Birthday Cake and Bears

from Pinterest

Last night's dream:

The cake was the most important thing. I had to get the cake for my 16-year-old daughter's birthday. Some other mom had ordered it for us, insisting there had to be a fancy cake and a party when, really, our lives were unraveling. This other mom had planned everything--picked a date and a time and sent out invitations. My daughters and I were between houses, halfway moved, not sure where to sleep and what belongings were where. A party seemed impossible. 

The cake was from a special bakery in an L.A. neighborhood I'd never been to. Some inner city suburb, or it's own separate town within the city. It had an interesting name I've been trying all morning to remember. Hidalgo. Trivalgo. Something pleasant and slightly exotic. I looked it up on the map on my phone. Oh. There. It wasn't far. We drove over a huge bridge, a friend and I, to get there. There was a taxi stand and an information kiosk at the bridge. I didn't quite remember the name of the bakery, even though the other mother had told me twice. Dark something. Or something Black. I looked up bakeries on my iPhone. Dark Orpheus was the name of one of the bakeries, so I asked the information guy where it was. Walk through the canyon, the guy said. It's so beautiful. So we left my car parked near the bridge and set out. 

The canyon was deep and lined with fallen leaves. The walls of the canyon were pocked with small caves. There was bear scat on the trail.  By now, my younger daughter (not the birthday girl) had joined my friend and me, and so I had to worry, not just for my friend and me, but for my daughter too. I knew a bear would find us. At the very end of the the canyon, we had to scale a rock wall to get out. The hand and foot holds were easy, but we had to climb past a deep cave. The bear came roaring out of the cave just as I was near the top of the rocks. My friend covered himself in leaves and the bear tore past him. Run, I yelled. Shouldn't I play dead? he asked. Run, I yelled again, and he got to his feet, the leaves sticking to him so that he looked like a person made of leaves. My daughter was far behind. I turned and could see her blond ponytail bobbing as she took a steeper part of the canyon wall at a run, charging to the top like a super-hero. The bear didn't chase us.

There was something somber about the bakery. The wait staff wore black t-shirts and black pants and black bow ties. I couldn't remember the name of the mother who ordered the cake, so I asked if they had a birthday cake with my daughter's name on it. They did. It was tall with a hard shell of dark chocolate icing. It was elegantly decorated, her name written in a swirling script.  But we didn't want to carry the cake all the way back to the car, so I went to get the car, but there was some kind of problem, and now it was getting late. The bakery might be closed when we got back, so I took a taxi and had the taxi driver call them and plead, all the while I was getting texts from my friend to hurry. They wouldn't give the cake to anyone but me. 

I made it. But no one had money for the taxi back, so we walked, marveling at the city. There were many ornate tall buildings and terrazzo sidewalks. We cut through the lobby of a classic cinema, balancing the cake in its box while we admired the gold mortar between the dark granite blocks of the smooth and sparkling walls. We have to come back here, we said.

But now had to get to the party. But where was the party? New house? Old house? Would my daughter's father come? He'd said he would, but we knew maybe he wouldn't. Should some of us go to one house and the rest to the other house in case some guests showed up at the wrong place?

Somehow the party happened. People seemed to have a nice time. The house looked good. There were patters of food shining in the candlelight. My ex-husband was there. He and I spoke. Some mystery was revealed, but this morning I have no idea what it was. And I never got a piece of that cake.

******

I'm always grateful for an elaborate dream. And even though I'm often scared when I dream of bears, this bear incident resolved itself rather easily, even though I know that in real life a person can't outrun a bear. 

I Googled the name of the bakery. You never know. There's a restaurant called Orpheus New Orleans Cuisine. It's in New Zealand. 

Interesting that there is still some processing of the divorce and mothering of teen-agers. But even that felt like a welcome respite from the current political reality.

What have you been dreaming about?

Happy Mother's Day

Jacaranda Trees in Bloom at Grand Park, Los Angeles

I rode the train into downtown L.A. today.
Time travel.
There I was at the Oxnard train station, walking along the platform where two years ago, I would have met Dan as he stepped off the train, coming to see me for the weekend.  
Time travel.
There I was with a ticket marked "senior fare." As if I'd been asleep and awakened to find myself a senior citizen (by Amtrak standards anyway.)
Time travel.
I swear this park didn't exist the last time I was downtown, its wide swath of trees and fountains leading directly to the Music Center.
Time Travel.
It's Mother's Day. Last year I had a mother to celebrate with. This year I do not.
You go along and you go along, and then all of a sudden you are without the people you can't imagine being without. You yourself are old enough to get the senior discount, and a technicolor park emerges from the gray cityscape of the City of Angels.
There's nothing to be done but weep and celebrate, drink champagne, eat escargot and mussels with  the beautiful young woman who was once a baby in your arms and take the train back home.

