From the Castle Cary train station, we “did a shop” in Street (that’s a town.) It seems to me that we “did a shop” almost every other day. And the washing machine was going 24/7—more about that later. On that first day, Sue took me around Clark’s Village, an outlet mall built on the site of the first Clark’s shoe factory. Jet-lagged and fuzzy-headed, I stumbled like a hypnotized person into Radley London, Weird Fish, White Stuff, Fatface (look them up) AND the Cadbury Shop where I bought bags of Cadbury chocolates.

entrance to Clark’s Village

I bought Christmas cards in a charity shop. All the charity shops (thrift stores)–British Heart Foundation, Sue Ryder, Cancer Research, Oxfam—sell Christmas cards, the proceeds of which go to the charity. Touching, clever, pretty, Sue and Wendy do a massive business in sending and receiving cards.

Earlier in the month, in Seattle, I had ignored everything I could with the excuse, “Oh, I’m sorry, I am getting ready to go overseas” but I did want to send some cards and not just to gloat that I was in England for Christmas.

Cadbury Chocolates

At last we were in Butleigh, a village of about 900 people in Somerset, three miles from Glastonbury and nine from Wells –if that helps you. Wendy turned onto Chapel Lane and into the drive of the stone house with the rabbit hutch to one side. There are no longer rabbits in the hutch. Firewood, gardening supplies and other things are stored inside and it serves as a place to hang the washing and as a roof for Izzy the cat to sit on as her sister Lizzy used to do.

One of my first actions was to pay homage to the cats and we began as we meant to go along: Tabsy crawled on my lap and dug his claws into me to knead and purr. Izzy allowed me to pet her and fuss over her but would not sit on my lap. Seamus leapt up in alarm and hid whenever he sensed me near.

My home for the next two weeks

During the pandemic Wendy and Sue turned a mother-in-law apartment, heretofore called The Cottage, into an Airbnb. It was beautifully appointed (they are Super Hosts—that’s the industry term) and scrupulously clean. Though connected to their part of the house, it had its own entrance and it was to be my home for the next two weeks.

We ate cheese and biscuits and salad, salad being defined as lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes arranged artfully on a plate, and talked. Then we had tea and cake and talked. Both Wendy and Sue were sick with appalling coughs, congestion and sore throats – and the most they would ever say about being ill was that they were doing poorly–and I resigned myself to becoming sick before too long. But that first night I was merely jet-lagged.

In the evening, I joined a group of villagers to carol around the village. I went down the drain (the drain is a passageway resembling a tunnel that was at one time an actual drain but now functions as a foot path. I never like to miss a chance to say I am going down the drain), outfitted with a torch (flashlight.) It was pitch black except for a few street lights around the shop and the glow from cottage windows.

At the village shop I met up with a small group of glorious voices, led by David the choirmaster at St Leonard’s parish church.  Latching onto a wonderful bass named Brian, I sang along side him, eventually gushing all over him about his voice for which he seemed both pleased and bemused. One woman had descants stored in her head from her school years. On the last verse of every carol, she let another one rip. It was thrilling.

We sang songs I knew but that we rarely hear in the states. “Once in Royal David’s City,” “Christians Awake,” “Infant Lowly,” “As With Gladness.” I had first heard “Christians Awake” when I stood next to Hazel (the oldest generation I have met of my family) on Christmas Day in 1991 in Metherell Baptist Church, Cornwall. She was planted on the floor like Birgit Nilsson in Die Walküre and held forth with “Rise to adore the mystery of love” with its beautiful melodic swoop.

We sang “Ding Dong, Merrily on High” several times –merrily, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” English tune; and the odious “Away in a Manger,” the only thing making it bearable was the English tune.

I was my usual American-on-holiday self, chatting up people I might have walked down the far aisle to avoid if I’d been home. I can imagine them complaining over breakfast the next morning about the brash American with the crude speech patterns.

We sang for Wendy and Sue after which I cut out and followed them inside where Christmas music accompanied a small cottage industry of wrapping paper and gifts boxes, scissors, cello tape, gift cards and a mile high stack of Cadbury chocolate boxes and other delectables.  So industrious were they that I was inspired to sit down with my ten Christmas cards and write them all. (If you didn’t get one, it’s the fault of the Royal Mail; it was on strike. What mail didn’t go out late probably got lost and that’s where your card is.)

My first morning in Butleigh, I lay in bed until I felt the heat come on. Running through my head was the wonderful line from Once in Royal David’s City: “When our eyes at last shall see him.”

Before Sue and Wendy were up, I was out the door for a walk around the village. I wanted to re-visit the field where I had watched the sheep at the same time that the church bells were ringing and had thought, “Could anything be more English?” I found the field but the sheep had moved. Funny how that works. Then I found the sheep and there were week-old lambs. I waved at the farmer—Keith– and asked if I could come in and look at them.

Back home, Sue was up and ironing.

“Is it “Once in David’s Royal City or “Once in Royal David’s City,” I asked. It was reminiscent of Ruth’s Kris Steakhouse.

“Once in Royal David’s City.”

“Thank you. How are you feeling?”

“About the same.”  Violent coughing ensued.

Sue had to work at the village shop in the afternoon. Wendy proposed that she and I walk “up the tor.”

“Are you sure you’re up for that?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m all right.” Violent coughing ensued.

I follow a woman on social media, Michelle Cowbourne, who walks up the tor every morning before dawn and takes the most glorious photographs. Earlier I told Wendy that I wanted to walk up the tor before dawn.

“Well, you can do that,” Wendy said. But there was no offer to take me at that hour or show me how to get started. We set off at a more convenient time.

The tor is a dizzying climb and I was still quite jet lagged. The wind was fierce and I thought several times I was going to topple down the hill. We walked up the steep backside and came down the gentler grade in the front.

