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I was in my late twenties and had never in my life lived anywhere but London. There had never seemed a great deal of reason to. I was a writer on a glossy magazine there and was being talked of as one to watch; I had good friends there, some of the world’s best theater on my doorstep, and shared a rented flat with interesting people in a vibrant part of town: quite soon, I supposed, as my career solidified, I would save up some money and buy a flat of my own. My life’s pattern was set, and a very pleasant pattern it was. Except that I had never lived anywhere but London, and as my thirties approached, it was starting to occur to me that there was a whole wide world out there, of which I really should see at least a little before I settled down permanently.

The British pound, in those dear departed days, was strong against the dollar, and freelance journalism work, in those even dearer and even further departed days, was easy to come by; a couple of my journalist friends were taking six months or a year out of their London careers to work in New York, where they were having, by their accounts, a high old time. It sounded attractive, but not, something inside me said, precisely for me. New York, from what I had heard, was not so very different from London; and if I were to go somewhere new for an adventure, I would go somewhere really new.

I had recently met a couple of young Los Angeles women who were passing through London, who had talked of beaches, and film studios, and driving to Mexico for the day … Los Angeles, I thought, sounded definitely intriguing. That first trip with my brother was still only a vacation; but, for me, it was nevertheless a vacation with something more in mind.

We touched down first in New York because you kind of have to, and did all the requisite New York things: we felt the buzz in the air; we climbed the Empire State Building and marveled at the view; we saw Woody Allen walking down Sixth Avenue with a leggy Diane Keaton lookalike whom he was making snort with laughter, and followed them shamelessly all the way to the Gotham Book Mart; we had brunch with my London friends at Joe Allen’s and wolfed transcendentally delicious knishes from a street cart on the Lower East Side; we got – in my case, certainly not for the last time – hopelessly lost in Central Park.

It was fun: New York always is. But the Greatest City in the World was never where I planned to hang my humble hat for an extended period: it was LA that was already calling me.

The plane we took to Los Angeles was delayed and the flight was turbulent: by the time we landed at LAX it was well into the night and we were tired and airsick. We hadn’t made hotel reservations in advance, because, extraordinary as it may now sound, in Europe then you didn’t have to, you just jumped off the train and walked into town; someone in New York had recommended the Los Angeles YMCA as a reliable place to stay, so, once we had collected our luggage, we made our exhausted way to the phone booth to look up its address in the local telephone directory.

Only to be confronted with, not one telephone directory but a whole shelf of them, each one representing a different portion of all of the very many different communities that made up the 502 square miles of Greater Los Angeles.

Newcomers to this city without a conventional center, not even sure of which part of town we were currently standing in, we could only stare at the names, befuddled. Was it Santa Monica or Santa Ana that was out in the desert? San Gabriel and I shared a name, maybe that was a lucky sign? The grandly styled Marina del Rey was clearly too posh for the likes of us, and wasn’t Chatsworth a stately home back in England? In the end, we decided on Hollywood because at least we’d heard of it, located the telephone number of the YMCA just off Hollywood Boulevard, and reserved a room for two.

“You want to go where?” said the cab driver in disbelief.

Hearts sinking, but seeing at this point little alternative, we repeated the address.

He mulled the information for a while, then shrugged.

“It’s not the worst time to go,” he commented philosophically. “This time of night, most of the druggies are out cold anyways.”

It was a long drive to the district the driver reassuringly described as Hollyweird. Neon signs flashed past in the darkness, the driver shook his head in foreboding, and inside the cab Donnelly tempers, never noticeably mellow at the best of times and now rubbed raw by six hours of lurching plane travel and an uncertain destination at the end of the drive, were doing what Donnelly tempers will do. By the time we were at last disgorged into the Y, had settled the discussion about who would take which bed, and one of us (that would be the one with the stubbly chin and the cowlick) had concluded his complaints about the smell of the miniature of whisky that the other (no cowlick, but a burgeoning stress headache along with a diminishing appreciation for the joys of sibling relationships) had snapped that she had damned well earned by organizing this damned trip for the both of them and was damned well going to enjoy so damned well get used to it, we were both wondering why we had come there at all.

The next morning, we woke to wonderland. Blue skies smiled benignly on tourist and drug dealer alike; palm trees swayed gracefully above Spanish-style buildings; and … was that really the Hollywood sign on the hills above the town?

