Back at the junkyard.

Feb. 2, 2008, Dallas.

We're back at the family junkyard, don Sandro's house in the fast becoming Latino, formerly Black barrio of West Dallas. It makes for a good trailer with a view, and you can't beat the free rent - and the lively family.

San Francisco.

Jan. 27, Dallas, Texas.

To the friends we left in the Bay Area: Beverly and Bob, always there with something for the kids, garage sales fanatics, Beverly with the quick wit behind her good humor ("Have you met a terrorist lately?" ,) just seeing them drive in made me happy, Margaret and her big heart, Richard and Frank and Tim, their hospitality, Natalie and Marc, friends of the spirit, always.
This is what we left.

San Francisco, Nov. 21, 2007.

To Hugo.

Jan. 20, Hugo, Oklahoma.

It took us a week to come from northern California. A week to enter another world altogether, a week of bitter cold nights, strange bedfellows and a sordid motel.
We left El Cerrito on Monday, almost six months to the day after Circus Chimera closed unexpectedly in early July. It was six months of paradise suspended, perfect weather and enchanted places, the Metro Hotel in Petaluma with Paris the cat where my mother and her friend Margaret stayed, a ride through postcard dairy country along the highway to Bodega Bay and the chowder at the seaside cafe, strolling through the "historic downtown," shopping at a posh of malls (complete with valet parking) in Marin county just a few blocks from the trailer park we had moved to, looking for Christmas presents with my mother after Margaret left and Fridman went to Texas, then to Vegas, leaving us to ourselves and the babies, and time disappeared from under us as it does and the month and a half of her visit was up and we took her to the airport in San Francisco and Dylan started crying when she stepped into the security area and he could not follow.
It took us a week to travel from northern California.
It became cold when we were in Las vegas, sleeping in the trailer parked on the street at a friend's house one night. We bundled up, the four of us arranged like dominoes in the full-size bed, head to toes and the babies in between, sweat-pants and socks, extra layers under the triple blankets, and Dylan being Dylan keeps throwing off the covers, the cold wind blowing in from the head of the bed, it is open because Fridman never finished the job of reconstructing the wall and there is a gap two inches wide where the air comes through, so out he goes in the night with duck tape the next day at an RV park lost in the desert dust somewhere in Kingman, Arizona, to try and close the gap, and it works, it is less cold in the bedroom, but it is colder the day after in Albuquerque, and the heaters fail to warm us up as we eat dinner in the trailer after a day's drive across two states, and a water drop which failed to fall at the tap instead has turned into ice, and it is cold, cold, cold when we go to bed, not warmed up by the food but chilled, still, and daylight brings only the illusion of relief as we embark onto another day on the road, dreaming maybe it could be the last? the babies are quiet and let us drive hours at a time, not a 12-hour stretch as I used to do driving across the country by myself but still, but then the truck stalls a few feet from the gas pump in Amarillo and we're stuck sideways at the entrance to the gas station, powerless to move, and a good samaritan appears and rescues us and we crawl on til we can't.
It is the last night on road, if our luck holds, and I'm tired just contemplating another night of bone chilling trailer so I beg Fridman to stop at a motel for one night, just tonight, I dream of a warm shower - no bath in days, the pipes are still frozen in the trailer - the bliss of a warm shower and a warm bed, the simple comfort of warmth; Fridman is reluctant, finally he passes all the national brand ones with the promise of reasonably clean sheets in a town called Childress in the Texas panhandle and stops at a motel with an empty parking lot called Budget Inn which advertises clean rooms on an electronic panel above the door to the office, and there is only one car parked in front of one of the rooms, I should have known, and the windows of the rooms are small and high, like prison windows I think as I'm waiting, half asleep, for Fridman to check us in, the real window must give out onto the back is what comes through my mind, and then I go in and stand in the most sordid room I have ever seen in so many years of road trips on a shoestring budget: there is no window in the back, only an old AC unit mounted onto the wall blasting warmish air into a room with no lights at the beds, and I don't know which one is worse, the pee-stained bathroom door or the amount of dirt and trash under the beds as we move them close together so the babies won't fall during the night, or the crumbling bathroom rack, or the peeking scotch-taped tissue holder with no tissues, or that the room reeks and makes me feel as if I have fallen at the bottom of an endless well where exhaustion and my own disgust don't matter anymore. I am exhausted but I cannot sleep. In the morning, still, I showered. The hot water felt good when I closed my eyes, breathing in deeply; there was only a small towel and it was badly frayed, worn to the thread, with more than the tinge of a large red stain on it.
Later that day we drove the last leg of the trip, up to Hugo, Oklahoma, Fridman and I taking a memory ride on a road we traveled together before, highway 70 in Oklahoma, a road cutting through the rolling hills of the southernmost part of the state along the Red River that makes up the border with Texas, we pass the Shamrock gas station where we stopped two years ago for lunch, it has the look of another era, we pass the small towns, we pass through Durant, where the Peruvian family Cavallini played a few dusty, empty-house dates before closing, the year before Dylan was born, itself a ghost of a circus, and we arrive in Hugo and the first stop is at the Wal-mart, what else, and a surprise, our friend Marcos there and I've never been happier to see him and his house and the junk in his yard makes me feel happy too, I'm somewhere nearing home, I'm forty-one years old, I have two babies, I'm on the move, but I have arrived for now.

