CHAPTER EIGHT
The Center of The Universe
May, 1974
Over the next three months, I had no time to dream about the future, or worry over the past. I spent many days at the CDU endlessly viewing and re-viewing tapes of the 12 mother-infant pairs as they performed in front of our dual-camera setup. I got to know each of them intimately, not only from the 3-minute controlled sessions, but also before and after, chatting with them each time they came in, helping them relax and prepare. Ed had told me to remain “clinically detached” from the subjects, to remain objective in the descriptions I wrote. Looking back on them now, I remember the dissonance of cramming the joy and love I saw into the dry prose of a research study. A typical report of the first few seconds of the interaction might go like this:
“… As his mother comes in, saying, ‘Hello’ in a high-pitched but gentle voice, he follows her with his head and eyes as she approaches him. His body builds up with tension, his face and eyes open up with a real greeting which ends with a smile. His mouth opens wide and his whole body orients towards her. He subsides, mouths his tongue twice, his smile dies and he looks down briefly, while she continues to talk in an increasingly eliciting voice. During this, his voice and face are still but all parts of his body point toward her. After he looks down, she reaches for and begins to move his hips and legs in a gentle, containing movement…”
During Spring and early Summer, I watched 50 tapes, producing a novella of 60,000 words for Ed and Barry to read and turn into a clinical description of the process mothers and their infants went through: “initiation, mutual orientation, greetings, cyclical exchange of affective information in dialogue and games, disengagement.”
“Why do we have to make it all sound detached?” I asked Barry at the end of one particularly tiring day. “I don’t understand why we have to do it this way.”
“How would you rather do it, Sarah?” he asked. He offered the chair in his cluttered office. “You can put those on the floor,” he said, indicating the papers piled on the one other place to sit in his cramped quarters.
“The moms – and the babies, too – they’re obviously feeling something. The smiles, the laughs, the coos, and the touching. Especially the touching. That affective sub-text seems to me the core of the interaction. Everything else flows from that, right?”
With an avuncular tilt of his head, he smiled and said, “I know what you must be feeling as you watch them. It is beautiful, isn’t it? It’s what we all want for every child. But if we’re to help families, mothers, who are having problems with their babies, help them give their kids a better start, then we have to know what it’s like when it’s working well. Nobody has defined what is ‘normal’ for a warm and caring maternal-infant relationship. You’re doing the sort of field work that scientists did 100, 200 years ago, when they started describing and categorizing the natural world. All those observations about geology, plants, and animals, all that had to be done before someone like Darwin could come up with evolution. You are doing important work here, Sarah, important basic science.”
I thought about that, and said, “Hmm. It would be good if we got beyond the speculations of Freud, and could understand what’s really going on between them, mothers and babies.” I frowned, then said, “But what am I supposed to do with all the feelings I’m getting from this? It’s impossible to suppress, to ignore them. Sometimes, all I can think about is sitting with, holding a baby myself, my own baby, and how I would act with her…”
He looked out the window, then back at me, saying, “Don’t ever lose that, Sarah. That’s exactly what I’d like to see happening from this research, but for thousands, millions of mothers.”
At the end of July, I flew out to Seattle, where Linda had promised me I could have her car, a 1970 VW Beetle. The evening before I left, she treated me to a dinner at the top of the Space Needle.
“Watch out when you step across here,” the hostess said as we moved from the stationary center core to the rotating platform where diners slowly revolved through a 360-degree view of the entire Puget Sound, Olympic mountains and Cascade range. While the Olympics faded behind us, and Mt. Rainier glowed white and blue in the setting summer sun, Linda decided I might need some sisterly advice.
“Howard’s gone for good? How does that feel?”
I’d already rehearsed this many time with my therapist, and felt little as I said, “I’m beginning to wonder if I can hold onto a man.”
“What you ought to wonder is, if it’s worth it.” She turned to the window, staring down at the remains of the World’s Fair arrayed below us. “I mean, I’ve decided I don’t want to hold on to someone who cares so much more about himself than me or us.”
“I know what you’re saying. What’s hard, is…I don’t seem to be someone who can have, who wants, a casual relationship. I was lucky. I fell into one or two good ones. Most men , I’m finding are either too rushed, or too distant. Wrapped up in themselves. And I don’t want one just to have a warm body, you know.”
