known to yell at them as I pass, “Get lost!”

One day recently a bizarre thing happened. A big man ahead of me in a wheel chair got into a wrangle with the clerk behind the counter. He wheeled himself closer, and his chair just happened to hit the little metal stanchion that holds one end of the divider rope. He grabbed the metal pole and slammed it to the ground. But the pole bounced back, so he seized it again and slammed it down harder. I stared at him, amazed. Others stared too, but nobody said anything.  

Seemingly inspired by his own rage, he picked it up with added fury, bent on crushing it once and for all. Without thinking, I yelled, “Cut it out!  CUT IT OUT!” Somebody had to say something. With others around me murmuring, he finished his last slam and quit.

I couldn’t believe my voice had been the only one. Eventually the man wheeled himself closer to the clerk, but he wasn’t quite through. Reaching above his head, he pounded his money onto the counter—so loud you could hear it everywhere. I left, wondering how much violence it would take before someone with testosterone got involved.    

Today was the strangest post office day yet.   

With twelve books to ship, I couldn’t pack them at home—I needed one of the postal service’s big priority boxes.

In a hurry to get there, I made a swift decision to wear, one last time, a sweat shirt I’ve been on the point of giving away. It’s twenty-three years old, which I happen to know because the lively insignia is right there on the shoulder—Queen Elizabeth Two--and it dates back to our fortieth anniversary on the lovely ship. The shirt is a flashy mix of white and bright red, and even incorporates some red and white stripes—loud enough to make an impression across the street.      

Who knows what difference clothes can make?    

As I was standing at the customer table, carefully packing books, a lovely-looking lady broke out of the line and asked, “What are those books?”

“Memoirs,” I said. And then added, “I wrote them.”

“You wrote them?”

“Yes, it’s my tenth book.” I went on packing. “A story about our family.”

Around her, people were starting to lean closer.

“Really,” she said. “I work with some older people, all of whom have great stories to tell. How did you get this published?”

I named the publisher, and she said, “That’s the kind of thing we need to know.”  

When she paused I said, “I teach novel writing. Here, I’ll give you my card.” As I wrestled it out of my purse, to my surprise the man ahead of her in line put out his hand. “I’d like one.”  

I smiled at him. Well, this is interesting! I dug a little deeper, pulled out another card. And right then the lady in front of him said, “I’d like one, too.”

Now I was really surprised! It was as though I’d suddenly been recognized as a celebrity . . . Janet Evanovich come to Tustin. Immediately others spoke up, until almost everyone in line wanted cards, and I found my supply nearly depleted. Here I was, passing out six or seven cards in a row to total strangers. I was laughing, thinking, how did this ever happen?

I said to the original lady, “Tell you what. I’ll get you a book from my car.”

“I’ll watch your box,” she said.

As I backed toward the front of the line, everyone was looking at me and smiling, so I said for them all to hear, “I guess I should give a speech,” and they all laughed. Well, I could, I thought, now that I’ve got the whole post office involved.    

Back at the car I decided, What the hell, I might as well bring in two books. Which I did. The first I gave to the original lady. And since the man was next in line, I hesitated, then handed him one, too. The room had taken on the atmosphere of a party.  

Further down the line a lady said, “I’ll BUY one!”  So I gave her a card.

Once back in line with my books, I could see the man ahead of me reading what I’d given him and smiling. As I reached the counter, the first woman rushed back inside and gave me her card.

Just before I handed over the big box, the lady who said she’d buy a book came up to talk, and we learned we were practically neighbors. “I’ll be in touch,” she said.

The clerk was smiling as I reached him. “Did you see what happened?” I asked, and he nodded, as if to say,  Another post office drama.  

Home again, I studied myself in the mirror. Was it me or the Queen Elizabeth  shirt?  Impossible to be sure . . . except the shirt had suddenly become a keeper. Just in case, I’ll wear it to other drama settings. Who knows what adventures still lay ahead?

WE LEFT A KID ONCE

WE LEFT A KID ONCE

            So the Prime Minister of England, David Cameron, left one of his kids in a pub. Knowing the Brits, half of them are laughing and the other half are calling Cameron an unfit father.

            Call us what you like, but I’ve been guilty of the same crime. Or rather my husband Rob was guilty, because he was driving. As a family, we were on our way to Las Vegas. As we always did on those occasional trips, Rob stopped in Baker, to let us all take a drink-and-potty break. That done, we merrily set off again. As usual, the noise inside our eight-passenger Buick was so intense you’d think we were members of a traveling circus. And that the circus was in full operative mode.