Friday Night Dream, Remembered and Receding

Dream:

We stood in the corner of a pasture. Or a yard given over to shagginess. A rock, a fence post, a tree--trunk gnarled with branches bending low. "Here," someone said. And we went in like Alice, the fall not like a fall at at all. When we arrived at this place below the earth the sky was still blue, the grass still green.

My 23-year-old daughter was a child of five or six again, her hair its childhood golden hue as she ran by holding the hand of a friend. "Wait," I said. "I want to look at you." She obliged just for a moment, turned and laughed. Then she ran forward to her future from this place in the past where I had been allowed a visit.

photo credit: The Someone (taken by him, but edited by me)

We All Fall Down

The first time I lived in New York City,  I arrived on a sweltering summer afternoon. Through the windows of the taxi I saw a rainbow stretching across the skyline while children shouted and splashed in the spray of open fire hydrants. My friends took me to a concert in Central Park that night, and as we walked home I was giddy with fact that New York would be my city for the next six weeks while I rehearsed a show that would tour middle schools in Wisconsin and Indiana. I lived in New York for another rehearsal period the next year, and then again for the summer of 1984 while I studied at HB Studios.

Counter to prevailing opinion, New Yorkers seemed to me to be friendly and talkative. I loved brushing shoulders with other people on my morning commute to rehearsal. The "bar car" on the Friday afternoon return to Grand Central was certainly far more congenial than being sealed in one's lonely automobile in L. A. I stumbled getting off a bus once in mid-town and and was scooped up and set on my feet by a man who was about to get on. He insisted on waiting for the next bus to be sure I was okay and to give me the name of a good shoe repair because the heel of my shoe had cracked in the mishap. Bus drivers gave me advice on how to get from here to there and how to vary that route if I was going to be coming home late at night by myself.

By February of 1986, I had a new baby. The acting career was finished, and I spent my days in a 450-square-foot apartment in the middle of Los Angeles. New York might have been a better environment  for my daughter and me back then. It would have easier to mix with other mothers and babies, to feel the hum of humans going about their days. Yes, there would have icy sidewalks and snow. But isolation is cold, too.

Five years after the birth of my first daughter, I considered that I might be suffering from some kind of late-onset postpartum insanity when I planned our first big family vacation that didn't revolve around a visit to see family in the Midwest. New York seemed like an off-kilter place to take a two-year-old, a five-year-old, and my mom and her twin sister who were then in their mid-sixties. If it turned to chaos, I'd be the one to blame. I bought theater tickets, made dinner reservations, planned which attractions we'd visit, and in a stroke of mothering genius, made our first stop FAO SWARZ where my daughters were each allowed to choose a new toy. Despite an emergency trip to Woolworth's on our second morning to buy a stroller (a two-year old in L.A. is quite capable of walking to the car), the vacation was a show-stopping hit. We returned nearly every spring for the next sixteen years.

The towers and the Pentagon had already been hit when my cell phone rang the morning of September 11th, 2001. My mother, who was living outside of Washington D.C., called to tell me the news. Instead of driving to the Burbank airport to board a plane to Arizona to see my son's new baby, I sat on my bed, alone, and watched on TV as the towers fell. My younger daughter and my husband were on a school camping trip and unreachable. My older daughter was in boarding school an hour away, and when I called the school office to see if I could speak to her, I was told that the administration was handling all communications to the student body.

I drove to a coffee shop not far from the school and watched another hour or so of coverage on their TV. Then I sat in my car in the coffee shop parking lot, checking the news on the radio every so often to see if L.A. had been hit. If the world was going to end, at least there was a chance of  getting to one of the people I loved.

Full Circle

I stood  under a shade tree on a St. Paul street and watched as my daughter finished up her workday this afternoon. Pint-sized athletes cheered and high fived, then dropped soccer balls into the net bag she held open  for them. Water bottles and backpacks were rounded up. Parents sauntered onto the field and ushered their children to mini vans. A movie of my life--one of those moments when something comes full circle. Fifteen years ago I was the mom in droopy jeans and a drab t-shirt picking the grass out of a little blond girl's hair as she bargained for a fast-food burger. Today I was the coach's mom visiting from California, my daughter behind the wheel chauffeuring  me.

I was not a sporty child. Softball was the playground game during my growing up years.  Struck unconscious by both bats and balls, I was equally afraid on the outfield and waiting my turn to bat. I  was the girl picked last every recess, relieved on the days when red rover was substituted for softball until I was reminded how much it hurt my hands to have someone plow through the clenched barrier. Dodge ball, given my Catholic education, seemed to me to be a sport invented at the Roman Coliseum, an imperfect blend of cruelty and entertainment.

I never expected to have an athletic child--or to have a moment like this morning where the smell of grass and sweat brought that little girl back to me at the same moment that she stood there in the sunshine, a grown woman.