Where to?

For the past year or so I've been working on our house here in Davis, turning it from a musty and nondescript ranch house into something more congenial. The first time the realtor opened the front door to the place I nearly turned and fled, for it reminded me of the tract houses from which I picked up a number of unfortunate dates in high school. I could all but see the coiled father seated in his armchair, the anxious mother peeking in from the kitchen, the sullen brothers hovering around the door to the garage, and my date for the evening emerging unrecognizable in full mufti from the hall. 


The house had been occupied for forty years by the same, the original owners: an ailing emeritus and his second wife. A large ranch house to which had been added a mother-in-law apartment in back, it had a stifling, congested atmosphere and a back yard that had been almost entirely paved over, and I immediately crossed it off my list. 


But that was when I still held out hope that a house of some architectural character might come on the market: even a 1920s California cottage with tapering porch columns would have sufficed. Every other town in the Central Valley was replete with foreclosed homes for sale, but not Davis, where the university has kept the local economy afloat and tenure limits the number of homes that come on the market. 


So I returned with my wife to the old professor's house, underwhelming and overpriced though it was, and, beaten down, perhaps, by the run of available houses available in Davis, which but for its core barely dates back to the 1960s, I began to see the house as a kind of tabula rasa, the concrete backyard as a potential pool site, the porch with its 4X4 posts as an Asian verandah similar to ones I had recently chanced upon in Thailand. 


After paring down the price and selling the house we had left in Seattle, I spent many long, hot months installing a pool, reaming out the living room,  knocking out walls, remodeling the kitchen and bathrooms, and installing throughout the house 4 inch wide black trim to try to give the place a Japanese teahouse quality commensurate with the tora gate the previous owner had installed in the front yard. 


I completed the interior some months ago, went to work on the verandah, and finally, last month, painted the exterior: a kind of deep marine green with red beams and yellow rafters and, as elsewhere, black trim.  


But now what? I feel as though I have created a set for a play I've yet to write. About an orientalist, perhaps, or some transplanted old Asia hand. It seems sometimes to say, "Davis? Please, God. Anywhere but Davis." But it's hard to complain about anything or anyone but myself, seeing as how I have, for instance, accomplished a lifelong dream of owning a pool. A small pool, certainly: too small to accommodate much more than a wallow. But a pool nonetheless. And I have planted citrus tree along two sides: dwarf citrus trees but nonetheless fruitful, or so they tell me. And I have a grandchild to look forward to, due in October and destined to frolic, or at least urinate, in the pool in another year or so. 


Maybe out of sheer restlessness I have begun to explore switching the house to solar power, and there are a few maintenance items I have yet to attend to, as there always are in the wonderful world of home owning. But even though I have three plays making the rounds of various theatre companies and a book or two in the offing, I haven't written anything in months, and it's time I climbed back on the literary horse or put him out to pasture; time I made up my mind what road to follow. 

Hello, I must be going

It's unfortunate that the blog page that's been sitting unchanged over the past month sported a cartoon of a "Too Much Information" booth, as too little information has been more the theme since I posted it. 


Some weeks ago I finally managed to persuade my mother to come celebrate her 97th birthday to California from Connecticut to celebrate her 97th birthday with her west coast family. 


The whole family thought the trip was a fine idea: Mom was in great shape, and the proposition seemed to give her a new lease on life after years of grieving for my father. The whole family except my wife, the nurse, who thought it was a foolish and reckless idea but did not have the heart to tell me. 


Mom flew to Sacramento escorted by her grandnephew Garrett and his wife Beth, and after sleeping half a day to recover from the flight, ensconced herself on the verandah, where, as she visited with Garrett and Beth and Debbie and me and enjoyed the sight of the blackbirds bathing in our pool, she was her effervescent self.


My mother has been something of a miracle of nature. No-one who meets her suspects she's as old as she is, and some don't believe us when we tell them. Some thirteen years ago, during my son Jake's graduation from Wesleyan, my sister escorted Mom to the ladies' room the college had established in a field house. It was a sweltering day, and there was a long line of matrons waiting to get in. So my sister went to the head of the line and asked if the ladies would let her eighty-four year-old mother cut in line. "Of course, dear," they said, so Helen retrieved Mom and escorted her forward. But as she reached the head of the line Helen began to hear some grumbling, and finally overheard one woman say to another, "Eighty-four, my foot!" 


So it is understandable that her family -- some of whose members are hoarier than she - thinks she will live forever, or at least that she may be immune to the usual geriatric slings and arrows.  But then, in the wee hours of her birthday, Debbie and I awoke to the sound of a crash and ran in to find my mother crumpled up on the floor of the guest room, having slipped getting out of bed to go to the bathroom. Apparently she had grabbed an end table for support and it collapsed, and now here she lay in great pain. 


Soon the EMT folks arrived and transported her to the local hospital where she was diagnosed with that gravest of geriatric injuries: a fractured hip. It required partially replacing with a steel femur, and by two that afternoon she was under the knife. Once upon a time, a fractured hip was attended by clots and pneumonia and infection and amounted in most cases to a prolonged death sentence. But hip replacement surgery has removed a good deal of risk, and in fact, over the ensuing weeks, the hip was the least of her problems. 


She received extraordinary care: superior to anything she might have received back home. And though she greeted the physical therapists who attended her at the nursing facility into which we squeezed her as though they were the Spanish Inquisition, she made enough progress to be able to fly back east eventually and return to her apartment. 


Over the course of the five or six weeks she was here, I found I could not think of much else, and spent most of my time either visiting her or preparing to visit her -- collecting toiletries, checkbooks, mail, magazines, audio books from the library, snapshots off the web; writing various care givers back east; and reporting on her progress to the rest of the family. My errands and missives served the purpose of creating the illusion that I had some measure of control over something that was happening to someone else. That that someone else was my mother gave this purpose a special urgency, and the primal nature of my relationship, at 64, with my 97 year-old mother, left me with no extra energy to invest in this blog, and if the clumsy way in which this is written is any indication, I may in fact be returning to it prematurely.