I am writing this from the cottage in Mill Valley, California, where I wrote the first draft of Motherland back in the days before Covid. We found it on VRBO, I think, and it looked beautiful, nestled on the mid-ledge of Tamalpais; we first stayed here when we discovered how much we loved Mill Valley, but didn’t want to be in town the way we were the first time we visited. The last time we were here, it was after Susan and I fled a yoga retreat in the Central Valley where we were staying in a room under the dormitory’s cement stairs with one ceiling-height window whose screen had been kicked in by raccoons.
I consulted with people wiser than myself. Even my Zen Buddhist priest friends from San Francisco told me: go over the wall. So we did.
We felt guilty about it — about leaving — even though it was 106 degrees out, there were no fans, my asthma was kicking in, the food was rice served with white bread, and I still managed to lose four pounds just by sleeping and sweating. Susan, being the good (lapsed) Catholic schoolgirl she is, was willing to tough it out, but I was not; I had reached a point familiar to her after two decades together, when my aggravation bucket begins to overflow, my field of vision narrows, and I go all action and get-out-of-my-way. She came back to our sweatbox/room to find me pacing and making a reservation at a hotel near Monterey that had air conditioning and a pool, and we packed up and left that very afternoon, driving down the road that splits the Driscoll berry fields in half, with its scores of laborers in their glyphosate-soaked long-sleeved shirts and bandanas and thermal hoodies and straw hats, picking strawberries just so that I could have them with my morning organic yogurt back home in New England, where it was wintertime. (Where are those laborers now? But wait till all those nice folks in Washington discover they can’t make their fruit smoothies every morning.)
I will say it again: stories and storytelling are at risk of vaporizing. Permission, in many camps, depending upon who you’re talking to, is being rescinded.
I will say it again: stories and storytelling are at risk of vaporizing. The permission I wrote that book about? Permission, in many camps, depending upon who you’re talking to, is being rescinded.
Start from this place: historically and culturally, women are the storytellers, the people who hand down the myth and the lore, and who start every bedtime tuck-in with Once upon a time. And here is what will happen: we will become tentative in our storytelling. We will look over our shoulders if there is, for example, any allusion to peace, or calling out division, or racism, in the things we write. I want to write about those guys in the straw hats picking strawberries for the expensive yogurt breakfasts of white people three thousand miles away. I want to write about the young guy delivering a package to an apartment building in Santa Monica – I walked right past him on the way back from the beach in the first hours of my visit – who got Christian Cooper-ed because some lady decided that he didn’t look quite right, started filming him while he tried to calm her down, and threatened to get him fired because he’d parked his Amazon delivery scooter too close to the building. I was on the other side of the street, but I heard them both clearly, and I wondered: exactly when has it become illegal to be a young Black kid delivering a book in a lovely and sleepy community that does a lot of its ordering online? (My Black friends and family are laughing at me right now and saying Um, ALWAYS.)
I had just come from the beach, which was everything a Southern California beach should be, for a woman from Queens who, as a kid, spent a lot of time listening to The Beach Boys and watching Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer. The water was warm and gentle, which is usually not a great thing for a vast ocean, and if I’d had my bathing suit on instead of buried in the bottom of my suitcase, I’d have gone in. I’m yearning — desperately yearning — to be immersed in salt water like a baptism; I’m wanting to be cleansed of the muck and mess of politics, of all the hatred, of the eldercare which I am in the throes of, even though it’s three thousand miles away. The reason I didn’t put the bathing suit on before I went to the beach? On the Saturday night before I left to come to California, I tripped over the air purifier in our bedroom and tore my right rotator cuff (again), making putting on what amounts to a navy blue sausage casing difficult without help, and while I have a lot of friends in SoCal, calling them up and asking them to get really well-acquainted with me so that I could swim somehow didn’t feel right. I mean, I was in Santa Monica, not Esalen.
Stinson Beach in the fog
I am in Northern California now, thinking about the last time I was here with Susan, and driving across the berry fields, and thinking about the delivery guy, and thinking about the two — TWO — women I met at my reading the other night who lost their homes in the Palisades fires, and I wish that you could see the beauty I’m staring at as I write this. Stinson Beach is only a few miles from here, so I took a (very) winding drive there today, over Tamalpais and through the fog. I have never been here without Susan, but she decided to stay back to be available if my mother, whose needs seem to be changing hourly, has to be tended to; while I was in the air flying from LA to SF, Saint Susan was home baking a pie to placate Rita, whose world has suddenly shrunk radically and drastically. Although she fell on August 6th, she has yet to walk unassisted, even with a walker; a veritable city of people, complete strangers, surround her, easing her way down the hallway of the rehab where she’s been since August 21st. Left foot, right foot, as my friend Annie says.
It’s a hot and dusty world. Glimmering, and dangerous, wrote Mary Oliver in her prose poem Are You Okay? There is so much beauty — so much — surrounding us, as we stumble along in the dark, coping with parents at the end of their days who were (we’re sure) vital just two minutes ago, and we trip over our air purifiers in the middle of the night, unable to find the light switch that will show us that everything is exactly where we left it. Only: it has moved. This is the thing they never tell you, although my Buddhist friends seem to know it: nothing stays. In Southern California and Northern, the ocean is like a bathtub; the waters off Stinson were ferocious today, but warm. Fruit is rotting in the fields because the guys — perhaps the adult children of family matriarchs, the storytellers — who are exposed to deadly glyphosate every day of their lives have disappeared. (That’s some choice, isn’t it.) There is beauty and there is ugly. Glimmer and danger. There are bad, uncomfortable ends-of-life that are just too hard to look at and you have to bankrupt yourself if you want someone to follow your mother and her walker down the hallway after she breaks her femur so that she doesn’t break the other one a month shy of her ninetieth birthday for which you are considering hiring a cabaret accompanist who can play You Ought to Be in Pictures behind her while she sings from a wheelchair in the party room of her rehab and you order in deli for everyone. And you remember her fiftieth birthday, which your stepfather asked you to plan in a gorgeous restaurant in Manhattan in 1985, shortly before the days of Jennifer Levin and the Preppie Murderer, and the Central Park Five and that horrible real estate nepo baby tycoon who called for their execution long before they were exonerated by DNA, and long before that baby became a president. But that was forty years ago.
So here I am, in one of the most beautiful places on earth, and there is Stinson Beach and Muir Woods and over the next few days I will dunk in one and walk in the other, and I will look out at the vastness of the Pacific, and the profundity of the redwoods and sequoias in Muir, and despite my worlds both large and small imploding, I will not have to remember to breathe: I’ll just do it.
This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, the James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack, or keep up with her archives here.
Images courtesy of the author. Header image: “My view of Mill Valley”
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