Budget Inn, Childress, Texas.

A tooth at the Halloween party.

October 21, El Cerrito.

A whirlwind of a day, a big milestone and a disturbing discovery, and Dylan falls asleep by himself on the couch next to me at 8:30 PM.
Today I decided to switch back to the cloth diapers I had left behind after Dylan became Mr. Wigglish. I had used them again for a time after Nicolas was born and before I joined the circus, but ended up capitulating, vaguely ashamed of myself; two babies, no washer and dryer and nowhere to hang clothes to dry, water a scarce and precious commodity were too much to handle.
And then today I read a disturbing article on all the chemicals we come in contact with in our every day life and the efforts of the U.S. administration to derail legislation by the European Union to ban most of them and tightly control the others. The article opened with a list of the chemicals used in baby stuff, from bottles to diapers. I think I must have blanched, sitting there in the trendy bookstore cafe sipping my hot chocolate for what I thought would be a peaceful reprieve from the usual hustle of the day. The article, by Mark Shapiro, is in this week's Harper's magazine; it is vastly scarier than the worst Halloween movie Hollywood could ever conjure up.
There was a Halloween party tonight at Playland, so I dressed Peanut up in his pumpkin baby suit, Dylan in his skeleton sweater, put on my flamingo outfit (all thanks to Beverly, but more on that story later) and out we trotted across the parking lot. It was there that I discovered Nicolas' first tooth.

The march of time.

October 17, El Cerrito.

I wish I could keep Dylan the way he is now. Keep him forever laughing, singing, dancing, bouncing around with me the way he does now, keep looking at him and see the way he looks now, the way he talks now, the little man he is now, impossibly adorable. But he'll grow up and be an impossibly fabulous man, and I'll just have to keep these memories sharp and warm forever. Easy enough.

To my children: my Heart Sutra.

October 2, El Cerrito.

Je suis si heureuse de vous avoir, mes enfants, mes amours. Sans vous il n'y pas de jours ni de nuits, sans vous il n'y a pas de soleil, pas de pluie, pas de musique et pas de rires, vous etes ce sourire, vous etes mon souffle, mon coeur, vous etes ma vie.

Keeping up the tradition.

September 30, El Cerrito.

Nicolas turns six months old today (the 30th will have to do as September has no 31st.) Last night we celebrated this most important "cumplemeses" with what has become the tradition in our little family of sorts: half a pie for half a year.
This one with Dylan in tow, and it was all the better for it - nothing like an almost two-year-old to beat a six-month-old for cuteness and an extra dollop of joy.

Walking in half.

September 7, El Cerrito.

