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A tale of two balconies

These two balcony stories did not happen to me, but the cautionary lessons are many, so I repeat them here.

Story #1 comes from Mexico: Ms. Y and Ms. Z were sleeping in a rented beachfront condo and had locked all the first floor doors. Encouraging ocean breezes to lull them through their slumbers, they’d left the second floor balcony doors unlocked. Sometime in the night some people climbed up to that second floor balcony, entered through the unlocked screen doors, and took cash and laptop computers (including one work computer).

My comment: Mses. Y and Z slept through it all and were never molested. Just traumatized and troubled for all future Mexican–and everywhere else–vacations till the end of time. Lock everything that can be locked when traveling perhaps? Leave the laptops at home?

Story #2 comes from the US–albeit a warmer part of the US than where I live–and happened to Mr. X. I’ll let his e-mail tell it. “I went out [on my balcony and] accidentally bumped the door shut and was locked out. This was a serious problem as the balcony is on the second floor, sits high above a hard concrete slab on the interior of the complex, and has no reasonable down-climb. I had no key, no phone, no supplies, no jacket and nobody looking for me.

“When I realized I was totally f&%*ed, I started whistling and yelling loudly until I finally got a neighbor’s attention . . . my hero of the day. He came to see if my front door was unlocked (no), called the building manager to see if he had a key or a suitable ladder (no and no), called my friends to get someone with a key to come get me (finally), and checked in on me periodically. Fortunately, the stove was off. He brought me a sweater and a book. Nobody had a ladder or a rope, so I waited for someone with a key to come. I thought I would get off fairly fast so I did not call the fire department. . . .

“The five CDs blasting in the stereo completed, and the stereo automatically stopped. I got cold and managed to get another jacket and blanket thrown up to me. I found a zip lock bag to use as an impromptu urinal so I did not have to pee out into the patio area. I stretched and ran in place to stay warm. I finished the book in the dark using the light coming out the window. I finally got off the balcony at 10 PM.”

My comment: I am pretty amazed that the building manager seemed to opt out of any problem solving with his own tenant (where does the “manager” part of this person’s title kick in?) and that Mr. X was on the balcony for seven hours altogether. As far as the decision to not call the fire department, I would have thought this emergency might come under the “kitten in a tree” rescue heading, but it was his decision and apparently only Mr. X was affected by the event.

Locked or unlocked, the wonderfulness of the balcony is up to debate.

Skewering Hot Dog on a Stick

Squosh, splosh, spwish, throth. These sounds are part of my winter morning walks on the slick clean tiles of a local mall. On my arc through the food court, I watch the women at Hot Dog on a Stick churning lemons for the drinks. Young women. Young white women. Young white women who are slim. Young white women who are slim in tight-fitting striped shirts, shorts, and a ridiculous upside-down bucket-looking contraption some might call a hat.

The Orange Julius across the food court has men and women. Young and older men and women. Young and older men and women of color. Young and older men and women of color in dark, loose-fitting, wash-and-wear shirts and long pants. Not tight-fitting or attention-getting uniforms, just ones that look durable and something a food professional would find comfortable to you know work in. The same for other food franchises around the food court: Edo, the Great Steak and Potato Company, Sbarro, Rocky Mountain Chocolate, Subway, and Panda Express. Some of these other food workers wear knit hats, some ball caps, some just have their hair pulled back in ponytails.

So what’s with the get-ups the bucketheaded women have to wear at Hot Dog on a Stick? (Continued)

Elfinwild

Actually it was East Elfinwild Road, Glenshaw, Hampton Township, Pennsylvania, and it was a hell of a place to drive–or learn to drive–a stick shift. A windy two-laner east up the ravine from the river bottom, East Elfinwild Road was lined with trees, so a sunny day threw quick, blinding shafts across a driver’s eyes: sun and shadow, sun and shadow, sun and shadow. Elfinwild was slick with ice and snow in the winter, so you needed to take it at a consistent pace with a steady foot on the accelerator. A false move could land you thrashing and smashing down over the side through the trees. Once you got to the T intersection at the top, you had to ride the clutch or the emergency brake, ready to rocket into first gear once you were pretty sure the coast was clear to make a left onto Middle Road. Elfinwild wasn’t particularly unique to the Pittsburgh area’s twisty ravine-and-valley roads, but it was the convenient ravine-and-valley road in my neighborhood. (Continued)

My first transvestite

The red-haired giant from Tennessee was showing me his gowns, trailing his fingers in a reverie along the satin and feathers that hung in his closet. “This is my favorite,” he gushed, pulling out the hem of a silky blue number. A photo of him wearing that dress and ten pounds of wig and makeup sat on his bedside table. His slow accent, his friendliness, and his interest in what I thought was quite touching.

