Much Ado About Everything...

Pseudonyms, bicycle thieves, planes, trains, and layovers, and celebrating dearest Cousin Mo...

We landed in Birmingham from California a few days ago with our traveling companions. My mother insists they come to California on every visit, and since we’d been gone a month to Ireland and England, we could not leave them again. We only had one day between trips, which I’ll explain in a minute, but I am toying with a picture book called “The Traveling Weenies” to amuse myself.

It’s a Friday morning, the air thick with the idea of rain, and I don’t know yet what time zone I’m in these days. It’s a relief to be in our place in Alabama, (in spite of the crazy nonsense in this state with libraries and other things) though I sometimes get whiplash missing California (and Ireland and England too.)

I was in California last week walking through Highland Park with my friend, Laura, and I admitted how weird it was not to be able to go back home to our place in Echo Park, which is not our home anymore. Here are a few pictures of Highland Park and Mount Washington and Silver Lake where I slipped out for a solo walk before seeing Colm Tóibín read his incredible sequel to “Brooklyn” called “Long Island” at Skylight Books He said that the book quite honestly began as a plot exercise to see if he could pull it off. (Spoiler, he achieves this goal so beautifully, I want another sequel. These characters are so real and alive to me I want to start both books all over again.)

I also love Skylight, a bookstore where I raised our kids. I remember when “Skylight” was “Chattertons,” and I wore Flannery in a baby frontpack around the bookstore one Sunday afternoon. I remember walking him around the stacks as he waved his arms and kicked his legs, grabbing at books, and a woman came up to me and said in a loud voice, “Hey, where’s the father to hold that baby?” I was so deep in postpartum and freaking out at new motherhood that I blurted out, “The father’s at home. Who wants to know?” She walked away without a word. I was so mad at her because I was actually out in the world having a good day with my baby, who was totally happy to be out and about.

Later, I put her in my play, “Blood and Marriage” about living in a one-room studio in Hollywood with a new baby. I also got to kill the brother-in-law character night after night when he chokes on the Thanksgiving wishbone and no one calls 911.

It was very satisfying.

Other pictures from last week…

***

Over the decades in California, we lived in Hollywood, Silver Lake, and Echo Park, and once I wrote an essay about all the places we rented in Lost Angeles called “You don’t have to own it to make it a home.”

Um…you kind of do.

Five years after that op-ed was published our landlord, Sam Flowers, sold the place. We’d lived there for 15 years and we did make it a home, but we had to leave it because it belonged to Sam and to Sam’s father, Sam Flowers Senior, before that who worked on the Black Dahlia case. The house was haunted but the ghost only appeared to visitors and never to us. We had at least four or five visitors tell us something appeared in their room in the night, and they thought it was one of the kids or our weenie dog, Uncle Basom, but it never was. The guestroom was downstairs at the end of the hallway, and it was also my office where I wrote constantly - novels, short stories, essays, articles, plays - but the ghost never seemed to mind me. Sometimes, I wonder if it was the wife of Sam Flowers Senior, because I’d heard she had a hard time being married to hardboiled LAPD detective, but I don’t know if that’s true. I kind of immortalized the house (sans ghost) in “Werewolf Hamlet,” a children’s novel coming out next year about a family whose home gets foreclosed and the mean, sweaty “Four Closers Are Coming” with their clipboards and lock-box.

Anyway…it was all a long time and many times zones ago…

After Ireland, we were in London for one week where something straight out of Oliver Twist happened with a modern “twist.” (Sorry, I can’t myself.)

First of all my sister-in-law, Eppie, treated us to four plays!

Yes, four plays, which was a huge gift because I honestly could see a play every night in London, and I could have stayed another week or two to see more plays. But we did get to see Machinal at the Old Vic Theatre, The Hills of California at the Harold Pinter Theatre, Underdog: The Other, Other Brontë at the National Theatre, and Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Globe. I’d never been to Old Globe and it was pouring rain but people stood and watched the play for three hours, and it was wonderful.

Back in the late spring of 1983, my parents visited in London and Dad wanted to see the farce “Run for Your Wife,” which I thought was absurd. I wanted my parents to experience real theatre, real drama like Harold Pinter, so we went to “Betrayal” at the Greenwich Theatre in London. My parents managed to stay through the play, but at the end, Dad stood up as people were leaving and announced to several rows, “Folks, I have an announcement. I have seen my first and last Pinter play.”

I pretended not to know the big loud American man and slipped outside.

But Dad would have loved the Old Globe. If I could have do-overs, I would take them to the “Old Globe.”

My favorite of the four was "Underdog: The Other, Other Brontë” as we got to experience Anne Brontë in ways I’d never known before, and the playwright Sarah Gordon captured the deep bonds, humor, and fierce animosity in a transplendent retelling of these three sisters on the moors of Yorkshire. And brother Branwell did not upstage at all in this version, and the dad, Patrick Brontë, never appeared at all because we didn’t need him. It was so good, and I immediately bought Agnes Grey and The Tenent of WildFell Hall to reread.

