365 Memories

For twenty years now, or very nearly, my father and I have shared a tradition of leather journal giving. I confess that the ratio of giving and receiving is not at all an even one. Mostly it is I who have been blessed with a package to unwrap—a hardcover, hand sewn, hand bound package smelling of rich, oiled sheepskin. The color of the hand-dyed leather has varied, as has the size of the journal (from the rather large to the quite compact) and the image carefully pressed into the cover, but one thing has always been the same: the journals all have been brought to life by the same hand, that of bookbinder Greg   Pfaff . The first journal, I remember, was discovered by my father at a small gift shop in Rhinebeck , New York, where I lived alone in an apartment on Montgomery Street while I attended Bard College. He gave one to me for Christmas, I think in 1990 (if not, I could only be off by a single year). I was immediately honored and intimidated. How could I ever hope to have thoughts,

In L.A., we shopped often at a grocery store called Vicente Foods, which was ( eponymously ) on San Vicente Boulevard and directly across from my elementary school. It was (still is, I believe) a small market, convenient to Brentwood neighborhood residents and known to carry exclusive foodstuffs not found at the mega-stores. For convenience and quality, one paid a premium, but it was worth it for certain shopping. Vicente Foods was where you'd go for excellent produce, a great butcher, and an in-house bakery. (For things like paper towels and toilet paper, there was always Ralph's.) My mom and I loved the little bakery section tucked into the back left-hand area of the store, and it wasn't too hard to make a convincing case for stopping and picking up a dessert to accompany that night's dinner. The modest pastry case was always filled with fresh temptations. Perfectly iced cakes, pies, and glazed fruit tarts, plus the smaller French standbys: eclairs and napoleons. At

OK, here's the story: first in Chicago, then in Los Angeles, my father worked for Playboy. In Chicago, it seemed like no big deal. Maybe my young age had something to do with it; certainly the Midwestern normalcy of Windy City operations also played a role. In Chicago, Playboy is business; in Los Angeles, it's THE Business (meaning Hollywood entertainment). We moved from Chicago to L.A. in 1979, so that my father could take on the position of Senior Vice President, Office of the Chairman. The Chairman at the time was Hugh M. Hefner; the "office" was his legendary mansion in the Holmby Hills neighborhood (though my dad actually did have an office in the boring-looking building on Sunset Strip, which I think no longer exists in that location). There are many stories-within-the-story, as you might imagine, but most of them are properly my dad's stories to tell and not my own. So, in this blog of firsthand memories, I will stick to my elementary-school view. And now,

There was something "coming of age" about my first spa experience. In fact, the half day I spent at Elizabeth Arden's Red Door Spa in New York City was a gift from my parents for my twenty-first birthday, so it really did mark a milestone. It was the kind of pampered indulgence that I imagined only the most mature, confident, fashionable, and privileged women enjoyed—and that is mostly true. Did walking through the Red Door on Fifth Avenue suddenly make me one of them? Yes and no. I was certainly privileged to be there, and I was pampered and indulged the same as any other client of the spa. I suppose I was fashionable, if in an edgier way than what seemed the usual Elizabeth Arden demographic. I was not mature in years . . . though in some ways I was older than my age (in other ways younger). Finally, I confess that in this environment I was not particularly confident. I was out of my element. I was self-conscious and nervous every bit as much as I was eager to give myse

A small, private moment—almost missed and never intended to be witnessed. The top of a staircase; a glance right instead of left, and a single instant in time becomes the defining line of "before" and "after," a shift in the balance between protected innocence and mutual knowledge. I was eleven, maybe twelve. We were living in Los Angeles at the time, and the stairs were the ones leading from the open space near the family room, up to the landing where my parents and I went our separate ways: my room to the left, the master bedroom to the right. Framed in the doorway, shown in the afternoon light cut to ribbons by the vertical blinds in my parents' room: a desk, curved on its outer edge to form a softened L; the smooth, pale gray surface of a hard, poly-substance, veined with white to look like heavy marble. Behind the desk, a tall-backed chair, wide and thickly padded with light gray suede. A powerful executive chair—one I used to like to swivel in—not at all t