She nodded, poking at her crab salad.
I went on, “I’m so engaged in these studies I’m doing at Barry’s lab, along with trying to keep up at B.U., I don’t have the time, the mental or emotional energy to get involved with anyone new.”
“Maybe you need to get clear?” she suggested.
“Don’t start, Linda. Don’t start. My engrams are fine.” I winced, then added, “I’m sorry.”
She sighed, them smiled. “Your loss…”
“For now, I’m thinking I may end up like Howard’s aunt, Jane, the one who got married, then found out he was really gay, a closet homosexual. They got divorced when she was in her early 30’s, she must have soured on men, she’s lived like a spinster ever since.”
“How’s that work for her?”
I said, “She seems fine with it, she says she gets to create, to have her own life. But to me, it seems a little sad, like she’s missing something.”
“What?”
I was surprised when I said, “Kids. She doesn’t have any kids. That just feels…wrong.”
Linda smirked. “I thought you were a feminist, sister. Never knew you wanted to be a suburban housewife.”
I frowned, shook my head, and picked the bones out of my salmon filet.
I left the next day for British Columbia, spending a night at the farm Howard and I had visited on our epic road trip two years earlier. I had planned to spend a few days there, but the memories were still too poignant, too confusing, to hang out for long, so I pushed the chattering, quivering little Beetle on through the Canadian Rockies towards the plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan. The mountains looked different than in Colorado or Idaho or Montana, great walls of granite without the curves and peaks further south. After spending the night in Banff, I rushed past Calgary, on through wheat fields and past endless lakes. Since leaving Linda, I had not seen a newspaper nor heard an American radio station, I felt myself encysting, enclosed in the little car, responsible to no one for anything. Finally, I thought, a road trip for myself. Somewhere past Regina, the local station came through with a static-marred “Me and Bobby McGee”, by Janis Joplin. Listening to the power of her scratchy singing, I was oddly reminded of the Barbra Streisand of my teen-age years. I vaguely remembered Mike observing that, though totally different in their styles and sound, each poured a crescendo of pure emotion into her music. That led me to the tragedy of her death, and the sadness of that particular song. I could barely see the road through the tears.
As I pulled off, an announcer intoned, “CBC interrupts this program with a special bulletin from Washington, DC, already in progress.”
A man was saying a sonorous, somber tone, “…And now, President Nixon is walking towards the helicopter. He steps up the ladder. Now, he turns around, smiles and waves one arm over his head. He enters the helicopter, ducking his head while he places his arm around Pat. Down on the South Lawn, President Ford is heading to the podium…”
My head exploded. Why are they interrupting my music with a routine departure from the White House? And what is this about “President Ford?”
By the time I got to Niagara Falls, I had read enough to realize that, as some were saying, “Our great national nightmare is over.” I was too much a child of the ‘60s to believe that for a second.
ii
A fat envelope awaited me on my return, postmarked “Los Angeles”. Inside, I found a sheaf of onion-skin secured with a paper clip. The attached card read, in it’s entirety, “Janie – I’m writing stories now, not poems. – Mike”
THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDER THE HOUSE
“I’d like to move out here to the beach,” I ventured. I was staring out the window of April’s second-floor efficiency apartment (complete with a Murphy bed), straining to see the ocean beyond the houses crammed along the boardwalk.
“Why? It’s so far away from the hospital.” (Of course, she worked at the same hospital.) I’d have to be careful answering. I couldn’t come right out and tell her I wanted to move in together, not yet. She still seemed like she might be scared away by signs of clinging permanence.
“You’re on the edge here. Los Angeles is so big and over-built. Where I am, it’s sixty miles in any direction until you get away from concrete and people. But here – I can walk down to the water, and there’s nothing out there for thousands of miles. Gives me a feeling of freedom, of space, of being alone in the big city.” I’d always liked space and aloneness, I figured. So why did I want to move in with someone else for the rest of my life?
“But what about Rick? You can’t just abandon him, can you?” I shared a house in Alhambra with another intern. We were the sole survivors of our medical school house of five; the other three had dispersed across the country seeking the grail of perfect knowledge in post-graduate training.
