writer

What I know for sure besides the fact that salted caramel anything has become my Kryptonite and that those shoes with toes creep me out—is that those who have crossed-over use technology to reach us.

They do this because technology is a frequency, think Wi-Fi, and well, now so are they.
It’s easy for them. So much easier than moving furniture or materializing at the foot of your bed. That stuff takes work and our dearly departed ones tend to be lazy. They are always looking for the path of least resistance and since if you’re like me, your phone or computer are always within arms reach, this makes getting our attention a cake walk.

Please don’t argue with me on this.
I didn’t believe it at first either. And I’m not saying I’m one thousand percent sold on the concept, but…being that I’m not as gullible as you might think, I stubbornly ask for proof—which has been provided to this professional skeptic repeatedly. Over and Over and OVER again!

It has become irrefutable. Ask my tribe. I send them example after example which has made believers out of (most) of them.

The past few days I decided to have some fun with this recent discovery of mine. The one about technology.

Almost every morning, unless I’m not feeling it or a gooey cinnamon bun has my name on it (I believe there is an unwritten law that states that it is immoral to hike with white icing on your face), I take a 3.5-mile hike in the hills above my home. Unless I’m distracted, talking my head off with a friend, the only thing that gets this ass up those hills is live streaming NPR, a juicy podcast or something inspirational on YouTube straight into my ears via my phone and some comfy ear buds.

The last quarter-mile is all uphill. A slow vertical ascent that takes my breath away, pisses me off, and makes me want to cry and vomit—all at the same time. At the end is the parking lot where I hug my car and wait for my heart rate return to something life sustainable.

Unfortunately, right at the base of this climb—at the same red brick mailbox—the WiFi cuts out—and I’m left to listen to the voices in my head. Two which are cheering me on and the other 1,065 which scream at me in no uncertain terms—that I am an idiot and this hill is certain to kill me.

For months, I have suffered the same shattering disappointment at exactly the same spot at the base of that fucking hill.
Silence.
Until Wednesday. That day I asked my disembodied friend to extend the WiFi signal past the familiar brick mailbox to the top of the first hill. The “killer” as I like to call it.

‘Just let me continue listening to Abraham to the top of the killer’ I asked playfully. Then I laughed at the absurdity of asking for an internet connection from someone marinating in Pure Positive Energy—not lottery numbers or stock tips—and the fact that this has become my new normal.

Sure enough, the signal remained strong, cutting out at the very top of the killer hill just as I had requested. I was jubilant! Not only for the audio distraction on my way up the hill but for the sign I received from my friend.

“All you have to do is ask, and then not care”, I heard her say, so I decided to try again the next morning.

Thursday, as I approached the killer, I decided to ask for something more audacious.
If this was a game—then why the hell not?

‘I’d love to listen to Morning Becomes Eclectic all the way up to the parking lot’ I requested. Then I waited with a huge smile on my face as I chugged slowly up the killer hill. I lost the music briefly at the mailbox…but only for a second.
Sike!!

As I crested the top of killer hill and continued on to the dirt path I couldn’t believe my ears! WiFi! On the most remote part of the hike!
I can’t tell you how I got to the parking lot. I’m pretty sure I skipped or floated. It was everything I could do not to yodel my joy at this technological miracle.

Once at the parking lot, I did a sweaty slob-kebob dance to celebrate the music that was still going strong in my ears!

How was that possible? Was it a sign? An answer to my asking?
Someone I told yesterday, I can’t remember who, surmised that the neighborhood had probably just gotten tired of shitty internet and boosted the signal. I thought the timing was interesting, but I’m not gonna lie, it burst my miracle believing bubble a little bit.

This morning, Friday, I just assumed that the boosted signal would continue all the way up to the parking lot …and beyond, but alas, right at the brick mailbox…silence.
What?

I tried to get it to work as I slogged along but it was behaving badly just as it had for months.
Suddenly, about fifty yards from the end, the music came back on, strong as ever. It actually startled me in the middle of an argument with my disembodied friend who insisted that MY WiFi connection had nothing at all to do with a boosted signal.

‘It was the answer to an asking, a sign, a game’, she insisted, ‘and as long as you remember that, the music will play uninterrupted.’

Man, I love not taking life so seriously! Treating it like a game. You guys have to try it! It beats the alternative.
I’m starting with the small stuff until I get the hang of it. Come with me!

Carry on
xox

This is a Flashback from a couple of years ago that I was telling a friend about just the other day. Her husband has to fly up to the Bay area in a couple of weeks for a mediation on a lawsuit that is one of the bat-shit craziest wastes of time you could ever imagine. I can SO relate and it’s easier for me to repost this than to tell them the story—and I figure maybe a few of you might need to read this too.
Big love to HT & CT.

Carry on,
xox

“Anger is just Sad’s bodyguard… and Shame’s too, I think.”

Someone tell me, how come the crazy ones never lose any sleep?
Is it their complete lack of a conscience that causes them to appear so slick, smug and impossibly fresh?

Not a hair out-of-place.
Barely a hint of the devil that lies within.

While those of us that possess a moral compass and have the misfortune to find ourselves in their orbit are sleep deprived, disheveled, walking disasters.

That will always bother me.

The fact that people who operate outside the constructs of polite society close their eyes at night and sleep the uninterrupted, peaceful sleep of the just.

