Filed under: Confessions
Just discovered another video ad on my recent post called the Auto/Body Connection – a piece about my old car.
The ad was for a 2012 Audi sports car with very bright LED headlights so powerful that their light pulverized a bunch of teen vampires partying in a dark forest.
Now that’s what I call relevant advertising by Google and WordPress.
My old eyes feel almost pulverized when suddenly confronted with those bright lights on a dark lonely highway.
Susan
Filed under: Confessions, fragments, Landscape Ptgs, Paintings -Inspiration | Tags: california, Fort Bragg, night life, paul bunyan's thrift store
With an oblique view from my bedroom window overlooking the parking lot behind Paul Bunyan’s thrift store, I stood just out of sight, watching the parade of night people coming and going. Some came to drop off donations; many came to pilfer. A sense of desperation and greed and of wrong-doing pervaded the scene with people skittering about in the dark under cover of dark clothing and hoodies.
The thrift store provided employment and financial support for developmentally challenged and disabled people. After a night of thievery, it’s a wonder they found anything left in the morning that was worth selling. But the night people didn’t care that it was a helpful community nonprofit organization created to help people. For them it was a first-come first-serve help-themselves-buffet-of-goodies game. It was free and up for grabs, and that’s what counted. Using the parking lot to dump their trash also meant they could avoid paying the refuse site’s fees.
But it was not free to Paul Bunyan’s. After a night of pilfering and damage, they had to pay to clean up. They had to pay to haul damaged goods to the refuse site. They had very little good donations left to sell for profit. All in all, it cost them money.
They eventually put a lock on their dumpster to keep people from dumping their own garbage into it, but even that wasn’t fool-proof. Two ingenious night people hammered for an hour to break the locks. When they got it open, I heard them say, Shit, it’s nothing but garbage!
Serves them right, I thought.
Every night, one by one, all through the night, people crept into the parking lot searching for the better donations—clothing, children’s clothes and toys, stuffed animals, a large stuffed purple Barney, electronic equipment, furniture, bicycles, exercise equipment, televisions, bed frames, and even stoves and refrigerators.
Dressed in big coats with hoods and carrying tiny flashlights, they scurried around in the dark. They tossed items from one spot to another, good items to good piles and the rest, just tossed. When they were all done it looked like a tornado had ripped through the parking lot. The concrete floor littered with junk, clothing, old toys, everything now dirty, wet from rain, broken and unusable. Worthless; profits for the thrift store transformed into scattered bits and pieces.
And every night from my window, I spied a one-legged man waiting in his black Volvo with darkened windows across the alley behind my apartment. When a person dropped off a donation, he moved his car the short ride from one parking lot to the other, got out, hopped on one leg around to the trunk pulling out a wheel chair in which he sat and wheeled around, rummaging through piles and boxes of donations, finding and taking all the electronic equipment, radios, cassette players, TVs, stereos. He stuffed it all in the trunk of his Volvo along with his wheel chair, hopped back into the driver’s seat and drove back to the other parking lot to wait again, waiting, night after night after night, sitting like a spider on the edge of his web ready to catch the next fly that flew into his sticky trap.
At the time I assumed he had an electronics repair business and was gathering material from the donations, making an illicit profit from items that might well have brought money to the organization. It dawns on me now that maybe his purpose was to collect the valuable equipment, clean it up and repair it for Paul Bunyan’s. So maybe, just maybe he was a good spider, if there is such a critter!
Awakened bright and early one morning by a loud screeching sound, I got up to see a young man dragging a refrigerator down the alley. He was alone. All he could do was drag it, the fridge scraping and screeching in protest. Someone called the police. They came, talked to the man, and left. They may have called the director of Paul Bunyan’s and received permission to help the guy move the refrigerator, for very soon, they returned with a mover’s dolly and a truck. They loaded the fridge and the young man into the truck and took off. I thought it was the most kind and generous act of compassion I saw on that alley the whole two years I lived there. And Paul Bunyans didn’t have to haul it to the dump or worry about little kids getting trapped inside the abandoned fridge.
