memories of the spa

When I was in high school, my Mom decided we should spend Christmas at a famous spa in Mexico. Normally you had to be 18, but they made an exception over the holidays. It was the first time either of us had really been to a spa, and at times it felt like we were in an episode of I Love Lucy.

Our package included a body wrap. We weren't really sure what that was, but figured we could try it. We walked into a room that had a row of tables. The floors were dark wood, and there was a large wooden light fixture (think wagon wheel) hanging in the middle. There were already several women on the tables, completely draped in white linens. The room was silent. It looked like a morgue. A morgue in the wild wild West.

We were told to disrobe, and lie on the table. We were then covered in seaweed soaked towels. I felt like a mummy.

Two of the women next to us had the same feeling, and started cracking jokes. A few of the other women didn't appreciate them, and told them to hush. It was hard not to giggle. It went on like that for the rest of our session. It was a very long half hour.

Later that day we went to an aerobics class. We knew we were novices. We thought we were doing the smart thing - standing in the back. Of course the instructors were like magnets to us. Suddenly we each had an instructor moving our bodies into the correct pose. Ouch!

That's when I realized that maybe I was better off hanging out with the "older" ladies. There was a water aerobics class they seemed to be signing up for, so I decided to join them.

The instructor started us out a ball exercise. The idea was to sit on the ball and balance yourself in the water. Within a few seconds there were several whooshes as the balls popped out from under us, and out of the pool. This was followed by uproarious laughter. The teacher ran around the pool, tossing the balls back in the water. We each tried again, with similar results. The instructor got miffed and made us give back the balls. She really thought our laughter was out of line.

We managed to get through the class without further incident, although the laughter continued. I hadn't laughed that hard in a long time. After the class we decided to use the sauna. First though a couple of the ladies had to run an errand. That left me and another woman to figure things out.

I had been in a sauna before, but it had been a while. We found a temperature control on the wall and set it. Then we sat down on the wooden bench.

It didn't feel as hot as I had remembered. I noted this to the other woman, and she agreed. I also said I recalled there being hot rocks that you poured water on to release steam. After a bit though we convinced each other that it was indeed getting warmer.

That was about the time the other three women returned. They wanted to know why we weren't in the sauna. Thankfully this was a coed sauna, so we weren't sitting in the area outside what we thought was the sauna naked -now that would have been truly embarrassing.

The sauna was behind the door. In our defense the door was mirrored, and the handle was not obvious. One of the other women opened the door and we laughed. It was hot in there and there were rocks. Part of me hoped I would just melt away.

Of course at dinner my new water aerobic chums decided to sit with my mother and me, and tell her of our adventures. My Mom always found it entertaining to learn how "smart" I really was.



on the night stand :: Such a Pretty Fat

remembering

I remember odd things about the houses that I have lived in. The vibrant aqua tile in the bathroom. That there were two closets in the hallway - on where we kept our dog's puppies for a while.

I remember the oven that baked the lopsided cake because the rack was crooked. I helped my Mom fill it in with extra frosting so she could bring it to work without too much embarrassment. It was also in that oven that I dropped the chicken, roasting within, onto the floor. I ran outside to tell my Mom and she came in and helped me rinse it off, and cook it - otherwise there would have been nothing for dinner.

I remember when the lights went out and my Uncle Bobby played the Boogieman and scared me half to death. I remember the purple plush sofa. And who could forget the spinning kitchen chairs?

I remember all these bits and pieces because they are a part of me. They remind me of where I came from, but most importantly they help me remember you.


on the night stand :: Lady of the Snakes

pop pop fizz flash

Lately odd memories seem to pop in my head out of no where. Well, maybe not entirely out of no where. I was reading Her Last Death this afternoon. I need to return it to the library. I am about a third of the way through.

I was reminded that my mother was hospitalized for mental illness when I was eight. Technically she was committed by my father, who was still legally her husband. She always claimed that he was just getting even with her (I am guessing because of her affair), but on some level I suspect this was only part of the story.

The summer 1976 through the spring of 1977 were a very bizarre time for me. We all ended up in Chico, California. Initially my sister and I lived with our father, and my mom and her boyfriend lived down the street in another apartment. But then the boyfriend left, and all of us ended up in a new, bigger apartment on the other side of town.

I only left the house to go to school. Otherwise I stayed inside and cleaned. My hair fell out. I had a bald spot along my forehead. I knew things were out of control, and was expressing it the only way I could.

