My son Richard had a friend flying into town for a visit over the break, and we took her to the Monterey Bay Aquarium to show her the sights. We’ve been there many a time, but it’s always evolving and never the same twice. And: they had a Great White shark to go see. The first one that ever survived captivity was the first one they had, till it outgrew the place and they let it go into the outer bay.

Let me tell you about that new shark. It’s huge. I have never before seen the cleaning crew at work on the huge Outer Banks exhibit. Picture two large people swimming on the floor of the tank, sweeping it with giant squeegees. Now picture a third, swimming above them, occasionally waving hi to the crowd but mostly looking out for that Great White: he’s holding a long pole with a large loop at one end and a giant rubber Q-tip thing at the other end. All three swimmers are wearing chain mail.

A sunfish comes a little too close to the guy. Sunfish are these truly strange creatures where God forgot to add on the rest of the body after the head: just behind the bulging bug eyes, there’s this sort-of-a tail–more like a downward arc with giant silver beads attached. The thing wasn’t the 5000 pounds they can get to be, but it was big enough, and it actually leaned into the window a bit right above our heads. Showoff. Keep an eye on that Great White…

It being a Saturday, there was a large crowd, and all the sudden a collective loud gasp and breathcatching happened; I didn’t see it. But I saw that pole in return midswing and the shark swimming off.

The penguin exhibit: there were two keepers in there, and one had a shivering bird in her lap–shivering, or, it looked like me when I was having my seizures. She stroked it, and gradually it relaxed and held still. Another penguin was going, me? Me?? She handed the first to the next keeper, who stroked it under its chin like a kitten, and then the back of its neck. The bird was clearly feeling, ooh aah. Right there–yeah, you got it. Yessss. Bliss. Meantime, the second penguin waddled right up into the first keeper’s lap to be stroked. My turn!

The giant kelp forest tank had a diver coming in to feed the fish just as we were about to leave, so we watched. The leopard sharks–scratch that, I just looked at their site, I guess it was wolf eels, which makes more sense–did an elaborate, lithe, figure-8 dance, curving and curling around each other, the diver, each other again, the diver, and he held out his hand with a good-sized morsel to one: chomp! Kevlar. No chain mail here, but he had to have had kevlar gloves on. He did it for the next one; again, right out of his hand.

I snapped a photo on our way out of that tall kid again…

It was Wednesday when the phone rang rather early; my oldest sister wanted to talk to the folks before any of us might happen on any breaking news stories. Her daughter was safe. And, it was mentioned, she didn’t really know the victim.

Carole goes to Foss High School in Tacoma, Washington.

I’ve been thinking since then, it doesn’t really matter how close we are personally to the one who was hit. An act of hatred hates all of us, hurts all of us.

But an act of great grace, of love and of unwavering compassion regardless of what was done, heals us all far more. Will anyone ever forget how the Amish lived what they believed, for as long as any of us will live? Will we not hand that story down to our children’s children in our personal families’ histories as well as in the textbooks to come?

Which our children’s children’s children will learn about in school. And our humanity will go on.

Seventeen and a half years ago–and you’ll see in a moment why I can tell you that’s when it was–I was newly diagnosed with lupus and none too happy about it. Turns out my mother’s cousin had died of it–that’s bad enough–a week before her wedding date. Add that to your pathos and stir a bit.

So I was feeling none too happy; I had four small children, my youngest being two, and I wanted to see them grow up.

My husband decided I needed some cheering up, so he recruited a friend of ours to the task: they were going to throw me a surprise party. Only trouble is, it was early June and my birthday was in December. Not a problem–they would throw me a half-birthday party.

Which is how I came to be standing in her living room, surrounded by friends, totally stunned, as I was presented with a glorious cake that had inscribed on it in frosting,

Hap
Birt
Ali!

So. I found out when it was her birthday, and later that year made her a chocolate torte, my specialty then and now, made with bittersweet chocolate and manufacturing cream (what they dilute with milk to make heavy whipping cream. Rich stuff.) I surprised her back with it with a card that said, ” ‘Hap Birt Ali!’ Happy birthday to you, too, she re-torted.”

Fast forward. I didn’t get a birthday cake this year. Mom is here, and she didn’t get one either. And Richard and I just had our 26-and-a-half-year anniversary. So, finally, I made an almond cake (Dad’s allergic to chocolate) in the shape of a castle. I was hoping to snap a picture of it half eaten to go along with the theme, but my sons woke up this morning before I did. And can you think of a better breakfast than leftover cake? Six eggs in there, just like scrambled only with a little extra stuff thrown in, right?