Just in that moment’s musing, a man teetered in a drunken stupor into my vision and unrinated on a wall below my window. Damn! Why doesn’t he just go home to pee? Or find a gas station? Obviously, I said to myself, he was probably homeless or too drunk to know he had a home.
The alley was a convenient place for all kinds of odd and nefarious human and animal activities. It was dark and hidden, not patrolled by the cops, a no-man’s land on the baby-scale of no-man’s lands. And I had landed in the middle of it.
I had moved to Fort Bragg on the California coast to find peace and quiet after my mother died. After having lived in hot valley towns for eight years while I was a student, I longed for cool light and the majesty and power of the ocean. I wanted to paint the ocean and beaches and bridges in all their grandeur. However, I soon discovered I had rented an apartment smack-dab in the middle of the movie Escape From New York, starring Kurt Russell and Lee Van Cleef. Although Fort Bragg was not a city prison as was New York in the movie, the events of the movie take place in the future and that future was 1997, exactly when I moved to Fort Bragg.
In the movie, the prisoner scavengers and rival gangs skittered about like rats during the day in the sewers and subways, living underground in the great maze of New York’s underbelly that WW III had left almost in tact. By night, they were above, out in full force, lawless, pillaging, killing, raping and torturing. It was a raging battle for survival and political power among the inmates. They controlled the night.
Like in the movie, the Fort Bragg night people came alive under the shroud of darkness and hoodies and I stood at my window watching it unfold, the light of flashlights flickering on the dark screen in the dark places of my mind. During the day, I looked out that same window, gazing over the rooftops into the distance to the ocean’s white light, the glare almost too much to bear as it returned me to sanity. I must leave this place, I remember thinking.
Filed under: autos, Confessions, fragments | Tags: auto, car, paul potter, repairs, susan canavarro
How fitting it is that when I finally turn 65, when life is supposed to be less stressful and free of complications, my car receives a death prognosis in September, 2011.
After the first mechanic I took my car to takes a cursory look at my leaky engine, I asked him, Well, what’s your prognosis? Is it going to live?
He said, You’ve got three major problems: a steering fluid leak, a transmission leak, and one or two bad UV joints that need fixing. He looks at me seriously, I frown back at him and sigh with recognition that I’ve lost the battle, and he says, If I were you, I’d just let it die a natural death.
I know he is implying the repairs were going to be very expensive, and he knew from past work he had done for me that I didn’t have enough money to throw away on dying cars. I assumed his death knell for my Honda was one of kindness and consideration for my financial situation.
But what he didn’t understand was that the prohibitive cost of another newer car was beyond my means. I would not be able to afford a newer used car and a new insurance policy and I didn’t want to be stuck with an older car, or one as old as mine which may have unknown problems to be discovered one by one. At least with my car, I know certain things. For one, I know it has never been in a major accident.
And there was a hidden cost: losing my car meant losing my freedom and independence, but more than that, it meant losing my sense of security and safety. I’ve always felt that if I had nothing else in life—no money, no place to live—I’d at least have a car to sleep in. I’d always loved taking road trips, discovering new roads less traveled, and beautiful countryside and small towns along the way. And all the while, as an independent person, I could go anywhere, be anywhere and feel safe and secure in my own car.
After a few weeks of pondering what to do, I realized I could not just let my car die without a second opinion. The second mechanic looked at it and said it had a bad steering fluid leak and one bad UV joint. He estimated it would cost $638.00.
Only $638 dollars? Wow, maybe this is doable! I expected it to be more around a thousand dollars. From my saved pet-sitting earnings, combined with a few birthday gifts, I knew I could plunk down at least $500 in cash. And he agreed to carry the last bit with installment payments. I said, let’s do it!
However, fixing the car was problematic. The engine compartment, frozen and filthy, was full of old brown pine needles and maple leaves and dirt from having to park outside through heat and cold and wind and snow…and of course, from my neglect of the poor thing.
First, his crew worked long hours just to get the parts off. Second, since they don’t make parts for ‘86 Honda’s anymore, they needed to purchase used parts. Used parts are a hit and miss game, not always in perfect condition. He wound up replacing these old parts three times to find a good one (at his expense), but the third time was a charmer.