My aunt, uncle and cousin also lived in town. That is how we ended up there. One weekend they decided to go to Disneyland, and invited me to go along. Just me. My aunt and sister didn't get along, and so I went solo. I felt a bit weird (and guilty) about this, but what kid turns down a trip to the home of Mickey Mouse?!

I don't remember much about the trip. I remember more about coming back home. Part of me was anxious about leaving my family behind. I had no idea what might happen. Clearly I wasn't too far off.

I could tell as soon as I got home that they had not had a good weekend - it was in the air. One of the first things I found was a pizza pan sitting out on the kitchen counter. We didn't have a pizza pan (our dining table was a set of milk crates). This looked like a pizza pan you would find at a pizza place. I asked my sister about it and she confirmed that it did come from a pizza place.

The only thing she would tell me was that they had gone out to dinner and decided to take the pizza home. She wouldn't give me details, but it was clear that something had gone wrong at the restaurant. Of course to her I was now the traitor who went to Disneyland without her. Guess I can't blame her for not sharing.

I believe it was after that weekend that my dad had my mom committed. I don't remember the details. I am sure it happened while we were at school. She wasn't there very long, but long enough that we were allowed to visit.

We weren't allowed inside the hospital. Instead we met our mom on the lawn, near a tree. There is a scene in the movie, "What Dreams May Come", that reminded me of visiting my mom at the hospital. In fact, it brought the memory back. I wonder if it was shot at the same place. I have no idea the name of the hospital or even what city it was in.

Shortly after my mom was released, she decided it was time to leave our father. He had gotten a job as a night guard for the city. Part of his job was to lock up the cemetery. After he had been there for several weeks, they were going to give him a gun. This is why she decided we needed to go. And so in the middle of the night we packed up the car and headed to Southern California.


on the night stand :: Her Last Death

fun with street view

I highly doubt that this was something Google thought users would do with the controversial street view feature. Lately I have been having trouble sleeping. The other night I somehow found myself looking up addresses of places I once lived.

I had been browsing BlogHer, looking at the speaker bios. I came across a woman who is a professor at a college that I once lived a stone throws from. The school is still there. Somehow I ended up on Google and then I found myself touring my old neighborhood.

Above was the first school I attended. It was right across the street. I remember it being P.S. 17, but I think they renamed it to P.S. 1. I know that this school district was the first in the country to be taken over because it was so bad. I remember my mom calling me to watch the Today Show as they announced the news.

My cousins (who lived around the corner) also went to this school. Two of them decided to burn the teacher's desk when they realized they were going to fail her class. Another climbed that fence (twice) and broke his arm (twice). It wasn't my imagination that kids didn't learn at this school.

I entered kindergarten able to read and write. First grade had the same books as kindergarten and required that we return after lunch. There is only so much "Fun With Dick and Jane" a girl can take. I routinely had headaches in the afternoons so I didn't have to go back. I also peed in my seat because I was afraid to ask to go to the bathroom. Once I was sent home in boy's underwear.

A few other memories before we move on:

• At an assembly, I watched a boy stick a fork in an electric outlet on the stage. Yes, he got shocked.


• My dog, an Old English Sheepdog, got out of the house and ran up the block to his favorite park. I ran after him and into my kindergarten teacher, who taught my father and my aunt. Her name was Mrs. Dingly. My father called her Mrs. Ding-a-Ling. My aunt told me stories of how badly she treated black students.


• We moved before the school year ended, but my parents didn't want me to tell. It was June and hot, and I showed up wearing a halter dress and got picked to bring up the attendance sheet. When the Vice Principal saw what I was wearing (my back was exposed but the dress was sown closed, not tied), he told me that I was to change at lunch. Only problem I had no clothes at my grandmother's and couldn't tell him that. When I explained to my grandmother, she sent me back with a navy blue button down sweater. I wore that sweater all afternoon, buttoned up.

The Google van didn't go down this street, so I can't see a full on photo of the house where I once lived with my grandmother. It was a true nuclear family situation. We lived downstairs from our paternal grandparents. In the live-in attic, my grandmother's mother lived. Later my great-aunt (my maternal grandfather's sister) and great-uncle would move in.

I don't know if that sign was always there, but it is a good representation about how I felt about that place.

This is the street where I learned to roller skate and ride a bike. It is cobblestone. And I think there were more trees.