            Rob and I had six kids.  I’ve always said that six was too many for the capacity of my brain, that I couldn’t keep them all on my mental screen at the same time.  I’d know someone was missing, but I was never quite sure which one.  

            On this day we were twenty miles out of Baker when Bobby, our oldest, said, “Where’s Eric?”  It appears Bobby’s mental screen was better than mine.  

            “Eric?” I said. “Why he’s right here, of course.”

            “No he isn’t,” said Bobby.  “He’s not in our row. Is he back there with you, Mom?”

            I didn’t really have to look.  “Oh, my God. I don’t see Eric. Where is he?”

            “Eric?” shouted Rob from the driver’s seat. “Didn’t he get in with the rest of us?”  He was still speeding along. 

“Don’t think he made it,” said our second son, solemnly. “Count ‘em, Mom. He’s not here.” Even back then, Chris never panicked.  

“Stop, Rob!  Stop!” I screamed. “We left Eric!”

“Good God!” said Rob, “I told everyone to get in.”  With his usual great reflexes, Rob spun the car around, right there in the middle of the highway. Within seconds he was speeding in the other direction.

Finally our daughter spoke up. “I saw him going to the men’s room. I never saw him come out.”

“Eric was probably looking at his hair again,” said Chris. “That’s all he ever does. He  must’ve been looking when we left.”    

“Hurry, Rob!” I yelled. “Hurry!”  Poor little boy, he’s only ten. “I can’t believe we left him!”

For twenty miles I could hardly breathe. They were the longest twenty miles of my life.  Poor little boy, I kept thinking. The poor kid. What will he do?

We arrived back at the gas station, nearly crazy with worry. Both Rob and I leaped out of the car, poured into the little mini-mart, desperate to find him.

There sat Eric on a stool. He was calmly licking a popsicle. Strange as it seems, he didn’t seem worried at all. “The man told me you’d be back.”

“Of course we’d be back,” said Rob.  

           “Of course,” I said. “You know we would.” God, I’m so glad to see you. And then, in my relief and gratitude I couldn’t help thinking, He really does have great hair.

            I’m way behind on adding chapters from “A Circus Without Elephants.”  Here’s Chapter 7.

CHAPTER  SEVEN 

                      

              THE GREAT SEQUOIA HIKE

NONE OF US WANTED it, but Bobby would be leaving soon.   

With our son’s departure imminent, Rob and I scrambled to soften the pain that we knew was coming. Maybe if he had a last, great weekend, we thought . . . which is how we happened to take the four oldest boys to the High Sierras, a kind of final-hurrah for a departing son. 

Determined to hike efficiently, Rob had studied catalogues and ordered the latest marvels in deep-woods engineering, two Mountain Master back-packs touted as offering perfect weight-distribution over the hiker’s body.  “These may be expensive,” he said, holding up one of the khaki green contraptions and fingering the aluminum frame, “but if they’re half as good as the Mountain Master people claim, they’ll be worth it.”

“Money’s not important when it comes to our backs,” I echoed.  Then somehow I got the message confused.  In an odd twist of logic, perfect weight distribution began to mean the extra weight disappears.  Suddenly additional ounces meant nothing.            

Feeling smug at being so wonderfully organized, I filled our packs with everything we could possibly need:  canned pork-and-beans, frozen meat, canned soups, dried eggs, pancake mix, jars of coffee, sugar, and syrup, extra jackets, a flashlight, and various toilet articles and drugs.  This in addition to raisins and candy bars, sacks of nuts, cooking pots and a frying pan.  At the time it all seemed quite reasonable.  We would, after all, be out of touch with civilization for most of two days.   

At the start of a rustic trail in Sequoia National Park, Rob and I squirmed into our Mountain Masters and helped Bobby and Chris with their bundles--all the sleeping bags rolled into two fat sausages.  Chris was now eleven-and-a-half and almost as tall as Bobby, who was nearly thirteen.  Eric, ten, and Kenny, seven, carried tiny knapsacks on their tiny shoulders. 

Rob had someone snap our picture, which shows the six of us strapped into our loads, smiling, fresh, and eager. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” Rob said, “if all our trips got off to this kind of easy start?” 

Our destination was Bearpaw Meadow, eleven miles along the High Sierra Trail.  As I looked toward the forest, the air seemed to shimmer with its very cleanness, and sunlight produced shadows as sharp as etchings.  The woods smelled good, like damp leaves and sap.  In the sun it was warm, in the deeper forest briskly cool. 