Glastonbury Tor with St Michael’s Tower from the back

The Glastonbury tor is a 518 feet hill that used to be surrounded by water. At its top is St Michael’s tower.  Looking over the Somerset levels it’s easy to imagine Avalon rising out of the water and the mist. The atmosphere is otherworldly –or at least it is when you’re jet-lagged and have vertigo. I can see why people come to commune with the ancients.

getting closer to the top

Coming down the front of the Tor

Wendy and I carried on to Arthur’s Court in Street, the care home where her mother Pam now lives. Pam has shrunk to her bones since the last time I saw her and she can’t form words that are understandable but she is still vocal and babbles on either in pleasure or irritation. I was so pleased that she recognized me. We looked at photos from her and Mervyn’s trips to Seattle and I fed her Cadbury Dairy Milk buttons.

My favorite part of this visit, however, was watching Wendy’s face as she helped her mother eat. The love in her eyes. The patience, the sadness, the acceptance. The love.

When I told people I was spending Christmas with my cousins in an English village, I heard a fair amount of “that sounds magical.” I don’t think my cousins think of themselves as magical even if they do live in a place with things like fairy soap, fairy lights and fairy cakes

fairy cakes

fairy lights

fairy liquid

Now that I am home after three weeks in England, it does feel like I went through a bit of magic although the beginning of the trip did not suggest such an outcome. It began when my cousin Sue texted me to say that there was a train strike beginning the day I flew into London. I’d best book two nights in the city because there would be no way to get to the village. It took me half a morning but I found myself a cheap little place near Paddington for two nights.

Then my cat sitter got sick and I had to scramble to line up another one. One of my former students, Julia, had told me she would stay with the cat if I needed back-up and this she graciously did. The cat rewarded her with not coming out in the open for two weeks but I am eternally grateful to Julia.

On the day of my departure, the plane was four hours late. It was fortunate for me that by then, I had gone Zen because when I got to Paddington station after dark, I was fine with dragging my suitcase up and down Sussex Gardens looking for the Royal Cambridge Hotel. In the photo it was a clean white building that looked to be on a corner. In reality it was a dark and dirty little place in the middle of some brighter hotels and I passed it three times before I finally saw it. The nicest things I can say is that it was over-heated so at least it wasn’t cold, and reasonaly clean.

At reception I learned that a main pipe had burst in Belsize Park, a neighborhood to the north and water had been turned off over a considerable area, including the hotels along Sussex Gardens.

“Are you saying there’s no running water?” I asked Ziyad at the desk.

“It’s been off for a few hours but we expect it to come back on soon.”

I checked in and found the shoe box I had booked. My bathroom was across the hall, accessible with a skeleton key. It was all mine, a moot point since there was no running water. I was grimy and sweaty and wanted nothing more than to take a hot shower.

I went back to Paddington station to wash my face and brush the mold off my teeth. Then I slept for 12 hours.

The next morning there was still no running water and it continued to be expected to come on soon. I used my private toilet but didn’t flush. I knew I had one flush from the water in the tank and I saved it for when it mattered. Enough said.

Ziyad was gone and reception was full of unhappy looking people; the exodus was beginning, not just from the Royal Cambridge but from all the little hotels along the road.

I walked to Paddington and got a coffee and porridge (oatmeal) at Pret a Manger and tried to think what to do. Connected to Paddington station is what use to be the Great Western Railway hotel but is now a Hilton. I decided to see if the Paddington Hilton could accommodate me—at any price.

“Does your hotel have running water?” I asked at reception

The clerk looked at me with the same astonishment a waiter once had at the Land’s End café when I asked if there was salad with my soup. (There wasn’t, there never is, it’s not a thing in the U.K.)

“Of course we have running water.”

“Could you accommodate me for tonight?”

“Yes, we have a standard room.”

“How much?”

“219 GBP.”

“OK,” I said.

“It will be all right?” she asked

“Does it have running water?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then it will be all right.”

I checked out of the Royal Cambridge (such a promising name) and dragged my suitcase to the Hilton.  I took a long hot shower, during which, due to a wonky shower head, I flooded the bathroom floor without noticing until I stepped out and into an inch of water.

After mopping that up, I set out for a walk across Hyde Park, stopping to watch a crowd of happy dachshunds all decked out in Santa outfits for their annual Christmas walk. The rain began as a drizzle but was in full flow by the time I got to Kensington Road which turns into Knightsbridge and from there to Harrods. I wanted to see it decked out for Christmas. When I turned the corner onto Brompton Road, I saw a display that looked a cross between an amusement park and oh, maybe Prince Albert’s exhibition palace.

Harrods at Christmas

The crowd carried me like the tide into the store. I knew within 30 seconds I couldn’t stay: thick with people, no masks and too much noise. I had to fight the current to get to one of the green-coated doormen who called me “dear lady” and told me it would be difficult to get a taxi because everyone wanted a taxi on a day like today.

He was correct. I decided I would start walking back and try to get a taxi along the way. I found one but the driver, Bashir, called through his window that he couldn’t pick me up right there. “Down there, down there” he pointed. I stalked him all the way “down there” and collapsed inside his taxi. When we got to Paddington, I gave him a whacking great tip.

I had an overpriced lunch in the hotel. Something had been bothering ever since I left the Royal Cambridge. It came to me with the last chip I put in my mouth: I think I left behind my charger and adaptor.

In my room I took everything out of my bags and rifled every pocket. No charger. I trudged back to the Royal Cambridge where Ziyad was again presiding. His hair was piled with curls that hung down into his face. The day before his hair had been flat against his head.

“You’ve changed your hair,” I said.

“This is how it usually looks,” he said. “But I couldn’t wash it yesterday because there was no water.”

He couldn’t find my charger. It hadn’t been reported. As I was leaving, I just thought to say, “If it shows up, could you call me? I’m over at the Paddington Hilton.”

I would say that by then I was only half Zen.

I texted Gwen in Seattle who knows something about just about everything and Nancy, a world traveller. The consensus seemed to be that I could easily buy another one but I wasn’t so sure. It used to be that you had to get those things before you came to the U.K. Brit-rail passes and electricity adaptors. I was operating on old information.

I went to the concierge desk to see if any help was available. James hauled out a box full of chargers and adaptors left behind by guests and together we pawed through it. No U.S. to U.K. James said he would loan me his –he just happened to have one—and in the morning I could buy one at Boots.

