APPRISE

To cheer myself, as an antidote to the news, I find on my computer every morning a little spirit lifter from Dr. Dictionary, who daily sends me a word; as if I did not already have too many of them. But as there is so little left to believe in, I have decided to worship words. I look to them for Guidance. Today's word is apprise.
Apprise. Look around you. For all the shadows in the world, you are alive. And life is light.
So I am apprising. Because I am trying to ascribe to the philosophy I think I have expressed in my new novel:if you will reach out to help somebody, to interact, you can forget about yourself, and so lose the pain. I have enlisted in GAB, an association called Grandparents and Books, where retirees and even sometimes young vital people, go through a training so they will be fit to read to children in libraries. Really.
There were about twenty in my training group, It started off, in a library in Baldwin Hills, just as elegantly and generously--more so, as it turns out-- than those breakfast meetings at the high end condos of socially ambitious women in Century Woods;. Same menu. Bagels and nutbreads and coffee and grapes and Danish. Sweetly lavish.
The women (no men) were of different shapes, sizes, colors, tongues-- one in my sub-group when we went in to practice reading aloud was a Hispanic, English still a little hard for her, making the woman who trained us say how inspirational that would be to the children, with so many of them being Latinos in this region. We will wear aprons so they know it's safe to talk to us, so many of them being latchkey kids told not to talk to strangers. Big job: to pull them away from the computers so they will love books.
I put my first day's training into practice with Silas, 4, whom I had for the afternoon yesterday, and took to the Santa Monica Library which is pretty paradisical(sp?) Lots of light, spiffy, newly redone, loaded with books and a computer games section which I pulled him past, though he wanted to go there because he said the games go on forever. I told him what also goes on foreveer is the imagination, especially his, so he can think more things while we're reading, and he'll have a whole lifetime of thought to play with. Then I tried to read him The Elephant's Child, the story of how the elephant got his trunk, Kipling, from his Jungle Book which was actually the first children's book-- but the 'O Best Beloved' diction threw him and lost his interest so I seized on the Judith Viorst book about Alexander having a horrible terrible very bad no good day that gives the kids a chance to join in and repeat her magically downtrodden phrase, and also brings up Australia, where Silas has a Grandma and goes to visit as he will in August. It was better than fun. So my own spirits are lifted, and I look forward to being fingerprinted which I will be in the second training session, I assume so they can check I'm not a child molester.
But in spite of all this spiritual enhancement and upliftment, I did read the papers today and see that all the Taliban have escaped from a prison in Afghanistan which seems more than a little sloppy and unfortunate. Then, reading that the Irish were opposed to joining the European Union, I called my good friend the foremer Lord Mayor of Belfast, who disagrees with their refusal to sign the Lisbon treaty. The the Irish believe they've worked too hard to become independent to throw it all away by joining the European Union, and I must admit I rather like that, find it very Irish stubborn and twee. Maybe that will affect the Euro and one day we can go to Europe again. Then I spoke to my daughter the nail technician whose best customer, now on tour, used to be Cindy McCain. Madeleine told me Cindy not only was in Rehab for Oxycodin but actually stole it from a clinic she served on the board of. Oh, I do hope someone is on that for when they attack Michelle Obama.
What a world what a world as the witch said in The Wizard of Oz, though the evil dealt with in those days seems by today's standards, a mere bagatelle, the word from Dr. Dictionary last Tuesday.

