Some Things...

When I was in college I never went to one of those spring break hot spots. The first year, I was homesick and went home.  The second year, I spent sailing and kayaking around the Channel Islands with my boyfriend.  The third year I crewed a trimaran that sailed from Port Hueneme, California, to Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii.  The fourth year I went off-trail backpacking into the high Sierras with my dad, both of us figuring that would be the last chance for us to ever do that again, which has proven true.

 “Luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
― Daphne du Maurier

I was not born in the continental United States.  Several times when I have mentioned this to someone, the person has remarked on how good my English is.

 “No political party ought to exist when one of its corner-stones is opposition to freedom of thought.”
― Ulysses S. Grant

I know a Mexican-American who is utterly disdainful of Mexico and its people.  "I know I have relatives in Mexico," he says, "but I don't know who they are and I don't want to know."

“The streets were dark with something more than night.”
― Raymond Chandler

I was offered a full scholarship to a hoity-toity university back east but when I went to visit it I felt like I was in a sinister foreign country.  Everything looked strange -- too green, too humid, the landscape too closed in.  All those red brick buildings seemed weird to me.  The air smelled of something unpleasant.  And the people looked like menacing foreigners and talked with odd accents.  The interviewers asked what I thought were irrelevant questions and eyed me with a sort of knowing expectation, as if they had caught a fish they would soon be feasting on.  I turned down the scholarship.  When I did, I was told that I was passing up on great things for myself.  Maybe, but the only great thing I wanted was to get away from there.

 “Once they have you asking the wrong questions they don't have to worry about the answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon

When I was in high school, Clint Eastwood, accompanied by a woman who looked uneasy and was wearing a really nice Chopard watch, once asked me for directions outside of Barney’s Beanery on Santa Monica Blvd. He wanted to know which bus to take to get someplace.  I did not know.  I was not pleased that he thought I looked like someone who rode the bus.

“You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.”
― Annie Dillard

When I was a seven-year-old SOFA kid in Japan my mother took me to a tea ceremony party at the Nezu Museum in Tokyo.  Afterwards one of the ladies who had conducted the ceremony complimented me on my Japanese and for some reason instead of just thanking her, I stood up and sang the Kimigayo (君が代), the Japanese national anthem.  I learned it by hearing it on the radio and on TV.  It's a lovely song to my mind, easy to sing and the lyrics are short and simple, too:

 君が代は
千代に八千代に
細石の
巌と為りて
苔の生すまで

All the Japanese looked stunned and my mother cringed.   I still don't know why the Japanese reacted the way they did but my mother says they probably thought I was showing off and possibly insulting them. I wasn't.

 “One must pray first, but afterwards one must help oneself. God does not care for cowards.”
― Ouida

One time when I was walking along the beach near Malibu an older man came out of one of the beach houses and approached me.  I thought he was going to tell me the beach was private above the tide line where I was walking  and to move away, but instead he invited me to a party inside the house.  I decided why not? and went up to the house with him. As we walked, he introduced himself as Telly Savalas.  I knew that couldn't be true because my parents knew Savalas and this guy wasn't him. And also he had been dead for a number of years.  I should have taken that as a warning sign and excused myself, but I didn't.  I just wondered why he would tell me that.
Inside, the party was more like a bacchanal.  I looked around amazed.  Naked people were having sex on couches and chairs, standing up, lying on the floor.  Others appeared to be passed out, sprawled wherever they collapsed. There were bowls of pills of various colors, other things that looked like drugs, and, of course, alcohol.  The man who had invited me had disappeared while I was staring at what was going on.   Another man walked over to me and stood beside me watching the action.  After a minute he said, "Pretty wild, isn't it?  Let's join in."  I wasn't in the least bit tempted.  In fact, I was getting scared and wondering how I was going to get out of there.  I was silent for a minute, then I said, "How do you know I'm not an undercover cop?"  He faded away.  I walked back outside and when I stepped onto the sand I broke into a run.

 “I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

I know an old Japanese lady who emigrated to the US around 20 years ago.  I never asked about the circumstances. All that time she lived in Los Angeles, but recently her neighborhood has become too dangerous, with homeless types breaking into her apartment building lobby and camping out -- not just sleeping but moving in.  They watch when people leave to go to work and then break into their apartments and trash them, apparently just for the hell of it.  Of course, they steal anything valuable.  The cops have been called multiple times but they never show up.  The last straw for her was hearing gunshots seemingly right outside her window late one night.  She moved a thousand miles away to a small Whiteopia.  She is delighted, repeatedly saying how pleasant, helpful and kind the people are.  "It's just like being in Japan!" she exclaims.