Why is that?
How can it be?

The night before an arbitration with the attorneys for DWP to discuss the fact that their one-hundred-year-old water main had burst and turned my store into an aquarium; I tossed and turned until the sheets were knotted up around my head and neck, fashioned into an unattractive turban/noose—and I ground my teeth down to nubs. Which left me the next morning gumming my toast, with a foggy brain and pronounced sheet marks on my face that didn’t fade until after lunch.

The team of He, She and It, that represented the water company, entered the room that morning laughing.
Uproariously.
Like they’d all participated in a hilarious episode of Carpool Karaoke on their way to work.

I felt at a distinct disadvantage. Out of the loop, like the punchline to the funniest joke ever told was lost on me. Was that their plan?

They were meticulously coiffed and groomed, cool as the proverbial cucumbers, while I was drenched in flop sweat, permanently wrinkled and frantically struggling to remove a poppy-seed from between my two front teeth with my tongue.

Note to self: Don’t accept half a poppy-seed bagel when you’re out of coffee. And you forgot your water.
You’re going to need something to rinse your mouth with when the big guns enter the room.

If I’d had more sleep I would have remembered that.

They all seemed so nice, so genuinely happy to meet me; that is until the bell rang and we went to our respective corners. Then the gloves came off and the crazy started to show.

They made shit up. Their entire alibi was jack-crap.
With graphs, documents and flow charts. Listen, if you show me a flow chart, I’ll believe anything…almost.
Somehow they double teamed my attorney and me. In the most well crafted, legal babbly, thinly veiled insulting way, they pinned the whole thing on me.
ME!
They made the accidental, midnight break of their water main seem like MY fault.

Business was slow, debt was high, it was 2009, and I need out—only I was too stupid to commit arson.

Seems bat-shit crazy, right?

When we broke for lunch even I wanted to throw the book at me.
The picture they painted of me was that of a sad-sack, loser of a business woman. Which was exactly how I felt at the time. I think my lawyer drank the Kool-Aid too—they were that convincing. She wouldn’t make eye contact, skulking in the corner on her phone, and then disappearing for the entire lunch break.

But you wanna know what trumps sleep deprivation? Rage. That’s what.
It also instantly removes sheet marks from your face.

It also overrides all shame and victim-hood.

Crazy and Rage are curious dance partners and they should never be left alone in a room together.
Let me tell you why. Crazy is so put together, so charming, pretty, and unflappable. Crazy looooooves a victim, she gets off on them, they get her panties wet.

Rage is no victim, he’s a gangster. He’s raw, he’s greasy and he talks real dirty. He wears a wife beater t-shirt and too much Aramis; and he has only one thing in his crosshairs—Crazy.

Crazy gets high on Rage and it quickly becomes a street-brawl.

But Rage is better than Sad, which is where I’d pitched my tent for eighteen months. Some say you can get caught in anger and never feel despair. The opposite had been true for me.
Sad victimhood covered in shame is like chum in the water to Crazy.

So Rage felt better. It felt…empowering. Sadness felt like quick-sand—Rage, like solid ground.

It got my attention and cleared my vision, so I could finally see the truth and it kicked Sad’s ass to the curb.

I locked myself in a public bathroom stall kicking, screaming, and raging for nearly an hour before taking a walk around the building to help me come to my senses—and find my courage.

I knew my opponent. I was very familiar with Crazy.
You see, I had met her as a teenager in the form of my father’s second wife. I had witnessed her devouring her victims and I was smart enough to remember that Rage threw her into a sort of drunken feeding frenzy.

I also remembered that nothing can get to Crazy. Nothing touches their heart. There is no reasoning with Crazy. There is no sympathy, empathy or compassion and absolutely nothing is open for discussion.

They act as your judge, jury, and executioner.

And the more they sense is at stake; the faster and louder the accusations come. Their aim is to keep you off-balance, on the ropes.

Remember they are rested, ready and strong after their peaceful night’s sleep.

How is that fair?
Because they get a buzz off this shit and they don’t care about anything other than winning. So it’s not.

I sure wasn’t feeling sad anymore, Rage had hatched a plan but I knew better than to let it enter that room. I waited outside the double doors of the conference room until I saw my attorney exit the elevator. I could hear the team of Crazy, Crazier, and Craziest, whopping it up inside.

“You handle this, I’m leaving” I announced. I had her by the arm and was walking her back down a long hallway of endless doors, out of earshot of the hyenas.

“What?” she asked, looking surprised.

“You don’t need me here. They can smell my fear and sadness, and well, their offer is beyond ridiculous. See what happens when they can’t focus on me. When they have to deal with you and only the facts.”  We had walked in a circle making our way back toward the bank of elevators.

“Give me a number you’ll you settle at”, she asked as she reached into her bag for paper and a pen. She actually seemed relieved, like the day could be salvaged. Like it could go back to a language she understood—the law.

I wrote a figure down. She looked and nodded in agreement, folding the paper into a small square and tucking into her suit-jacket pocket.

The elevator chimed, opening right on cue. People were packed in like sardines, but as I stepped inside she grabbed my purse strap, making me turn around. “This could end today”, she said with a hint of a smile, letting me go as the doors slowly closed.

A hairy mystery hand reached around me and pushed the button for LOBBY, getting me the hell out of that DWP building. I know it was Rage. I could smell his Aramis. But I made sure I left him behind, losing him in the crowd.