“You sure?”

“Oh, yes, sure.”

I accepted his charger but went down that very night to the Boots in Paddington station and bought the last one they had. Then I was able to charge both phone and tablet at the same time.

That night the phone rang at 10:30 just as I was drifting to sleep. It was the front desk saying that Ziyad had brought my charger and adaptor and I could pick them up in the morning. It was raining more than water, it seemed.

The next morning I deposited myself in the Great Western Railway first class lounge. I swear this lounge at Paddington is one of the big reasons to get a first class rail pass although the biscuits at the one in Glasgow are better.

My train was cancelled due to flooding and I was hurried onto an earlier train. Then at last I was at Castle Cary station. At last I was hugging Sue and Wendy. Everything was lovely and familiar except that it was raining and there are no summer strawberries. There are floods and train strikes and rain. Let the magic begin.

Wendy

Recently I posted a piece about a violation of my privacy –one I consented to—in the form of an app called Right Track. For three months I allowed my insurance company to track my driving so that I could scrounge a discount on my auto insurance. My ordeal is now over, the app has been deleted (I hope. Cue sinister sounds), I am driving like a madwoman and I am saving $164 a year on my premium.

But there was a bit of a speed bump earlier. Even though my insurer had a GPS out on me and presumably know I live in Seattle, a city of hills, they nevertheless took issue with my braking. They thought I used it too often. I felt they preferred I not use it at all.

After every trip, I checked my rating on the app, read the report which always said I braked too often and watched the rising tide of my savings. Halfway through the process I was saving $145 a year. Remember that figure.

One Friday afternoon a traffic ticket arrived in the mail. I had been caught on camera running a red light. Up to that point, I don’t think I quite believed there were cameras at intersections but evidently, there are. I remembered the incident even without the photo and video that came with the ticket, which, by the way, was for $139. Bringing my annual premium discount to $6 a year.

I was so pissed, I almost deleted the app right there and then. I was in a snit all weekend. But apps don’t run red lights, people do. I hate it when they have you dead to rights. I decided to request a mitigation hearing on the off chance that I would get a magistrate with either a good sense of irony or a degree in English literature.

A week later a packet of stuff arrived in the mail. The first page gave me a hearing date and the courtroom in which I was to appear, followed by threats of arrest, custody, jail time for reasons that had nothing to do with me since there aren’t any outstanding warrants for my arrest. I considered that paragraph overkill but nevertheless, it encouraged me to plow through the rest of the information carefully. After the first two pages of schedules and threats, was an Important Notice in regards to Courtroom Hearings During Covid-19, which some parts of the government think we are still in.

I had four options: mitigation hearing by 1) written statement, 2) telephone conference, 3) video conference, 4) in person hearing. Puzzled, I went back over the first page. Why did they schedule me an in-person hearing date if there were these other options with penalties attached if I made one incorrect step?

At the top of the next page the words “Important Notice Please Read” was highlighted, the first hint of an actual human being involved. It almost seemed kind and encouraging, that highlighting. On this informative page, I was told to disregard everything on the previous pages although it wasn’t so straightforward as to say actually that. What it said was that all in-person mitigation hearings were suspended. I turned back to look at the court date I had been assigned.

I opted to change my mitigation hearing to a written statement. I do better in writing than screaming hysterically over the phone at civil servants.

Here is what I sent the court:

September 12, 2022
Statement of Elena Louise Richmond re citation # 0212201135192:

I am 68 years and have been driving for 53 years and have never run a red light. I don’t expect to ever do it again. I want to explain why I did on Aug 8, 2022.

My insurance company is tracking my driving so I can reduce my insurance premiums. At the time of this incident, I was up to saving $145 a year. The feedback I get from Safeco is that I use my brake too much so I have been consciously trying to watch ahead, anticipate other drivers and keep my speed even so I don’t use the brake unnecessarily.

When I approached the light at 80^th, it had turned yellow, I didn’t know how long the yellow would last and my mind froze for a moment because I thought, “Oh no, I can’t slam on the brakes now because well .  .  . the App.” So I went through it at the point it had turned red.

The irony of a $145 discount for trying to drive more safely and getting a $139 ticket has an O. Henry quality to it.

I am hoping that, while I did commit the infraction, the circumstances of my driving record and my desire to be a better driver—this insurance company tracking has been kind of a driving refresher for me—the court might lower the fee.

A week later I got an un-ironic response with $42 dollars knocked off the fine. Now I am waiting for a second shoe to drop because it seems to me I ran a second light a month later.

Kay decided she was going to die on Saturday, July 9. She didn’t have the death-with-dignity drugs or anything, she just felt that was when she would die. Pursuant to that she sent out her own death notice on Friday, July 8. On Tuesday when she was still alive, the calls started coming in.

“Who is it?”

“Lulu in Issaquah.”

“What does she want?”

“I told her you were alive and she wants to talk to you. She got your announcement.”

I watched Kay’s face as she realized the ramifications of having sent out 75 notices. She leaned back and closed her eyes.

“Oh, fuck!”

Kay died two months later, the second week in September. Although I promised her I would write about her life, the summer of her death was a journey and an education for many of us. She taught me how to die with grace.

When she first got the diagnosis of three to six months to live, she thought about her options, talked to friends and decided she would go into hospice. Her directness and calm made it easier for, well, me anyway. She and I talked freely about death. She promised me that if, when she got to other side, there was any way to tell me what it was like, she would. It was our little pact.

I once sent Kay a card that said, “we aren’t just friends, we’re a small gang.” Her then partner Jerry said he always felt a little nervous when the two of us were together; we were a dangerous pair.

I only wish we had had the time to spend a night at the Tulalip Casino. Not to gamble, but to see how many things we could pinch off the maid’s cart. Speaking of carts, another idea we had was to get on those motorized carts at the grocery store and chase each other around the store like we were riding bumper cars.