“Let’s go,” I said, eager to test our equipment.  So Rob led off, his plump Mountain Master giving him the proportions of a hump-backed grizzly.  Strung out on the trail behind him, the boys and I trudged along at just the right intervals to breathe each other’s dust. 

As we started up the first small incline, I could tell that our backpacks were indeed well-designed, for I could feel the weight in several unexpected places--not just in my shoulders, but also in my arms, calves, and lower spine. 

Then the trail grew steeper, and I began to wonder if I hadn’t overdone the packing a tiny bit . . . Did we really need four tins of pork-and-beans?   

We’d been walking silently for maybe twenty minutes when I thought I heard a groan up ahead.  “You okay, Rob?” I called out. 

He didn’t answer, nor did he slow the pace.  But minutes later he stopped and sagged against a tree. 

Catching up, I saw rivulets of sweat making their way down the sides of his face, and he was bent low, massaging his legs.  “Sonofabitch!” he said.  “My knees!” 

Momentarily overtaken by the guilt which I keep handy for such occasions, I started to apologize.  Then stopped.  He knew what I’d been packing and he hadn’t said anything   . . . and anyway, I was carrying my share.

But not very well.  I found my own tree to lean against and felt a dull ache recede from my muscles.  It appeared the Mountain Master people had certainly kept their promise; whatever sensations you got, you got them everywhere.

For several minutes Rob and I rested in disgruntled silence, dismayed that we were so much weaker than we’d imagined.  Neither of us felt like talking.  

The boys, on the other hand, seemed annoyingly fresh.  Bobby’s thin face was alert, brighter than normal, and Chris beamed at us out of chipmunk cheeks, his usual good-natured self.  The two carried their packs as casually as pocket handkerchiefs. 

“This is neat,” said Eric, “isn’t it neat, Kenny?” and Kenny nodded, and with much squealing the two dashed off after a ground squirrel. 

After awhile we set off again. 

But the respite hadn’t helped.  If anything, my load was heavier, in fact inexplicably weighty, as though something big had crawled inside.   

I wasn’t watching Rob anymore or the Redwoods or the carpet of ferns.  I was watching the ground, staring at dust, staring at the trail.  The minutes passed, and it no longer mattered how the weight was distributed.  The whole blasted load could have hung from my neck, for all the help I was getting from that perfect engineering.  I felt like I was hauling a Steinway.   

Bearpaw Meadow was no longer attainable.  Eleven miles or one mile, what was the difference, I was never going to get there.

Suddenly I couldn’t walk another step.  With a last surge of will I gasped my way to a big rock and sagged out from under the crushing load.       

Rob stopped too, and in one swift motion he jerked the pack off his body and dropped it on the ground.  “My knees are through,” he declared.  “Finished.” 

In our separate foul moods, we stood there panting.  The boys watched in surprise as Rob roused enough to drag his Mountain Master off the trail, growling that he didn’t care whether he ever saw the damned thing again.  “For two cents I’d leave it right here.” 

“What if somebody steals it?” Eric asked.  He was cute and blue-eyed, just outgrowing his baby softness. 

Rob laughed without mirth.  “I’d like to see the thief who’s strong enough to haul it away!” 

So this was it, I thought, Rob and I finally felled by our possessions, with too much to carry in either direction.

Six of us milled on the trail while we tried to decide what to do.  After several irresolute minutes, Bobby offered casually, “I’ll carry your pack, Dad.”  

Rob and I stared at him and shook our heads in unison.  “You can’t,” Rob said.  “If I can’t, you can’t.”

“Sure I can,” said Bobby, and he hoisted Rob’s pack onto his scrawny shoulders.  “See?”

Rob smiled.  “Bobby, you haven’t tried walking yet.”

“I can walk,” Bobby said, and started off. 

With that Chris picked up my pack.  “You take my stuff, Mom.  It’s light.” 

He was right, it was.  So I carried Chris’s load and Rob took Bobby’s, and the six of us moved off down the trail again with our oldest boys in front, where anyone that strong deserved to be.  
            From time to time Rob and I exchanged incredulous glances, amazed at this turning point, that our roles had been reversed with two pre-teens.  But the bigger boys never said a word.  Not a complaint, not a murmur. 