“I can talk him into coming out here – he’s always liked the beach.” I didn’t tell her he would be leaving after this year to take a residency somewhere else. My plan was to bait and switch – get a house for Rick and I, then, when he left, entice April to move in.
A few days later, she came up to me at the hospital. “There’s a house for rent over on Wavecrest.”
Aha! She’s not scared off after all; she’s actually interested in having me close by! “What’s it like?”
“It’s really neat. It’s two houses in from the street” – meaning Pacific; all the houses between Pacific and the beach were on walkways perpendicular to the ocean, with alleys behind – “and it’s got this sunroom in front, all glass and light.”
Wow, this was serious. She’d been over to see it and size it up, I thought. I let her continue, which was what I did best.
“It’s got three bedrooms, a refrigerator and stove. And it’s $450 a month” This was three times what she was paying now, more even then Rick and I paid in Alhambra for a suburban tract house.
“You wanna go look at it sometime?”
The house was a salt box, probably forty or fifty years old. One story, 20 by 50 feet. A white, slanted roof covered a tiny attic, with the main portion painted a faded deep blue. A concrete set of stairs marched up from the postage stamp-sized dirt front yard to a lead glass door opening into the main room. A glassed-in porch took up the remainder of the front. Windows on three sides captured the morning light in spring and summer, and evening sunsets most of the year. Three bedrooms and two baths took up one side of the house, the main room and kitchen/dinette the other.
We creaked through the cramped spaces, imagining what it would be like to be in a complete house, near the beach, with beds that stayed on the floor, a bathroom you could turn around in, and room for more than one in the kitchen.
I turned to April. “You know, I bet I could talk Rick into moving in here. Then we could afford it.”
April seemed a little disappointed. “Why would you want to do that?”
“Well, we are sharing a house together. I wouldn’t want to leave him high and dry. Just for a while, until he decides he can get somewhere on his own. Besides, I think he wants to live near the beach.” Actually, Rick had no desire to leave Alhambra. Even more practical than I, he liked the 15 minute drive to work, and would balk, I knew, at the traffic heading into town along the Santa Monica. But, quiet as he was, he wouldn’t want to be marooned. He’d move, and we’d hardly see him anyway.
April set me up with the landlady. What she mainly wanted was $900 and proof of permanent employment. She seemed pleased she was getting two doctors in her house.
“The last ones who were here – complete slobs! Didn’t work a lick; just parked their motor cycles here in the living room, and in the front yard.” I looked down at the dark grease stains in the carpet. No wonder there was no grass out front. The landlady narrowed her eyes at me. “You really a doctor? Your hair’s so long! They let you look like that at the hospital?” Slight pause. She went on, “You’re an intern, huh? I guess you work, what, 80 hours a week? You got a motor cycle?”
“No, just a bike. I ride it down the beach sometimes.”
“Well, don’t fix it inside!” she snapped. “Here’s my address, and phone. Mail the checks before the end of the month. If you have any problems, give me a call.” She looked out the window at the house next door. “You ought to meet those folks there. Regular family. He’s an engineer, she writes plays. They’ve got a kid. If you have any problems, maybe they can help you.” It was clear maintenance was going to be a do-it-yourself sort of thing. “When’re you going to move in?”
“Probably this weekend. I’m on call Fri-“
“Huh!?”
“On call, have to stay at the hospital all night, get the next day off.”
“You do this often, stay at the hospital?”
“Every third night …”
Her eyes lit up. She glanced at me up and down, at my tie and slacks. “Great! Just keep it neat when you move your stuff in. Oh, and no waterbeds. The last folks had a water bed; it broke the floor in there” – she threw her chin at the front bedroom, where I was going to put my waterbed – “and we had to patch it up underneath, give it a little support.”
“Underneath?”
“Yeah, there’s a crawl space under there with trusses and such. We put a new one in, so the floor wouldn’t cave in.”
“Oh”
“Well, don’t forget the rent. Call if you need me.” She waddled down the back steps into her car, and drove out the alley to Pacific.