In case you are understandably confused, Kay and I are not children. Not chronologically. She was 84 and I was 68 when she died. We had known each other for about 15 years, our friendship secured with learning we shared a birthday and the subsequent Gemini energy that went with it. We each found something within the other person.

Not only a friend, Kay was just old enough to be the mother I didn’t have. I was comfortably myself with her, not something that comes easily for me. She accepted me, she was honest with me, she called me honey. My own mother never called me honey.

“If you had been my mother, the republicans would have forced you to give birth,” I said.

She smiled her mischievous smile.

Kay was a beautiful and sexy woman who was self-conscious about her looks. She was a bright, creative, capable woman who was self-conscious about never having gone to college.

She was mystified by the internet.

“What’s the cloud?” she asked me. “Do I get my own cloud or do I have to share?”

She managed to grow old without the headache of gaining computer skills. I told her that was a great accomplishment and she was a happier person for it.

July 9 was only the first time Kay was sure she would die. Like those eschatologists who continue to nail down the date of the rapture (she would hate that comparison), Kay would regularly decide it was now or tomorrow or soon. I think these pronouncements occurred as she seemed to feel life seeping from her.

One Sunday morning she called me.

“Can you come over?”

“Sure, when?”

“Now.”

I almost went over in my nightclothes, not sure how much time I had. I sat with her for much of the day, watching the rise and fall of her breathing and holding her hand. This was late-July. Over the next month and a half, I clocked in hours of holding her hand, watching her sleep, talking gently or making jokes, singing songs, feeding her ice pieces, eating popsicles with her.

She had stopped eating thinking that would hasten the process. When the hospice nurse said it didn’t work that way, we started giving her ice cream, pudding and Jello, things that would slip down her throat because she had difficulty swallowing.

She liked the Lindor milk chocolate truffles. “Dying is fun!” she declared, her mouth smeared with chocolate.

Lisa, Kay’s daughter, had moved in and was living in the house. Chris, a mutual friend, was often there. K.C. and Jamber were health aides that came in every morning. And Christina was the hospice nurse occasionally referred to as Dum-dum when Kay was annoyed with her. Kay perked up when we were there. She had always liked a party.

Once when we were all there, talking and laughing among ourselves, Kay piped up from the bed, “Hey, I’m the one who’s dying here!”

She had a big party for her last birthday, mid-June. She managed to be up and to walk around, talk and smile. The food was fabulous. Her son –who I called her Beloved Son and she called Randy—Randal flew up from New Orleans with Adrianna, his wife. It was after the party that she settled down to start dying and a full two weeks before she decided that July 9 was the day.

There was always a little flurry of activity when Kay decided she was dying the next day. She was in a fever until she got her will and directives in order. Once she had me haul out all her jewelry and divvy it up in little plastic bags with the names of her nieces and friends. She liked to look around the room and point out objects. She’d ask me to put a tag with someone’s name on them.

Other times we looked through her paintings. (I had taught her to paint and she painted joyfully for years.) She saved her best paintings for Randal who heads the art department of various movies and TV series. He will use her paintings as props in upcoming shows, a lasting legacy of his beautiful mother.

We all went through a period when we had to constantly arrange flowers for her. We had vase after arrangement after pot of them and we grouped them all together on the coffee table. Kay, who had to look at them all day long from her bed, made us move them an inch this way, an inch that way. Put those yellow mums together and the round hydrangeas in the middle by the pink delphiniums. Set the orchid a little to the side. The next day, annoyed with something that seemed off, she made us move them around again.

I liked seeing Chris when I visited but my favorite times were when it was Kay and me and I could watch her breath and tell her how beautiful she was and how gracefully she was doing this. I felt like she and I had a little world of our own, our little club of two, our small gang.  It felt priceless.

On one visit, Chris was in the family room with Kay.

“How’s she doing?”

“She’s been asleep for a while.”

I leaned over the bed and stared at Kay. She opened her eyes.

“I bet you thought you’d died and gone to heaven when you saw me,” I said.

“I did think that,” she whispered with a smile.

I started to sit but she reached for me. I put my ear close to her.

“Can you stay?” she whispered

I felt as though my entire heart flowed right up into my throat and my eyes and I almost sobbed. I couldn’t remember what I needed to do that day but yes, of course, I would stay.

I learned something about my capacities for end-of-life-care. For two months I lived in fear of being asked to help with the process of cleaning Kay, the kind of cleaning that required I put on surgical gloves. I wanted to do whatever was needed and I suppose I could have learned how and gotten used to it but the surgical glove operations were not my skill set.

I was the one who sat with her and watched her breathe. One day Kay said, ‘When I die, you have to call hospice and they —”

“Kay,” I said. “We all know what to do when you die. But if you die today while I am here, I am just going to sit with you for a long time.”

Her face relaxed and she closed her eyes and nodded. I wasn’t there when she died. I wanted to be but I wasn’t. In the end I decided it was far better to have been there while she lived.

My beautiful friend, three weeks before her death

My automobile insurer has a program called Right Track, a device to help you get a discount –up to 30%– on your car insurance. It’s an app you install on your phone; using GPS, the company tracks your driving for three months. When they decide how much of a good driver discount you deserve, you can take the app off your phone.

At least that is what they said when I decided to try it.

It sounds creepy, I know. It feels like some dark figure somewhere is sitting in his cave (or in his basement in his underwear) spying on me, maybe accessing my personal data or establishing permanent spyware on my phone.

For someone my age, they are most interested in how I accelerate from a start, how I use my brake and my night-time driving. I thought this would be an easy gig. For one thing, I rarely drive at night and these days the nights are so long I am usually in bed before dark. I don’t peel out from a stopped position and I didn’t think there was any problem with how I used my brake.

I have been consistently getting bright, smiling faces and starry eyed emojis for my acceleration. That’s not surprising as I am purposely creeping forward in ways that previously would irritate the hell out of me if I was the car behind me. I hope that drivers behind me aren’t in a bad mood and don’t carry firearms.

Braking is another matter. As far as I can make out, this app would prefer I don’t use the brake at all. Just go so slow that I can roll to a stop when I need to.

