Golden Boots

Golden Boots

by Nancy Grossman-Samuel

I have a pair of golden boots. They are not boots I would have bought myself, but when Pat said she wanted them I was tickled. Someone should have those golden boots. And they’re mine now. And I am both sad and happy at the same time because it would be nice if Pat could still wear her golden boots. She’s done with them. She’s done with it all. She decided, at seventy something that she’d had it here and was ready to move on.

I met Pat because I was her hospice volunteer. We became good friends. She told me her stories. Some common, some exciting, like about when she won a modeling contest even before finishing high school, and how she went all over the country and the world to model clothes. She showed me her picture in a magazine. She was adorable. She was wearing a cute blue dress, white gloves (I think), and a white belt that accentuated her teeny tiny waist. She was naive and young, and the money would be a great help to her hard working mother who she loved as much as life itself.

Though barely conscious, I sat with Pat a few days before she passed, and there were times she’d get a smile on her face that I knew meant she must be seeing that very mother.

While modeling in New York, she met a young man who was a friend of her employer. Sometime later she was invited down south where he lived with his parents for a holiday visit. He was Jewish and she was Christian and his mother would have none of it. He was wealthy and she was poor, and he adored her and she him. But he could not defy his parents, and they parted forever. Not a happy event for either of them.

The next time Pat heard from him was the day of her wedding. He decided he’d made a terrible mistake and went to her house; she was out; her mother told the young man that Pat was to be married that day. He left, I assume heartbroken. I tried to find him through Google and various social media sites, but I was never successful. I didn’t tell her that I was going to try, or that I did try. Neither of her two marriages worked and I had fantasies about them meeting and that meeting creating a healing for her.

Pat was very self-sufficient, but when I met her she was very ill and living at her daughter’s house. Right before Christmas she went back to her own apartment where I visited her for nearly a year. As she declined, she moved to a private care home. Before we knew it, she was off hospice for failure to decline. Being fed three meals a day, and assisted daily with her general care was probably the key though she often missed her independent living.

No longer my hospice patient, I kept visiting, and eventually we decided it would be okay, since I was now just her friend, to leave the house together. I would drive her. She loved my Prius plug-in. She loved the car, its light blue color, and the drive. She loved to get out and go places. We went to movies, lunch, and shopping. Pat loved to shop. It made her happy.

When I originally saw those golden boots my eyes widened, but it was more a “who would wear those?” wide. When Pat saw them she said “Oh my. I think I have to have those.”

She tried them on and asked me if she was silly to get them. I asked her if she really liked them, and when she said ‘yes’ I said, ‘no, you are not silly to get them.’

The following week we went out, and she was wearing the golden boots. She looked like a kid in a candy shop. “Will you be embarrassed to be seen with me wearing these?” she asked, a grin on her face.

“Are you kidding?” I asked, “I want to get a pair of my own!”

Rest in Peace Pat – you are missed

A post script to this story: I was working on a number of different possible stories to read at the open mic for which this was written. I spent hours and came up with lots of things that weren't working for a variety of reasons. None of them were about Pat. I took a shower to get ready to go figuring I would not read, just enjoy others’ stories. I sat down one more time with not very much time left before I had to go, the golden boots on my feet, and this story poured out of me. I’m sure it was Pat at my shoulder dictating. She would have loved the open mic evenings. I’m sorry I never thought to invite her.

Heading Into Old Age Rant

By Susan Cameron

I ripped into my husband a couple of days ago, and this is all I feel like writing tonight.  We patched it up, but time will tell if the patch holds...


My dear friend will turn 61 next week. I've known her since she was 18. I'm sending her a funny birthday card that teases about age and forgetfulness, though I am no longer sure if forgetfulness is a laughable curse or a blessing in disguise.  

I pulled out my address book to look up her latest address -- the third one for her in this particular book, though there are many other defunct entries for her in many other long-gone books. Her list of former homes is short compared to the one I compiled for myself in my chaotic youth.  