When I left college, everything I owned fit in my car. That’s the way I kept it until I moved into my first unfurnished house, near MacArthur Park (the one that melted in the dark in that old song). The house was two stories, with four bedrooms upstairs, and one down. I built a dining room “table” out of two by sixes, and a waterbed frame made from four 2 by twelve’s, stained and nailed together. The table was too heavy to move, so I left it. The bed frame knocked apart, and fit into my car, a ’66 Dodge Charger, with the back seats folded down. It must have taken at least two car loads to move my stuff the forty miles from Alhambra to the beach.
It could have been the pounding that woke him up, I don’t know. But after that second load, I started putting the bed together, simply pounding the nails back into their old slots. I had draped the liner (an old waterbed sliced open) onto the floor and up over the side boards, and was about to put the $10 mattress on top, when the knock came on the door. April answered it while I tried to plug the hose fitting into the bath tub outlet.
“Mike, there’s somebody here who wants to talk with us.” April had a little question mark in her voice, indicating she didn’t know quite what to make of him and wanted my help. She’d been in Venice for more than nine months, and had gotten a good feel for how crazy, stupid, or weird some of the inhabitants could be. So I perked up when she signaled her distress.
When I got to the door, I saw confusion, not concern in her eyes. We both knew crazy people, and this guy was clearly a marginally functional schizophrenic. He had the Thorazine shakes, or the Prolixin hop. His clothes were there, but he’d stopped being aware of them some time ago. Somebody had talked him into a hair cut a while back, but couldn’t get him to follow through with a comb. Or a razor. He was dark blond, average sized, Hollywood good-looking, and on the street.
“See, the last people who lived here let me keep my stuff under the house,” he was saying.
“The last people?” I tried. Three summers on a psych ward had taught me that repeating their words back to them was a good way to help schizophrenics make a little sense. It keeps them on track, as long as you want to go there with them.
“Yeah … uh … they said … I could put … you know, I would keep my stuff under there, I wouldn’t bother you at all. I’d be very quiet coming in and out. Those last people, they said they never even knew I was there. I had a lock I’d put on that little door, to keep my stuff safe..” He was trying to make it seem like he came with the house. But he had no leverage, so he was being cautious, trying desperately to size me up through his psychotic fog.
“Now why would I want to let you do that? What would I get out of it?” I figured I could bargain with him, try to inject some level of rationality in what was obviously, to both of us, an absurd situation – a crazy street bum asking for a handout, not of money, but of space.
“Well, you’d have a place to keep your stuff. I’d let you know the combination.”
Schizophrenics have a kind of ESP. They know what other people are feeling, and aren’t afraid to feed it back to them. It also works the other way around. I could sense that he wanted to reassure me he was normal, in some ways, and wouldn’t want to hide anything from me.
“How do I know it’s safe? What if you’re keeping something illegal there, like drugs? Do you have any drugs?” I thought I’d start being directive with him, see how far I could push this.
” No, I don’t have any … the only drugs I have are, you know, prescription drugs, medicines I take.” I didn’t doubt that.
This guy appeared the same age as me, about 25. We’d been through the sixties together, and learned the same lesson – it’s us against them, the young folks against The Man. We had to stick together, and if your brother was a little down, and you had some to share, then you’d do your best to help. This guy was not dangerous. He had such a tenuous hold on himself, he could never put one on anybody else.
April’s brother had been in and out of the mental hospital at Camarillo since he was a kid. She knew every bum had a mother, a sister or brother, who’d tried to have a real life with them. She’d knew folks so far on the edge, they couldn’t see back towards the center. She didn’t want to live there herself, but if someone was marginal because they were crazy, or dull, she’d give them the benefit of the doubt. It seemed like a Karmic thing: if she was kind to other schizophrenics, someone would look out for her brother. She’d purged whatever demons had infested her, but she knew others never made it past purgatory, where this guy clearly was going to spend the rest of his life. We both wanted to ease his passage to wherever he would stumble next. Somehow he knew that about us.
Besides, I figured in his state, he was making all this up – an elaborate story hoping to get us to tell him he could crash in our house that night. But I played it straight, and told him, “OK man, but listen: We don’t want you staying here. You can leave your stuff under there, if it’s already there. Just don’t bother us – we don’t want to hear you or see you. OK?”
“Yeah, thanks, that’s great, man. You won’t be sorry. You won’t see me, I won’t be here except to get at my stuff now and then. I live at a house up in Santa Monica.”