We knew most of the neighbors. Next door there was another family with two girls (the same age). They lived upstairs from their grandparents, and had a baby brother (we had a dog). When it snowed, we would go to the neighbors' yard across the street (on the end) and make snow angels in their yard because that was where the snow was the deepest.

This is the house that fell on me (well a piece anyway) while I was sitting in the yard on the slide, eating a baloney sandwich. The nail went into my head and required three stitches to repair.



At the end of first grade, my parents bought the house above. It is an attached home. We lived on the right side. My mother was a real estate broker, and worked down the street. The house had been foreclosed upon. The previous owner was a drunk and a wife beater (I wonder when that trend stopped). The house was a mess when we took possession.

The first time they took me to see the house, I cried. I didn't want to live there. It was awful. I didn't want to leave my grandmother and my friends for this dump.

My mother transformed the place. She put in wallpaper and new carpet. She was even crazy enough to stucco the ceiling by hand. I hardly recognized the place when we did move in.

The gate which seems to be missing, but never closed properly, is where I put the trash can against it to close it to keep the dog in. That would have been good, except I tied the dog to the trash can. When he moved the trash can moved. It scared him (he was afraid of his own shadow) and he took off. He was done for several days, during which I was inconsolable.

This is the stoop where my sister sat and cried because our insane babysitter, Anne Marie Rogan, didn't feed my sister lunch. She purposefully bought things my sister didn't like and then made her sit outside when she started crying. Our neighbor found her and took her inside and made her lunch and told my mother. But that isn't what got Anne Marie fired.

Anne Marie was in the 8th grade and the daughter of one of the people my mother worked with. Anne Marie borrowed my mother's clothes and played my parents' records and invited her friends over. She could eat a whole can of fruit cocktail by herself. When her friends came over she would send us to our room to clean. She would brag to her friends that she had us under control. She would spend the afternoons on the phone, before call waiting, and my mom would have to have the operator break in. But none of that got Anne Marie fired either.

I told my parents what was going on in their home when they weren't there. When I kept at it, they finally started to think that maybe things were not okay. And one day my Mom, who worked down the street, came home. She found Anne Marie on the couch with her boyfriend. I think they were more than kissing. She was finally fired, but then we had no babysitter and had to eat lunch at school. This required special permission and meant that we sat in a classroom and ate lunch.


This is the school. St. Anne's. It had no playground.

It had a church. We were supposed to go to the children's mass on Sunday. I had to answer questions about the sermon on Monday morning in religion class. I was going to fail. My parent's didn't get up early on Sunday. As a compromise, my father, a non-Catholic, took us to 5pm mass on Saturday.

When Anne Marie was preparing for her confirmation, she was required to attend mass on Friday morning. Since she walked us to school, this meant we went to mass too. Sometimes the priest didn't finish by 8:30am, but we knew better than to leave mass early (that was a sin). Instead we walked back to school with the 8th graders and slipped into our classrooms on the first floor. One morning the Principal, a nun, was waiting for us. She wanted to mark us tardy. It took everything to bite my tongue and not call her a hypocrite.

The window I think is the gym. We had a gym uniform which we wore under our uniforms instead of our shirts on gym day. It had matching bloomers. Seriously - bloomers. When my sister left crayons in her uniform pocket, and my dad washed and dried them, it ruined all of our (mint green) uniform shirts. We had to wear our gym uniforms that day and everyone thought we didn't know when gym was. We eventually got new shirts and I learned how to do the laundry.

That door is where my mom passed out after the Principal explained what my sister, who was in the first grade, was up to. No one will ever know because she doesn't remember. And really it doesn't matter because they are both gone.



They are buried here. Which is down the street from the first photo.

My maternal grandmother is also buried in the same plot. I remember visiting her grave as a child. This is a large cemetery. You can drive through it (but the Google Van didn't).

on the night stand :: Sergio Makes A Splash

the nut tree

When we first moved to California, we lived in the town of Chico, home of Chico State and Bidwell Park. We only lived there for about six months before moving to southern California. I don't remember much about that time (I was only eight), but one of my few memories is visiting The Nut Tree in Vacaville.

The one thing I remember is standing by the fence with my dad, watching the train. It would appear that they recently gave the place a makeover, but the train is still there. It was like a little trip down memory lane.

on the night stand :: The Almost Moon