“Sometimes I get a good feeling
A feeling I’ve never, never, never, had before . . .”

Her gravelly vocal statements were answered by a back-up group, and then she launched into “Something’s Got a Hold On Me (It Must Be Love).” And I was born again as a hipster at that exact moment. You can look at several YouTube versions. The beginning shout outs are downright primal and still make my hair stand on end. She was full-throated sex and womanhood.

I am from an L.A. County surfer town, so you might think I would have liked the Beach Boys. So white bread. So ONE-two, ONE-two, chucka, chucka. In 1964 the Beatles hit America, and my high school girlfriends and I were enthralled. I was even in a Beatles group (I was John Lennon). But I didn’t really like the Beatles’ music nearly as much as the soul and R&B I heard on the L.A. radio stations. Miss Etta was, and always will be, my favorite singer.

I was lucky enough to see Etta James perform live one time at Salt Lake City’s Capitol Theater. She had great difficulty walking, sat on a stool for most of the show, yet belted out her soul, pain, rage, and truth like she was young and tortured all over again.

Etta James died today at age 73 after lifelong drug and health problems that followed her rough beginning: a too-young mother, an absent father, and abuse throughout her life from men and the music industry. She claimed the pool pro Minnesota Fats was her dad, and maybe that’s so. The 2008 movie Cadillac Records spotlights some of her life, though all those intimate close ups with Adrian Brody and Beyonce (as Etta) were a little too creepy for my taste. Maybe that is how it was, but still. I have her autobiography Rage to Survive, and now I just may read it. And perhaps Beyonce’s brand new baby girl was a sign that a spirit was passing.

Rest in peace, Miss Etta.

I live in a little town where there are great breakfast places. This is probably because it gets so freakin’, Baghdad hot in the summer. And, since most tourists come to Moab in that freakin’-hot summertime, they want to get up early, eat, and GO; thus, the breakfast places. As I work my way through all the breakfast places here, I’ll share my list of good-for-breakfast diner requirements:

1. A round-lipped coffee mug, preferably with the diner’s logo on it. Hats and T-shirts with the logo are attractive extras, and sometimes I’ll buy something. I bought the Mom’s Cafe (Salina, Utah) and Midvale Mining Cafe mugs because I liked the logos. Accompanied by small pitchers of half-and-half.
2. Comfortable booth upholstery. No cracks, no four-inch-wide openings between said cracks, and no duct tap repairs.
3. Great service. I’m not too picky here. I don’t care if the wait person writes or doesn’t write down my order. I don’t need lots of smiling and asking how I like the town or the weather or the local high school football team, etc. I don’t need flashy or pretty or charming. I do like efficient and, well, servile. So, say, when I ask for ketchup, the ketchup should arrive within five minutes with no reminders.
4. Reasonable checking in on. I don’t need a “How’s everything here?” every two minutes. Maybe every ten. Do keep an eye on me. I like about two full cups of coffee in my rounded-lip mug every breakfast. That’s about three top-offs worth.
5. Good, well-stocked, clean restrooms. I’ve been in non-franchise restaurants with restrooms down the hall, out a door, up the stairs, and across from the Olympic-sized pool. When I’m full to bursting, I don’t want that.
6. Parking where I can see my car. That’s not a strong requirement, but, since I’m usually on a road trip when I choose a Denny’s for breakfast, I like to check that my darling honey Honda Pilot is alright. On a road trip, my Pilot is my knight in shining armor, my love and companion, serving my every need. It may be the heated seats that make me go on like this, but those of you who’ve taken long road trips know how attached you get. Any Denny’s usually meets all six of my criteria.

Some minuses with diners are loud TVs and poor heating or A/C. Moab’s Red Rock Bakery shows a TV football/soccer game all the time, but with no sound. And please set your thermostats for extreme comfort for us travelers. We might have just come from our condo where the wintertime thermostat is set at 58 because we’re cheap. Or we’ve just come from pumping gas in 120-degree heat, and we’d like some respite before going out again.