Dylan is gone and I feel like an amputee. I'm pushing a half-empty stroller and it is as if I were hopping on one leg.
I miss my son.
They are at the Ringling Brothers circus, in Prescott Valley, Arizona, visiting with Patrizia Zerbini, an old boss of Fridman's; they left early this morning and will be back Sunday.

Dinner tonight.

August 29, El Cerrito.

Mostly I'm by myself with the babies.
So. It's 10:15 PM and I haven't gotten around to eating dinner yet.

Like a feather.

August 27, El Cerrito.

Thinking again about the New Orleans stories. The attachment to home, universal, my home, my land, my country, the rest of us mavericks in their wanderings, no strings attached and home is where the heart is, and my babies.
The lightness of being!

View from the parking lot, Playland.

Bourgeois.

August 20, El Cerrito.

An NPR story last week, reading Harper's magazine sitting on my stoop in the morning, after Nicolas has fallen back asleep and before Dylan wakes up, soaking in the sun, unusually warm these past few days, watching the kitties that have set up house outside the trailer, fast becoming adopted, Tintin et Milou or Azamat and Borat, depending on the day, the picture of cute, what else.
What it boils down to is people going into depression, even wanting to commit suicide down in Louisiana because they're living in trailers "meant for short vacation trips," (the NPR story,) the grief of losing a house, ie a life (Duncan Murrell on the dying of New Orleans since Katrina,) and I find myself more baffled than moved, struggling to understand, struggling to feel that loss he writes about, the despair the Katrina evacuees talk about.
I went online after listening to the NPR story, I wanted to see the trailer park, the trailers, maybe then I could relate. The trailers were brand new and the park looked like a dream place to unhitch any trailer, junk or new; it was green and roomy, shaded by tall pines, I would go wild with the gardening there, remembering how I tried to scrape life out of that solid-packed dirt area the exact size of my trailer I called my front yard out in Rubidoux.
As for losing a home I can't speak for it because it has never happened to me, but I find it equally hard to understand how a heap of belongings can so much define you that you feel such unspeakable grief over the loss of it. The writing in Harper's is masterly, harsh and dreamy and beautifully evocative but the reality it interprets escapes me.
Because things happen that way, at the same time I was reading those stories I met a Romanian woman at the playgrounds and she talked about how people in this country have so much, and of course they don't seem to know it (what else?) She and her husband emigrated to this country after their daughter came here to go to school and never returned. She talked about how hard it was in the beginning here, missing home, even though home was where she never even knew a washing machine until 1992; she talked about her mother, who worked until she was 93 and never felt depressed a day in her life, about living ten to a room, raising her children on a Romanian school teacher salary, about the Communist regime taking all her "bourgeois" family belongings away after World War II, everything wiped off; she used the term bourgeois, it had the sound of a dusted, discarded antique, it sounded so European, and so odd, like her Eastern European memories in the America of this age of affluence and ease.

Friedman, Fridman.

August 15, El Cerrito.

The in-laws came to visit this week. Sheyla, Fridman's sister, her boyfriend, Alain, and their eight-month-old boy, Friedman, just left on a plane back to Dallas, Texas, after driving over and spending five short days with us. Sheyla named her son like her brother, my Fridman, except she spelled it the way it's spelled as a family name so it wouldn't be misspelled all the time. It fits a baby even less than an adult and had to fight its way out of my mouth.
At least he won't have to carry such heavy expectations: she also liked Rembrandt.

Drizzle.

August 5, El Cerrito.

It's been a drizzly-grizzly day.
I'm loving it.

The carnival.

The fair.

August 5, El Cerrito.

