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.

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?

SD Headliner, “The official fake newspaper of Sand Diego,” ran the recent headline “Hot Dog on a Stick Employee Wins Gold at Third Annual Degrading Uniform Pageant.” The accompanying fake photo shows a young woman in an HDOAS uniform standing on an Olympics-type medal platform in first place, next to the second-place Hooters girl, and the third-place man in a San Diego Padres uniform. The fake quote from the winner in the HDOAS uniform is, “I mean my uniform is pretty degrading . . . but I’d rather have middle-aged men gawk at me while I pump lemonade in this ridiculous outfit than have to wear a Padres uniform.”

And though all these other mall food businesses sell drinks, they don’t put employees out front pumping the ingredients. Orange Julius figured out that machines can do this.

One Saturday I walked the mall in the afternoon, and many families were purchasing lunch. The Hot Dog on a Stick girls were dunking hot dogs on sticks into vats and holding them above the vat, dripping with light yellow batter. A bit suggestive? Part of a food porno business model? A model that doesn’t include men . . . or heavy women of color?

Or am I just another frumpy middle-aged woman with no sense of play? Can I not just see Hot Dog on a Stick as a fun, old-timey, summery beach-and-circus themed food business?

Maybe. But every time I swing briskly through the food court, there is a young woman in a tight, degrading outfit, an outfit different from other food professionals in the food court. She’s violently smashing lemons and suggestively dipping frankfurters. Time to skewer this ridiculous vision.

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.

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.

After mending your shirts and putting wheat germ in the batter
Now I stand here before you, my life all in tatters
‘Cause of you, Mr. Rich and Famous.

So you can take your new wife and all the skis on up to Aspen
And go down those black diamond runs with abandon
With her, Mrs. Rich and Famous.

And then we’ll bury your bodies ‘neath the pines in the backyard
And we’ll say a short prayer but there ain’t nobody cryin’ real hard
For you, Mr. Rich and Famous
Not for you, Mr. Rich and Famous
Nor for me, never rich, never famous.

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.

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.

Perhaps the thing was beached after one of the estuarial floods that occasionally inundated our back yard. Maybe the being had floated many miles down streams feeding into the bayou. However it traveled, the thing seemed to be only a part, a leftover, of something: maybe an animal that somebody was butchering and then tossed into the water. There was an eye, an ear, and part of a torso I think I remember before I ran from the shore retching. My husband and I gathered the kids and hoped some boatman’s wake or a violent storm would eventually take the thing back into the water and carry it down to the bay. But no wakes or storms seemed strong enough to lift the thing from our banks.

I remember not being able to go out to the west side of the house at all. We didn’t swim in the bayou for weeks. The boys stayed inside. My husband and I had difficulty talking about it; the thing was too upsetting and we didn’t know quite what to do. We didn’t walk out on the pier at sunset as we liked to do because of the thing lying there. One night I woke up hallucinating that it had somehow come alive and was dragging itself toward the house.

The next morning my husband said he was tired of worrying about the thing. He went down to the water and–I don’t want to know or remember his description how–he John Wayned it into a trash bag, stuffed it into one of our bins, and slammed the lid. Perhaps strong liquor was involved. I don’t know if he told me what he thought it was–a deer, a cow, or somebody’s old dog. I’ve blocked out any details for my own sanity. I just know that his manliness that day meant more to me than any rose, chocolates, medal, award, or dinner at the finest restaurant in Paris.

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.

Ten years later I had a husband and babies, but from that whole Mexican trip I only saved that little candlestick. My little son was sitting on our kitchen table one evening, playing with the candlestick as I prepared dinner. The candlestick slipped from his grasp and shattered on the linoleum. My former life lay in pieces on the floor. I screamed my anguish at him and at the world. To this day I can see his wide eyes and remember my scary overreaction. The candlestick had cost maybe 50 cents and wasn’t even particularly unique; somebody had poured clay slip into a mold, painted decorative vines, applied glazes in an Acapulco assembly line, and stuck it into a kiln with thousands like it.

As much as I was happy and loved being a wife and mother, that little Mexican candlestick was my spontaneous long-ago life where I had been the center of everything, where I could decide to hop on a bus at a moment’s notice, where life was all about me, and I’d survived some serious depression. No amount of glue would bring that back.