After that, we didn’t see him again, and we began to worry. So one day, we walked around to the side of the house, and found the door into the crawl space underneath the front porch. It was a small, sorry collection of stuff we found there: discarded clothing, some canned food, a few prescription bottles, almost nothing of value or personal interest. For the past fifteen years, I’d lived in special environments, academic havens where the smart and rich were pampered, prodded, and prepared to propagate more smart, rich, successful progeny. It was one thing to read a magazine, or watch a film about down-and-out folks on the margin. I could even see and touch them when they came into the ER, psych ward, or medical clinics. But to live in the same neighborhood with the underclass, to share a house with someone who used a crawl space for a closet, and the street for a living room – this quite literally brought home a three-dimensional picture of another way to live. For the first time in my life, I knew how lucky I was, how fragile comfort can be, and the value of dogged persistence in building some protection, some shelter from the chaotic spasms of a world that didn’t care about me, no matter how nice it seemed on the surface.
iii
My therapist returned from her August vacation just in time to save me from complete collapse before I started classes again my second year at B.U. As usual, we did not discuss her time off. I so wanted to ask her whether she, like many other Boston and New York analysts, spent that time on Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket. A great source of fantasy for me, but she assiduously avoided any possibility of transference on that topic.
“What did you think, when you read Mike has found someone else to move in with? Do you still have conflict over whether that should have been you?”
Having dealt with my feelings alone for two weeks, I was ready with an answer. “It’s his life, isn’t it? That particular ship of dreams sailed a long time ago for me. I know I’m happy for him, on the intellectual plane. It’s what he’d been looking for, all these years, I suspect, someone to play on the beach with.”
“You never wish that could have been you?”
“Apart from me loving it here in Boston, and him being enraptured with California life, yes, I do think about that now and then.” I didn’t want to open up any further about that, so I stayed silent, staring at the picture of a storm-tossed clipper ship on the wall next to her diplomas.
On cue, she persisted, “When you do, what do you feel?”
I sighed, knowing she would not let this go. “Sadness. Faded love. I wonder what he’s like, what she’s like, what they are like together. But not enough to find out. I’m ready to leave that behind completely. I don’t have time for memories, for the could-have-beens in the past. It’s hard enough working on a doctorate. Maybe it’s sublimation, turning things like that, like Howard leaving, into energy for, say, coming up with a thesis topic. I’m 25 now. They are part of me, always will be, and I’m grateful for that. But I don’t need them for me to be who I want to be. I’m getting there on my own”
To my amazement, she seemed satisfied. “And what about that thesis, Sarah?”
I smiled, and said, “I have the first meeting with my advisor next week.”
Julia Klein was one of the few female psychologists in the department at B.U. After getting her Ph.D. from Yale 10 years earlier, she had stayed in New Haven until offered a tenure track in Boston in 1969. I asked for her after discovering her interest in childhood trauma, its effects and prevention. I thought she could help me use my experiences in the Childhood Development Unit to find a suitable study topic for my dissertation.
“It’s a hidden truth, Sarah,” she told me at our first meeting. “The men in our profession don’t see it, or won’t admit it, but millions of women know, abuse of children leaves scars that often get hidden.” I nodded, not knowing where she might be going with this. “It’s the source, the fount of so many problems which bring people to a therapist.”
“What do you mean, ‘abuse’? People hitting their kids? Getting angry at them, emotional trauma?”
“Well that certainly does happen, but those things have not been kept in the shadows. I’m not talking about getting yelled at, or spanked or beaten.” She paused, blinked her eyes rapidly, and went on. “Girls suffering at the hands of the men in their lives, young girls, teenagers, who are used by their fathers, brothers, uncles, neighbors. Then made to feel ashamed, as if it was their fault for being born female.”
I’d certainly heard about this, but never connected it before to the study of psychology. Freud certainly didn’t give it much credence. “I see,” was all I could say.
“Sexual abuse. Childhood sexual abuse. It can be so traumatizing, disorganizing a young woman’s relationship with her body, leading her to look for love in, say, risky sexual encounters. Damaging her ability to care for and raise her child if she does get pregnant. Since we don’t talk about it very much, it hasn’t been studied well. If we don’t study it, we can never know how to help those who suffer from it, or help create a better environment so it doesn’t happen, break the cycle, so to speak.”