Away to the carnival in Turlock yesterday to drop Fridman off.
It's the Central Valley, it's hot, it's dusty, it's a world away from the Bay Area. The carnival is Butler Amusements, the company that raked in most of the crew workers from Chimera when the circus closed last month. It's a huge affair, an array of "sleepers" lined up behind the fairgrounds, and private trailers, and trucks, a small city on the move.
The fairgrounds are crowded, it's the annual county fair. Fridman wants Dylan to see the cows, we watch the milking operation, the two of us mesmerized, city folks that we are, really. Afternoons taking pictures of county fairs in rural Illinois, pacing the stalls and chatting up the farmers all come rushing back with the smells, the heat, the sweat, with the sight of Four-H kids meticulously caring for their prized animals, blond heads, long legs, young boys on the verge of adulthood, cheeks flushed, the girls all business, not to be disregarded, whole families meeting, the fathers upfront, shaking hands, the grandfathers, the wives, the babies behind, and everybody is there because it's the big get-together of the year.
The carnival is mostly the noise of the rides and the sullen looks of the men in the stands, one job short of drifters, but also the families, the young Dads with tattoos, and the teenagers, girls and boys all about hanging, the mating game, groups of them eyeing each other, the girls squealing on the rides, the boys tight-mouthed, hormones in full swing. The afternoon air is charged with their whispers.
It was tough for my darling husband. His first job outside of the circus, like a fish out of the water, struggling for air he seemed, agonizing for days on end over the decision whether to sign up or not, there was another possibility and it was a circus one and better paid but he would have been away from us for three months, he would have missed his son's birthday a second time, so he took a big adult step and went to the carnival.
Oh but there are circus people there.

Kisses.

August 1, El Cerrito.

Peanut turned four months yesterday.
Dylan kisses him all the time - then us, then the gorilla on the book cover, then the model in the fashion magazine, so we can't really say for sure what it means that he kisses him all the time.

Off.

July 28, El Cerrito.

An Argentinian couple moving to Spain was having a garage sale over the week end a few blocks from where we are and we could have furnished our whole future-imagined-hoped for house with the stuff they were practically giving away, almost new: a bright red Ikea sofa, a futon sofa-bed, spiffy-looking bookshelves, two twin beds with good mattresses, you could have all that and more for under $200. I was dying to buy the Ikea sofa, but where to put it? I would have settled for outside as trailer patio furniture but Fridman wouldn't have it.
We got a smaller bargain, a dollar for a pair of remote toy cars, one of which even works, and a haircutting machine, the kind that gives you a military-looking edge, also for a buck.
And so Dylan got his first haircut. I wanted it so bad, the tangled hair was driving me crazy, and we had to cut off a chunk of back hair the other day because there was no way to untangle it, and now I look at him and I want to cry for the baby I lost. He looks as if he'd grown overnight into a child, the baby dissolved, cast off like the hair, a memory now.
I want my baby back, I who cringed under the slow pace of Dylan-baby days only last year. I want my baby back before he heads off to school and I lose him even more, before he's off to college with a wave of the hand and kiss on my cheek. They were right in the end then, time does go by too fast.
Only he was never mine, was he.

Before and after.

The junkyard.

July 23, El Cerrito.

Don Sandro's house: the yard crowded with a hapless mess of junk cars, tools and parts, everything from discarded car batteries to a broken lawn-mower.
My trailer is parked behind the house, a hundred feet at the most; to get to the house is not unlike hiking in a jungle (or so I imagine,) you have to carefully pick your way, here it is around cars in various stages of dismemberment, and the landscape has a life of its own, it evolves every day as work progresses and the cars change. It gets more treacherous at night; once I tripped on the kind of rolling benches used in shops to slide under cars as I was walking to the house, carrying Dylan on my hip, nine month pregnant with Nicolas; as I got up it occurred to me the incident would have been funny.
"New" cars appear almost every day, each one more of a disaster than the other. This one has no lights, that one's rear door is stuck, another's front window doesn't get back up once you lower it, another's whole transmission is out of whack.
The cars are don Sandro's business now that he's too old to work in the circus; he buys and sells used cars - very used cars. A Colombian mechanic called Castro arrived one day to help fix them, Wonder Castro with the magic touch, because nothing less would do. He used to work in circuses too, as a mechanic, the place to learn how to do wonders fast and mean, because you have to be on the road tomorrow no matter what.
The circus family has a way to find itself back together - like a benevolent mafia family extending its reach away from home, its grip just as tight, its loyalty just as strong.

Circus dreams.

Beyond the white curtain.