Denny’s started in 1953 in Lakewood, California, as Danny’s Doughnuts. The name changed to “Denny’s” to avoid confusion with Doughnut Dan’s, another doughnut place. Denny’s has won awards for hygiene (nice to know) and it’s open 24 hours. A friend of mine goes there at all hours when she can’t sleep. Tom Waits writes about it. A dependable, safe, predictable eating place open 24 hours is a precious thing. And I’m talking as a short old lady who often travels alone. Sometimes you don’t care if the food is fantastic, you just want a warm, dry, safe place.

As a former waitress, I get to talk long and hard about service. I hated waitressing. Actually, at Hermosa Beach’s Taco’s Bill’s, it was greeting, seating, taking orders, cooking, busing tables, and cleaning up. And putting up with know-it-all Agnes. Hard work with little thanks. I remember getting a dime for a tip from a couple who came in everyday for large taco salads with extra olives. Everyday. I’d see them coming and start their order. For a dime. Now I shamelessly over-tip every waitress. A waitress would have to do an absolutely crap job to get no tip from me.

An old boyfriend used to say how he loved going to pool rooms because no one knew who he was; it didn’t matter that he had a law degree or several angry ex-girlfriends or little money. He was accepted as is. That’s something I like about diners, too: I’m anonymous and equal, just a body at the counter or in the booth. The only clue to me is my good manners and a debit card. Maybe that soul bareness is why I’ve written so many country-western songs in diner booths.

My dad loved Denny’s. He was a filmmaker and took many road trips around the country to meet with clients and do location shoots. I remember turning my nose up when he’d talk about how he “could count on Denny’s” to serve the same things. His assertion that food safety, clean bathrooms, and dependable menus were important seemed so boring, so dad. And then I was the one driving long distances through parts–and eating at places–unknown. The Cortez, New Mexico, Navajo taco food poisoning event brought my nose back down pretty quick. I will not say that my father knew best, since he could also be brutishly inattentive to the work his mother and my mother put into family meals, but he did seem to know some things.

There were many times in Paris I got so tired a the cute little bistro with great food, hard and narrow chairs, euro-coin-sized tables, nice paintings on the walls, and the requisite huffy ignoramus waiter. I wanted a wide, smooth bench seat in a booth at a warm, convivial Denny’s. Where a table big enough to spread out my road atlas comes with the hash browns. Denny’s is also the largest corporate sponsor of Save the Children, a nice circular benefit since my son Sam’s fiancee works for that fine organization. And Heinz ketchup–Pittsburgh’s finest–is right there on the table. No need to ask.

I have other favorite diners: the Y Cafe (Carlsbad, New Mexico), Waffle House (Ft. Collins, Colorado), Belgian Waffle (Sandy, Utah), The Outlaw (Wellington, Utah), Mom’s Cafe (Salina, Utah), and Moab faves Eklecticafe, Moab Diner, and The Jailhouse. But if I’m pulling off an interstate in the American hinterlands, I like a bit of predictability, a private booth, and a warm bathroom. I prefer a non-franchised breakfast place, but it is nice to know Denny’s light is lit 24 hours everyday and is but a short walk from my house.

You’ll next see me at a Yuma, Arizona Denny’s bent over a road atlas and a Grand Slam on January 10.

If you’re a man, this is what you need to teach your daughters and expect your girlfriends and wives to do. If you’re a woman, this is what you need to teach yourself and expect your daughters and girlfriends to do.

PIT STOP 101
* Learn where the release latch is for the gas cap door . . . no matter whose car you’re in.
* Know the grade gas the car owner (and that might be you) thinks best for the vehicle.
* Pump the gas.
* Pay the bill.
* Check tire pressures.
* Inside at the mini mart, buy snacks and gum, coffee, good maps: whatever the driver needs.
* Be friendly and courteous with mini-mart clerks. You need these people.
* Wash the windows, front and back headlamps, and license plates. Evil, dark streams of residue may drip from your cleaning, but maybe rain will take care of that later.
* Get a blue (don’t know why they’re always blue) paper towel and clean the side and rearview mirrors. Better, carry some Windex sheets.
* Learn how to pop, keep open, and drop a hood safely.
* Check the fluids. Buy a quart of oil if you need to. Buy some windshield washer fluid if you need to. Better, carry some of both in the car you’re riding in (and that might be yours). A roll of paper towels is useful for checking the oil and cleaning everything.
* Walk the dog, check on the cat, take children to the restroom whether they say they need to or not. Everybody needs to start each driving leg with an empty bladder.

