road trip

The drive from Northern California to Southern California, or vice versa, is one I've made many times. It can be accomplished in as few as 7 1/2 hours or so, but it makes more sense to allow 9 hours. Usually I do this drive alone.

For some time, after moving to San Diego for my husband's career in 1996, I continued to seek out and accept freelance corporate video work in the San Francisco Bay Area where I had lived my entire life. This allowed me to retain the source of income I'd enjoyed since 1987 (and, truth be told, a good portion of my identity), but also to ease the overall change.

Once I eventually realized I hadn't lost a home town but had gained a lovely new area and lifestyle, our unexpected 500 mile relocation ceased to be a source of deep anxiety. This relatively unexplored, balmy, less counterculture part of the state proved to be nearly perfect for me; it only remained to reassure myself that my old friends, family, and livelihood was a mere half day's drive away.

And so it was.

But I didn't always take the overland route from point A to B. I'm no longer sure of the sequence, but for a while I managed this new living situation by flying back and forth on Southwest Airlines, maintaining not only two complete sets of work kits, but two cars. The ambivalence demonstrated by this elaborate duplication seems painfully obvious to me now, some fourteen years later, but I didn't question it at the time.

That first year of my new life now has a hazy, dreamlike quality to it.

Just how much was crammed into that time period wasn't clear to me until the other day when I was sorting some boxes of slides. Before digital photography eclipsed film and rendered it a quaint folk art, most of my photography took the form of 35mm slides. I unfailingly sorted them for perhaps the first ten years of our now 30-year marriage. The rest are in unmarked stacks, awaiting my attention.

Looking at these slides a couple of weeks ago, I noted that some time during that blur of a year that was 1996, my husband and I moved to a small furnished apartment in downtown San Diego with our four cats, awaiting our eventual move to a new home in North County some six months later. I had never lived anywhere but in the suburbs, and the urban setting felt unreal. It would be some time before I figured out how to grocery shop there; restaurants proved easier. All of our furnishings and most of my art and craft supplies were packed up and sent away into long-term storage. Life, as I knew it, would clearly be in a kind of holding pattern. I can't recall where we spent Christmas.

This was also the year my husband and I took a trip to the UK for his work; grafted onto this excursion was a side-trip to a small, elegant Human Consciousness conference at Jesus College in Oxford with a difficult friend and writing partner while my husband stayed back in High Wycombe and carried out his work.

There was another conference that year, this one in Tucson, Arizona, a twelve-hour drive away. This was the time of my growing involvement with the lucid dreaming and consciousness community; dreaming and psychology had long been of interest, but my sudden immersion was evidence of restlessness and indecision about my life path. In this quirky world (scientific, but with whiffs of new age-ery) I was making my civilian contributions wherever I could, losing myself in a kind of extended pseudo-academic reverie. It escalated to the point where I spent nights in the Stanford dream lab with electrodes glued to my head, and even co-authored and presented a sound and respectable paper despite lack of any official credentials. Caught up in the magic and yet aware of the limitations of being a fringe player, I toyed briefly with the idea of returning to school for a psychology degree, before coming to my senses and realizing going back to school would, in my case, be a stalling tactic.

More stacks of slides later, I'm reminded this was also the year of our trip to New Zealand. Like England, this too was a trip undertaken for my husband's job. I can remember packing and wearing a spray eau de parfum called Red, new at the time. The scent reminded me of my mother because we'd bought bottles of it around the same time.

The people we met there were unfailingly kind. They fed us, and drove us everywhere, and the scenery was spectacular at every diverse turn; New Zealand seemed like a half dozen marvelous countries combined. We peered into exotic Maori houses, scampered around steam vents and mud pits, savored gourmet food in convivial restaurants, and rowed through quiet caves with ceilings lit by fairytale glowworms. Every day we felt the giddy rush of being further from home on this amazing blue orb than we'd ever been.

All too soon, my husband and I were on the long flight home. For many surrealistically long hours where we'd never fall more than half asleep, we felt the plane drop from the sky again and again in the worst nauseating turbulence we'd ever experienced.