He bought used parts three times, he had paid his crew for the extra work hours each time, and he never increased his original estimate. I expressed my concern that he was losing money on my job, but he comforted me by telling me that he would fix the car. That was his job. He would work on it until it was fixed. This man’s name is Paul Potter and he owns and operates Potter’s Tires and Auto Repairs on Hwy. 101 in Florence, a couple of doors down from Fred Meyers.
After all was said, I waited to hear that death knell again: he never wanted to see me again or work on my old car again. Don’t bring it back here. Not fixable. He never said those words of course. I asked him if he would help me keep it running for a few more years. That’s when he said it should get 250 thousand miles. He gave me suggestions of how I could maintain it better and I promised to bring my car in more frequently for the tune-ups—the least I could do was give him my future business for basic preventive care medicine. Perhaps if he caught problems earlier, it would cost less to fix the problem.
The car is old and has been sorely neglected. Parts are rusting and rotting and falling off, fading away. Door locks no longer work properly. The key is often gripped by an unseen force that won’t let me turn it one way or another, like the arthritis in my fingers – they get stuck in one position. The window-washer fluid-hose snapped apart like someone cut it with shears. Chronic fatigue. The black vinyl material covering the exterior metal parts is shedding dead skin like after a sun burn. The dried-up rubber seals in the doors are breaking apart. The doors no longer have tight seals. Water and cold seeps in. The once-nice bumpers burst out in huge fade spots a few years back that look like the areas of skin which have lost all pigmentation due to discoid Lupus. The car’s surface looks like it has broken out with a bad case of acne with its pits and scars and bumps of tree sap and a few dents. Its dark blue color now faded is like the color of my mother’s eyes that drained away to gray as she got older.
Old cars suddenly or slowly develop leaks seemingly for no reason at all other than neglect, like our bodies begin to leak from places we never thought we’d leak: mouth, eyes, ears, nose, and those ahhummmm unmentionables. There are products, duct tape for the leaks, repair jobs, medications, and exercises. Use it or lose they say about our bodies and minds. Well it’s true of cars too. Keep it lubed, drive it or lose it.
I bought a warming wrap used by hikers and campers and I lay it over the car’s engine under the hood at night to hopefully keep the engine warm and dry. The auto parts salesman thought I was nuts. The heat will just escape under the engine he said, but I thought it worth a try. And besides, what else is new? I’m a little bit nuts. I also use newspapers on the windshield to keep the ice from blanketing the glass in a cold snap—nothing worse than scraping off ice with frozen hands on a chilled winter morning. Because I once woke up with all movable parts on my car frozen solid, couldn’t even open the door without the hair drier, I also spray the locks and door edges and wiper-joints with a de-icer periodically which keeps them from freezing
I’m thinking of using duct tape to cover the exposed metal parts. Black duct tape would look just like the original black covering and it would protect the metal from rust—if the water and the freeze and thaw temperatures don’t cause the tape to crack and flake off. I duct-taped the windshield-wiper water-hose together, but unfortunately it didn’t hold for even one day. I used a bright red duct tape. It occurs to me that I could have many colors of duct tape decorating my car in my attempts to hold it together. There is a candy-striped red and white, a purple, hot pink, red, green, yellow, white and black and the standard silver tone. The car could become my canvas. This reminds me of a painting I did in grad school on which I used duct tape wrapped around the entire canvas. It turned out to be one of those paintings with multiple meanings and associations. In my mind it started out as an expression of pain but it wound up as an expression of healing. Holding my car together with colorful duct tape…hmmmmm
In a mental effort to put my car problems in perspective, I had an insight: I envisioned the auto’s aging and breaking down as a perfect analogy to my own age and body breaking down. What is happening with my auto is happening to my body, aging and breaking, freezing with arthritis, and leaking. When you grow up with a car, so to speak, you and it become old together, all the aches and pains of the car and body are living in parallel aging worlds, but it’s as if the rust and destruction and frozen joints of one are transmitted to the other: the minute you start the car, you are jump-starting the transmutation of the rust and goo of this hunk of metal and iron into your own physical body.