Not knowing how to respond, I looked over at a painting on the wall to my left. A blue-jay, caught in raucous mid caw, its beak open, head tilted back, sat on a dark evergreen surrounded by impressionist yellow sun-splotches. “That’s an interesting painting,” I ventured.
“Oh, thank you. It’s one of mine, my hobby. So relaxing, to paint pure nature, after spending all day in the often dark corridors of the human mind.”
“Beautiful,” I murmured.
As if to herself, she said, “Art labors to make whole what is incomplete, to supplement by an act of imagination the fragments and scraps of life.”
I pulled out my pen, asking, “Wow, can you say that again?”
“Not mine,” Julia said. “I heard it last summer, in England, talking with a woman named Briggs, a Virginia Woolf scholar.”
All that Fall, we discussed possible thesis topics. Our bi-weekly sessions were the highlight of that year, as we talked about combining what interested me – mothers and their new babies – with what might be valuable for the future of our science.
“Young women – girls – who get pregnant. Is there anything we can do to help them get on the right path with their babies? What makes some of them more resilient, better able to love and nurture their child, instead of ignoring, rejecting, or otherwise inhibiting, harming their growth?” Julia mused one December morning. “That’s something which would draw together all the threads of your interests, all your passion, Sarah.”
iv
Early Spring, another fat envelope from LA, another of what Mike called his “Venice Stories”.
OUR DOG HAS MORE FRIENDS THAN WE DO
“Go get it, Buff. Come on boy, you’ve got it! OK, now bring it back!” April and I watched our 8 week-old Golden Retriever puppy, “Great White Buffalo”, pad into the water on giant paws, snatch a stick from the foam, and waddle hyper-kinetically back up the sloping sand to our feet. He smiled crazily, having retrieved from water at his master’s command for the first time in his life.
“Geez, these guys must be bred for this – they do it naturally.”
“You’ve never done this before?”
“Well, just in the living room, you know, throwing that sock. But we’ve never trained him or anything, never given him a reward for fetching.” I marveled at the Darwinian strength of his instincts.
“Look at him,” April pointed. “He’s trying to swim!” This little guy had bug eyes as he tasted salt water. Madly dog paddling, he stayed one stroke ahead of a breaker with a stick the size of his leg clamped in his mouth.
Buff lives in our front yard, with his step-mother Tasha, a Collie/Shepherd mix saved from the pound a year or two before we bought Buff purebred from a breeder in Diamond Bar. She’s smart and cautious where Buff is quick and reactive. They spend their days rooting amidst the weeds in the 10′ by 20′ patch of turf in front of our house, lazing on the porch when the sun gets too hot. They live for our morning and evening walks down to the beach.
Our own little patch of sand stretches between two piles of rocks, one anchoring a storm drain outlet, the other a T-shaped jetty protecting the beach from northbound waves. Evenings, I open the gate to our little yard, and let the dogs trot down the sidewalk, tugging at leashes, to the open sand past the boardwalk. There, I free them from restraint, and Buff whips away towards the water like some alcohol-fueled funny car whose drag chute has failed to open. His tongue lurching out to one side, he rockets straight over the sand, front and rear paws working like horizontal pistons – first spread out in front and far behind, then rammed all four together underneath. Tasha, the lady, has a more stately entrance to the water. While Buff bounds first on his front feet, and then his rear, she works each side in tandem. I almost expect her to prance along with her tail in the air like some Disney poodle or Aristocat.
Buff never has figured out that he can’t chase a stick until I get there. To kill time and cool his jets while waiting for me to catch up, he’ll hit the water and do a quick 180, catching his tail in the languid pools left over from the waves. He’ll throw his snout down into the wet sand, and jump up like a bare back bronc trying to buck a rodeo cowboy. Finally, Tasha and I amble up and I heft the stick I’d brought along.