Suicide by Sushi

When I went back to my beloved college to write a play after Don died, I got to know one of the professors I had had as an undergraduate. He asked me, non-judgmentally, how it was to wrote 'soft-core' porn.' As his subject had been Romanticism, and the Romanic poets, of which I had once fancied myself one,I did not take offense, but simply listened, as he rambled on softly, and spoke of what we were eating at faculty lunch in Wyndham as 'comfort food.' It was mostly pasta and cheese, the last of which we know is terrible for you. I had been to an acupuncturist shortly after Don's death,when I suffered, understandably, from migraines, and he stuck a needle in between my brows releasing not only what energies he might have been after but also a torrent of sobs. He asked me what was wrong, I said "My husband died," and, Asian that he was, said "Such is life." Then he stuck me again and said 'No more cheese," and that made me really cry because I still had a friend in San Francisco, Enrico, who restaurateured and made great Italian, so I said to the acupuncturist, :"First my husband dies and then you tell me 'No more cheese.'"
Don's legacy to me was Sushi, one of the few things, as he was less than adventurous, a man most comfortable at home, that he had discovered on his own, and ushered me into, stunned as I was that he expected me to sit -- where? At the bar? But I came to love it, and Kaji, the friend he had made who was a Sushi master, one of the few friends who actually came to the hospital, bringing Sushi, everyone was so shocked that a man of Don's youth and size and obvious heartiness should have cancer. Kaji brought a tray the size of a table to the house after the funeral, and Robert, our son, went into his bedroom and ate it all, in an act of cannibalistic grief. I stayed friends with Kaji and followed him wherever he went, until he disappeared from the Marina, and I was on my own. Then, I found Hide Sushi on Sawtelle, where I was redeemed. As I wrote my new novel, if it went well, I rewarded myself with Sushi. If it went badly, I consoled myself with it.
But alas, as the phonies in publishing say, anything that feels too good is bad for you. So it is that tuna, the most comforting of non-cheesy comfort foods, is riddled with mercury, and when I asked Helmut, a shrink of few words, the other day what it could do to you, he said "Kill you."
So for the last few days, which have been hard ones, I went only occasionally and ordered salmon skin handrolls. But they do not make you feel better. Yesterday, more than any other day, as I went to a beautidul shower for a beautiful new young friend, and sat at the grown-ups table, when the event was over I didn't want to stand in line with the ladies on walkers, so was the last to get my car, as everyone else went off to their lives, husbands, boyfriends, charity auctions, I felt like 'The Cheese Stands Alone.'
Today the mood lingered and deepened, exacerbated by not having anything to turn to, including the Daily Word, a pamphlet of spiritual uplift which has on its cover for June a woman lying in a field of clover sending a text message,a fucking text message, so what is there left to believe in? Obama? Oh, okay. I spoke to a friend who works on his campaign last night who said he should have the nomination by Tuesday night and as soon as it is secured he will announce his vice-president, and who it will be, according to him, is Chuck Hegel, which I think would be a very good thing. A Republican. Really reaching across the aisle, to a man who opposes the bad stuff. Still that didn't comfort me enough, as it all still feels up in the air, as does most of life, so I went for Sushi.
I tried to branch out and enjoy, but it just isn't the same. So I broke down and ordered my signature tuna roll. Well, just a tsate. How could that hurt?
But ehre's how my life works: the sushi masters have become genuinely fond of me. So there was in that roll six times the normal amount of blue fin,
It is a slow death. But then, so is the Democratic party. That selfsame source said that whenver America has been in great crisis, the great man has come, then citing Roosevelt, Lincoln, and .. not to mention.. "the Founder."
Really? Is this a man of Washington's stature? The general, not the city. We shall see. I mean, provided mercury doesn't make you blind. .