“God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does.”
― Martin Luther

I once knew a married couple with children who seemed like a typical normal family except that one of the kids had been fathered by the husband's best friend.  They had been in the same Marine fire team in Iraq and were close enough to share wives, something that is more common than you might think among those kinds of people.  About the arrangement, the husband said, "As long as he's not in there when I want in, I don't care."

I read a semi-biographical novel of 1950s-era SAC by a former pilot of a B-47, Wings of Fire by Henry Zeybel, that contains this line: “When you’re a lieutenant, you’re allowed to do anything you want, short of raping the wing commander’s wife. She might not complain, but he’d probably get jealous.”  But among those of similar rank, key parties and etc. were part of the way of life.  I suppose that's because the men at the pointed end of the war-fighting professions lead such dangerous lives, depend on each other implicitly in the face of death and may be killed at any time, that having sex with each others' girlfriends and wives is, besides probably being a male bonding ritual, a way for them to enhance their enjoyment of their leisure.  Incidentally, the author of the novel later flew AC-130 gunships during the Viet Nam War and was awarded the Silver Star for actions over Tcehpone, Laos, during Operation Lam Son 719.

  I recently looked for one of Edna St. Vincent Millay's books -- "Make Bright the Arrows," her pro-war poetry collection --at the local library. They didn't have it; in fact, they had no books of her poetry at all. But they did have a biography of her, "Savage Beauty." I then checked to see if they had Robinson Jeffers' anti-war poetry collection, "The Double Axe." No; in fact, they had nothing at all by or about Jeffers.

Then, for the heck of it, I checked to see if they had any poetry by Elinor Wylie, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Randall Jarrell, George Sterling... No, no, no, no, no. But they did have stuff by Maya Angelou. So I thought, well, then, they will have Langston Hughes. But no.
So what value the library? It should be where you can find what is not at the bookstores -- but then, bookstores, even the musty used ones in low-rent blocks, are vanishing.
I drove to a nearby town that has a lovely old Carnegie Library, heavy with dark woodwork, streaming sunlight, and stolid rows of shelves that smell of ancient books and furniture polish, but it was closed, having very limited hours these days.
I remembered a two-story used-book store in the same town where I first discovered Nora Waln, up the creaking staircase to the second floor and far in the back amid old books on foreign travel, so I went there. But it was out of business, as was the bakery/luncheonette next to it where I used to have coffee and a snack while I flipped through the treasures I'd just bought as I half-listened to other diners and the staff chatting and gossiping.
Well, everything can be ordered on-line now, or digitally downloaded, in the bum- and derelict-free comfort of your own home, so it's all good, right? Right? 

It amuses me how intensely interested males are in the female form.  They could be 10 or 100, it doesn't matter.  Some cleavage, a glimpse of a bare  thigh or the swaying hindquarters of a fit woman strolling down the street mesmerizes them.  Girl-watching never gets old for them.  I contrast that with the routine put-downs of women men indulge in, the belittling snark, nasty cracks, sneering contempt and crude insults.  The reverse side of the urge-to-merge coin, I guess.  I've often thought that maybe the hostility to women is a reaction to or a resistance to the intense, relentless desire for women that men seem to never be free from. 
I once sat next to an elderly man, in his mid-seventies I'd guess, on a delayed airline flight.  We got to talking to kill the time, and, as passing strangers often do, talked of many personal things.  At one point he said that his sexual urge was still strong and he patronized what he termed call-girls twice a week to satisfy himself.  He volunteered that he did not need Viagra and would like to enjoy female charms much more often but his budget wouldn't allow it.  "I do have to eat," he said, "even though my digestion won't allow me the foods I like.  But I can still enjoy sex as much as when I was a teenager!"  The man sitting across the aisle began listening in on our conversation and kept glancing at me as if he wanted to say something so I smiled at him and he burst out, "I just wanted to say I hope I can talk so freely and enjoy my sex life as much as your grandfather when I'm his age!"  I started to say that the old guy was not my grandfather and was probably just telling sea stories, but instead said "Gramps and I have a very special relationship," and winked at him.

 “To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.”
― Henry Miller