I asked my student Alex, who is in drivers training, if she had been given any guidelines about braking and accelerating.

“Huh?” she asked.

“Are you told anything about how much time you should take to get to cruising speed or to come to a halt after you start braking?”

“Nah. You step on the gas to move and the brake to stop.”

Alex is much more forthcoming and specific when she tells me what words and gestures I should not employ as an adult to try to seem cool to kids.

“When adults do that, they look cringy.  That’s another word you shouldn’t use.”

But I digress. For every trip I make, the app gives a little report card telling me—with face emojis– how I am doing, how much money I am currently saving on my insurance and if I am trending up or down with that figure. When my braking had me trending down, I started paying close attention. It brought back memories of learning to drive with my dad in the front seat with me.

My dad never grabbed the dashboard and gasped like my mother did. He said things like, “Don’t take chances, look for opportunities.” “Drive ahead, watch two cars ahead of you.”

He read with amusement the Driver’s Guide that I was given for the driver’s education class I took in high school. “Implement your directional signal indicator,” he’d say with a snicker instead of “put your blinker on.” Then we’d pull over for ice cream.

His words come back to me now that I am creeping along like a 90 year-old woman afraid to go into traffic at the end of her driveway. My friend Kay, who is in Hospice, lives three miles from me. I’ve been visiting every day for the past month. Thanks to my new skills, I can almost get there with using my brake at all.

But you do not want to be behind me.

I recently hosted an episode of Wild Kingdom here in my quiet Seattle residential neighborhood. Coyotes live in Carkeek Park, a wildish, greenbelt a mile from my house. They have, in the past, drifted up from the park to terrorize the neighborhood for a night or two. The alarm goes out, we keep our cats and small animals inside and then the threat slithers back to Carkeek.

The coyotes have gotten quite bold in the past year. They routinely trot down the middle of the street like private citizens. My neighbor’s small cat (in a face-off with a coyote, my money would be on Suli) sits in her gate and observes their coming and going.

My own cat is more cautious; she’s also older and more fragile. One morning she stuck her head out the sunroom door, backed up, ran into the bathroom, jumped in the tub and made a sound I have never heard from her. In my garden a coyote was strolling around, assessing the real estate.

I chased him out. This is not a sustainable thing to do with a coyote. They are like street punks –or cats, actually. They retreat a few feet, turn around and give me a look that says, “Oh yeah? Make me.” I grabbed something I could wave around, a broom, and chased it like a madwoman, yelling “No, no!” It slipped through the fence. That was it for an hour or two. Then it was back. I chased it four times that day.

The next day, Artemis (my cat) was still sniffing tentatively and backing up from the door. The coyote came through with a dis-emboweled squirrel hanging out of its mouth. I got a pang because there is one squirrel—Smudgie–who will eat out of my hand and I hoped Smudgie wasn’t the one now in the coyote’s mouth. The coyote dropped the corpse and ran when I chased him but he came back several times to finish his meal. Last I looked there was a part of a squirrel behind the raspberries. I left it in hopes the crows would clean it up. To date, I am afraid to go behind the raspberries.

The next afternoon I was reading in my front room when a faint siren sounded in the distance followed by a blood-curdling scream that sounded like it was coming from the chair next to me. I leaped up and looked outside. The coyote was sitting in my raspberries right outside the window, responding to the siren. They do that. The sirens set them off. They are like nerve pain. There’s a twitch in one part of the body and then a whole party starts up in another part. I chased him out yet again.

I went next door to talk to the guys in the cemetery. (Not the dead ones—I don’t discuss current events with them—but the caretakers.) As we chatted on the road, a coyote came waltzing by. This was a different one than the one attempting a coup on my garden. My nemesis was light tan and short-haired. This new one was gray and white with a fluffy tail like a malamute or a collie. The guys said they had seen two pups. We mused over where they had their den and why they were still around after five days. There’s not much cover in the cemetery. We compared our brief notes on Animal Control: they won’t do anything.

The next morning, I went out to feed the birds and what my father used to call the “shy, wild things.” (Yes, I know I am not supposed to feed them.) A miniature of the fluffy tailed coyote shot up and went zipping through the fence. A street punk in training.

I feed the birds and squirrels on the north side of my house where I let things be wild. Mid-July, the grass is four feet tall. I don’t usually pay any attention to it but this pup sighting made me curious. I waded into the tall grass.  There, inside my fence, I found some spacious, comfortable indentations hidden by grass and the low-hanging laburnam.

Oh. my. god. (And you must know I never, ever put periods in front of words like I just did, that’s how shocked I was.) The den was in my yard, inside my fence. The enemy had breached the gate. They were a day away from breaking into the house and seizing the remote.

To be fair, I think coyotes are wonderful animals. They are the tricksters. As someone with a Gemini sun, I can’t help but appreciate the mythology around them. That doesn’t mean I want them in my yard.

I got out the weed whacker and took down all the grass. My neighbor Bill (servant of Suli) came over with his lawnmower and cut the grass to the ground. Next thing I knew, both Suli and Artemis were out there observing the change in terrain. Artemis was considerably bolder; she didn’t run from the open door any longer. The odor of coyote had left the premises.

I checked “Coyotes” off my list and moved on to the laundry room, which had flooded.

A few months ago I printed a 25 page article from The Guardian called “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction.” Thirty different writers contributed their lists. I thought the article might inspire me to start thinking about writing another novel.