It was Christmas break 1969, and I was visiting my boyfriend’s gay friend Richard in San Francisco. We’d hitchhiked for two days from our apartment in Isla Vista a few months after rioters had burned down the Bank of America. I remember wandering over to the bank several days later with my dad’s check to deposit, then looking up in shock when I realized that it was my bank that had burned down. Reality on the news doesn’t always immediately translate into your reality. (Continued)

Mr. Rich and Famous

This bluegrass a capella betrayal waltz came to me like a lightning bolt as I was driving south through cold, dry flatness out of Glenn’s Ferry, Idaho, listening to car parts commercials on a Boise radio station. I was going to add a murder verse, but I like having it just implied. When singing this, I “feather” the end of each line like the old-timey singers do. For Nancy.

Well, I was handed to you on a silver platter
And now three kids and ten years later I don’t matter
To you, Mr. Rich and Famous. (Continued)

A Skater’s Winter

It didn’t snow for Halloween
The Pocahantas Halloween that skater’s winter
Hundreds of little white girls dressed as Indians
Too cold to go door to door
They raided the stores in the biggest mall in Anchorage
Moms wearing ranch mink
Carrying their daughters’ pink coats lined with rabbit fur
Those trap lines are so romantic
Sulking teenage clerks handing out cheap waxpaper twists of taffy
No, we don’t have Milky Ways or Snickers or Dairy Milks
This is all we’ve got. (Continued)

Ben and the giant stairs

It’s such a simple thing, a staircase. Yet I spent a good half hour with a two-year-old recently using the library stairs as a giant fascinating toy. Up, down, jump, fall, hold onto my hand, DON’T hold onto my hand, go up, turn around, step back down, do it again, repeat.

Fischer-Price doesn’t make stairs, and Toys R Us didn’t get a dime from our play that day. No toy company in China benefited financially from Ben’s delight in this old school exercise, yet he delighted in every risky step. Adults passed up going up and going down, barely registering the extreme concentration Ben was marshaling for his feet and legs to work together. (Continued)

Halene

Halene and I were eating lunch together, together for the last time as it turned out. “So, you remember that scene in Titanic where Jack sketches Rose lying nude on a couch?” Yes, I said. “Well, that was Dogie and me.” She was looking down at her salad and remembering her cowboy-painter husband who had died recently of Parkinson’s. She looked up at me. “We did a lot of that.”

I was a beginning teacher in 1976 when Halene came into my life. I’d had all my training and educational foundation classes, but was just eager not very disciplined, energetic but not methodical, passionate but not really sure of my teaching theory. Through the years that I was privileged to orbit Halene’s great star, I developed my own beliefs in the power of children’s learning abilities, with or without teachers. Her grounding helped me stay strong through the nine years that I homeschooled my sons. Her examples and wisdom guide my teaching life still. (Continued)

The thing in the bayou

Masculinity comes in many forms. Height, build, protectiveness, resolve, muscles, decisiveness, sensitivity, strength, courage, taking charge, heroism, bravery. And I witnessed all of those things in my man one day 16 years ago.

We were living on a bayou in Dickinson, Texas. Our estuary was alive with fish, ducks, and herons, and our neighbor’s geese patrolled the waters regularly for insects. Dark, furry nutria and their young came out from the bayou’s banks at twilight to feed, like lumbering Lovecraftian rats patrolling the water’s edge. Floodwaters had once filled our house halfway up our living room wall. A neighbor told us she’d seen an alligator climb out of the water and grab and eat somebody’s puppy. Happy Texans in motorboats, jet skis, and canoes plied up and down our bayou. It was raw nature out there. But one day the bayou washed up something that wasn’t so happy or so natural. (Continued)

The little Mexican candlestick

I made my way through central Mexico by myself for a month in the summer of 1975. I’d finished my post-BA education classes to qualify for an Illinois teaching certificate, and I had just broken up with a longtime boyfriend. I flew into Mexico City from Chicago, took buses, walked beaches, swam, wrote, and carried a large, orange, nylon backpack. To an outsider, this might have looked incredibly romantic and freeing, but I often felt pretty depressed. The long periods of speaking only schoolgirl Spanish, fighting off Mexican men, and sitting alone at restaurants and in my lodgings were taking their toll. As I stood in a room in Mexico City’s Museum of Anthropology between two giant granite figures, I considered throwing myself through a huge window.

I picked up small crafts in local markets along the way, things that weren’t too heavy or bulky for my pack like tiny clay cups and plates, a poncho, a small rug, and a six-inch tall, hand-painted, porcelain candlestick. (Continued)