*I got the call a couple of hours later that they’d settled on the figure I’d written down. “Piece of cake”, I remember her saying in a distracted voice; she was already on to her next case.

We all slept well that night.

I know some of you guys needed to hear this,
Carry on,
xox

I’m not proud of what I’m about to tell you. But I think you’ll thank me. Mostly for admitting that I’m just another deeply flawed human being walking this spinning blue planet—and for telling the truth.
I like to pride myself on being rather unflappable. Emotionally steady and able to find the humor in any situation I’m placed in and yet… some are triggers and can toss me like a piece of trash into a swirling eddy of unhappiness, anger, and even revenge.

Maybe, just maybe dear reader, you know what I’m talking about.

It was 7:00 pm on a balmy Friday night. After a week full of jumbly-stuff, all the two of us could focus on was enjoying a scrumptious meal at one of our favorite local foodie hangouts—and a nice red wine. I had the foresight to make a reservation so getting a coveted table on the patio was no problem.

As we were guided outside past the bar I couldn’t help but notice how packed the place was. It was loud and lively, filled with couples and groups of friends starting off their weekend right. That felt good. The place had recently re-opened after an extensive renovation and I was happy to see the neighborhood showing their support.

After being seated by the hostess we both smiled at each other, exhaled deeply, and held hands across the table. Everything was perfect.

We had been assured that our waitress, Sara, would be with us shortly so we started talking about this and that, catching each other up on our day–you know, your basic pre-dinner chit-chat. Ten minutes later, after running out of small talk, we started looking around. That’s the moment I realized we were invisible. That no one had come by to acknowledge our presence.

If it’s Friday, the end of a long work week, and wine has not been offered to my husband in a timely manner—he gets fidgety.

Enter bad habit number one: I try to ease an uncomfortable situation by justifying it.

“It’s really busy tonight”, I say just to cut the tension that’s building with each moment that goes by wine-free.

“Yeah, but they have a lot of staff”, he replies looking around the restaurant. And he’s right. I can see five waiter/waitresses just servicing the patio. One of them MUST be Sara.

Enter bad habit number two: I’m going to turn my attention away from my partner and make things right by catching the eye of our waitress.

It was then that I caught a glimpse of someone walking toward us with purpose. A girl in her mid-twenties, cute and blonde and wearing an apron, so I assumed she was OUR Sara.

Hallelujah! Wine at last, wine at last, Thank God Almighty, wine at last!

“Here she comes”, I declare just as she walks all of that purpose directly to a table behind us.

He looks at his watch. “It’s been twenty minutes”. Now he’s getting annoyed, looking around with his head on its maximum swivel speed.

My husband has sparkle. He just does, And never is it on display more than with the wait staff at restaurants. But I fear his sparkle is diminished; long gone as Sara finally approaches our table from behind my back.

“I like your hair”, she deadpans, referring to the purple underneath the gray. “I like your earrings”, I spit out immediately, laughing a little too loud, trying to diffuse the tension.

Enter bad habit number three: It’s really just an extension of BH#2. Soothe and diffuse. It can be jokes, laughing, even tap-dancing.

“I’d love some wine and a bottle of San Pellegrino when you get a chance”, he wedges in-between the phoney-baloney compliments.

“Great”, she smiles and disappears and when I say disappears I’m not exaggerating. I swear I saw her walk into a magical cupboard and enter an imaginary realm where she is a princess and not a waitress who is getting slammed on a busy Friday night.

7:38…and counting…and still nothing. No water, no bread. And definitely no wine. Now I’M looking at MY watch. Mama needs some alcohol.

Enter bad habit number four: I absorb all of the mad in the room and take it on. I fight the urge to get all Norma Raye and stand on my chair railing against every social injustice including bad service while dining out. (I thought I had a handle on this but apparently not.)

Things are starting to spiral downward. This is the point when you start looking at the tables around you, taking score. “They came in after we did and they already have their drinks and appetizers”, I found myself saying. I hate doing that. It’s petty and stupid but you just can’t help it when you seem to be seated in NO MANS LAND.

I know what you’re thinking, I really do. Tell somebody that you need some attention!
We start to debate the issue and I have to tell you, without wine, common sense has flown out the window. Who do we tell? The hostess who is running around like a headless chicken? The waitress herself? I’d need to send out a search party to find her and I’m assuming she’ll just get defensive. Maybe the manager?

When did my (our) happiness become so conditional? Why can’t we just chill and enjoy our evening in the midst of sucky service?

Good question!

I don’t want a scene so I haven’t told my famished, wine deprived, crab-ass of a husband that I can see Sara (who has apparently escaped the cupboard), standing and chatting at the bar. I’m assuming she went there over twenty minutes ago with the best intentions of getting us our wine but…I’m suppressing another urge my body has summoned. The one to saunter over to the bar, grab Sara by the ear, take her out back and beat the shit out of her.

I really hate it when things that seem outside of my control hijack a good time. The mood at our table has shifted from buoyantly jovial to passive-aggressively pissed off.

Sara walks toward us with a large tray of drinks balanced on her shoulder. “This has to be us”, he says hopefully, straightening up in his chair as I observe a warm basket of bread being placed two tables over by a waitress worth her weight in gold. Sara walks right past us being sure not to make eye contact. Can we all agree that selective eye contact is a dark art?