Some experiences—no, many—I wish I could have over again, exactly the way they were except for one thing: I'd like to take my intervening years and their wisdom, maturity, or or insights back with me. I'd like to see with the eyes and feel with the heart I have now, those things that I am tempted to say were wasted on my youth. Full-time student status (the unadulterated chance for learning, with no distractions, that college presented), first love, and many of my travel adventures. Of these last, the one I most wish I could replay: my family's visit to Japan. I was fifteen years old, and both my mother and I got to accompany my father on a business trip to Tokyo, then take the bullet train to Kyoto, where we stayed in a traditional Japanese inn, or ryokan . I'd like to think that I did take advantage of the opportunity, to the full measure of my ability at that time of life. I was mesmerized, curious, immersed myself in small details (the photo here is one I took on th

In the 1970s, my parents and I would go every so often to a fondue restaurant in Chicago called Geja's Cafe. Here I had my first experience of fondue, that communal cooking ritual that became a fad in this country in the sixties and grew in popularity through the next decade as well. If you go to Geja's Web site , you might see their warning: "As always, please remember that Geja's does not allow children under the age of 10 in the restaurant." I have no idea why they say "as always," since this restriction was definitely NOT always in place. I was only turning ten later in the year of 1979—the year we left Chicago to move to Los Angeles. I'd been enjoying dinners at Geja's for years by that point. What I remember from my childhood is bubbly, gooey cheese, popping oil, fruits and cubes of pound cake dipped in chocolate. I loved those long, skinny, two-pronged forks; I felt somewhat grown up being able to cook my own food. But I also have anot

Detroit in the 1970s. My aunt (my mother's sister, the eldest child out of six in the family) had a finished basement in her house, and she would host large family parties there—often I think, although pretty soon after my birth, we left the Detroit area and so were too far away to participate in many of these celebrations. I think I attended two of the parties, but even to me, it felt like a ritual occurrence, such was the welcoming atmosphere, the instant acceptance of family. Jean and Louis (my aunt and uncle), plus their grown kids and my cousins once removed (who were closer in age to me than my first cousins), opened their home and their hearts, their basement and their kitchen to us all. I was very young, so I don't remember much, nor do I trust the memories I do have; they may just be associations. Mostly I remember two things, and the first is culinary. When we came through the front door of the house (or maybe it was a side door? I have an image of a set of two doors,

Discharged from Sloan-Kettering after two weeks of bed rest, I was an atrophied version of my sixteen-year-old self. Atrophied physically from lack of exercise and loss of muscle tone, but also somewhat in spirit. I sported a toe-to-thigh fiberglass cast that immobilized my right leg; my left was graced with a wicked scar. (My surgeon did not give a hoot for the aesthetics of his sutures; he was no plastics man). Weakened, in pain, but nonetheless happy to be leaving, I was wheeled through the hospital doors in a chair, then driven to our family home in Southport , Connecticut. It didn't feel like home to me; my parents had moved to Connecticut when I was away in boarding school. I knew no one there and felt isolated. And then there was the problem of autonomy, or lack thereof. Independent from day one, the family joke is that I "moved out of the house" for the first time the day I was born—two months early and put in an incubator where I "lived alone" for the f

I didn't know what " Googie " architecture was—didn't know Martin Stern Jr., the designer, and couldn't tell you the name of Matthew or Emmett Shipman (or any other of their clan)—but being a Southern California girl at one point in my life, in a certain era, I knew and loved Ships Coffee Shop. There were three of them in Los Angeles, but the one I visited with my family was the one that stood at the corner of Wilshire and, I think, Glendon, marking the edge of Westwood Village. Here is what I remember about Ships, a place that provoked (along with Polly's Pies in Santa Monica) many a comfort-food foray out into restaurant land: I loved the "back to the future" look of the place, the 1960s "space-age" sign, which called to mind a rocket shooting its neon into the (smoggy) California sky. The facade of the building carried through on this visual, with an irregular roof line that echoed the arrow motif. In the early 1980s, the exterior of