Last Train to Muguet

I remember in what were carefree days that I didn't recognize as such, when I would meditate in May in St. Tropez, they would celebrate Spring with a little bouquet, a sprig of Muguet, which I didn't know at the time, either, was Lilies of the Valley. It would be given to all present in the charming village, which it still seemed to be in May,the tourists not having yet invaded, with a ribbon tied to a tiny card saying 'Profitez de la vie', meaning 'Enjoy Life.' I had first heard that expression in French when I was visiting there-- it was still possible to do that for centimes, and I used to go and do silences and swim among the calming Maritime Pine, shading my anxieties like leafy umbrellas-- and Grace Kelly drove off her cliff, and the assistant concierge at the little hotel I stayed at in Ramatuelle, as the whole Cote d'Azur grieved, said "Il faut profitez de la vie." In other words, you better.
Well, today is the last day I will be the age I am, so I am summing up, as Mr. Maugham would put it--does anyone read Mr. Maugham anymore?--remembering all the wonderful friends I have made in these interesting years. When I first started studying spiritual things-- you don't have to gag, I have been less than faithful-- Jack, my Jewru(new book out: The Wise Heart) in his always moving talks quoted a lot of Castenada, so I think it was Castenada he cited as dissing the idea of things being blessings or curses, but just seeing everything as what it is, meaning life, with all its challenges and changes. In spite of this wisdom, I do consider my life has been studded with blessings, meaning the places I have been able to go when they were still go-able, and the friends I have made in the course of my travels, both in the world and in inner space. There was Diane who introduced me to metaphysics, and Pippa who introduced me to Orient Express, and Gerrie Pitt who showed me through the less-than hallowed halls of the Mandarin in Hong Kong, and several fine locales to follow, Sandy whom I loved best of all who was murdered in Bali, so she won't get this e-mail,unless of course there is an Afterlife and it's electronically connected. The rest of you have been on my computer and in my heart for a number of years now,so I will not cite you one by one, but you have all and each given me moments or days or years of warmth and connection, and I thank you.
Yesterday was a good friend's birthday, so to celebrate her I went through the driving and blowing rain, torrential it was, a leftover either from Myanmar or our own tornados, tearing my umbrella apart, to see Iron Man as she told me I should do, and I was happy to sit there soaked watching Robert Downey, Jr. make a new life for himself, since I knew his grandparents(Good God!) the Dorsos, when Dick ruled showbiz and Betty ruled fashion, and I am relieved he took himself by the back of the collar and worked it out. I would wish the same for my own children with whom I am not celebrating Mother's Day/my birthday, but that is another story, actually probably a novel, but one I don't think I will write, as I am weary of children that disappoint and parents who are surprised by that. I have in the past year become entranced with the simple miracle of speech, how it comes into the brain of little people and grows into thought, and eventually words that can lift your soul, and keep you floaty for days. So that takes care of Silas, who is four, and as fine a spirit as I have ever encountered, a personal gift to me, I think, from the mischievous angels who can't wait to see how we recover from the slings and arrows of outrageous spawn.
I have also, I think, come at last to enjoy New York, expecting nothing from it, finally, hoping for nothing from it in the way of acceptance, validation or good weather. It is enough to have watched the park burgeon with Spring, first the daffs, yellow and white dazzling, now withered, which is what happens to all things Spring, then the greens, bursting, growing daily from their shoots, then the great sweeps of white and salmon azaleas, and always and lingering, the little white flowers that I didn't know what they were till I walked with an actress friend and she started singing 'White Coral Bells upon a slender stalk, lilies of the valley deck my garden walls,' a song we used to step-sing at Bryn Mawr, the delicate blossom I finally recognized as Muguet.
So il faut profitez de la vie. I certainly feel that I have. Having all but completed the novel that caused me suffering in L.A. where, if I do not write I have little to make me happy but sushi and Silas(and of course you) stunned at New York's making me more charged up and creative, so you never know, I rest my case.
Thanks to all of you for all you have given me, and all I have been lucky enough, I hope, to receive with some degree of grace when I listened, and was able to give back when I could. We are all part of each other's story. Happy Birthday.