He turns in his chair to stare in her direction. Can she feel his laser-like gaze burning a hole in the back of her head? I wonder, will her hair catch fire?

Oh, hello bad habit number five: Wishing bad things on perfectly lovely people who are acting like asshats.

Just then somebody else brings us our drinks. I grab this angel in human form’s arm before he can leave and order two appetizers, It’s not his job to take our order and he looks at me funny but shakes his head okay.

Sara returns with one of our orders and plunks it down in the middle of the table as her eyes scan the room, and leaves without giving us any share plates. It’s after 8 pm and I’m suddenly starving. Mama needs some foodies. Fast. The alcohol is going to her head and things could get ugly so I start eating, making the long traverse with my overloaded fork from the plate—across the table—to my mouth. My husband follows my lead and before we know it we both end up with grits in a bacon coulee all over the front of us. I’m hungrily sucking pieces of bacon off of my sweater. Can this night get any better?

“What should we do?” I ask with earnestness now that I’m buzzed with more food on the front of my outfit than in my stomach. If I had my sense of humor and wasn’t hostile from absorbing all the mad— it would be funny. I usually find everything funny. But four people who sat down a half hour after us are happily finishing their dessert. Satiated and ready to leave.

That’s just not fucking funny.

“We’ve let it go too far. We should have said something to someone an hour ago. Now we just look like a couple of starving idiots who are wasting a perfectly good table in a very busy restaurant.”

My husband gets up, folds his napkin neatly into triangle and walks toward the back.’Oh God, here we go’, I think, ‘he’s going to complain, and they’re going to spit in our food’.

Back in the day, my husband worked his way through college as a waiter in a fancy French restaurant in Beverly Hills, and his stories of cranky customer retribution are stomach turning. Fingers and other body parts jabbed into food and drinks…cigarette ashes in sauces…terrifying but true. But that experience has also made him endlessly patient with waiters. He can recognize hard work and a job well done. He laughs with them, validates them with compliments and tips them well.

While my head is turned searching the place for the enigma called Sara, (I’m afraid he’s going to be the one to take her out back by the scruff of her neck and beat her senseless), the table is cleared, silverware and all. As she whizzes by, I relax a little at the sight of her alive and well, and then I remember that she’s our waitress goddamnit and I yell out our entrees and inquire about the second appetizer. She stops in her tracks and looks at me as if I told her she could never have children and does a thing with her head, like, ‘can’t you see how busy I am?’ —and walks away, back to the bar where she takes root for another ten minutes.

The same lovely gentleman who delivered our first appetizer delivers the second one, (full of ashes or finger pokes, I’m sure), this time with plates. I’m so busy gushing my appreciation that I forget to mention that we have no flatware. When I ask Sara for a fork she looks bewildered like everyone else is eating with their feet or elbows and I—the overdemanding, spoiled woman at table seventeen—wants a FORK!

My husband returns and suddenly things start to look up. The sparkle has returned and I can only imagine why. Some things are better left unsaid. Within a minute, the flatware appears—as if by magic.

It’s amazing how when you are treated like shit, the smallest gesture, like being given utensils, feels like a gift. Like when a restaurant starts to act restautraunty it can make you feel giddy.

Our food arrives in an appropriate amount of time delivered by an effusive upper management looking woman. Then a man in a suit brings us water. Finally, water! After an hour. I wanted to give him a kiss on lips and a standing ovation!

“We are so bad at this!” I lament on the walk to our car. “God! we have such a hard time dealing with bad service”.

And there it is, bad habit number six: I say We when I should say I.

My husband gives me side-eye which is our silent signal that he ‘took care of the situation’ which could mean that Sara has taken up permanent residency inside of the magical cupboard OR he tipped her only ten percent, which in California is practically punishable by law.

So, you guys,
I hope you can see ALL of the places where I went wrong and how my bad habits, just when I think I’ve kicked them, seem to have a recurring role in my life

What do you do in situations like that? I’ve done it all and had mediocre results. The waitress or waiter usually gets defensive, the host couldn’t give a shit and although management wants to hear about poor service, IN THEORY, they have rarely been magnanimous in the moment.

Carry on,
xox

Morning you guys,
I say this ALL THE TIME. That the world is better off and safer than its ever been—and most people look at me like I’m wearing an armadillo hat—on my two heads.

But it’s TRUE! I know it is! Yet…
Why are we so invested in being scared to death? Is this a dangerous world? A bad place?

I believe not.  Are you willing to change your mind?
Take a look at this essay by Pam Grout, take a deep breath and know that there are many of us out here who are trying to drown out the 24/7 cacophony of terror.

Carry on,
xox

“Why it’s time for an intervention from the relentless 24/7 media
by ps grout

“Violence is interesting which makes it a great obstacle to world peace and more thoughtful television programming.” –P.J. O’Rourke

Crisis, conflict, and violence are the prevailing themes of our 24/7 media. If some stranger talked to us the way newscasters do, we’d tell them to go jump in a lake. Likewise, if our boyfriends made us feel the way headlines often do, our friends would line up for an intervention. ‘Toss the jerk out on his head,’ they’d say.”

Living in fear sells products, creates economies, elects politicians and keeps the flying monkeys on the job. But it’s not the truth about the world.