Living in Venice, and spending the rest of my time in a hospital or on the freeway, I don’t have easy access to trees, alive or dead. So I had grabbed a scrap of two by two one day from a construction site, about two feet long, and saved it by the door as Buff’s fetching stick. I’d skim it over the water, trying to land it past the breakers’ peaks. As soon as my arm goes back for the fling, Buff runs until the water hits his chest. Then he jumps up a bit, and paddles out to sea, hoping to spy the flying stick over his head while keeping spray out of his eyes. (He’s so eager to fetch, I can easily fool him four or five times in a row with a fake toss, if I want some cheap amusement.) No matter where I throw, he’ll reach the stick within a second or two after it leaves my hand; turning as he grabs, he swims, then runs back to my side, simultaneously dropping the stick at my feet and soaking my legs with his shake. Then he’ll sit down, tongue lolling, and give me that Golden idiot grin while panting heavily, waiting for me to throw again.
He’s tireless. My arm will give out long before he ever does. Ten, twenty, thirty times in a row – he never quits, always wants more. A regular canine boomerang.
Tasha is more genteel, of course. While Buff is swimming himself to exhaustion, she taps along the edge of the foam, taking care never to let the water get above her ankles. She’ll race in and out as the waves break and fall, running a zig-zag along the squishy waterlogged sand, barking encouragingly while Buff does all the work.
When I get tired, April and I walk from one rock wall to the other and back. We link arms behind each other’s back, lock hips side-by-side, and synchronize our steps to sway together. If we time it right, and the wind and smog cooperate, we hit my favorite time of night, that magic light a half hour before sunset.
When the sun angles low over the northwest, and the air is scooped clean by a passing winter storm, the beach becomes electric. Each facet of the cups in the choppy water shows a different side to the light, yet a rhythmic regularity comes out of the bobbing wavelets. Not yet the dullness of sunset, and no longer the harshness of the fading afternoon, the light is both softened and sharpened. In the distance, the horizon shimmers at its jagged junction with the sky. The sun is changing from white to yellow. Reflections coming off the serrated surface of the sea hit the eye like a thousand crystal prisms shining in my face. And the sand, now starting to dampen from the invading evening fog, catches each and every aspect of the light show, transforming into a purely psychedelic backdrop for the whole affair.
The sand, shimmering back at us, gives up its heat absorbed throughout the day. Lazy waves, their washing sounds surrounding us like a silk headdress, a swaying walk with April, dogs lapping at our sides, light coming at us like a fireworks show seen through closed eyelids, cocooning warmth of sand contrasting with the cool wet mush beneath our bare feet – evenings like that with my little family on the beach at Venice seem the center of the world, a place from which all life could emanate.
And a place you’d never want to leave. But the secret of Southern California nights, even in the summer, is the air gets cool as the sun goes down. Unlike the Midwest, a thousand miles from any cooling ocean, the beach at night can turn downright chilly. Forget your sweater, ignore your jacket, insist on shorts, and goose bumps crawl up your legs like an army of pinching spiders, pulling your skin tight before the shakes start up. So we’d tramp back home, pull up the latch on our front gate, pet the dogs one last time on the porch steps, and move inside for an evening of home life.
Sometimes we’ll go down to the boardwalk without the dogs, and they’ll moan a bit, jumping up to get their front paws on the five foot high edge of the solid wood fence surrounding our yard. We give them a pet or two, and turn away. Coming back, we might see walk a stranger talking softly and petting Buff, or saying “hi” to Tasha (she was more reserved, and wouldn’t come to the fence for just anyone). This gave us the idea to announce Buff’s birthday to his friends. We put up a little sign, saying “Wish Buff Happy Birthday (He’s 1 today!).”
“This dog is so cool! He’s the friendliest pup. I always bring him something when I come by. He seems to love biscuits.” A lanky long-hair smiled up at me when I came out on the porch to gather the morning sunshine before going to work. He leaned over the fence and scratched Buff, who was standing on his hind legs, leaning against the top rail of the fence. He clearly knew this guy. “Yep, this feller’s my friend. He and I talk every day. Maybe I should get him a present or something. What’s he like?”
“Well, he probably likes being petted as much as anything.”
All day, April said, people stopped by and said “Hi” to Buff. Street people, suited people, sandaled people, hippies, surfers, guys, gals, old folks, kids, cops and robbers. Hardly anybody we knew, though. Buff had a secret life he carried on while we were away at work. We only got him for those morning and evening walks down to the beach, but his fans got him all the rest of the time. He had so much love, though, we never knew the difference. He’s very easy to share.