I telephoned one of the young women I had met briefly in London. She arrived at the Y an hour later, greeted me, in what I would delightedly discover to be the regular California style of greeting, as a long-lost sister who had newly recovered from a near-terminal illness while being held hostage by terrorists and along the way winning the Nobel Prize for literature (“Are people here always so enthusiastic?” muttered my brother, in sotto voce awe), bundled all three of us into her car, and drove us down long sunny streets lined with more palm trees, past the billboards of Sunset Strip, around the mansions of Beverly Hills, past the UCLA campus in Westwood, down through Santa Monca and the ramshackle bohemian enclave that was then Venice, until we ended up in that oh so intimidating Marina del Rey, which, it turned out, was not posh at all but a bustling, cheerful yachting community, where we sat in a restaurant eating the sort of Mexican food most of us used to eat back then – long on the sour cream and shredded cheese, short on the complexity of the spices – and looking out over the water.

I was in heaven. The restaurant’s food tasted glorious to my still-gringa palate; the sky was high, the water sparkled, and all around me were sun-kissed people who smiled when they caught my eye. Already there was something in the California air that spoke to me; that promised optimism and good American can-do; that whispered to my very soul, “Come on down. Try it out and see what it’s like.”

I did not know, that sunny lunchtime in the Marina, that my entire life was about to be thrown most happily onto its head. I did not know that my original plan of six months’ time out from my London life would turn into two years, that the two years would turn into a lifetime. I did not know that it would be in Los Angeles that I would dream my best dreams, and make friendships that would last through tempests, that it would be where I would marry an American, buy a house just down the street from that same sunny, friendly Marina del Rey, and four decades later be buying my books at the Barnes & Noble and my wine at the Trader Joe’s there.

I did not know that I would one day trade in my foreign journalist’s working visa for a green card, which I would then trade in for American citizenship; I did not know that when I would cast my first electoral vote, in 2004, I would feel my heart nearly burst with joy to be, no longer a guest in this extraordinary, complicated, one-of-a-kind nation, but a full American at last.

Nor could I ever have guessed that this week, like so many other Americans, I would be watching the news reports with grim dread, all of us praying, with all of our hearts, to whatever gods we follow, that our nation will survive whatever will come in this coming week.

God protect our democracy. God preserve the America in which I choose to live.

(first published December 10 2024)

So horrified was I by their mere idea, that I made a point of reading each and every single ghost story that I could lay my hands on, from the occasional short story in my elder brother’s Eagle, to A Christmas Carol, to (ooh-ee-ooh) The Monkey’s Paw, retreating to bed after each reading to lie wide-eyed and rigid with fear, the blankets pulled scrupulously to my chin that no spectral hand might shake my shoulder, the curtains tugged close across the window that no supernatural apparition might peer in, jumping in terror at each creak of our old house, each hiss of our overworked radiator system, each (oh, no) rustling of the close-pulled curtain in the (oh, nooooooo!) nighttime breeze. I was petrified. I adored it.

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Given this predilection, the night of Hallowe’en was for me a combination of Christmas Day, the Superbowl, and the Beatles on the rooftop, all rolled into one. It was the night when the damp winds of October gave way to the bleak chill of November; the night when ghosts walked the earth, when the graves opened and the dead in all their decomposing flesh crawled out, the night when one such (I can only now suppose a particularly bored one, with nowhere more interesting to be) would surely feel the compulsion to drag its gruesome way to the Donnelly family’s toy-strewn, sausages-and-chips-fragrant house in North London specifically in order to show itself to the thoroughly unremarkable little girl who lived there, either groaning and rattling the chains with which Dickens, who must surely know about such matters, had confidently informed me ghosts came accessorized, or possibly, worse, horrifically still and silent, staring at me with eyes of ice. The level of terror was divine.

It was something of a shock, therefore, to encounter some years later Southern California’s version of Hallowe’en. Instead of dead leaves swirling in circles through sodden air, we had mild blue skies, oranges growing in front yards, and lissome palm trees casting slender shadows in the mellowing sun. Instead of the chill whisper of dread creeping like ghostly fingers on the damply foreboding wind, we had … well, we had decorations. Festive decorations. Enthusiastic decorations. Happy decorations.

Ghosts and ghouls danced merrily together on manicured lawns; skeletons relaxed on patios or waved cheerful greetings from front porches; grinning green-skinned witches appeared delighted to be strung by their necks from cactus branches; and children played raucously in bone-strewn lawns decorated with tombstones etched with their own names. At first, the dour Northern European inside of me was appalled by such frivolity. This was Hallowe’en?