And we later stumbled upon the sisters at the National Portrait Gallery.

I had read Anne Brontë and Charlotte and Emily when I was an exchange at Manchester University but not that much since those days. Back then, I was in a tiny tutorial called “Women in 19th Century Literature” that met in the professor’s office, and it was the first time I’d ever been in a professor’s office discussing novels every Monday morning. I’d been in massive lectures at UT, the worst was “Econ 101,” watching this old guy drone on and on and on and on and on….about micro and macro economics three times a week. It was excruciating, so this tutorial discussing Women and 19th Century novels was like a big slice of heaven, and every night I would heat my hot water bottle in my icy flat in Rusholme and crawl into bed with George Eliot or George Sand or the Brontës or Jane Austen or Thomas Hardy or Henry James or Zola or Flaubert - it’s weird how I can remember what we read but it meant everything and the professor cared about what we thought, which couldn’t have been much, but it was like being invited to the table, something I’d never experienced in that way before.

Here is George Eliot, formerly Mary Ann Evans. She had to publish under a man’s name to be taken seriously, too, like the Bronte sisters. They published under the names: Currer Bell, Ellis Bell, and Acton Bell - the names chosen according to the letter of their first names.

A critic in 1848 had this to say about Wuthering Heights.

“There is an old saying that those who eat toasted cheese at night will dream of Lucifer. The author of Wuthering Heights has evidently eaten toasted cheese. How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.”

On that note of depravity, I must get back to the “Oliver Twist” reenactment that occurred on our way to “The Hills of California” when sister Eppie broke away from the slow-moving folks on the sidewalk in the West End and walked on the edge of the street. We were walking behind her, while she kept a fast clip. We had assumed the play started at 7:30 as “Machinal” had the night before, but “The Hills of California” began at 7:00, so I was wondering why Eppie was rushing, but I was keeping an eye on her and trying to keep up, and then two guys in black on bikes rode by her and one of them lifted her cell phone right out of her hands. It was so smooth, deft, and effortless, no pushing or shoving or violence but more of a kind of - “Thank you, I’ll take that now.”

It happened so fast, and they pedaled off in a flash.

Eppie screamed, “Motherfucker!!!!!!” arms flailing and took off running after them, and Kiffen began to chase him and flew past Eppie, but he was holding my bag and he couldn’t catch a guy on a bike, and he was also worried that people might think he was an old school robber, stealing purses the old-fashioned way.

So we all just stopped running and headed to the theatre.

Here is a picture before the stolen phone debacle at the Churchill Pub.

We made the play, except Eppie had the tickets on her phone, but the people at the Box Office let us in anyway. The sad stolen phone saga was not a new story to them. But Eppie was too distracted to watch “The Hills of California,” so she took a taxi to the Apple store to shut her phone down and make sure she wasn’t going to lose everything. The next morning she said she stood outside another phone store (Think Verizon/ATT of London) getting everything restored and warning people lining up, “Watch your phone. Watch your phone.”

The unanimous and unimpressed response she received from the taxi driver and the guys at the phone store when she tried to explain what happened:

“What? A guy in black on a bike stole your phone?” And the phone guys said, “There are at least 20 or 30 people here very Monday morning with their phones stolen just like you.”

Apparently, it’s rampant, artful dodgers on bikes (this video is very much like what happened) instead of Dickens’ pickpockets, but we retold the story over and over, and Eppie began to have revenge visions of an exploding phone with powder or red dye to capture the thieves on bikes, and Kiffen came up with the Oliver Twist scenario. It was clear these thieves had practiced and apparently, sometimes a person appearing unhoused will be on the sidewalk distracting tourists but actually on headset with the guys on the bike. I began to see the beginnings of a whole new musical or film.

On another day, we walked ten miles through London without meaning to because we just wanted to keep walking finding Peter Pan in Kensington and Mary Poppins in Leicester Square.

Here they are and few others of the day…

We also saw a fox and it was almost too quick to catch a glimpse of…

And on another day, we found Hatchard’s bookstore where Mrs. Dalloway looks in the window, thanks to our Virginia Woolf friends who gave us great ideas for our last day in London. And we found some of Virginia’s sister - Vanessa Bell’s paintings too in the National Portait Gallery.

Thank you Donna Rifkind and Sheila Fitzgerald.

And I found Emily Sutton’s book Betty and The Mysterious Vistor, which is so wonderful!

And we got to attend the premiere of a beautiful film, “The Almond and the Seahorse” about traumatic brain injury starring Rebel Wilson and our dear friend, Meera Syal from Manchester days. In the audience was a group from “Headway,” people who have suffered traumatic brain injury, and their art was in the film too. It’s such an important story about memory and loss and grief, adapted from a play by by Celyn Jones and Kaite O’Reilly.