Anyhow, after I addressed her card, I grabbed a pencil, started on the A's and went through the Z's, drawing lines through entries that were no longer valid -- my late mother's, my late father's, a few dead friends and acquaintances, closed businesses, doctors I no longer see, people I have not seen for a long time and do not wish to see, people I'd like to see again, but they're somewhere in the wind.

I closed the book and knew there was some kind of lesson in this, but what? Nothing stands still, time moves on, change is inevitable, all things must pass, blah banal blah?  Well, yes; but I think the reminder is that there's a bigger pencil than mine that does the final crossing out.  

Two-thirds of the sand in my personal hourglass has slid through to the bottom. This is fine, and I accept it, but I refuse to spend the final third of my life seething and furious over a spouse's stupidity and disrespect. Change is indeed inevitable, and many, many times I have been the agent of major changes in my own life and in other people's as well, and I can absolutely, fearlessly do it again.

If I have to choose between being angry and being alone, I will choose solitude and hope over fury and despair.  

I've dug my old flamethrower out of the closet and polished it up. If I have to use it, I will. See the smile on my face? Right now, I feel better than James Brown!

copyright 2013, Susan (by-God) Cameron

Introducing Love Street

By Liz Zuercher

Over the next few months here on Tasty Sauce I'd like to introduce you to some of the people who live on one street in a coastal Southern California new home community.  You've already gotten to know Cassie, who sold them all their homes.  Now it's time to meet some of her customers, starting with Eddie Petrocelli.

Imagine barbells or a baby’s rattle – two orbs connected by a metal rod or a silver cylinder - and you will know what Camino Dos Cortes looks like.  Two cul de sacs connected by a straight line of a street, fourteen new houses sidled up next to each other as closely as the city code will allow until they must curve around the cul de sac.  There the lots fall into pie shapes, with the point of the pie slice at the street flaring back into a large wide back yard. 

One cul de sac is missing the two end homes and instead has a grassy hill up to an adjoining street with a walkway down to Dos Cortes.  The other cul de sac borders California wild land that glows green and yellow in the spring after the winter rains.  That’s the way it was when everyone put down their deposits and signed their contracts.  Now, though, in late September, the hills are gray with brush gone dry from lack of rain. 

One row of houses backs up to a hill with a network of concrete drainage culverts and newly installed landscaping intended to hold and beautify the slope.  So far it has done neither.  The houses here were less expensive than the ones across the street that have expansive views toward the ocean.  You can’t always see the ocean in the distance, but the owners of these homes have paid dearly for the possibility of an ocean view.

It’s been almost a year since the homes on Dos Cortes were completed, people moved in and the neighborhood began to take shape.  Over a period of two months moving vans came and went, sometimes three or four at a time jockeying for position on the street.  Workers’ trucks buzzed around like gnats as last minute adjustments were made to the homes, utilities were connected and buyers turned into homeowners and met their neighbors.  Even though some of them had paid vastly different amounts for their homes, they all had a sense of equality and expansiveness for their new neighbors, people they expected would become fast friends.  It was like the beginning of a marriage, the honeymoon period, where love blinds spouses to their annoying habits and greater failings.

Neighbors met each other for the first time at the mailbox or in the street, shaking hands and making introductions as they unloaded boxes or took out the trash.  Someone organized an open house to get acquainted. The couples with children clustered together as the kids sized each other up.  The moms talked about forming a playgroup.  The dads talked about their jobs, their golf games and surfing Trestles.  There were also two single men and one single woman, one set of grandparents and two newlywed couples who mingled and introduced themselves over guacamole, chips and beer.  Everyone was full of promise for their new neighborhood, expectations high.

The street that led to Camino Dos Cortes was named Via Amor and that prompted Kristen Weber, one of the moms, to suggest that they all lived at the end of Love Street, that this bit of California real estate was where Love Street emptied out, pouring all the love onto their street.  That made their street full of love, she said, and before long they were all saying they lived on Love Street, ignoring the actual name of their street.