Some parts of the aging process of our bodies and our autos are due to normal atrophy that would occur no matter what we do. On the other hand we could make it last longer with better care. Due to my neglect of the health of my auto and my body and mind, things have fallen into disrepair or dis-ease as my father would say, at a much faster rate than they should have perhaps. These days I am holding my body together with artificial means in an attempt to keep it functioning smoothly. I call it the duct tape of adaptation, self-healing and medicine.
Somehow the old faded blue Honda has become very important to my own physical and emotional survival and to my understanding of what my life has become. We need each other. It’s a strange symbiosis. I must keep my old car going. To do that, I must take better care of my now fragile body and mind… to keep on going: going on being.
To take better care of my auto, I must take better care of my body. I have no other choice—the auto/body connection.
Filed under: Al Need, art, Paintings -Inspiration, seascapes | Tags: al need, alvin w. need, Jean Varda, Mendocino, Northern California coast, painter, the Vallejo house boat in Sausalito, writing
Often, I’ve a need to revisit my father’s writings. Yesterday I found a short story he wrote which I remember enjoying when he first sent it to me. The oddest thing about it is that for my whole life, I never knew he believed in “God.” I knew he believed in a force, the a priori, universal consciousness, harmony, synchronicity, but he never called it God. This story fills out the picture.
THANKS FOR THE ORANGES ~ © Thanks For The Oranges by Alvin W. Need
He had a feeling that it was the house that was changing around him, growing emptier and being invaded by a dingy solitude that was absorbing all space and all things. The symptoms were no stranger to him and he met them head on. But he met them by telling himself the time-worn things, and just the telling did not affect the growing emptiness around him.
Solitude was not really solitude, he reminded himself. He had always depended upon that “other” aspect of things—that “other reality”—to keep him from feeling alone. Aloneness was a myth, or better, aloneness was all there was, depending on how you related to the other reality.
And what of his isolation? Isolation was not really isolation when it was by choice. By choice he had remained at the cabin in the clearing deep in the Mendocino woods. By choice he could not leave the redwoods, the ferns, the trilliums in the spring, the deer, and the raccoons. By choice he needed the pervading sound of the storm winds rushing through the top of the forest. He could not do without the distant thumping roar of the surf against the coast, or the faint moan of faraway foghorns.
He was not “cut off” from people, anyway. His files were full of “fan” letters from admirers of his paintings. Many of these letters were truly perceptive, and startling in their sensitivity to the ambiance and latent meaning he always managed to put into light and color and atmosphere. His work had worth in the lives of people. His own quality of love fulfilled a human need, whatever the nature of his personal seclusion.
”Then, by Allah, why the emptiness now?” His mood was petulant as he addressed himself to the silent room—rather, to that other reality which he assured himself was always there, with him. “Father, Father, do not take thy presence from me…!”
He swept a pained glance around the familiar room which served as his studio and bedroom. No, it was not that it was really any more empty than usual. The mahogany spinet still stood patiently against the redwood paneling of the east wall. The dust on its top was a little more obvious this morning. Cat prints made a dainty trail along the closed keyboard cover. That Buddha-boy! When did he ever walk on the floor? And the bookshelves which formed most of the south wall still sagged under the weight of a jam of hard and soft cover religious and philosophical books, parapsychology reports, magazines, music, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, not to mention a small library of art books. His bed still reposed in the corner, neatly made. He scowled at it. “Should rumple it all to hell, walk on it, jump on it. “Change my luck, Lord, no?” he should have been, rather, a Varda, lounging royally on a fantasy sailing craft on San Francisco Bay, waited on by a colorful covey of nubile young maidens. [Varda also lived on the infamous ferryboat the Vallejo docked in Sausalito.}
Clothing was strewn over his beloved director’s chair which he had liberated from the Mirisch Bros., when they had come to town to shoot “the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming.” He hung up the clothes, shoved his boots under the bed. “Make your bed, put your clothes away, wash the dishes, sweep the floor—but don’t dust the piano, old man.” Leave a slate for the Great spirit to write on.