Dorothy Hamill, the 1976 Olympic gold medalist in figure skating, and America's Sweetheart for some time after. If you didn't see her on the ice—if you didn't really see her at all—then you saw traces of her image reflected in neighborhood acquaintances who copied her style. In the late 70s and early 80s, everyone knew at least one person with the "Dorothy Hamill 'do," that hairstyle she made incredibly popular: the wedge. Despite the fact that I was dancing, and ballet still mandated long tresses, I made a bold move the summer I was ten and cropped off my hair; it would always grow back. It was the first time I wore my hair that short, and once the shock of being light-headed wore off, I remember thinking that it looked very sophisticated. (Give me a break; as I said, I was only ten!) But since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, this was not exactly a universal opinion. Maybe it was the fact that my wedge may have looked a bit more like a bowl cut than is

I remember the words "giant" and "bone" and "tumor." I remember looking at fuzzy black and white X-ray films (fuzzy-looking to me anyway), and being told that the bone in the lower part of my right tibia was the thickness of an eggshell: a fracture would pose severe risks. The deformity was ever so slightly visible from the outside; there was a softly swollen, bowed look to the outer line of my leg above the ankle. I thought of my ballet mistress, Madame S., and her parting assessment of "thick ankles" when I left the pre -professional dance world of NCSA (see previous posts on dancing). I suddenly longed for the luxury of earlier days when I could still tell myself that anything wrong might be fixed with paraffin wax and Ace bandages. Instead, I sat in the office of one of NYC's top orthopedic surgeons—a near deity with whom an appointment was worth its weight in gold (we obtained one through a man named Stanley G., who worked with my fath

Just days after I received my MFA degree, I got officially engaged (the idea had come up before, in a very unofficial moment). Perhaps my husband was afraid that otherwise I'd decide to go back to Chicago, where I was living before I attended graduate school. There had not been much danger of that, really. By staying in New York, I would be close to my family—the main reason I came back East rather than doing graduate work elsewhere—and also, New York still held its lure as a vital place for someone interested in the publishing industry. I was jobless and was waiting to find out about residencies at artists' colonies to which I had applied, all the while remaining pragmatic and working on employment options in the city. While in this state of limbo, I had a good amount of time on my hands, and much of that time I spent in the apartment that my husband then shared with his brother and another friend. Their place was on East 92 nd Street, on the fifth floor of a brownstone walk-

The myth we believed, to a certain extent, when we left Chicago and moved to Los Angeles in 1979 was that the weather in L.A. was beautiful in the winter. The weather was not the reason we moved, mind you; it was our consolation prize for uprooting ourselves due to a job promotion (my father's). We assumed that we were leaving our tribulations of harsh weather conditions behind, and in terms of the thermostat, I guess we were. The air temperature in Southern California was undeniably milder. We moved at the end of spring, settled in during the summer, and made it through the "Back to School" season without incident. The end of the year, and the holidays with it, took us by surprise--we were lost without our usual seasonal cues of falling mercury, blankets of white--and our Christmas shopping that year was done in a last-minute rush (we simply couldn't believe it really was December). We rounded a new decade: January 1980, then February. We were living in a house, and

Valentine's Day, 1980. Red and white striped rectangular candy box. In my memory, before finding the picture posted here, the stripes covered the entire background, but otherwise, the box is as I remembered it. Old-fashioned Turtles: roasted pecans, chewy caramel, and milk chocolate--before the brand was bought by Nestle. For 29 years, every Valentine's Day, I have remembered with bittersweet sentiment a gifted box of Turtles. That almost counts as a lifetime; it counts as longer than some lives. The candies on this day in 1980 were the most extravagant Valentine's gift I had ever received, with the possible exception of tokens from my parents in previous years. I was in the fifth grade ( Brentwood Science Magnet School, in Los Angeles), and the candies were given to me by a classmate--a girl who was a friend, but a girl whose friendship brought with it certain tests for my developing moral compass. K. M. was a quiet girl, withdrawn and challenged socially in the face of c