“It doesn’t matter what the street is really called,” Kristen told Cassie in the sales office. “We all love each other, so we live on Love Street.  It’s so perfect.”

For a while it was true – all was beautiful on Love Street, except maybe for Eddie Petrocelli.

* * * * *

Eddie Petrocelli stirred things up from the day he moved in, when he put a life-sized plastic alligator in his front yard.  Well, you couldn’t exactly call it a yard yet.  To be honest, it was raked dirt like everyone else’s lot. 

If you came up Via Amor and turned right into the cul de sac, Eddie’s house was the third house on the right, next to the grassy hill.  If you turned left from Via Amor you’d miss seeing Eddie’s house altogether, but when you drove out of the neighborhood you couldn’t miss the house or the alligator.  If you walked the dog or chased the kids or just strolled at dawn or dusk, the alligator seemed to snarl at you as you went by.  Dogs growled at it, then peed on it when it didn’t move.  Babies cried when they saw it, but a few adventurous kids used it as a climbing toy, much to their mothers’ dismay.

Eddie Petrocelli was one of the single men on the block, but no one considered him a “catch”, except maybe Eddie himself.  He was a big boisterous fellow in his late thirties with thick black hair and a barrel chest, who enjoyed telling everyone he encountered how successful he was as a sub prime mortgage broker.

“I make $50,000 a month, man,” he told Dan Christiansen across the street, who hadn’t asked and didn’t care how much Eddie made a month or a year or in his lifetime.  “You should try it.  I can get you a job.  I have my own company and I can hire whoever I want.  You’d make a bundle,” Eddie boasted.  But Dan was happy as a civil engineer and had no desire to work for Eddie, so he said no thanks.  Eddie slapped Dan on the back and said to keep it in mind.

“What I really want to talk to you about is the alligator,” Dan said.

“Isn’t it a hoot?” Eddie said, letting out a guffaw.  “It’s just temporary.  I’ll take it down when I start my landscaping.”

That was another bone of contention the neighbors discussed.  Almost everyone else had done their landscaping, but Eddie still had a dirt yard.  Dan decided to stick to the alligator issue.

“Well, it’s been ten months now and the neighbors aren’t that crazy about it.  Could you maybe move it to the back yard?” Dan had the dubious honor of being the spokesperson for several of the neighbors who’d been talking about this eyesore.  Since Dan was such a mild-mannered guy, they all decided he would be best suited to approach Eddie.

Eddie’s brow furrowed and a dark cloud seemed to cover his face for just a moment before a smile returned to his lips.  “I don’t think so,” he said.  “I like it there.”

Dan thought he’d heard Eddie wrong.  Was the guy really making an issue of this?  “We were hoping to resolve this in a friendly fashion.  No one wants to get pissy about this, but the CC&R’s are pretty clear about lawn ornaments,” Dan said.

“I like the alligator.  The alligator stays.” Eddie said with an intensity that surprised Dan. 

“Oh,” said Dan, shocked by Eddie’s lack of Love Street cooperative spirit.  “I guess we’ll see about that.” 

“I guess we will,” said Eddie.  He stood straight as a sentinel in front of the alligator.

Dan shook his head as he walked back to his house.  That hadn’t gone well, not well at all.

* * * * * 

The next morning when Dan went out to pick up his newspaper, he saw that Eddie had been busy overnight.  Three plastic bunnies and two plastic squirrels cavorted around the alligator, and a wire coat hanger hung from the alligator’s snout.  A foot high redwood picket fence edged the sidewalk in front of Eddie’s house and a wooden picnic table with attached benches sat in the middle of the dirt yard.  On the Juliet balcony above the garage a full-sized carousel horse looked like it was about to leap over the railing.  Dan thought he saw Eddie peeking out from behind the curtain and could swear he was laughing.  

Just like that the honeymoon was over on Love Street.