The reality is that the world is safer today than at any time in history. The murder rate has plummeted in the last ten years. School shootings are no more prevalent than they were in “Leave it to Beaver” days. In fact, collaboration, goodness and, yes, love are the norm.

It’s just that the dominant paradigm, the one we’ve blindly bought into is “life sucks.” Any thought to the contrary is sidelined immediately by the 27-inch box in the corner of most of our living rooms (and kitchen and bedrooms). In fact, if you pay attention to the box–and most of us use it to form our view of reality–you have little choice but to conclude that murder, rape, war, and genocide is the human condition.

But if you look at it scientifically, the math just doesn’t work out. For every Koran-burning Terry Jones, there are 335,000 ministers who aren’t burning the Koran, who are espousing peace and love and tolerance. For every Scott Peterson, there’s 58.9 million husbands who didn’t murder their wives.

Every day, we’re spoon-fed “news” about missing children, identity theft, the mild-mannered neighbor who walks into work with an AK-47 and a bomb pack and blows up his boss and 27 co-workers.

Why do we think this is news?

On the same day (February 18, 2008), two-year-old Karissa Jones was abducted from her home in Louisville, Kentucky (by her father, as it turns out), there were 53,298 two-year-olds in Kentucky who didn’t get abducted, who were safe and sound at home, happily sipping apple juice from their Winnie-the-Pooh high chairs. Nearly a million children of all ages in Kentucky also didn’t get abducted that same day.

Why is Karissa the “news?”

News, by definition, is new information that teaches people about the world. Picking out what happened to two-one thousandth of one percent of the state’s two-year-olds is not an accurate picture of the world. If you ask me, what happened to the other 53,298 two-year-olds is a bigger story. Or at least it’s more realistic news.

What you see on the newscasts at night, what you read in the morning newspaper is not a realistic perception of our world. It’s an anomaly, an out-of-character thing that happened at one moment in time. News junkies pride themselves on believing they’re well-informed. Because they know what Ann Curry said about the latest layoffs at Boeing and what Morley Safer reported on the earthquake in New Zealand, they smugly believe they’re up on current events.

But do they know about the African-American postman in Germantown, Tennessee who jumped into a lake to save a couple whose brakes went out of their car when they were coming home from a hospital dialysis treatment? Do they know about the Marysville, Kansas attorney who flew, on his own dime, to Israel to donate a kidney to a 10-year-old he’d never met?

Thinking you’re informed because you watch the news is like thinking you understand a zoo when you’ve only seen the “Z” on the entryway sign. It’s not a complete picture, guys. It’s not even a good picture. I’m not going to argue that you can’t find the letter “Z” at any zoo. But if you try to convince me you’re a zoo expert or even that you have a faint understanding of what a zoo is all about because you’ve seen a “Z,” well, I’m sorry, I have no choice but to argue.

Attention-grabbing headlines and newscasts are nothing more than a sales tool, no more “factual” than “The Simpsons.” Isolated incidences get turned into frightening trends and our own thoughts have become conditioned to leap to the worst.

The mission of this blog is to free readers from the straitjacket of the relentless news media. Instead of asking “What’s wrong?,” a question we hear over and over again, I’d like to pose a simple question with the power to change the world: “What’s right?”

Pam Grout is the author of 18 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and the about to be released, Thank and Grow Rich: a 30-day Experiment in Shameless Gratitude and Unabashed Joy

“Charles finally attained inner peace by ascribing all the world’s ills to the 24/7 news cycle.”

“And then, when you’re off chasing a dream, you miss out on what’s happening right under your nose.”
~Charles de Lint

Oh, hello Paris, it’s me, Janet…Again.

In my mind, we are old friends given the fact that’s this is the third time in a decade that I’ve visited your beautiful City of Lights.

You might not have recognized me. My hair is a softer shade of red now that I’m rounding the bend toward forty, and I may even resemble a local Parisian woman, not the ‘American in Paris’ tourist whose skin I inhabited the other two times.  Much to my surprised delight a Frenchman asked me, ME,  for directions this very morning.  Anyway, it’s okay if you didn’t know who I was.

Paris: Bon Jour Jeannette, good to see you again. Nope, sorry, you are right, I didn’t recognize you because all American tourists look the same to me.

Me: But the man asked ME… uh…right. Was it sitting on the wall on the banks of the Seine, having my picture taken that gave me away?

Paris: No. Well, yes, that and the metro schedule and map of the city that I can see protruding from the little bag you’re carrying. Also, and I say this with the all the sensitivity I can muster ( I am Paris after all), no self-respecting French woman would be caught dead walking around my city with a sweater tied around her waist.

Me: Right.

Paris: Enough idle chit-chat, what brings you here?

Me: Oh, uh, it’s kind of awkward. I’m here with my boyfriend, but I can see the writing on the wall. We’re here for a friend’s wedding, traveling around Europe for three weeks by train and I’m sorry to say we can now add long distance travel to our ever-expanding list of incompatibilities.

Paris: Right. Sorry. How can I help?

Me: Ugh. I’m so tired. Chasing love for so many years is exhausting. Although…I do have to say I love your men. I think my next serious relationship has to be with a European man.

Paris: Well, Ma Cherie; there’s European men and then there are French men. Do you think you are ready for a Parisian man?

