sweetheart redux

Throughout the years I've decorated and filled several keepsake boxes.  I keep them hidden away in raggedy cardboard boxes, and every few years, when I feel up to the headache of it all, I unearth some of these memory boxes.  Here's my "Wild and Free" box.

The Circle of Life One day when I was driving on Los Angeles Avenue in Los Angeles the city, I saw 3 cop cars worth of cops tiredly swooping homeless peoples’ possessions into standard issue blue tarps they were trying to fold into portable bundles for the harassed indigents to take with them to some other street or park. One cop was shrugging off a homeless man like he wasn’t there, as he collapsed the man’s tent, and another cop ignored a woman repeating, “That’s my stuff.  That’s my stuff.”  There was a pick up truck full of grocery carts being reclaimed from the homeless camp, presumably to be taken back to the stores they came from.  One woman began to charge at a cop but once she got inches away, she realized there was nothing she could do, physically; she just hollered up close in the police man’s face.  She had the kind of Midland American accent that I usually hate to hear, but in this situation, the aggressively nasal vowels added to the sense of her b...

I’ve long had this wish that it’d be possible to live inside the ground zero of nostalgia.  This is more of a daydream, along the lines of sci-fi and the idea of teleportation.  My more realistic version of trying to embody the bittersweet peter pan root of nostalgia is to imagine training myself to adapt my thinking to nostalgia, the way Buddhists train themselves to be zen or recovering alcoholics train themselves to be sober.  That’s what December is like for me.  I know that Christmas Day is at its most basic a few hours of exchanging gifts, a few hours of cleaning up afterwards, a couple hours of appreciating the gifts and then a festive dish for dinner; that is at least the make-up of my Christmas days.  There is no getting around the fact that Christmas ends.  Nonetheless, every December I plan which Christmas light displays we’re going to drive to and marvel at and which Christmas movies feel the most special to me and will be watched a milli...

Santa Prayer Santa hovered close and said, “Why all the flies around your head? Why all the thumbtacks ‘round your bed? Your wishlist said you want a pony.” “I got candy stuck among my hair They pull it free and pluck me bare The tacks are so intruders spare This sparse and lonely thing. The pony – so glad you got my list! I prayed so hard I split my lip. Is Snowflake waiting outside for me? Or, maybe I’ll name her Cinnamon.” 

When I was a kindergartner, I went to a private Christian school in Koreatown, called “Pilgrim.”   Strangely, I currently work four block away from this building of nostalgia and terror.    A little background:   I never had enough to eat in my packed lunches, but I was too shy to tell my dad.   Instead, I became what other kids called a “Beggar.”   Nerds candies were sold at the student store, and as a big handful of Nerds is bound to spill over a little, I picked up the extras from the ground:  I actually roamed the blacktop looking for stray Nerds to eat.  I also regularly snuck into the classroom at recess and lunch, to steal, mostly food, but also some decorative erasers and such.   Also, for the most part, my few friends were boys, because I was always like “Look at my underwear!” all the time, and what boy in their right mind is going to be like “I want to avoid being friends with the girl who   shows me her underwear...

When I was a morose and pained teenager (as teenagers are), I was in a feminist punk band called Foxfire.  It was a pretty big part of my existence.   Tamra Lucid   from the band Lucid Nation  (our guardian angels who were always letting us share their equipment and promoting us through word of mouth) just finished emailing me a few mp3's she'd been able to create from one of our old cassettes (pardon any incorrect tech verbiage here).  My song "Earthquakes" was my favorite one to sing at shows.  Pretty much everything I had to get off my chest:  feeling ugly, not being taken seriously as a girl, being victim to a violent crime that left me jumpy to things like earthquakes -- it was all in that song.   Foxfire was a three girl band:   me,  Rhani Lee Remedes  and  Andrea Branca .   We all switched around on which instruments we played for each song; Earthquakes is A ndrea on ba...

The Four Tops, singing "Duke of Earl" The Los Angeles version of Autumn is here – a crispness in the air for a few hours on Saturday morning, before the temperature hit the eighties again.  Even when I was a little kid, that kind of autumn quality of air made me feel wistful for my youth.   The annual Halloween nights of trick-or-treating made me feel like a kid in a movie about trick-or-treating, because how could real life be so almost melodramatically, so theatrically childlike.   These annual Halloween nights usually turned out a little disastrous, with a mom in her cups who loved Halloween too much not to feel compelled to ruin it, to make it less fun and therefore more bearable.   I also got sick at least a few Halloweens of my life.   One Halloween, a close friend of mom’s, who used to be her room mate, sleeping on that old fashioned contrivance the Murphy Bed, made me a princess costume by hand, tracing a t-shirt and skirt of mine as a patter...