They carried those Mountain Masters all the way to Bearpaw Meadow, they slept on the ground that night, and Sunday morning they hauled their loads five miles up and down a precipitous, winding trail to Hamilton Lake and out again, then back the eleven miles to our parked car.  Thirty-two miles in thirty-four hours. 

The only time they complained was at Sunday morning’s breakfast.  They didn’t like the scrambled eggs, which I’d made from a dried packet and a cup of stream water and which cooked up into a dark, gray-green viscous blob, a mess that only Dr. Seuss could love.  “I’ve never seen green eggs!” Bobby said, screwing up his long face.

“I’m sorry, Mom, it looks like a big, squashed slug,” said Chris. 

“Pancakes, then?” I asked, tossing the green eggs into the campfire because nobody else wanted them either.   

Kenny watched the eggs as they sizzled.  “Good you burned ‘em, Mom.  They coulda made some bear sick.”    

But the pancakes, too, turned a strange color in addition to being dense and hard.  I was finally glad we’d hauled in the heavy, canned baked beans. 

Sunday night we ran out of everything except food (of which we had enough to take us through the winter), out of time, daylight, and energy.  We’d tried to go too far, lingered to catch a few fish too many.  But we had to get back to Orange County that night because our flight to Denver left the next morning.   

As the light faded and the miles didn’t, Rob said, “Boys, we’ve got to keep going,” and Bobby nodded and led us down the murky trail as though he always went hiking in inky darkness.  He still hadn’t mentioned the piano on his shoulders, nor had Chris.

Behind Bobby came Rob with a wavering flashlight, then Chris and Eric, both resolutely quiet, and finally Kenny, who began asking, “What if we see a bear?”

From the rear I told him we probably wouldn’t see any bears, we were making too much noise, and Kenny said in a nervous, pipey voice, “How do you know?  Are you sure?”

“Yes, I said, and yearned to have this over with, not because of the bears or the darkness but because I felt like I’d already walked a thousand miles.   

About ten-thirty Rob’s flashlight gave out and we all disappeared.  Such an irony, I thought.  All those canned goods and only one flashlight.  An eerie tension crept over us, not helped when little Kenny, thin and skitterish as a bird, began to whimper.  “I’m scared.  There MIGHT be a bear.”

“There’s no bear, Kenny,” I promised.  

“I think I hear a mountain lion.” 

“It’s just Bobby stepping on a twig.”

“What if a cougar jumps out?”   

“Cougars won’t bother us,” I said.  “They’re afraid of people.”     

“But you don’t know, Mom.  You don’t know.” 

With increasing anguish he named all the wild predators one by one, the spiders, the snakes, the wolves, while up front somewhere Bobby searched out the trail. 

For the next two hours Kenny clung to my hand and sobbed into the night.

Periodically Bobby called out the distances.  “Mile five,” he sang out, because he’d somehow managed to spot the wooden marker nailed to a tree.  And later, “Mile four.”  When he missed mile three, the tension became so thick even Rob sounded edgy. 

By then Kenny was crying hard enough for all of us.   

SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT WE emerged from the forest and staggered up to our station wagon. 

As Rob lifted the pack from Bobby’s narrow shoulders, he clapped his hand on Bobby’s arm.  “You guys were terrific.”

Bobby smiled and nodded, a private, satisfied smile.  The moment was vintage Bobby, the start of the quiet triumphs we would one day see so vividly.  I thought it odd that he didn’t seem weary at all.  

The boys all climbed into the back of our large station wagon and immediately fell asleep. 

Rob said he’d take us down the mountain and I could drive the rest of the way home. 

Back on level roads once more, we stopped to switch drivers.  When I stepped out of the car on my side, a surprise was waiting.  With no warning whatever--before I’d taken a single step--my legs gave way and I sank to the ground like a collapsing card table. 

I sat there, startled; my legs had never behaved like that before.   

From the pavement, wanting to tell him what had happened, I looked through the open car door toward Rob.  I expected to see him standing there, waiting.  But he wasn’t.  He was sitting in a heap on the ground.  Like me, he’d stepped out and buckled and gone down.       

As I drove the rest of the way home to Orange County, I wondered if there wasn’t a better plan than taking Bobby to Denver.  For a whole weekend he hadn’t wheezed once.  No coughing, no fighting for breath.   

Perhaps instead of the Home for Asthmatic Children, we ought to send him off to the High Sierras with a thirty-pound pack on his back. 