Me: Yeah, sure…no, you’re right…probably not. But I think they are sublime. I’ll aspire to one, yeah, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll…

Paris: You can start by untying the sweater from around your waist. Try your shoulders instead.

Me: Right. Listen, do you think I need to move here to find true love? You know, I’m not getting any younger and I’ve fantasized about doing that for years! What do you say? Rent an apartment here, eat cheese and warm baguette while walking the city, find an amazing jewelry job and a gorgeous French husband all at the same time?

Paris: This may surprise you but—I don’t believe in chasing dreams. I say go back to Los Angeles and be yourself. Wear your sweater as a belt and let the love of a Frenchman find you there. You never know, there could be the Parisian man of your dreams living within a ten-mile radius. Fate will intervene. If you are meant to marry a Frenchman…he will find you. Stop running.

Me:  Thank you Paris. I have to go now. I’m wearing a dress and the rough stone is exfoliating my ass and not in a good way. I love you.

Paris: Je t’aime Jeannette.

This is a true story. Mostly.
Actually, the moment our plane landed back in LA my boyfriend and I broke up. That was okay. I had my European dream and I just kept putting it our there and lo and behold, four years later, on a blind date in Los Angeles…I met the most delicious Parisian man…who it turns out lived within a ten-mile radius of my house. Fortunately, he was able to overlook my poor use of sweaters—and married me nine months later.

To me, that just goes to prove that ANYTHING is possible!

Carry on,
xox

A reader sent this to me. Wtf? And thank you.
This is a woman in hospice care, on her deathbed. At death’s doorstep.
And apparently this is part of her family. Grandsons? Great-grandsons? Who knows.

You’ve gotta love this. Her feisty spirit and ‘game’ is what struck me. Is that a gesture she made often in her life? (‘Come on Nona, flip ‘um the bird like you always did!’).
Or is this for a laugh like when you tell a two-year-old to say ‘fuck it?’

Is she watching the Republican debates? Or flipping off the kid taking the picture? Or is she giving death the finger?
God, I hope it’s death.

She looks as if she’s lived a good long life with her sense of humor intact until the end…

“I imagine you like this at the end”, the reader said when he sent the photo.

What a compliment.
I hope so dear reader.
I aspire.

Carry on,
xox

“Wealth is not about having a lot of money; it’s about having a lot of options.”
~ Chris Rock

Being the obedient, Catholic girl and rule follower that I am, when I was advised by my accountants back in 1998 to save every dime I could scrap together, scavenge every couch cushion quarter I could find, and buy a house–I did just that.

I took my sister up on her very generous offer to move in, put everything in storage except for the scratch post/cat palace and my pillow, and called a small room with Teddy and Fraidy, my two Siamese cats, home for a year. We all went on what I referred to as ‘The Austerity Program’. The only thing tighter than our living conditions was my wallet.

Oh, don’t feel sorry for them. As I came to find out cats have little concern for square footage. Think about it. They tend to claim one or two spots in your house as their own, which they mark with coughed up fur balls and claw marks and that’s where you’ll find them hour after hour, day after day. For mine, it was the three story cat palace during the day and my pillow at night.

Anyway…Austerity became me. I excelled at it.

Living small became a mindset that I was assured would come in handy once I purchased the house and was subject to the “sticker shock”. Except for some measly living expenses and a car payment I banked every dollar. Contrary to my former way of living there were no extravagant trips, expensive new shoes or shiny new cat toys. We all hunkered down.

I had been ‘pre-approved’ to a certain dollar amount meaning that if I exceeded that imaginary line in the sand, I did so at my own peril. Of course, as I started to look around, spending my Sundays at open houses, everything in my price range was dreck. Run down with peeling paint, wonky, un-permitted additions that looked as if they had been slapped together with playing cards and duck tape, and bathrooms that were one mold spore away from being condemned by the health department.

Did I mention the amount I had to spend was HEALTHY? Like, buy me a castle with a moat AND an alligator in Ohio, healthy?

I was advised to stay away from the properties that were over what I could spend, so I immediately made a beeline for the homes north of a million dollars. These were my people. They had taste and class and lush green grass. Alas, even if I robbed a bank that would barely cover the property taxes, so most Sunday nights saw me drowning my austere little sorrows in a bottle of two-buck-Chuck, my face buried in a cat hair covered pillow to disguise the sobs. I felt sorry for myself that I only had the equivalent of a king’s ransom to spend. Oh, poor me.

Are you feeling bad? Maybe for the cats?  Please don’t.

Eventually, I did find something I liked. It had just been reduced to the very tippy top of my price limit, so I pounced, made an offer, and I’m sitting happily in that very same house writing this today.

As it turned out the peanut gallery was right; my mortgage, gardener and other responsible homeowner generated expenses kept me waist deep in austerity for a couple of years. Then so did my business. Austerity had become the gum on the bottom of my shoe. The mindset that wouldn’t let go.

Recently, I have felt the tug diminish. I’ve begun to dream of a compound in Santa Barbara.

Yep, you heard me. A compound. It may seem as unlikely as catching me gardening in a bikini, but everything starts as a dream, right? I’ve pulled up Santa Barbara real estate on Zillow the past few Sundays as a lark, and due to some residual austerity that stuck to my face—the prices caused an accidental nose-douche with ice-tea.