ON THE ROAD in the PASSENGER SEAT 101
* The driver is god, serve the driver. Navigate, find and change CDs, pour coffee, slice apples, or manage the driver’s hamburger so god can keep his/her eyes on the road. Whatever god needs.
* Clean up and organize the front seats, foot wells, door side pockets, and dashboard. No errant golf balls, food wrappers, water bottles, wads of old gum, or friendly dogs should distract god.
* Check, clean, and maintain the glove box. Is the registration there? Insurance card? Some actual gloves?
* Maybe the passenger seat isn’t where you’re most useful to god. Sitting in a back seat can be enormously helpful to a driver, especially if there are children (and they can be any age), contentious or high-maintenance adults. If you’re not driving, you’re not god or the queen.
* Bring maps, use a compass or GPS, learn to navigate, communicate well to the driver.
* If god is a car slob, leave god’s car better than you found it.

No more useless women on road trips. There’s lots to do and lots of place to go.

“A triumph!” “Provocative!” “Visually spectacular!” “One of the year’s 10 best!” (best what is not specified) were the blurbs on the back of this film I got from the library. The exclamation points alone should have tipped me off that this was going to be outrageously bad, and famously Bostonian Matt Damon and Casey Affleck should have been ashamed to have had anything to do with this crap. Shame on them that they shared writing credits with director Gus Van Sant. I’m guessing the three of them were driving out to Wendover one July with beers in their laps, looked around and thought, “Wow! A guy could get pretty lost out here!” and then somebody started writing stuff down, and voila, this drek.

Plot: Uncommunicative Eastern idiots, apparently in good enough shape to survive without water for several days, get lost and make lots of bad decisions (like hiking away from wood and water sources onto salt flats) in an unnamed hostile Western wilderness

Film title: Gerry (supposedly after the pet name they each they call each other, but that wasn’t too clear)

Theme: Eastern US men’s idiocy

Setting: A nameless western wilderness that includes Elko, Nevada, and the gorgeous wastes of Death Valley and Bonneville flats, Utah.

Genre: Hikers being incredibly stupid noir (and I’m being generous with the noir part)

After a lot of sitting silently in a car, Damon and Affleck inexplicably start hiking a trail marked “Wilderness Trail.” Why the BLM or a state or national park or wilderness area would post that generic title on some trail which probably had a perfectly good actual name I can’t say. They might have had maybe a bottle of water when they started, but otherwise no backpack and maybe one sweatshirt between them. I could have watched this disaster a second time to catch more details, but I didn’t want to writhe in twisted agony a second time.

I wondered if this was Van Sandt’s first trip beyond New Jersey or wherever he’s from. I promised myself I wouldn’t Google him or look at any information about Gerry before writing this.

After walking through high desert scrub (maybe the Elko, Nevada, part) and then leaping to Death Valley barrenness (I recognized those dried popcorny mud hills immediately), and then venturing out onto our iconic Bonneville Salt Flats, these two Eastern ignoramuses realize they’re pretty, well, lost. Why they left the areas where they could get lots of dry wood I don’t know. I kept waiting for a Blair Witch-kind of scene going nuts with each other when they realize how screwed they are, but no. How they knew how to build a fire I don’t know. Maybe that’s hardwired into even an Easterner. Maybe they’d been Boy Scouts. Not great Boy Scouts, but. Why they walked out onto barren land when they were already dying of thirst I also don’t know. Why nobody was looking for them after finding their car parked at the trailhead . . . well, you get the dismal cinematic picture.

The end has a Brokeback Mountainy kind of scene where I guess Matt Damon was choking his friend to death rather than dying together on the salt flats. Damon then walks away from Affleck’s body, sees I-80, gets picked up by a guy and his son in an SUV, and sits expressionless in lots of sunburn makeup till the end credits. That’s when I saw that the scrub brush hiking must have been near Elko.