A Circus Without Elephants--Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

THE UNDERGROUND FORT

TEN YEARS LATER WE’D become the parents of six children--five boys and a girl--and it was assumed by those who knew us only in passing that we were militant Catholics, when in fact we were simply prolific Presbyterians.

Once in awhile I thought back to those childhood dreams Rob and I had entertained as youngsters, those wholly unrealistic images of ourselves as adults. For a short while Rob imagined he’d be a railroad engineer, and later, with a dawning love of the outdoors, a forest ranger.

I entertained no such lofty ideals. I saw myself as a bride. As though being a bride was a permanent state of affairs, as though brideship was a condition that lasted through maturity and on into senility. How else can one explain a vision that never carried me beyond a few golden moments of twirling before a mirror in a silken wedding gown, radiant to the point of luminescence, and on to a dizzying, forever-float down a church aisle with everyone looking and gasping? Oh, what a fairy vision of a bride I’d conjured up, what a back-lit center of attention I imagined I’d be!

That walk was obviously meant to last forever. Certainly no competing image ever arose to explain what I might be doing after the bride bit.

It was all so ironic.

By 1962, surrounded by half a dozen children in all stages from pupa to butterfly, I was thinking back on how the dream had gone astray: after all my girlish fantasies about a wedding as opulent as a coronation, I’d settled for Spartan vows and no real wedding at all. And having given no thought whatever to children, I was now the mother of six--and I swear they snuck up on me, one by one, when I wasn’t looking.

Along with everything else, the humor in our lives had taken a twist. The funny things that once happened to us when it was just Rob and me squaring off against the world, had now become the craziness created by the two of us pitted against a defiant army we’d created ourselves from scratch—-a phalanx of children that surrounded us on all sides.

We’d moved, of course. No army could possibly be garreted in such tiny quarters as that first house in the San Fernando Valley. Together, Rob and I chose to locate miles away in cooler Orange County, though I maintain he deliberately cultivated a twenty-eight-mile commute to his legal work in Long Beach, a distance which struck him as a bare-minimum separation from the confusion he left each morning. Sometimes he said, only half in jest, “This place is like a circus without the elephants.”

In North Tustin, California, we built a modest house on a half acre of land that backed up to an orange grove. Our children loved the new location; they had endless space for their endless projects, and even better, they could roam unfettered through the grove and stage little wars and bomb each other with oranges.

By 1962 our oldest, Bobby, was eleven and a half, and our youngest, Kirk, only two, and we’d learned what every parent of more than one discovers sooner or later--no matter how painstakingly you work at molding your kids, they will turn out different than you planned, and in fact no two will be remotely alike, and if you don’t believe that’s possible in a nice, consistent, even-tempered environment, just study a few snowflakes.

WE’D KNOWN FROM THE start that Bobby was the stubborn one. Long-faced and quietly intense, he was a skinny child who said frequently, “I don’t want to do what everyone else has done. I want to be different.” From his earliest years he was propelled by an inner force that drove him—-not to play like other children, God forbid--but to re-make, improve, or otherwise conquer his childhood toys. He didn’t play with his train set. He built a virtual train switching yard that crept across the cement and devoured our patio.

Sometimes as he worked, he wheezed. But obstinate beyond reason, he said, “It’s not asthma. I’m not sick.” I was always arguing with him. “Bobby, stop fixing your train set and come to dinner.” He came when he felt like it.

Bobby wasn’t the one getting raised, I was. In his own dogged way, he trained me to equal him in stubbornness. The problem was, I kept imagining myself as the boss who ought to be making the decisions . . . whereas he saw himself as a youthful Alexander the Great who couldn’t be conquered. We lived our lives in a clash of images.

Soon Rob and I discovered he had dreams, but what we didn’t know at first was their width and breadth . . . that an eleven-year-old could think of himself in global terms, that he could vow privately to create a competition-size environment deep in the ground. And then actually do it.

Bobby confided his plans one morning at breakfast. “Dad, I’m going to dig the world’s biggest underground fort.” He said it just like that. No buildup. No explanation. No preparatory speeches.

Rob looked up from his puffed wheat. “How will you know it’s the world’s biggest, Bobby?” Rob was trying to be serious, but of course he wasn’t, how could he be? Bobby was just a child, and even to me this was idle conversation.

Bobby’s long face changed subtly, took on greater eagerness, more resolve. His voice conveyed his certainty. “I’ll just know, Dad. I will.” And I swear, we almost believed him.

And so began The Year of the Underground Fort.