Fuck it! I yelled to no one in particular after almost drowning, then I clicked on an 8.9 million dollar property.
‘I have all the money in the world to spend!’, I told myself.
‘No limit, no imaginary line in the sand to keep me down! SHOW ME A COMPOUND!’

Then the funniest thing happened. And it surprised the shit out of me.
I felt a blinding white hatred for the 8.9 million dollar house. It was dark and medieval with a wine cellar that could double as a torture chamber for a serial killer. The kitchen was enormous… but it was trying was too hard! Custom this and custom that—bleeeaaaack!

I felt the same about the 12.5 million dollar monstrosity on the hill.
And the ranch with a view of the ocean.
I don’t need nine bedrooms.
I don’t want a horse property.
I don’t need a vineyard…

Come on people! Show me a decent house!

A 5 million dollar FIXER-UPPER! Yuck!
A 3.9 million dollar nightmare dipped in gold leaf. Puke!
I started to laugh. LOUD. Here, I have all the money in the world to spend…and I still can’t find something I love! I mean, at those prices—you’d better love it.

Since succumbing to the austerity mindset, I had convinced myself that the things I couldn’t afford were the things that would make me happy!
Which made me wonder. If I really had let’s say, only 2 million to spend, would I be loving these pricier properties and cursing my sad little austere lot in life, like I did before?

Uh…NO!

I actually liked the 2-3 million dollar homes better.

So, it wasn’t about the money. It was NEVER about the money. It’s a mindset.
Even with an imaginary wallet full of cash, what you want may be hard to find.
Good taste doesn’t come as a result of having a lot of money (Donald Trump).
And real wealth has nothing to do with dollars and cents.

Isn’t that good to know?

Carry on,
xox

I lost something very important to me last week. I squirmed. I obsessed. I bargained with God. The very minute I stopped caring…it came back to me.

Pass it along…
xox

After reading my post the other day about our majestic ash tree,
http://www.theobserversvoice.com/2016/05/earthquakes-rings-and-singing-ash-trees/
many of you asked me to reprise this essay about that very same tree—and his pal JAWT—who we murdered.
And just so you know, a year later finds Ash thriving as is our garden with all of the newly available sunshine (my bougainvillea has never looked more beautiful).
Yet…RIP, ‘Just A Weed Tree’, know that you are missed.
Carry on,
xox

We are all connected.
And not just by the proximity and outreach that is available to us via our devices.

It goes way beyond that.

I believe that everything is alive and has a spirit.

There is another web active in our lives besides that World Wide one. It is a web of life, of energy that connects everything and everyone on this earth.

We are all interconnected and anything that suggests the belief that we are separate is an illusion.

Nature is the supreme example of this web of interconnection. The bees need the flowers. The flowers need the bees to bloom.

And I fucked up and cut down a tree in our front yard, apparently upsetting the delicate balance of nature throughout the world, or at least Los Angeles, California.

We are the custodians of a one hundred and fifty-year-old ash tree. And he is our giant, grounded guardian.

Of that I am sure.

I remember a psychic predicting that I would live in a tree house one day, (which at the time seemed absurd), but when I purchased this house a few years later my friends all remarked “I see you got a little house with your tree.”

It is massive, one of the largest trees in Studio City and we are so blessed to live under its majestic canopy, feeling its energy, enjoying its shade.

On the curb, just adjacent to Ash (we’ll call him Ash) was a nondescript tree-thingy.
The arborist that came to the house ten years ago during our remodel educated us, telling us all about Ash, and when asked he informed me that the other tree wasn’t any species that he was familiar with.

“It’s just a weed that someone let grow into a tree a long time ago” he told us.

Just A Weed Tree was a lot of trouble.
His canopy was dense and…ugly, even after the annual haircut we gave him, not light and airy like Ash’s.
He cast too much shade for anything to flourish and the birds loved to congregate inside that dense, dark green foliage and shit all over our cars.

He had the bad attitude of an overgrown weed. He was pushy. And greedy, lifting the sidewalk, and getting into our pipes on a regular basis.

Just A Weed Tree always appeared to be crowding Ash, vying for light; and in the severe drought that we’ve found ourselves under, I feared he was chugalugging at the water table—and I knew Ash was too polite to say anything.

I LOVE trees, I do, ask anyone. I absolutely adore Ash, but I was not fond of JAWT.
He wasn’t a tree. He was a garden variety pest.

So this past Saturday our gardener cut him down. It took two guys and they were fast and thorough, even grinding the stump.

We both forgot that it was happening that day so when we got home the whole look and energy of the front yard had changed dramatically.

There was no sign that Just A Weed Tree had ever been there. But you could feel a HUGE void.
That weed had a presence.

FUCK.

We both stood at the curb, “Wow” was all we could say.

Now you could really see the front our house, there was the added sunlight in our yard that I had craved (for the plants) and with JAWT gone you could fully grasp the wonder of Ash.

“It looks like they trimmed the big tree too,” my husband remarked as I went around picking up leaves still on their branches.
It appeared as if they had been cleanly cut and they were EVERYWHERE.

Except they hadn’t been cut. They had been dropped.
I’d never seen anything like it. They covered the entire front yard, the driveway and even parts of the roof. In the fall, Ash drops single, dead, brown leaves, never bright green leaves still on their small branches.
What was up?