A Billy Collins poem, “Advice to Writers” was the prompt for a writing group I am part of. The poem is an imaginative journey that Billy Collins does so beautifully. What I came to write as a response to the prompt was my own advice to writers. It works just as well for any creative endeavor. And as a bonus, I have 15 points of advice:

1. Before you get started, make sure the kitchen is in a state that will make it easy to make lunch because you’ll be hungry after hours of writing. Otherwise, you’ll throw together something while nibbling that whole bag of potato chips you weren’t supposed to buy.
2. Make a large cup of tea—or coffee with cacao nibs and real cream.
3. Open your computer. Do not look at email. Maybe just check if your order has left the Fed-Ex facility yet. Oh, and check the hourly weather.
4. Find where you left off writing yesterday (or last week or before Christmas) and read what you wrote.
5. There’s a cacao nib in your teeth that won’t dislodge so get some dental floss.
6. Now the cat is staring at you. Go get her food dish. She likes to eat wherever you are. Rather she expects it.
7. There goes that couple from Santa Fe, walking their dog, Biscuit. You don’t remember the couples’ name but you have it written down in a drawer with their house key. They want you to feed Biscuit for a week while they’re away. You don’t know why they asked you; you’ve only spoken over the fence a few times. You wonder if they’re Russian agents investigating whether or not you’d be a possible asset.
8. OK. Write.
9. Take a sip of coffee
10. Blow your nose
11. Wonder if you took your thyroid medication this morning.
12. Those coupons for the hardware store expire in two days. What is the likelihood you’ll get up there by then. You don’t know what you’ll even buy but that’s five dollars.
13. Check Fed-Ex. Is it Out for Delivery yet?
14. OK. Write. Starting now.
15. Maybe read that “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction.” For the first time.

I got up early my final day in Berkeley, not wanting to miss a minute of it. Suzanne shut the front door after retrieving her paper and I called from the kitchen where I was making tea, “I HEAR you!” She chuckled.

Mary-Ellis picked me up in the morning and we moved my suitcase to her house. She had “computer work” to do so I made myself a pot of tea and sat at the kitchen table studying Swedish while she typed like the wind on her keyboard.

Next to me at the table were stencils for making envelopes and a pile of calendar art with my name on it. All through the pandemic, I got regular missives, cartoons and Barbara Lane columns from Mary-Ellis, always in envelopes folded from calendar pages. I imagined her with a little assembly line on her dining room table, going to town sending cheerful notes to her friends and shut-ins; I was both. At her work station would be the pile of cut-up cartoons and columns, some notepaper, post-its and a selection of pens. Then the calendar pages, the stencils, scissors, address labels and a glue stick. Lastly her address book and pile of stamps. I envisioned her moving industriously down the assembly line. Her notes and envelopes are a good memory from those two weird years.

In the afternoon I would learn to fold an image of the coral reef or the milky way into an envelope. But first we paid a visit to the Town and Gown Clubhouse of which Mary-Ellis is a longstanding member and often the lead in their annual plays. Neither of us wanted to stay for the lecture of the day but I wanted to see the clubhouse. My only directive for the weekend was that I wanted to see her world though her eyes. Town and Gown is part of her world but to me, it could have been the set of a 1940s movie.

Luncheon was being set up. It was a white-tablecloth catered meal with bone-china dishes and silver coffee service. The food looked sensational. Women were dressed up in hats and heels. I was kind of agog, going from Shut-In to Country Cousin.

I wonder if there is something like this is Seattle, I thought. Well, of course there is. If I hadn’t de-activated immediately upon graduating from Whitman I could have been a sorority alum. Then there were the several years I spent in the Seattle Music Teachers Association, even serving as social secretary. I hated it. But we weren’t talking about me. This was Mary-Ellis’ world and I loved seeing her there.

We had our own lunch outdoors at Saul’s Deli on Shattuck Ave.– (Isn’t that just the oddest name for a major street in a classy university town? Anything that ends in “uck” seems a little slummy to me) –then proceeded to Caesar Chavez Park. The park is made on a landfill that sticks out into San Francisco Bay and is full of walking paths. Mary-Ellis said she walked the path several times a week during the pandemic.

It was warm and windy and for the dozenth time, I thought, “Oh this is the best yet.” My favorite part was seeing all the little ground squirrels, the scourge of the park but oh so cute to the tourist.

On the way home, M-E dropped me off at Andronicos on Solano so I could get some train snacks. As awful as I had felt in the weeks prior to my Berkeley trip and as iffy as my system had been over the weekend, I have to say I enjoyed being mothered a little bit by my good friend. It made me feel warm and safe. But when M-E started to explain to me where I would find the yoghurt in Andronicos, I put my hand on her arm.

“I think I can figure it out,” I said.

I wandered all over the store twice before I finally asked someone where the yoghurt was. And I still had to ask yet again when I got into the correct quadrant of the store.

I walked along the beautiful streets back to Mary-Ellis’s House of Whimsey where M-E was in the kitchen in her apron. I sat at the kitchen table making envelopes from calendar pages and feeling like a happy grade school kid doing a craft project. To complete the simile, I glued all the sides wrong.

We reminisced about Whitman College and told Phil of our escapades over supper. Mary-Ellis and I looked at her beautiful quilts—another of her arty abilities. And then it was time to leave for the train station.

It was exciting boarding the train at night. Again I felt like I was in a 1940s movie. My berth was already made up, giving me my square foot of space to get myself ready for bed. I took a slug of CBD tincture and gradually relaxed, dozing off and on all night. I awoke to Mt Shasta. Between the south and north bound Coast Starlight, the only part of the journey I missed through sleep was the stretch from Chico to Dunsmuir.

I tried to read Walden—it’s one of those books I have always meant to read—but 15 pages into it, I thought, “What a gasbag. This is like listening to a 14-year old boy go on and on about how great he is.” I’ve listened to a lot of them over the years. Self-Importance is not that attractive when you’re 27 years old. Having said that, I do like a lot of his ideas but I’ll just put a check mark by the title and move on. What is that line from childhood? “Let’s not but say we did.”

I did a lot of staring out the window on the trip home. As I might say about Thoreau: “If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains.”

It had been 30 years since I visited the Bay Area. This trip marked my first use of an Airbnb and an Uber but not my last visit with Mary-Ellis. I would make the same trip in a heart-beat.

I crept about my routine at the cold Airbnb, bringing my tea up to my room and putting on the space heater. I had finished Empire of Pain and was into The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner.

Later I met Suzanne on my way out the door.

“You’re so quiet,” she commented.

“Well.” I didn’t know how to respond to this.