SPRING IS HERE

The flowers that etc, Tra La, out at last, little miniature daffs raising their bright yellow heads like in children's books: one half expects them to have faces that start to smile, mouths that sing. One gorgeous day where I lunched outside, so Mimi could come too, with an old friend who told me I shouldn't write these things as it will interfere with my novel, but as my novel is interfered with anyway, what the hell.
That day blossomed into high adventure, the New York variety, where I went to the Italian Cultural Society, and met up with new friends, a brilliantly funny PR person, Morty, and his quietly intense associate, and we went to dinner at Swifty's, where we were sat down next to a couple who looked TV familiar. A little into the appetizer I connected: it was Joe Wilson who blew the whistle on yellow cake nuclear bullshit in NIger from the administration and his wife Valerie Plame, the outed CIA-ette. So our dinner was even more stimulating than if it were just us being festive and interesting, and when they asked for their check, I leaned over slightly-- we were elbow to elbow on a banquette, and thanked him. "For what?" he asked. "For what you did for our country." He looked benign but somewhat puzzled, and asked who I thought he was, and I told him. He said that wasn't who he was at all, and a few minutes later showed me his driver's license to prove it, but Morty is convinced that's who he was anyway, and if he was Joe Wilson is very good-natured in addition to sharp, to be so pleasant while keeping up his charade.
Yesterday was dark and cold again but today dawns softly bright so Mimi and I strolled around the pond to check the progress of the tulips I came to town to visit-- they are not blooming yet, but the shoots are higher, so I hope the color will come out soon so I can see them and go back home, which I really feel LA is now, since it's where I'm writing this novel which is, alas, the center of my universe except for Silas, and Mimi who follows me everywhere, something Silas is not permitted to do. I spoke to my old friend George d'Almeida who lives in Tuscany on a vineyard he was smart enough to buy for a pittance in the 60s, and he has stopped painting as he says there are enough d'Almeidas in the world, most of them in his studio, and he wants to spend as much time as he can with his wife, the usual excuse of politicians here. But they are a special couple, and I envy them their companionship, as I envied the young people across the way from my tiny balcony in a glassed in room where they were eating breakfast, she in a nightie, picking up whatever she was eating with dainty fingers, he in a dark jacket, slicing with knife and fork, forking it into his mouth with his left hand so I took them to be Europeans. I remembered as I watched them that 'companion' comes from the Latin which I never studied, 'to break bread with," and I miss breaking bread with, especially French bread, that I never broke with anyone, that whole epoch of my life being mostly solitary. My Scottish buddy Rosemary is living in Paris now, and I would envy her that, too, except I came across a poem I wrote that goes

It is the function of envy
To shorten the breath
And the vision
And blur the senses
So that all one can feel
With perfect clarity
Is rage.

So envy is out. But I did tell George, as I told my good friend and editor, that I would rather leave a truly good book than have lived a happy life, and that does seem to me to be foolish.
Back to the moment, which is really all we have, and should live to the full if we learned anything at all as apparently I haven't: the park this morning was radiant, not only with the aforementioned about-to-sing daffodils, but bluebells and a little purple flower that barely peeks out above the grass but the color is vivid and soothing and would serve for mindful meditation if i were wise enough to be doing it. I wiped down a bench on which a vanished lover had left a message inscribed in metal "Think of me when day turns to night and believe it will be all right." a good thing to have fixed my eyes on before I saw the headline in the Times about how hard it would be for anyone to pay for college, and thought of a new motto for W, "No grad left behind, except how are they going to get there, heh heh," and the adjacent column about GE having a bleak projection(did you know Vonnegut worked for them, and much admired the company even after having become disgusted with everything else ?) and that being a bellweather for our tragically blighted country thanks to U Know Who, or perhaps we should change it to W know Who.
But in the distance I heard the lovingly mournful bleat of the saxaphone player who seems always to be in the park in the morning, and he was playing "I Concentrate on You." I tried to follow the counsel of the song, "whenever skies look gray to me and people declare we're through,:" combining it with the lost loving advice inscribed on the bench and concentrate on who? My You is long gone, as is Cole Porter, who wrote that song, and I wonder if he would have rather have left a slew of great music and lyrics rather than live a happy life, and knew of course the answer would have been yes, as he had no choice.