By October, my mother would be losing her year-long battle with colon cancer. My father would later recall a conversation they had about our pending move to San Diego, and that athough her thinking wasn't as sharp as it had once been, she was aware our relocation plans were becoming more definite. I recall the months just prior to her death as a blur of video jobs, staying at my parents' house in my old bedroom and helping my father and sister with her care as best I could. Throughout this, I must have been travelling from one end of the state to the other, but I have no recollection of it.

Our new home was ready in the spring, and we moved in. I'm sure my mother would have loved seeing it.

Our move to San Diego was cushioned by some work benefits, including compensation from my husband's company for what would undoubtedly be my lost income. I spent some of this money in one extravagant and unforgettable night attending a party at the winery estate of Francis Coppola with the idea of casually wearing my fashion designs, theoretically facilitating career contacts with the event's promising guest list. Because hotel rooms in the Rutherford area turned out to be prohibitively expensive, I rented an Airstream trailer to serve as a hotel room, situated in a funny little trees-and-dirt park in Calistoga.

The trailer floor swaying under my high heels, I stepped into my evening gown, put on my makeup in waning sunlight, and stepped out the doorway with my original, elaborately decorated handbag. I walked carefully across the dirt parking lot to my car, drove a winding road leading to the gated estate, and wandered among the rich and famous for one magical night.

* * *

When we are young, we're told again and again that time passes more quickly as one grows older. This has certainly proven to be true in my own life, but never more so than after 1996.

Moreover, just as the process of evolution seems to happen with glacial slowness and then in cataclysmic mutations, the forces of change seem to come in stunning clusters, seemingly from out of nowhere, followed by periods of repetitive quiet that slip by with unnerving speed.

Last week I drove up north for the first time in nearly three years, the longest period without going home since my move to San Diego. Enough time had passed such that as my car descended into the Livermore valley on I-580 for the last hour's stretch, the vista was noticably changed with large new electronic billboards and sleek new car dealerships. There's nothing like a greatly changed landscape to make a person feel like Rip Van Winkle.

It occurred to me during those long hours of driving that this older version of myself hadn't made this trip before. Just as one never steps into the same river more than once.

Southern Californians call freeways "the" I-5 or "the" 101. Northern Californians do not use the "the". I now take the I-5 when I drive from one end of California to the other.

The drive is a long one, a kind of extended meditation, an endurance test, a game, a session of mind control, a tributary of time removed from the river's flow. I calculate and re-calculate mileage and speed, plan when I'll stop, when I'll refuel, and what book on tape I'll listen to. I remember a car trip I took with an old friend from the production business, now deceased, a trip planned not for speed but for the special, quirky sort of adventure that a road trip can be. The I-5 allows the miles to slip by quickly, but other routes with greater narrative value await anyone willing to spend the extra time.

In some ways, my life has become quieter. I leave home less often, I've lost family members and friends, and I'm no longer either driving 500 miles in the blink of an eye at the drop of the hat, nor am I turning road trips into idiosyncratic personal theater. It's been many, many years since I've had two complete sets of work gear and two cars, in two worlds. My work has slowed, and last year for the first time, I had no income to report.

This is not a bad thing. Mostly, my days are spent at home now. This is something that feels good to me, and feels right. I'm not always on the road chasing either a fast trip or an eventful one. I now appreciate my life, my gifts, my marriage, more than ever before. I spend my time keeping my home, making art, interacting online, and doing the writing I'd long promised myself. I'm reminded of the old saying about doors closing and windows opening. Or is it the other way around?

With the passage of time both leisurely and blurry-fast, I've now learned in my soul what I've always intellectually known: except through the power of dream and memory, we can't keep everyone we love with us forever. We can't seize every dream, take every route, and be every version of ourselves. But we can find good paths, and zero in on the goals that matter most.

There will come again someday another year of upheaval where too much happens, where good and bad episodes jam up against eachother and rearrange my life as they did in 1996. Some of this will be purposeful as I push myself to complete my projects. And some of this, outside my control, I steel myself against. And dare not even mention.

That's life.

Road trip. Not a metaphor I invented, but it certainly fits.

wine country santa barbara

the adventures of cleo and toby

It must be close to ten years ago now that I came up with a theme for a paper doll set that relates to time travel. I did several sheets of illustrations, and had a nice time doing them.