I end this pan with the words written on the film case by the three men’s agents or maybe their girlfriends, “. . . this uncommonly compelling and starkly visualized film is a must-see motion picture that has earned the overwhelming praise of critics nationwide!” Again with the exclamation point. I’d never felt like more of a Westerner looking down my nose.

Elfinwild should have been closed for the winter, or maybe the township could’ve installed a monocline. Winter Elfinwild was Sleepy-Hollow dark with threatening leafless trees; it was snaky and narrow; and that steep left turn onto the street at the top with poor visibility was a test for a confident driver, let alone a new or cautious one. Many a time, I wouldn’t have been surprised to look in my rear view mirror past the bags of Giant Eagle groceries in the back seat to see a headless horseman.

And don’t we all have our own private Elfinwilds? The tricky relationship? The narrow, windy career? A neighborhood full of bright sun and dark shadow where you don’t exactly trust the knock at the door over a barking dog? Or the family situation that could benefit from getting closed off from Thanksgiving through Easter just to give everybody an emotional break? The tricky, the serpentine, the alarming, the painful: the situation that wears out your clutch.

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.

One of our hitch hiking rides in a van ended up spinning into a ditch, the group of us suddenly sprawled on the floor. A nearby farmer hooked up chains and winched the van out of the ditch. I don’t remember anybody yelling, “Damn hippies!” or anything like that. It was almost as if the farmer was expecting it. The van driver gave the guy some money, but I don’t remember that the rest of us were asked to contribute.

This friend Richard was a “royalist,” and had photos of kings and queens on his walls. He was also having sex with a lot of sailors. How ignorant and sad that all seems now. None of us talked about safe sex or appropriate behavior or good health practices. AIDS was something quite far off. When my boyfriend and I had arrived, Richard had handed us a stack of index cards with hand-written itineraries carefully planned for each day. We took the N Judah bus back to his apartment each night for five days.

Richard had taken us to the red-haired giant’s apartment which he shared with Bill, a gay man who’d recently come out. Bill had just grown a mustache and was telling us how much more he got noticed when he went to bars. They were having a small dinner party with gay and straight friends, and I remember how cut off from their families all these gay men were. It was near Christmas, and one man was telling us how he was preparing the gift of an antique table for his wife, sneaking down into the basement late every night to add another coat of varnish. The gay men appreciated the love and labor involved.

I was a new child of divorce, my mother having recently told me, “Your dad isn’t going to live with us anymore,” when he’d finally moved out with his girlfriend for good. The pain and confusion of that situation I couldn’t even articulate until many years later. I really needed the perspective of these damaged, worldly men in my life.

I helped prepare the salads for the party, and Bill and I stood in the kitchen talking about relationships. Though he was sure about coming out as a gay man, he was despondent over his breakup with his wife and the separation from his little boy. “I lied to myself for a long time,” he said. “Now I have to pay the price for coming out.” We discussed proper salad-making techniques and how we both liked to slice lettuce up with knives instead of tear it with our hands like Richard had asked us to do. Bill didn’t cross-dress, but he admired and accepted that the red-haired giant did. “He makes himself look so beautiful,” he said. I had felt so inadequate with these men, but, away from Richard’s bragging about his aristocratic knowledge and sailors, just the two of us talking in the kitchen relaxed my wariness. I wasn’t the only one with relationship problems.

That visit cracked my armor of denial that my life was falling apart. It really was falling apart. Hearing Bill talk about trade-offs and Richard talk about loneliness showed me how pain is everywhere, and that there’s room on this planet for everybody to share stories, friendship, and beautiful gowns over well-cut salads.

They’ll go skating tomorrow on lakes and rivers
Frozen down and down
A real skater’s winter
Huge horses raised along the Scottish Clyde will pull sleighs
And kettles of chili and chowder, hot chocolate and coffee
Will be slopped into mitten-wrapped Styrofoam cups.

The snow-removal people are all complaining
We’ll go out of business
Expensive equipment and mountains of grit
Sitting around, waiting for snow.

Everything turned around and out of sorts
That skater’s winter Halloween
Inuit and Athabaskan girls dressed as ballerinas.

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.