Happy New Year, everybody!

Quite the windstorm today. The power, thus the server and blog, were out for hours, I think the second power failure (not counting from the quake) that we’ve had in almost 20 years of living in California. The funny thing is how much having real weather made the place feel like home.

Postscript 12/28: Turns out some of those gusts made it to hurricane level. A bit of an irony to have that storm right after writing about the effects of Florida’s hurricanes: Californians have it so easy. But I am extremely grateful right now to my neighbor who had already cut down her towering and dying (and very expensive to remove) huge pine that had loomed over my house.

Yesterday I opened what I think is the best Christmas present I have ever been given: this brochure, stating inside that a sheep had been donated in my name to a Third World family, in either Kenya or Haiti. Wow!

My older son, three years ago, was called by the Mormon Church to go on a mission to Haiti. He was fluent in French, but the population there speaks Haitian Creole, not quite the same, and he went to the language training center to learn to speak it. While he was at that center, revolution broke out, Aristide fled the country, the Americans were evacuated, and the Church sent him to southern Florida instead.

Which means he was there during the hurricane season that so devastated the area. The Church decided that these young men had volunteered two years of their lives to service to God by serving their fellow men, and right then, the greatest need was clearly for physical and emotional help recovering from the storms; they were told to go do whatever the Red Cross needed them to do for the time being.

Which is how he came to help cook 1,600 Salisbury steaks one windy, rainy day.

But in one particular moment, he and his missionary companion walked into the Red Cross shelter to help, mentioning they spoke Creole. He was asked to go check on a woman sitting by herself in a corner.

When she found out he spoke Creole!!! She had lost contact with her husband since evacuating. She had missed her doctor appointment for her scheduled anti-coagulant shot. She didn’t have her heart meds with her. She had a mechanical heart valve. Her son, brain-damaged by sickle cell anemia, was acting out in this strange environment, and she was at wit’s end. The Red Cross workers had queried each person coming in as to what they needed, but nobody had been able to communicate with her: she didn’t speak English, but she looked fine, so they had given up and left her alone–and her heart was going bonkers. She felt truly alone. She was at the point of giving up altogether.

As soon as she started talking, Richard grabbed a pen and was writing down what she needed and what she was saying. She got the medical attention she’d so desperately needed.

Richard was later taken aside and told he’d probably saved her life. He emailed home, and said, Mom. If I never do anything else here, I now know why I had to come here and why I had to learn this language.

While he was on his mission, I read, “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” the biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, telling what a difference one dedicated man could make to the people in, in Farmer’s case, Haiti. I read at one point how the simple gift of one egg-laying chicken gradually made one man able to sustain his family for the long term.

A sheep! My sister donated a sheep in my name! Thank you, Carolyn! To say I feel honored doesn’t begin to convey how thrilled I am. A sheep to a family in a place like that!! Christmas presents don’t get better than that.

Christmas with the grandparents here: yay!!!

http://ww2.howmanyofme.com/search/ is one of those way-too-much-fun sites; it takes information from the census bureau. Checking it out, there are 307 men by my husband’s name in the US. When we moved here, there were four in the phone book.

I had someone email me once, wanting to know so she could be enthused with me over my success, whether I was the screenwriter for a Helen Hunt movie which I know nothing about, and so I can’t say whether the name was, indeed, a match. Later, I got congratulations from someone else on getting my article published in a magazine–Vogue Knitting, I think it was? Did that screenwriter take up knitting? I was going, what? I didn’t think–I mean, it’s not like I’m Bob Smith (although my college roommate is married to one.)

So, looking here, it turns out there are nine people in the US named Alison Hyde. If you spell it with two l’s, which I do not, that’s another 17. My little brother’s unique, and my older brother doesn’t exist. There are two people in the whole country with my dad’s name, and I bet I can guess who one of them is.

Yesterday morning I went with a couple of friends to visit our favorite potters, Mel and Kris Kunihiro, at a show in San Jose. Got home, got the hubby, got in our own car, and turned around and drove north and over the Golden Gate. As we went around Mt. Tamalpais, I mentally waved hi at my favorite author, Rachel Remen, who lives up there somewhere; I’ve met her. She’s as wonderful in person as she is in her writing. And then, on to the party.