It being Friday the 13 th tonight, I have been doing some thinking about "super" things--superstitions and the supernatural in particular. And somehow, this track of thought has led me back to the "tween" days of BFFs (though back then, of course, no one used these terms); to those goofy, giggly, just-starting-to-cop-an-attitude years, when it suddenly became clear that friends were infinitely more important than family. Back then, the most coveted of all invitations for a Friday night was the slumber party. If it was a birthday party, too, so much the better. We would have pizza and cake; we'd strain for the best view of the birthday girl opening presents, making our mental notes (who gave the coolest gift?); we'd spend long moments haggling over where our sleeping bags would go, who'd sleep next to whom (this would invariably provoke friendly accusations of drooling, snoring, talking in your sleep, and so forth); there would be a pillow fight, a game

Am I five years old? Seems about right. At this age, I took a plane by myself from Chicago to Florida to visit my paternal grandparents. (Being the mother of a boy the same age now as I was then, I shudder to think of this.) I remember I was in a window seat and, I think, in a bulkhead row on the right-hand side of the plane; I have a memory of seeing the exit door to the left of where I sat. I recall the widening space between myself and my parents, their worried withdrawal (or was it just my father I glimpsed at that last moment?)—also my sense of perfect security despite being alone. I don't remember the flight itself, what I did to pass the time, if I talked to anyone. I don't remember arriving in the airport in Florida, don't remember the drive to my grandparent's house (in an overly large dull green American boat of a car), but I can clearly see their driveway and the garage through which we entered into Mimi's kitchen. This is the central memory, though: the

Sometimes our memories are visual, sometimes auditory. One of my earliest musical memories is when I had my first turntable—it was white and blue, I think, and definitely crafted for children—and I recall one of the first records I owned: Free to Be . . . You and Me . (Yes, I am seriously dating myself here: not only with the title of the album, but with the fact that music was still mainly vinyl when I was young!) The album was first released in late 1972, but I was older than three when I first heard the songs. We were living in Chicago, on Commonwealth, so I must have been around eight years old. And it was exactly the time in my life when I needed to hear the messages in this socially progressive collection of stories and songs. Now, when I think back on it, I am amazed at what Marlo Thomas and her "friends" (the likes of Alan Alda, for example, and Rosey Grier the pro football player and needlepoint crafter!) accomplished, and what an impact they made on a whole generati

Back in the Paris Métro , I don't remember which station. I was with a couple of friends, G. and (I think) N., one male and one female, both of them participants in my study-abroad program. We were on a cultural excursion that day, waiting to the side of the ticket booth for the entire group to assemble before continuing on toward the platform. I remember it was a very cold day. All the more reason for us to take notice of the two men (Scots, we assumed) in their kilts on the other side of the entry/exit barriers. None of us, not even the most feminine girls, could imagine wearing a skirt on a day that cold—at least not without tights, which the Scots certainly did not have on. They were trying to exit, but were having some difficulty. We watched them attempt repeatedly to get past the barrier without success. Was it N. who asked whether the rumors were true? It was said that men in kilts wore nothing underneath. In a flash, it was decided: the men shrugged and vaulted over the bar

Thirteen years old, on the cusp of my own turbulent waves of adolescence. No longer a child but not yet anything other, I walked with my parents back through time; we stumbled among the rubble of ages, the ruins of Poseidon's temple at Cape Sounion. A spring day, blue Aegean sky and bleached white marble—the temple's Doric columns holding up the heavens, as if to cushion the proud, forgotten Olympians in their centuries of slumber. If they awoke, what would they take me for: supplicant or sacrilegious trespasser? I walked near the promontory's edge, looked across the water in the direction of Crete and saw—what? Was my command of mythology solid enough then to have imagined a ship approaching, its black sail hoisted instead of white? Hellenism, Romanticism—there we saw the name of Byron carved deep into ancient stone. However loyal to Greece, a mortal name gouged into holy marble seems enough to summon a strike of the trident. We strolled the once-sacred ground, now swellin