Bannister, railing, glass, metal, rubber, tread, up, down, backwards, forwards, stop, start, jump, come, go. And Ben’s counting got some attention as I coached his jumping from the bottom step. He initially chanted “One two three four nine ten. Jump!” and graduated to “One two three four five. Jump!.” A small rote victory.

I remember watching a film in a long-ago child development class of different stages of a boy’s life and a set of steps in a park. At first the baby boy crawled up the steps, then he toddled holding his dad’s hand, then he walked alone, then he skipped, and by the film’s end he was tearing down the railing of those same steps on a skateboard.

Ben won’t remember that a strange adult spent part of a morning with him on some stairs, concentrating on social and physical exercise. He won’t remember he called me “Grandma” or that his mom got some things done elsewhere or that he watched people walking by through the glass walls of the staircase.

But I’ll remember the simple process of focusing on the two-year-old brain, a toddler working on life skills, and a little boy giving a mother missing her own little boys a flashback moment. Simple was good that morning, simple was wholesome. Simple was joy.

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.

She was a child of the depression from Ohio just like my mother. She’d even gone to the same small liberal arts college in Holmes County. Unlike my mother, however, Halene had left school early to enter a sanitarium because of tuberculosis. The daughter of a milliner and an iron miner, she’d then gone west and married a cowboy, moved to Wyoming during World War II where she cooked for the guards and the Germans in a prisoner of war camp, and then finished her education so she could teach elementary school.

We met at a school in Albuquerque, where she’d noticed my handwriting on some posters I’d put up for my classroom art show. She became my mentor, and took me into her family like a daughter. Even though I didn’t really need another mother, Halene shared my own interest in the development of young children, language acquisition, and teaching writing and the language arts. My mother had felt the call to teach teenagers. My mother met Halene once, and they shared stories of their mutual college music professors, the Depression, and Ohio winters.

In 1977 Halene and I took a road trip from Albuquerque to Grand Forks, North Dakota. When she drove, I worked on a large needlepoint tapestry of two Mexican musicians that still hangs in my bathroom today. The Piaget workshop was a week long, and we roomed together, took meals together, and discussed David Elkind’s lectures and theories on young children’s learning. On the way back, we stopped in Lusk, Wyoming, where her cousin ran a motel. I saw that even the biggest star can have complicated challenges with relatives.

Halene’s own family included three sons, so when I became pregnant with my third son, I called her and asked how I was going to manage. Her response was succinct, “Three words, Kathy: Macaroni and cheese.” I visited her little rambling adobe house in the north valley often to enjoy her good conversation and southwestern fusion cooking. She was getting used to using a microwave oven and told me she didn’t like the difficulty of getting everything the same temperature at the same time. Our meals with Dogie often ended with “tin roof” sundaes, a concoction of vanilla ice cream topped with chocolate sauce and Spanish peanuts that only midwesterners like my mom seemed to know.

The last time I visited, Halene was having trouble understanding the world. She wore an old stained blouse as she came out to greet me at the car, and I don’t think she was sure who I was most of the time. When we went out to lunch, however, the old Halene was in fine form as she mediated what she noticed as a little boy at a nearby table was trying to communicate with his parents. Even in her impaired state, her powers of observation and attention gave me new lessons to follow. And I felt again as I always had in her presence: included, valued, and inspired.

My oldest son lives back east with two roommates in a rental house. My youngest son is moving into a rental house with three friends. My middle son is moving to a house his girlfriend bought. They’ll be fixing up, painting, installing, redecorating, and clearing the land for many months. I may bring over a KFC bucket and a bottle of wine once in a while, and they may even deign to come over to my house for an actual home-cooked Sunday dinner, but things will never be quite the same. The intense living-together time, where people get up in the morning and sit at a kitchen table together, the time when people sleepily wish each other good night and then good morning again: that time has passed for me.

Young men moving out from parents’ homes, moving on, and becoming self-reliant are all part of the natural order of things. But this week was also my last to feel day-to-day needed. I’m supposed to be celebrating this empty nest, relishing the freedom to use rooms in new ways as I please, gorging on all this time to myself. But being useful, involved, and part of an active live-in family was a dream job. This sudden quiet strangles my soul.