Called The Adventures of Cleo and Toby, the backstory was a single woman living in a small flat in New York. A white cat named Toby lives in her building, wandering freely and provided with kitty-kibble via the soft touch of the building superintendent. When the super dies and a new one less fond of cats takes over, Cleo lets the grateful but still independent and irascible Toby live with her.

Newly cleaned and fluffed, Toby insists on sleeping on Cleo's pillow next to her head. Each night he does so, Cleo begins to have spectacular dreams that feel like real time-travel adventures. The next day there is always something relevant happening in the news, or even in her life, that makes the previous night's dream even more uncanny.

Only these two outfit pages were ever scanned into my computer, but I have five or six more sheets with the rest of Cleo's outfits relating to an adventure where she travelled back to the early 1990s.

Perhaps this is obvious, but had I pursued this project any further, the concept would have taken me via clothing to a vast, virtually endless array of fascinating time periods.

* * *

sample dream account

Nowhere in this blog, other than a brief dream account I reformatted into poetry a couple of years ago (link here), is there a good example of a transcription from the dream journal I keep on my computer. To begin to open up this topic here, I selected this one at semi-random. Above is a digitally altered photo of my late paternal Grandmother; the following account is about her house, which is one of my primary recurring dream locales.

* * *

Dream Account
April 22, 1997

Moving In to Grandmother’s House

This was another odd-feeling suite of dreams. The morning dream was the one I best remember. The setting was my Grandmother’s house in Richmond, CA. I was there with my family… my mother, father, and sister. Unusually, I did not remember during the dream that my mother has actually died. I almost always realize this truth immediately.

Plans were being made for us to move into this house, and we were evaluating just how this would work out. I was in the living room, and noticed that my grandmother had a kind of shag carpeting throughout the room with very long blue and green yarns. The pieces of yarn must have been 8 to 10 inches long. I remarked that this carpeting would need to be replaced since cleaning would be too difficult, and it would make working on my various sewing projects problematic. I said I didn’t think it would be too expensive since the house was small. I felt a little uncertain asserting my wishes this way at first, but then figured some things really needed to be done. The house didn’t need to be perfect, but it did need improving.

I remarked that I was glad they were letting me stay there since not too many 43 year-olds could expect to be housed by their families. I then said I wanted all the kitchen cabinets torn out and replaced with the new ones that had slots for dinnerware, maybe the new colorful Fiesta being sold now at Macys. I also wanted glass fronts to some of the cabinets, and new countertops and sink. It hadn’t been remodeled in decades, and was long past due.

Then there was an incident where some small animals had gotten into the house, and we were trying to get them out. My mother really surprised me by picking up these animals, petting them, and getting ready to carry them out. They seemed to be like squirrels, or something similar. One was peeing all over the kitchen floor so I began using a sponge and water to clean up.

I then wondered what it was going to be like living in Richmond, and I started getting concerned that it wasn’t going to be as nice of an area as I was used to. It may not be all that great of a situation, I realized.

Never did I even briefly reflect on this situation in any larger sense, I.E., why I was there with my parents, and why it was happening. The details of the situation were absorbing enough, and it is interesting that I correctly understood my age to be 43, my taste in decorating was consistent with waking preferences. Yet I missed such important details as my being married and living in San Diego, and the death of my mother. I seemed also to have accepted the oddly long carpet yarns; they did seem long to me, but somehow I was able to rationalize them as being from another period.

end of entry

screenplay in 21 days

Ladies' Twilight Cottage Society

Brenda Cox Giguere

an original screenplay

* * *

Yes, I'm sure it's possible... but will I? Will I write a polished, full-length screenplay from my spare notes and simple outline in less than a month?

1969 journal tribute to apollo 11

My sense is that I wrote some sort of essay at the time, but the only thing in my actual journal turns out to be this little star-studded tribute in red ball point ink. It did deserve more than a single date's worth of space... note that I extended the entry through the next day.

My memory of that day lives here: Moon Landing Memories.

How far we have come. We barely seem to acknowledge the miracle of space stations, or blink an eye at shuttle takeoffs and landings. But some of us still look to the skies and remember the greatness of such dreams.

* * *

august coppola 1934-2010

"To write, you can't be interrupted," he said. "It throws you off. It's like trying to make love and people keep walking in on you."

August Coppola