To runish or not to runish - that is the question!

by Nancy Grossman-Samuel

Actually, there is no question. The answer is, of course, TO RUNISH!!

I did something recently that, blew me away. It was something I never thought I would do because, frankly, I never wanted to, but an e-mail from the American Heart Association changed all of that. They invited me to join them by racing at the OC Marathon. I would raise monies for a great cause (my father had an aneurysm  my uncle a stroke, and I have high blood pressure – so there are a lot of good reasons to support this worthy organization). I did a little fundraising, a lot of physical training and then I RUNNISHED the OC Marathon! Yahoo, wahoo, and holy mackerel! From virtual couch potato to marathoner – or more accurately half-marathoner – a full marathon still seems like a far off dream that frankly (gotta find another word), I really am not interested in doing though meeting all those marathoners is making me think – some day maybe…

Runishing is a word coined by Bethany – a Team in Training volunteer (the organization responsible for my next half-marathon to be undertaken at Disneyland in September) –  to describe… well actually RUNISH was the specific word, but any good verb will obviously need its various verb forms to stay grammatically correct …the act of both running and walking the same race. You know, “I don’t really run the whole race, I kind of runish it… I walk a little I run a little… I runish.”

So I just runished my first ½ marathon – the Orange County Marathon – on May 5^th.

It was brilliant. It was an amazing feat I never thought I would do as it is my sisters who are the athletes. I am a reader, writer, desk worker. I do walk, and at pretty decent clip. I have been walking approximately four miles, two or three times a week for years with a few additional walks in between and during certain times, even a swim. But 13.1 miles is a totally different animal.

I got through the blisters and fear of not being able to do it during my 9 and 10 mile training walks. By the time I got to the race, and completed 13.1 – I felt elated, ecstatic, joyful, playful, young at heart, and very much alive. All that and more, actually. I even left the two women I was runishing with behind when I saw the 12 mile marker, turned to them and said “I gotta go!” I do not quite know what came over me, but I was ready and needed to fulfill this inner child drive to do more and go faster and blaze my own new trail.

And I did mostly RUN the last mile except for a brief encounter with 86 year old, Dorothy Joy, who had on a bright yellow shirt whose back declared: “I am 86, walk with me!” I found out that this was not her first ½ marathon but somewhere around her 40^th, and that she did her very first one the day before her 75^th birthday! So let me see… using my math brain, if she has done 40 marathons in 11 years, that’s an average of just over 3 ½ half-marathons per year. At that rate, at 86 I should be on number 93 or 94. Heck, maybe I can get to my hundredth… but I really shouldn’t get so carried away. The big unknown in this is how my body will react. In my foolish youth I jumped out of airplanes 200 times, which means 200 landings, and my ankles and knees did take their fair share of beatings…

I crossed the finish line at the OC fairgrounds hearing a voice call out my name and city of residence, and then I wandered around a little chatting with a few friends, waited for my runish partners to complete, and then decided it was time to take a shower and leave. So I walked back to the hotel in my socks – my feet had been screaming “Hey, you, we really need to get out of these like NOW! Please. Let us free!!!” for a while, so I did, and my happier feet and eventually very dirty socks got to the hotel, took an ice bath, got dressed, and feeling awesome, drove to LA.

I volunteered in LA until nearly 8 that evening and I never got tired, or felt down or drained. My quads were a little angry with me, especially since I was walking stairs a lot that afternoon and evening, but they calmed down a few days later.

The part I am failing to grok (see Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein) is that 5 days later my body began an odd assortment of complaints that are keeping me from runnishing or even walking longer distances right now.

I want to start training for my next Team in Training experience, but I will not until I know that my body has fully recovered. My heal hurts, and my back is a little twingey. But alas, I do have some alternatives. I can’t runnish, but I can swim AND I can ride my bike – though I may need a little help for a bit getting it off the ceiling of my garage – a task that was easy last week.

So I have to wonder... is this is my body’s way of wanting me to prepare for my first triathlon? No date yet set, but I do have my triathlon partner!