I walked along the lovely streets: The Alameda, Capistrano, Colusa, San Lorenzo, Tacoma, Solano-“everything here is three blocks away from everything else”– and ended up at Mary-Ellis’ House of Whimsey. I should clarify that it’s not just the house that’s whimsical. So is my friend. I remember her at Whitman as being almost magical to me, coming as I did from a grim and oppressive upbringing.

I said as much to Phil as we gathered at Berkeley Espresso on Shattuck Ave for a morning cappucchino (Phil), green tea (M-E), black tea (me.) We talked about a mutual fondness for Perry Mason, the old television series that inspired so many attorneys of our generation even though the courtroom scenes are comically unrealistic.

“I DID IT!!. I killed him. I killed him because, because.  .  . I LOVED him!!!” Breakdown, sobbing, sober looks all around, dramatic music.

I heard the story of Phil and the giant speakers that Mary–Ellis hates. Phil likes a refined sound for his classical music and the two speakers are trained exactly on his spot in the living room. Mary-Ellis says she stumbles on them and they are ugly. I didn’t help by saying I hadn’t noticed them but then I had been still swaying from the train and lack of sleep.

M-E and I continued our day with a visit to the Berkeley City Club, of which she and Phil are members. I have friends in Seattle who seemingly would not stop talking about the Berkeley City Club from the moment I bought the train ticket three months ago.

“You have to see it! It’s spectacular. Oh, and the pool. And see if you can see what a room look likes. It’s like stepping into the past.”

They were correct. The building was designed by Julia Morgan in 1929 at the same time she was designing Hearst Castle. Originally The Berkeley Women’s City Club, it was a women’s residence. Two elderly residents continue to hang in there. The rest is rented out and used for functions.

Inside we were looking at a blend of Romanesque, Gothic and Moorish designs with exquisite attention to detail, which recollected a slow and gracious past. The pool is indeed beautiful with a rounded ceiling like a London train station.

Lunch at The Musical Offering Café on Bancroft Way where I had a cauliflower soup so good I quizzed the chef about how to make it. And I don’t much care for cauliflower. I think as my appetite was coming back combined with the pleasure of good company, I ate like a half-dead person coming back to life.

We walked to the Berkeley Campus (University of California Berkeley) through the Sather gate past the gnarled and pruned London plane trees just beginning to leaf and to the Campanile tower. Falcons in the tower can be watched 24 hours a day on a web cam but once up in the tower you can only see their poop on the window ledges underneath their abode.

Besides falcon poop, there is a magnificent carillon up there. We were there in time for the noon concert. I watched the young woman go at the keys and the pedals for “Bonnie Doon” with my fingers plugging my ears. I never thought I could have an experience like that outside of Europe.

Carillon, Campanile Tower, Berkeley

M-E dropped me off at the Airbnb and I fell asleep over The Lost Apothecary. Late afternoon I walked back to the House of Whimsey where M-E had an apron tied around her as she prepared what could have been a post-operative supper for me: broiled rockfish, unadorned white rice, steamed carrots and kale and potato. She and Phil ate apple crisp and I got a baked apple sans skin. Again it all tasted like the best thing I had ever eaten in my life.

We watched The Gift Horse, a Frasier episode where Niles and Frasier compete with each other for the best birthday gift for Martin. Frasier ended up buying a big screen TV, which loomed over his apartment. When the four ten-foot speakers were wheeled in, M-E and Phil laughed. Phil’s speakers did not join in the joke; they weren’t quite that big and there were only two.

Sunday morning, I got together my breakfast and settled in the breakfast nook. Suzanne called from somewhere in the house, “I HEAR you!” and made me smile.

I accompanied M-E to U.C.C. First Church where I was welcomed into the choir, directed by Derek Tam, a young man I was eager to meet. Early in the pandemic, Derek made a virtual choir video of his other group, the Vallejo Community Choir singing “We’ll Meet Again.” I have used that video for the goodbye song for my All Present zoom singalongs for two and a half years. I have watched the faces of the people singing and have made up stories about them, have tried to imagine which voice was sticking out on this note or that phrase.

I have admired Derek in one square, accompanying and in another square, singing, knowing that he also put the whole devilish virtual choir video together. I have never stopped being grateful that I did not try to learn how to do the same. If I had attempted to scale that learning curve, I now would be scratching plaster off the walls of my house and eating my hair.

It was fun being in the choir. I didn’t have to accompany or direct. I didn’t have to know every part in the music. I didn’t even have to know the part I was singing, having run through it for the first time the night before. I enjoyed the knowledge that M-E next to me would grab any note I wasn’t sure of. Most of all, I liked watching a director at work, watching what he did and how thought about the song we were singing.

That afternoon, M-E and I saw a performance of Octet at Berkeley Rep. The play centers around an Internet Anonymous group that meets in a church basement. They leave their phones at the door and take turns speaking up except all the speeches were a cappella compositions. I loved it even though I took my habitual twenty-minute doze.

I went to the Airbnb and slept some more. Supper was more of my post-operative diet. I heard the funny story of how M-E’s and Phil’s son and fiancé had tried to get a marriage license, zooming with the justice. When it was all over, they realized they hadn’t just got the license, they had actually got married. They had to hold another ceremony later to satisfy the family’s thirst for a wedding. They have to have a Persian ceremony this summer to satisfy the in-laws.

So that night we watched The Ring Cycle, the Frasier episode where Niles and Daphne get married three times to smooth over all the familial difficulties.

“Your life is a Frasier episode,” I said.

Mary-Ellis walked me back to the Airbnb. Thus ended Day #3

Elena, Berkeley campus

Mary-Ellis, Berkeley campus

A long weekend in Berkeley was more than my first post-pandemic travel. It had been twenty five years since I had been in the Bay Area; that time was also to visit my college roommate and longest friend, Mary-Ellis. In 1997, as a response to breaking up with a boyfriend, I drove from Seattle to Berkeley on Highway 101 and Highway 1 all the way from the Washington/Oregon border.  This time I took the train.