His painting things, too, were filmed with dust. The sheet of glass he used for a palette shone pristine enough, but old paint-stained brushes and painting knives lay scattered on his painting table, mingled with bits of pencils, charcoal, matches, golf tees, grains of tobacco, squashed tubes of color, DiGel tablets, bottles and cans of turps, linseed oil, and spray varnish. His favorite painting tools were clean, though, and lay gleaming in the gray radiance from the north skylight.
His palette, his tools, the white canvas on the easel were ready. Ready for loving, as of old. Inwardly he grimaced and lowered himself wearily on to his painting stool. He stared all unseeing out at the vista beyond the glass wall. “Divine One, my love,” he sighed, “deliver me! Let me feel thine ambiance…!”
A mystical fog-shrouded corridor of trees and manzanita brush stretched endlessly down to the far-hidden sea. Ponderous-limbed ancient firs, moss-draped and vine-tangled, merged like shadows into the drifting mist, coming and going in changing planes, dreaming of primeval mystery…
Ambiance!
There was the key! The French spelling of a word that dictionaries define as the “environment or pervading atmosphere” of a place, object, situation, etc. It was not that the room was growing smaller, emptier, closing in. It was that somehow energy had drained out of the world. The “pervading atmosphere” was gone and what was left was a dry, shriveled bag of bones, without flesh, without vitality and without glow. Without ambiance…
He clutched his graying head in his hands. “Dear god,” he moaned, “Enlightened One, by all the Prophets…how can I live without thee? Bride of the Lamb, how could you fail me…?”
He crouched on the stool for a long moment, his shoulders silently heaving. Outside, blue jays screeched. The fog drifted in veils across the corridor, tapestry in motion. A lone raven cawed, high over the primeval shadows.
Presently he lifted his head, his eyes suffering, and stretched out a listless hand to flip on the stereo. “I know,” he whispered more calmly. “it’s me! O master, lift me up…come to me…”
Soft, faint, three-dimensional music floated down from the ceiling beams and he knew that the girl was singing with haunting nostalgia about the sun streaming through a window in late afternoon. With the sound, he was suddenly smitten with a deep flooding hunger for value, for significance, for communication, to be at the center of the meaning of life.
He shot from the stool, rigid. “Now look, dammit, Holy one…”
A loud knock shook the kitchen door and shattered the spell of his mood. He stalked into the adjoining room and flung the door open.
Two young men stood frozen, startled by the violence of his sudden appearance. “Uh…sir…” The taller of the two wore faded blue denims and a tentative bearded grin. “Would you like to buy some oranges?” he held up a mesh bag bulging with large oranges.
His darker, younger companion proffered the cut half of an orange, holding it out in his hand. The fruit glistened juicily in the gray light. “Sunkist,” he said, his eyes crinkling.
There was just the right inflection of confidence, welcome, and deference in his voice. “Try one?”
He stared in amazement at the two young apparitions. One tall, sandy-haired and heavily but pleasantly built, the other in jeans and a sweater, dark-eyed. He felt a tide welling up in his chest and exploded in sudden, releasing laughter.
Surprised again, they looked at each other, grinning.
“Sir…”
“I…” and another roar of laughter burst from him. “I can’t believe it!’ he gasped, tears running into his beard. “Wh…what are you fellows up to?” he lost himself in laughter again.
The blond one made a deprecating motion, the bag of oranges swinging from his other hand. “Just oranges,” he said. “Just selling oranges. Look, they’re good! Try one!”
“I’m sure,” he chortled. “But – out here” Man, houses out here are at least a mile apart, and all of them hidden in the forest. The only people I get here are Jehovah’s Witnesses. About once a month,” he added. He accepted the sample orange and sucked noisily at it. “How much?”