Cajun sweet potatoes are definitely the way to go, and I want to know how they did that. Maybe a lace scarf bribe would help? Good food, good people all around, good times.

It wasn’t till we’d been home awhile that I noticed. I’d known for awhile that it was probably going to happen at some point. I’d lost weight, it had gotten awfully loose, and at some point yesterday my ring went flying off. (I can only hope it didn’t clog the sink at my husband’s boss’s house.) I have not the slightest clue where or when it went, only that I’d had it on in the beginning of the morning.

I’m not much of a jewelry person, but I liked that one: four turquoises, the birthstone of both me and my mother, one to symbolize each of my kids. Sterling silver, which stays bright and lovely only if you keep it shining by paying attention to it–I thought that was a good way to symbolize a relationship. It was my substitute for my wedding ring, back when the IV steroids had puffed my hands out so much that I couldn’t wear the original anymore. The steroids proved useless, and I never have to take them again. But I was in the habit of wearing that turquoise ring by then, and that was fine with Richard, so, for over three years, I did.

San Jose to San Rafael. There is no way to know. All I can do is hope that it’s in good shape, wherever it is, and that whoever finds it loves that handmade piece as much as I do, and that it fits them. That would be so cool.

…to Auntie’s house we go… Actually, she’s more a sister than an aunt, age-wise, we just call her Auntie when we want to tease her.

When we moved to California, she was thrilled to finally get to have some relatives nearby; she had us tour some houses up near her in the Santa Cruz mountains. It’s gorgeous up there in the redwoods. But for us, the commute would have been awful.

Tell us, what are those mini water towers we keep seeing there for?

The firetrucks can’t negotiate some of the switchback roads. The county required some places to have those after the big Lexington Reservoir fire. Did you notice how bare the hill was above the water?

Oh. What about the fault line? It’s right there, isn’t it?

We don’t worry about earthquakes! We’re Californians!

Oh.

Her kids went to Loma Prieta school, and if that phrase rings a bell, it should. We went up there to help dig up and repair the breaks in the water line from her neighborhood’s tower to her house. The stories that came out of those mountains! The near misses, the lucky breaks, the people pitching in and helping each other recover.

It’s so beautiful up there, so peaceful in the trees. I love spending Thanksgiving up there with her family.

Every place has its joys and every place has its faults. In California, we just tend to name ours.

Okay, I’ve lived in northern California for almost 20 years. I’m almost used to the Christmas-lights-in-the-palm-trees weirdness. But today’s front page photo! Picture a cake with white frosting with two lines of candles marching in a circle. Now: the cake is an ice-skating rink in a park, and the candles are palm trees. Tall, towering palm trees. Which die if they freeze. Bordered by ice to both sides just outside their cutout space. Exactly what image was someone trying to convey? Is this park mocking all the people who wear super-skimpy clothes when the San Francisco fog is rolling in and it’s downright chilly, but hey, this is California, so it’s hot, right? The down-jackets-and-Birki-sandals image? Will those palms drop coconuts on the iceskaters’ heads?

Totally nonpsychodegradeable. (My stars. I’m beginning to sound like my kids. Like, tew-tuhtallyyyyy…)

So, where are my ancient-by-now skates? Let’s go!

Camera. I forgot again to bring the camera. It’s been cold and rainy this afternoon, but I had some packages that needed to go out: one son at college discovered a sudden need for warm wool sweaters he’d left home (I’m trying not to type, duh, kid, ya think? I’m really trying), and there were a couple of kits that had arrived from UCSF’s lupus genetics study to be forwarded to a couple of my kids. So my youngest and I waited for a break in the downpour and ran for the car.

The good thing about playing passenger is that you get to see as you go: the snowy egrets are always so graceful. The road to the post office runs alongside the marshlands at the edge of San Francisco Bay. The sky was a quiet shade of gray, the cattails and reeds subdued, but as the water opened up to view, there was a flock of pelicans whose feathers somehow shone very white, as if they’d absorbed the sun and stored it up for the winter and were willing to share with all. Rain? What’s a little water to a pelican? They looked absolutely radiant. One dipped its long beak down deep, then tilted its head up and back as it swallowed its fish, and looked for all the world as if it were laughing for sheer joy.