Above is the picture Meera Syal with the playwright, Kaite O’Reilly, one of the writers of the film.

***

And then we summoned the courage for grueling trip home…

We left London on May 1st, spent the night in the Lisbon airport due to a twelve-hour layover, and then flew to Miami for another eight-hour layover and Birmingham by midnight on May 2nd.

My friend Laura texted, “What happened? Did you get stuck on the Trans-Siberian again?”

See you again NEVER, “Cheap Air.”

Before the trip, we were so focused on getting my passport renewed and the tickets that we didn’t pay close attention to the finer details of DAY-LONG airport layovers.

It was painful to be in Portugal and not even leave the airport, but we arrived at ten pm in Lisbon and left at ten am, so we hunkered down together and bought neck pillows just as the store was closing and tried to sleep a little on the chairs. On the flight to Miami the next day, we watched the Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King movie, which was very entertaining. We later consoled ourselves in Miami with Cuban food and found a place to finish watching “Fleabag.”

Okay, it was endless. The travel agent (Kiffen) resigned.

We finally arrived in Birmingham at midnight on May 2nd with presents for our dog-sitter, Dorris, who took such good care of Olive and Wilbur and sent us daily updates of the pups. We had exactly one day in Birmingham and then we had to fly to California for Cousin Mo’s memorial. We flew to San Diego on Saturday, rented a car, and drove up to LA on Sunday morning for the memorial in the afternoon. I was so worried we wouldn’t make it, and I so wanted to be there.

I’ve been doing a lot of magical thinking with Cousin Mo, believing it somehow wasn’t true. I refused to believe it was true. I didn’t want it to be true. When we met in 2018, she was diagnosed with Stage Four Cancer that had returned and metastasized in her liver. She was a remarkable cousin who knew about art, music, and literature, and we had all these new family stories to swap and compare. She kept to a strict diet, meditated, did qi gong, and practiced eastern and western medicine. She loved living and being alive. She gave me all her beautiful work clothes and coats from her Disney job, and it was so fun to have a whole new wardrobe but even better to have a brand new cousin who loved me. The first time I met her, I texted and said I was running late, and she said, “There is no late.” She’d also been sober for decades and understood about my son. I wanted a year with her, and I got six years. What a gift.

But when I arrived at the memorial wearing Mo’s blouse and jacket with a new Irish scarf, I opened the program celebrating her life and saw that I was one of the speakers. What? I didn’t know I was supposed to speak. Of course, I should have known, and maybe somebody told me, but I only remember an email that said speakers had three minutes. I thought that meant anybody who wanted to share memories of her.

I decided not to be scared and that I would just tell funny Mo stories. I was scheduled second to last, and I really wanted to hear the other speakers, so I wasn’t about to go into the park and dash something off.

Later, her friends said that Mo gave me a gift of not knowing. Someone said, “That was Mo’s gift for you. She knew you would have stressed and worried and revised endlessly, and you spoke from the heart.”

Mo and I used to walk the Palisades walk to the rose garden and we lingered at the Rachel Carson wall. Mo memorized the above quote from Rachel Carson: “Meanwhile, the sea ebbs and flows in these grander tides of earth…”

Once Meera made daal for Mo…

I walked with Mo’s best friend, Peter Jones, a fabulous documentary filmmaker, who adored Mo, and they walked together everyday. Mo gave me so many new friends. She used to introduce me, “This is my new cousin, Kerry. Her son is into meth, but we are taking a walk today.” It was disconcerting but it reminded me to look at the ocean and breathe instead of trying manage the unmanageable or fix the unfixable. None of her friends were at all surprised at her words as we were introduced but only nodded with love and understanding. Maybe, she didn’t teach me to let go but she helped me loosen my grip a little and embrace the beauty of what was right in front of me.

So that is where we are these days…

I still close my eyes and see Ireland…

And I wonder where our boy is…it’s been a while since he’s been in touch, and the fears and worries scratch at the edges, but I have to remind myself - “we don’t know what we don’t know,” and “we’ve been here before.”

But it’s hard.

I didn’t go and try to find him last week in Los Angeles. I didn’t have the heart to go searching the way I have so many times in some of the scary places. So we texted and messaged him the usual way without results, and then we drove back to San Diego.

I hope to hear from him soon. I miss him very much. I miss our other kids too, and we’ve been talking daily. Our grandson, Bonnie Alfred, has a birthday is tomorrow. He will be two years old.

My mom, a musician, is going to be 89 this year, and Bonnie loves trains, and Lucy and Norah (Bo) asked Janis to sing “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and instead, we wound up singing it together - our first duet ever while still learning the words.

And I bought Mom a cookie for Mother’s Day, and she broke it into four pieces to share with my brother, Duffy, Kiffen, and myself, and this is the piece she handed me.

Here is the first day I met Mo six years ago…it was supposed to be a one-time meeting.

And just one more - Thank you, Sonya Sones.