For I Have Measured out my Life in Dubble-Bubble

The true extent of the economic downturn, as it is politely called but really translates as the end of our world as we knew it, is not the $4.00 gallon of gas but the 50 cent piece of bubble gum. I got through most of my intellectual(such as it was) growth by balancing all my esoteric studies and learning and yearning and striving by reading Love Comics at Bryn Mawr while chewing Bazooka bubble gum or Fleer's Dubble Bubble.
Although this clearly, as I was to discover later in life, played havoc with my teeth and gums, it did handle the fact that I was always in love with the wrong narcissist(George Segal in college, Tony Perkins in my early days in H'wood, before they or I knew what gay was and it might not have mattered anyway, I so adored how smart and gifted he was, and was grateful for his pride and admiration for my creativity.) Chewing feverishly eased my frustration and thwarted lust.
As I wandered the world which I did even as a young striver I went to a-- I cannot quite call them a bevy, as they were none of them particulalry comely with the exception of Pattie in her youth, --fortune tellers, none of whom had the answer to my destiny, as the answer is usually in yourself or destiny, which is very mysterious.-
. Nonetheless wherever I wandered I had my fortune told, which is more exotic in Hong Kong than most places where you toss sticks in a temple. But it is none of it as satisfying even though incorrect as it is when you open the fortune cookie that says 'Your luck has been completely changed today' on the Fleer's Dubble Bubble Fortune in 4 different languages which it used to be if you you traveled far enough or wide.
Once I took a ship from Italy to San Francisco hoping to find out what my fortune was or if, indeed, I had one, and when I got to the last night of the voyage on which everyone on the ship except me was violently seasick-- I think it was the President Wilson on which I was traveling coolie class- I went to the Banquet that was to be the finale, -- with everything roped, chairs, tables, food, as the seas were so violent everything was sliding, including the people who were all in their cabins throwing up, except me-- and there before me were several hundred tables with roped crystal and roped china and nobody eating the Oriental feast, but all the tables laid with piles of fortune cookies. At last! I cried inside myself, enough fortunes! and nobody to go through them, but me. So I went to every table and opened all the cookies, and they were all homilies and bullshit except for the very last one that I opened with shaking fingers: 'You will go on a long voyage," it read.,'to no advantage.'
SInce that time I have resorted to colorogy, my own form of numerology, where you put the money in the machine and the gumball rolls down, and whatever the color is is what you can expect. Red is passion,(not very likely) yellow is luck(one can always hope) Green is money(ditto) orange is lust( still?) white is purity(what choice does one have?) and blue is spiritual growth. Today, on the heels and toes and instep of our latest disastrous figures, I went next door to my sushi restaurant,-- where the Dubble Bubble gumballs are. What was, when last I gumballed,, a quarter a ball, is now 50cents. Not to be deterred(I have no plans to go to France what with the euro and how stupid and ruined we are) I thought I could at least get a piece of gum. The pinlk one(love) rolled directly onto the street, and the man who owns the market felt compassionate, so he put 50 cents in for me. It was yellow, but that one, too, fell directly onto the sidewalk. He indulged me in one more, and I caught it in my hand. Blue. Spiritual growth. Well, I guess that's the only option we have. All the same it caught in my teeth and I have to go to the dentist.
It doesn't really matter that T.S. Eliot was an anti-Semite. He wrote really good poems that Jews can read.

MARCHING THROUGH GEORGE W

So as I strolled through the streets this early afternoon, having read the financial section of the NY Times, with all the bad news and the worse/amusing notice that the dollar is about to be bailed out by Japan, I heard in my ears the strains of the burning boys of Sherman's army singing 'Marching Through Georgia." It is beyond fiction, which I may have to give up writing, that the combined destructive talents of Attila the Hun, Charlemagne(to whom my friend Nancy is related), General Patton at the height of his messianic metaphysical warriroring, and Douglas MacArthur when he didn't want to stop, could not have accomplished the cumulative damage done to our country by our vacant-headed Prez. Those of us who believe in Karma wonder what past evil could have been done, including slavery, that could have earned such a sad and idiotic payback and fall. The greatest country in the world it was, for all the years of growing up, war, anguish, but always (almost) steadfastly principled and smart. That this great nation should be brought to its spiritual and monetary knees by a moron defies belief and understanding, except that we must have waterboarded God.
I have been accused by Harris Wofford, an old president of my college, Bryn Mawr, of having an apocalyptic mentality. But he is on board Obama's team, and I do believe that the minister's curse on the US will have undone Obama, and it is my fear, deep and strong in my apocaplyptic heart, that Hillary heading the ticket will elect John McCain. Oh, fearful New World, that has such creatures in it.
What the hell are we going to do? Answers welcome.