My arms were full, carrying the leaves to piles I had made on the driveway
And it suddenly occurred to me: Ash was showing his shock and disapproval at the death of his friend Just A Weed Tree.

I walked over to him, closed my eyes and rested my hand on the rough bark of his truck—and I could feel his stress and despair.

Oh Fuck.

First of all, I had always felt Ash was a female. Wrong. He has a very pronounced masculine energy.
And he was pissed. And under extreme stress.
Apparently the high pitched whine of a chainsaw has the same visceral effect on trees as a dental drill has on humans (yeah, okay, got it) plus he had known JAWT for over sixty years since he was just a tiny little weed that had somehow been spared. They were buddies.

I could feel his despair and it felt awful. I should have known better. Trees do have feelings and I had callously overlooked that fact.

We had basically murdered his friend right in front of him.

FUCK.

We are all interconnected, residents of this web of life and I needed Ash to know that I could feel his anguish, so I stood with both hands and my forehead on his trunk, apologizing and conveying our sincerest condolences for the loss of JAWT. I also explained the water situation and the fact that his health and stability were of the utmost importance to us. Then I played to his vanity telling him over and over how gorgeous (handsome) we think he is.
“You Mister, are the star of this neighborhood.” I think he was flattered.

Raphael watched from a distance, he could sense what was going on, and he added his sympathies from there. “I hope he’ll be okay,” he said with genuine concern, gazing at the piles of leaves.

“Now that he understands and knows how sorry we are—he’ll be fine.” I replied.

And he is. After our little talk…he never dropped another leaf.

Carry on,
xox

I’m a copy cat. I am.
And I’m not even very good at it. I’m out here in the open admitting to it.
I’m sharing something brilliant that somebody else has shared. It’s like the double-dipping of blogging…but I just had to do it.

My friend Angie Hite has a wonderful blog that I love and the other day she posted this. It has everything; a virtual smorgasbord of yumminess; life and death, poetry, Sue Monk Kidd, curiosity, and the quest for notoriousness. I want to be notorious for something…don’t you?
Take a look and…
Carry on,
xox

http://www.angelahite.com/let-my-epitaph-read/

Take it away Angie…and Mary…and Sue…

Let My Epitaph Read…

Ya know, sometimes what I want to share is what SOMEONE ELSE has written! That is the case here. Not only do I want to share Mary Oliver’s poem “When Death Comes,” but I want to share Sue Monk Kidd’s commentary on it, and an Emily Dickinson quote within the commentary! The only thing I personally have to add, and this will make sense at the end, is: “Me, too!”

Here is an excerpt of Mary Oliver’s poem (please read the whole thing sometime):

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

And here is s Sue Monk Kidd essay from her book Firstlight, reacting to Oliver’s poem:

“Recently on the eve of my birthday a woman said to me with a completely serious face, ‘When I turn fifty, I want to become notorious.’

‘Notorious for what?’ I asked.

This seemed to throw her. ‘Well, I’m not sure,’ she said. “I haven’t gotten that far along with the idea.’

Becoming notorious for the sake of becoming notorious was a peculiar idea to me. Besides that, had she consulted a dictionary for the meaning of notorious? I went home and looked it up. It said, ‘Notorious – widely but infamously known or talked about.’

I couldn’t see the appeal. But after my conversation with the woman, practically against my will, I began to entertain a thought: What would I want to be notorious for at fifty?

I was still secretly working on it when a group of women gathered to help me celebrate my birthday. For our evening’s entertainment, I brought out my book of Mary Oliver’s poems and suggested we take turns reading. As bemused glances were exchanged, it occurred to me if I did ever become notorious, it would not be for bacchanalian parties.

I read last, choosing a poem with the cheery title ‘When Death Comes.’ I read along unsuspecting till I got to a line in which Oliver writes about coming to the end and wanting to say that she has spent her life married to amazement.

Suddenly something unexpected happened to me. My throat tightened. My eyes filled. I don’t mean sad tears, but the kind that leak from something brimming.

I looked at the faces around the room. They seemed beautiful and shining to me. I glanced at a common white lily in a vase and honestly, the sight nearly wiped me out. It was that impertinently gorgeous. Out of nowhere, plain and simple objects were rising up to show off their flame. The divine, unnameable spark. I couldn’t think what to name the feeling except amazement at life. It was as if something fell from my eyes and I saw everything just as it is.

One second I was going along in a jaded marriage with life (because let’s face it, the intimacy can fade after a while if you don’t work on the relationship) when it rode in and swept me off my feet. I learned to be in love with life again. And I didn’t even know the romance had slipped.

‘Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it,’ wrote Emily Dickinson. Somehow I’d begun moving through life on automatic pilot, half-seeing, half-here, abducted by the dreaded small stuff. But the evening of my party, I realized all over again: we will have a true and blissful marriage to life only to the extent we are aware.

So. That’s how I resolved the question about what I wished to become notorious for at fifty. Let it be for nothing more than harboring a wild amazement at life. Let it be for choking up at poetry and the sight of human faces. For falling into easy rapture over lilies and all the other run-of-the-mill marvels that make up life. Let me become notorious for going around with my bridal veil tossed back and my mouth saying I do. Renewing my vows with life. Every day. A hundred times a day.”

Me, too, Mary and Sue and Emily! Me, too! Me, too! Can I get an Amen?