Reading Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s post at yarnharlot.ca today brought to mind an old memory, I guess my earliest road-trip memory. I was five or six years old, and, given our large family, I was sitting in what was the coveted position of the front seat of the station wagon between my parents. We were in Virginia, going past a Civil War battlefield, and I didn’t understand all those things in the grass. As Dad pulled off the main road and the car faced up a hill, with an ancient wooden fence to either side of the road as we faced that battlefield, my father, a vet, gently, sadly explained to me what a war was. I will never forget the moment the concept sank in.

This is a public service announcement. Just a quick post for the sake of anybody who does the Google search that I tried three weeks ago, to no avail. When I was discharged after my four-day EEG, where the 23 electrodes had been sealed to my hair via air compressor and some type of stinky superglue, I was told to rub huge amounts of cheap conditioner into my hair and then rub the hair hard between my hands to work the stuff out.

I thought, I’m a fiber artist. I know about felting. This sounds like a really really bad idea. It was, and I have the broken hairs and lost locks to prove it. But I didn’t know what else to do. Finally, my husband convinced me to try soaking it in baby oil (since they’d rubbed a little in while removing the electrodes.) Totally soak my head and my hair, drippity drip. Leave it there a couple of hours.

So much for the concert I’d been hoping to get out the door in time for. But it worked! So easily and with absolutely zero grief in terms of my hair, that I can only look in the mirror and wish I’d tried that first. Oh well, two years from now, you’ll never know.

One of my quirks is I don’t do standing very well. Moving around, okay, sitting, okay, but just standing still, I can get faint fairly quickly; it’s a falling-blood-pressure thing. So. Since a number of people seemed to be having problems with the machines, the line of voters was going quite slowly, and I decided sitting down on the floor was better than playing drama queen and getting there less voluntarily.

A poll worker ran to go get me a chair. That was kind of him, and fine. He set it up at the front of the line. Thanks, but no, I’ll stay back here, no reason I should make anybody else have to wait any longer, I’ll do just fine; it was definitely long enough for everybody as it was. The guy insisted. But I’m more stubborn than anyone (I can just hear Richard guffawing) and fine, I’ll stay over here on the floor, then, thank you.

The worker, about my father’s age (80), brought the chair over to me, then. That was all well and good. But I wasn’t prepared for what happened next. It’s not my first such experience, but you never get used to it. I suddenly had him putting his face far too close into mine and telling me how proud he was of me. How brave I was. How special. He went on and on, while I was thinking, What the heck? Who’s he talking about? A few minutes later, I got done voting before my husband did, and the man brought the chair over to me again, and then gave me a repeat performance. Well intentioned, I’m sure, but the acute invasion of space and the over-the-top gushing creeped me out, till I suddenly realized what he was really saying: I am so glad I’ve reached nearly twice your age without having become decrepit and frail. Without having to use a cane like you. I’m so glad I can hear better than you. I’m so glad I can carry a chair to you and show you what a good person I am and show off how strong and healthy I am at my age. I’m so glad I’m better off than you…

Absentee. Definitely go for the absentee next time.

When my husband and I showed up at the polling station today, our neighbor was there voting. No screens nor curtains, just machines placed a bit away from each other.

Jim was having a bit of a time with it, and twice had to call over a poll station worker. He told us afterwards that while touching the screen with his index finger, he guessed he hadn’t kept the other fingers tucked out of the way enough, had apparently brushed the screen, and twice had frozen it up. Oops.

So, with that in mind, I was very careful in how I touched that screen. Got all the way through, no problem, and I was quite glad that this time the machine was going to print out a paper strip verifying my choices; the non-paper-trail version of a few years ago had so clearly been a mistake.

Got all done, and the thing said to press continue or go back. Continue. Up scrolls the paper, longer than you could see all in one take. Continue. Okay. Check it, it’s fine, continue. And then…

VOIDED was what appeared at the bottom of the paper. What?? Like heck I’m going to Continue! I called out for a poll worker, who then tried both to fix the problem, while making a heroic effort not to be looking at my vote. I was trying not to be indignant: with Jim’s warnings in mind, I had been exactingly careful in how I’d touched that screen. Okay, so, we took it back (I didn’t have to redo my choices) and hit Continue. Continue. Continue. And then, having touched nothing in any way different from how I had the first time, my ballot was accepted and my vote recorded.

Enough. It’s time to become a permanent absentee voter and be done with it.

(On a lighter note, I happened to notice the Spanish translation of the office Schwartzenegger is running for: “Gobernador.” Somehow that struck me as screamingly funny.)