She was short, very, with a compact build. Not overweight at all, but definitely not exemplary of the type of thin Parisian silhouette so much in fashion, so expected in France. She wore trim black trousers, tight black sweaters, flat black shoes; she wore no lipstick but sometimes lined her eyes, doe-like, in liquid black; sometimes she knotted chiffon scarfs around her neck (she did have a way with fashion nonetheless). Her hair was glossy black and short, slightly wavy. She was Parisian, born and raised, but because of her "Arab" name and her darker complexion, she often faced discrimination. She transformed a lifelong feeling of being marginalized into a streak of deliberate nonconformity and a critical wit. She was my French teacher while I lived and worked in Paris, and I believe she saw herself as an ambassador of the "other" France. She and I became fast friends—we were not all that far apart in age, actually—and she made it her project to usher me past the

Blue, blue, Brazilian blue. My one, my only love is you . . . I may not recall with total accuracy this, or indeed any, specific passage, but to this day I bear the imprint of the text and vivid artwork bound together in the book  Lion and Blue . My father gave this book to me for a birthday in the 1970s (maybe '75 or '76); he inscribed it with words I also can no longer quote verbatim though the emotion behind them still resonates. I was between the ages of six and eight, no more. The book, a fable of love written by Robert Vavra and illustrated with reproduced oil paintings by Fleur Cowles, was published in 1974 by William Morrow & Co, and was marketed as children's literature. It's appeal, however, crossed over to all ages. What I remember most is the deeply saturated hue of the blue Brazilian butterfly with black-veined wings, who was the object of the lion's love. I remember being mesmerized by its intensity, and the color has in fact become a motif in my l

Sitting on a stool in the school infirmary, shoes off, I'd roll the right leg of my sweatpants up to the knee; I'd take up the tights on that leg, too, courtesy of a slit I always cut in the sole. I'd look down into the metal vat of hot liquid wax and plunge my foot in past the ankle, soak for 20 minutes or so. I'd do this several times a week, hoping that this "one size fits most" treatment would do the trick. (Soaking in paraffin wax was recommended frequently, for a variety of complaints that we just shrugged and called overuse, maybe tendinitis, not caring much what it really was, only needing to keep it at bay.) If the treatments did what I hoped, then maybe I'd have less discomfort to dance through, because that was what we all did with our aches, pains, and injuries: we danced through them, Ace-bandaged and ignored them—at least long enough to perfect the choreography in that day's class or rehearsal. The wax was clear-looking in the vat, and al

When we wanted to get out of Los Angeles on a last-minute weekend trip, we would occasionally go to the desert—to Palm Springs, to Desert Hot Springs. It was more of the same, only much more of it: more sun, more hours by the pool, many more palm trees, drier climate. The only thing there was less of, thankfully, was the city's smog (which you forgot about while living in it on a daily basis, but that you saw unmistakably from the sky if you were flying into LAX on the way home from someplace else). We would take the car, because we were always in our car out there, it's unavoidable, and we'd drive east from L.A. on Interstate 10—excuse me, "on the 10." I don't know which season it was, though probably it was not summer. In my experience, the seasons were always confounded in Southern California due to the weather, which didn't qualify as weather at all as far as I was concerned. After having lived in Michigan, Connecticut, New York, and Chicago, it was ha

If we wanted Chinese food, there was only one place we would go when we lived in Los Angeles: Twin Dragon, at 8597 West Pico Boulevard. When we went there, business seemed to be all right, but I suspect that they have gained more of a following since. A quick search turned up a Hollywood celebrity sighting at the restaurant, plus a link to the Twin Dragon Web site . (I am gratified to know they are still there, at the same location where they've been for close to fifty years.) If food quality has stayed the same, then they deserve recognition. I don't know how we discovered it in the early to mid-1980s, but it probably had something to do with the fact that my ballet studio was nearby. We were regulars, my parents and I, stopping by for an early dinner as frequently as once a week, and occasionally bringing guests with us as well. We got to know the owners and all of the wait staff, in particular a waiter who called himself Wilson—his name was incongruous with his nationality