I had a grand time. I had been viciously ill for two weeks prior to my leaving for California so one could argue it could only get better. But it was more than that: At the end of this trip I reflected that the mini-break was as good as electroshock therapy for busting up my frame of mind. Specifically, it was Mary-Ellis who had that effect on me. She always does.

I was not feeling tiptop when I boarded the train in Seattle. I was still “having a bit of A Do with my stomach,” an expression my English cousins reliably inform is not a Briticism so I must have picked it up somewhere else. I was prepared for the train to be cold but my tiny little compartment was well heated. I ended up needing the cool weather clothes for Berkeley, which, while warmer than Seattle, was still a bit chilly. After going through a winter, I forget what 65 degrees feels like.

What was lacking on the train was wi-fi. “I hope you all have a good book,” said the voice on the P.A. system after cheerfully telling us the Coast Starlight was an old train and not equipped for the internet. I had a lot of books and audiobooks on my tablet but I soon found out that just because there’s title in my library doesn’t mean it’s downloaded. So that was rude. In Portland I went into the station to download a few more titles.

I listened to Kenneth Branagh read Heart of Darkness, (Joseph Conrad) a gorgeous listen. The language is as luminous as the tale is dark. And I started Empire of Pain Patrick Radden Keefe, which was chilling.

The dining car had an ambitious menu, almost none of which I could eat due to The Do with my stomach. I picked at a child’s plate of roast chicken, ate the inside of a baked potato and took a complimentary mini-bottle of Maker’s Mark for Gwen in Seattle because she had taken me to the train station. For dinner, I had tea delivered to me in my compartment and ate the yoghurt and crackers I had brought with me.

I figured out how to pull the two facing seats into a bed, giving me an opening of about a square foot to change into sleeping clothes. I love sleeping on the train although it can be difficult to know if you are mostly awake and dozing off now and then or mostly asleep and waking up 487 times. I know I surfaced when the train stopped in Klamath Falls, Oregon and was awakened with the announcement that we were stuck there for an unscheduled hour and a half for some reason. When I awoke next, it was light outside and we were pulling into Chico, California.

The train was then an hour and a half late getting into Berkeley. I waited by the door with other detraining passengers. Our steward had his hands full so I slipped a five-dollar bill into his pocket. It stuck out so I gave it an extra poke.

One of my fellow passengers snickered and said, “You never know who might grab it!”

I said, “It’s not that. No one needs to know how much or how little I’m giving him.” Course now everyone reading this post has an opinion about what kind of a tipper I am.

One thing that I love about train travel is that train stations tend to be accessible and uncrowded the way airports used to be. You can park close and be in the receiving line for your guest. And there she was, Mary-Ellis, a head taller than the group of Amish people waiting to board.

Mary-Ellis and I roomed together for a year at Whitman College. We pledged a sorority in our junior year. I felt my social life was lacking and I wanted easier access to the fraternity houses. Mary-Ellis, however, was born to it. Not specifically to sororities with their hallowed and silly traditions but to the Women’s Club movement that she would discover later in her life and which had to be explained to me on this visit. There are aspects to Mary-Ellis. One is Ms. Junior League. Another is Fifth Grader at Camp. I love the latter—always have. The former is calm, gracious, solid, patient, beautiful. Yet a third would be The Mom which I especially appreciated what with The Do with my stomach. She was solicitous as only a mom could be and she paced the weekend to accommodate my weakened state right down to policing my butter and lemon intake.

We pulled up to the Mary-Ellis House of Whimsey where she lives with her husband Phil, where they raised their two sons and which is across the street from the grade school Kamela Harris attended. A garden with paved paths inlayed with whimsical flowers and creatures wind around a golden-orange house; if you are of a painting bent, think New Gamboge. Two Australian bottlebrush trees sit in front and a Meyer lemon tree in back.

I greeted Phil when he emerged from his office in a suit and red bow tie. “You get all dressed up to sit in front of your computer?” I asked, then realizing that sounded kind of snarky and he wasn’t used to me, I added “Because you’ve always dressed for work.”

“It’s important to look reasonably professional for clients,” he said

Phil was a public defender for years and he is now a judge. “But not in the courtroom.”

“Why is that important?” I asked.

“People think of all judges as being in the courtroom.”

“Do I have to say ‘but not in a courtroom’ when I tell all my friends you’re a judge?”

He smiled, “No, that’s not necessary.”

Phil is a judge.

For lunch, Mary-Ellis thawed a sumptuous creamy asparagus soup she had made. This might have been when I began saying “This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten.” I got her recipe. She took me around the corner to the Airbnb where I would be staying and we met Suzanne, an elderly woman with a load of energy and a beautiful smile. She’s rail thin but claims to be trying to get rid of the five pounds she gained while in Europe for three weeks.

Succulents on Steroids

I had a large sunny room upstairs and a bathroom to myself. After dispensing with all the pleasantries, Mary-Ellis left and I fell asleep on the comfortable bed until time for dinner. Walking back to the House of Whimsey felt like a stroll through a continuous garden. The neighborhood is old and lovely, full of flowers, birds, Little Free Libraries, a wishing tree, a poem tree and what I dubbed Succulents on Steroids. The little things we call Hens and Chickens in Seattle are sunflower-huge and sitting atop foot- long stems. An aloe bush looked like a colony of octopi. I remember the first time I saw geraniums in the Bay area: I thought, “Oh my, that’s what they are supposed to look like!” Everything there seems to explode with decadent voluptuousness.

We had a lovely meal at a Thai restaurant where I could get fried rice with half a star (to accommodate The Do in my stomach). Mary-Ellis and I walked up to Indian Rock Park, (“an acre of rhyolite outcroppings, deposited by volcanic eruptions some 10 million years ago” says the Cal Alum page). It and several other rock “outcroppings” in the neighborhood are used for beginning rock climbers and for anyone who wants to sit and watch the sun set on San Francisco Bay or just clamber around the rock. You don’t need climbing gear to get up there, there are plenty of ways to climb even in my insubstantial shoes. Truth be told, I was still feeling the train rocking me back and forth or I would have stayed for the sun set.

And the sun set on Day Two.