The Forty-Three Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding

I don't know how many of you are as old as I am, but I remember a novel that made a sensation in my still-youth, about a black(it was all right to call them then) hooker and a kind of hoosier, straw-chewing john who didn't realize there was a price to pay. In my less-than-youth but-still-naivete-except-for-my-prose, I wrote a novel with its central character a dominatrix based on Vicki Morgan, Alfred Bloomingdale's mistress, except I loved the character and through mine own compassion made her deep and complex and very touching, so I hated it when she got killed and even more when Dominick Dunne wrote a book on the same subject and made her cliche and superficial but that was his problem, as well as mine, probably, because not only did I feel he had killed my character but also his was a huge bestseller and mine had a struggle, as most everything I have written does except The Pretenders because it was so dirty. Oddly, Silk Lady, the one about Miranda as I called her, was not that dirty at all, even with its subject matter, but I did have to research dominatrixes, which led me into some adventures. I answered an ad in the LA Free Press("want a little discipline? call Mistress Victoria") so I did and told her I was writing a book and she said "Yeah, sure," but invited me to come anyway. Her 'dungeon' was in a little house behind the LA County Museum where I am going tomorrow(the museum, not the dungeon) its windows draped with red velvet so nobody could see in. She took me in to see all her gizmos, which included an Iron Maiden and a leather swing, told me how she had gotten into the business and how proud her parents were of her. Then she invited me for Easter Brunch, which my darling friend George-Anne, nursing her baby Nick at the time told me I had to go to, if only to see what they were serving, if they had bagels and cream cheese, fruit, etc.(as it turned out I think they had Hot Cross Buns, but it is possible I made that up as a pun.) Anyway, I figured unsound counsel would not come to me through a nursing mother, especially George-Anne, so on Palm Sunday, after going to Quaker Meeting and getting people to sign a No-First-Strike petition and taking my children to the airport to go visit their grandfather, I went to the Brunch. The details can be found, much prettified, especially the people who were in real life gross and pathetic, in Silk Lady, which except for that chapter is a fairly literate read. But I did learn from Mistress Victoria what it was that drove her clientele, mostly, according to her, high-powered executives under a lot of pressure so they needed women in spike heels to step on their genitals or paint them with mercurochrome, etc. as a release from having so much control. I was to go back to observe a private session with my lawyer, a woman of some caution and a most unsatisfactory sex life who insisted on accompanying me for my own protection(Ha!) but Mistress Victoria called me just before we set out to tell me the meeting was postponed as "two of her slaves had board meetings." When I called to re-schedule, she had disappeared, and I suppose the rest of her adventure can be found through CS!.
All of this brings me to Eliot Spitzer, for whom I cannot help but feel compassion, because compassion is my thing now more than it ever was, and I think I understand why he did it, if I can believe Mistress Victoria. So much pressure. And yet, such a lovely wife and such a smart law professor(Dershowitz) and so many hookers in DC. WHy did he have to bring anybody in? And why the Mayflower Hotel? It is all very Bill Clinton whom many people say always wanted to get caught but I think he was just a hubristic pig.
So to me it is not so much puzzling as suicidal and spendthrift. Surely he could have gotten someone for a hundred dollars, or, as things go nowadays, a few gallons of gas. I am brought in mind of Hugh Grant whom as we all may remember got a blow job from a street hooker around the corner from Grauman's Chinese, and when caught was asked by Jay Leno on TV, "What were you thinking?" Especially as there must have been multiple thousands of women who would have done him for nothing.
Well, "Men," as Sadie Thompson said. "They're all pigs." Of course I don't mean you or yours.