***************************************
A side note: An interesting site for an anecdotal history of Jean Varda and the Sausalito houseboat “beats” and artists - There is a page of Jean Varda’s beautiful collage work, pictures of him on his sail boat in the San Francisco Bay, stories from people who knew him. Wonderful site. – Susan
Filed under: fragments | Tags: susan canavarro, Monterey Peninsula artist, Carmel, sewing, singer sewing machine, draperies, upholstery, slipcovers, pillow covers, carmel woods
After Dad left that last time to get married to another woman, Mama, left with very little financial resources, had to find her own way. They had a bitter divorce over money and child support. Mama got half the child support, and the other half was deducted for payments towards the house. She had little work experience, but she could sew clothing; she knew how to use her old Singer treadle.
She worked odd jobs, sewing draperies and slipcovers for other shops, sold Diner’s cards over the phone, and eventually began her own decorating business, making draperies and Roman shades, slipcovers that fit so well they looked upholstered, and doing regular upholstery for Carmel clients. She made sandals, and fancy fabric linings for picnic baskets, tea cozies, and bun warmers. And like me, or me like her, she made throw pillow covers, only hers were more traditional than my bizarre creations. She could make anything with a sewing machine, and to my chagrin at times, even without patterns.
She worked only when she needed money. Many times, a large block of money went for something frivolous, like a chaise-lounge. I never understood her logic, until now. I know from personal experience of being a person without money, that holding a big chunk of money in my hands is very tempting and, like Mama, all I want to do is buy something frivolous and personal and fun.
Bill, gray-haired and old enough to be my grandfather, was a friend of Mother’s. He came to the same Monterey folk dancing group my sister and I attended. He didn’t dance, he just sat smiling and watching the dancers, chatting with Mother as she watched. It felt odd. I didn’t know what their relationship was. I didn’t know why he was there every Friday night, if not to dance.
When I was only 16, the year I started with the folk dancing and had begun my third year of high school, Mama asked him to buy a pair of shoes for me. He drove me down the hill to Holman’s Department Store in town where he bought a pair of sleek, shiny black flats for me. Wearing them, I felt grown up, but getting them from this old guy felt strange. Strange, and somehow inappropriate even though he was Mama’s friend.
He lived in the Carmel Woods area. A neighborhood of narrow roads winding around the forested hills and canyons with homes perched off canyon walls amidst the pines. In the early to mid 1900′s, the Woods was an unincorporated neighborhood of residents who settled in Carmel when it was a small inexpensive beach resort destination soon to become an artists’ enclave before it became a busy and gentrified tourist destination. Most of the people in this wooded area built their own homes, building codes probably non-existent at the time.
Before Bill’s wife died, they designed and hand created greeting cards. They had a very successful business. In their owner-built house in the Woods, they became old Carmel money. As they were in the arts, they knew some of the same people my mother and father knew—artists, writers and musicians.
When I was in high school, I heard that after his wife died, Bill was a humanitarian who supported several Monterey Peninsula Community College foreign exchange students, giving them a place to live, paying their tuition. I think Mother was hoping he would do the same for me.
One evening he invited us to supper at his home. When dinner was over, Mother got up to leave as if she was going to leave without me. She didn’t say, Come on Susan, it’s time to go. She just got up, put on her coat and started for the door, implying, and I remember thinking at the time, that I was to stay with Bill. Stay? Oh God, no. Stay?
The word lingers in the spaces and traces of my heart-pounding fear.
Mother! Wait! Where are you going?
It felt like she had made a deal—me for the shoes or possibly me for college tuition. At the time, I was taking all college prep classes; Mom had no money for college, no other resources but what Bill could offer her. Panic stricken, my heart pounding, I thought she was trying to give me to this old man, or worse, sell me to him.
Oh God, Mom, please don’t make me stay here. Please don’t make me do this.
To this day I do not remember how the evening turned out. The old man with the gray hair became my nightmare: a bad dream-wound that I can’t heal. Did that really happen to me? Did she really try to sell me? Or give me away? Was she that desperate? Was she really that nuts? Was she doing it for my benefit or for herself?
I don’t know.
It could be that I threw such a temper tantrum she had to take me home with her. It could also be my illusions. Like many memories, it could be just my illusions. I’m not sure any more.
© Susan Canavarro. All Rights Reserved.