BOBBY DIDN’T WASTE any time. Unlike other eleven-year-olds who begin a project after breakfast and abandon it by supper, Bobby recruited his brothers with an intensity that would have made the Marines proud. He did, indeed, intend to dig for himself and his siblings a noteworthy underground fort, and to that end he conscripted his next-oldest brother, Chris, and then our third son, Eric. By noon, the three of them were hard at work.

I heard them through the kitchen window. The far side of the yard became a noisy, industrial place.

But two shoveling brothers didn’t live up to Bobby’s expectations. “You’ve got to dig faster!” he cried, inciting them to greater effort. Willing to tunnel at a fiendish pace himself, he was dismayed to find that his brothers worked at something less than the speed of a steam shovel.

Clearly, help was needed. As only Bobby could do, he brought in friends, expanding his sphere of influence outward block by block, like a creeping flood, until every neighborhood child with access to a shovel had convened in our backyard. I watched and was mostly amused.

For days, then weeks, our yard was never quiet. The clanking of shovels and the shrill sounds of youthful voices dominated our half acre until our backyard was like an over-subscribed union job, with half the workers bent to the task and the other half leaning on their shovels.

Day after day Bobby led the charge, shoveling furiously one minute, exhorting his youthful minions the next.

Meanwhile, the mounds of dirt grew, and so, presumably, did the underground fort. I never saw it up close until the project was nearly at an end (when Chris, cheerfully but insistently, led me down into the bowels of the earth), but I did see that Bobby had hardened into steel; I could feel his willpower all the way to the kitchen. It hardly seemed possible that such a young boy could keep such tight control over what was basically an unmanageable company of slackers.

And then two things happened. Bobby’s friends, and soon even his brothers, grew weary of being the indentured servants of a relentless taskmaster. “I can’t dig anymore,” said Chris one day, walking toward the house. “I’m tired.”

I happened to be watching through the kitchen window and wondered how Bobby would handle the loss of his best worker—-Chris the faithful, Chris the determined shoveler.

For seconds Bobby stared in horror, and then he ran after his brother. “You can’t be tired!” he howled. “You’re not tired, Chris, you know you’re not. You want this fort a lot, you want it as much as I do.”

Chris gave him a glance and kept walking.

Giving up on mind control, Bobby did a quick, dancing sidestep, trying to cut off his brother’s escape.

Chris wouldn’t be stopped. He just moved deftly around his older brother and continued toward the house.

Bobby followed, desperation on his long face. “Please, Chris, come back. I need you. I can’t do it without you. Everyone needs you. Please.”

At last Chris paused and simply looked at him.

With a glint in his eyes, Bobby pulled out his trump card. Like a gambler, he slapped it on the table. “Chris, if you keep digging, I’ll . . . I’ll give you my marbles. All of them. Even the aggies.” Anxiously he waited to see if Chris would succumb to this, the ultimate bribe.

“The aggies?” Chris stopped to consider, letting the silence grow, thinking hard about Bobby’s offer. Finally he raised his eyes and said with his own fierce determination, “All right, Bobby. I’ll do it. But don’t yell at me anymore, okay? I don’t like being yelled at.”

“You’ll dig?” said Bobby.

“For awhile.” With slow steps Chris turned back toward the fort. Halfway across the yard he called out, “You don’t have to give me your aggies, Bobby.”

The second happening was bigger, much harder to solve. Bobby’s asthma, which he’d had since early childhood, flared up and became so severe that at night we could hear the sounds of his wheezing in the hall outside his room. Still he said stubbornly, “The fort’s not hurting me. Don’t you think I’d know if it was?”

Rob and I finally recognized the truth---that the spores, molds, and fungus inherent in all soil were making him worse. The fort had to go.

But it took both of us and the advice from a doctor and our combined willpowers to bring Bobby to a halt. And even then we might not have succeeded, had Rob not taken an extraordinary step: one night, by the light of the moon, he went outside with a shovel and for hours he relentlessly restored the earth to Bobby’s underground fort.

BOBBY GAVE UP WITH resignation, even grace. And that was only the beginning of his trauma.

Because his asthma was now so severe, Rob and I were forced to consider our last resort--a home for asthmatic children, an institution in Denver where the minimum stay was two years.

Telling Bobby he had to leave all of us, his brothers, his parents, his grandparents, for two years was one of the hardest things we ever did. And harder still when he didn’t argue. As he would do in later years, Bobby fought back when a fight was possible, and when it wasn’t, he just coped.