Truth to tell, I quickly learned to accept it. It did not require an archaeological dig of introspection for me to identify a preference for sunny skies over dark evenings; and I am happy to report that in my adult years I have discovered other ways to be thrilled than scaring myself halfway out of my wits. And, whether you happen to reside among the living or among the dead, you would have to have a heart of granite not to have it melt at least a little bit at the trick or treaters.

In a time when we are constantly told that the magic of childhood is all but dead, that the internet is driving our junior citizens to lose their sense of wonder, that they know too much about things they shouldn’t and not enough about finding joy in simple pleasures, trick or treat is an occasion of pure, untrammeled enchantment. Streams of kids will flock to the front door, some bounding excitedly, some clinging bashfully to their mothers’ hands, dressed as witches, fairies, flamenco dancers, spacemen, pop singers, dinosaurs, sandwiches, house plants, kitchen appliances … the only limit is that of youthful inventiveness, which, it quickly becomes apparent, is more or less no limit at all.

The costumes range from the exquisite to the grotesque, from the meticulously planned to the hastily slapped together; ghosts of all descriptions shout “Boo!” and stand grinning in delight as you reel back in pretend fear; princesses flounce through in dresses whose sequins would make a Kardashian weep with envy; last year, one little boy had simply painted an old woman’s face onto a sheet of cardboard and fastened it around his head with a length of elastic, and so convincingly did he hobble to the door with one hand clutching his aching hip that he had me on the point of whipping out a chair for the frail old dear to take a rest on. It is pure fantasy – and the purest of delight.

Mr. Los Angeles loved trick or treating when he was a child. Eschewing superhero costumes on the grounds that they were “icky,” and barred from paying realistic tribute to his personal hero Wyatt Earp by the stern edict of Mr. Los Angeles Senior that even toy guns “were not toys,” he gravitated more to the look of the sober 1960s superspy, his apotheosis being the year he donned a shirt and tie and parlayed his 9-year-old’s stick-straight, Norwegian white-blond hair into what he even now describes proudly as “the ultimate Illya Kuryakin.” Thrush agents were particularly shifty that year.

Receiving trick or treaters as a young adult, he would don a dramatic cloak, dim his house lights, and open the door with a rich Bela Lugosi-esque chortle, until one child, on seeing him, first let loose a word his mother had had no idea he had known, and immediately, realizing the trouble he had landed himself in, reflexively let loose a different word his mother had really had no idea he had known, before physically clamping both hands over his mouth to prevent further self-incrimination and fleeing the scene; following which, even Mr. Los Angeles acknowledged that the fun had gotten as good as it was going to get and retired on the high to regular candy-distributing – enlivened by the occasional sinister cackle along the way – from then on.

Mr. Los Angeles considers himself an expert on Hallowe’en candy. The point, he firmly maintains, is quantity over quality, and he returns from the supermarket delightedly laden with bag upon bag of waxy miniature chocolate bars, luridly colored lollipops, and a particularly repellent foodstuff called candy corn, an orange-colored wedge resembling to my European eye nothing so much as an earplug, than which I can imagine few objects less attractive to consume, but each to their own. He tends these treasures carefully, distributing them through a series of pumpkin-shaped buckets with the delicate precision of a Victorian spinster arranging a bowl of pot pourri, and hands them out with aplomb when the trick or treaters arrive.

For all the talk of the greed of the modern child, the tricksters who knock on our door are generally reticent to the point of self-denial. “Are you sure you don’t want another?” we will ask a fierce pirate captain or haughty Cruella De Vil, who will turn beseeching eyes to their parent for permission before shyly accepting. Siblings will even share with each other unbidden, which in these troubled times I find a pleasingly hopeful portent for our future. We could do far worse, I feel, in the coming generations than to be governed by a Cat in the Hat who is willing to share her candy.

After the last doorbell has rung, the last Jedi has swung his light saber, and the last giggling witch has bared her nails, Mr. Los Angeles and I take a bowl of the small mountain of candy that still remains and sit together in the quiet, passing pieces of the less repulsive chocolates, and chuckling over the evening. Our heads are filled with outlandish costumes and childish laughter, and there is the merest hint of a seasonal snap in the air; soon it will be Thanksgiving, and after that, Christmas. Parties will be thrown, gifts will be exchanged, and far too much food enthusiastically consumed; the joyous, endless, ridiculous American holiday season has officially begun.

And, just sometimes, after the chocolate wrappers have been discarded and the pulsating piles of Fruit Chews stowed somewhere discreetly far from polite gaze, when the moon has risen high in the sky, and all the trick or treaters are safely home and tucked quietly into their beds, when the mist creeps in from the ocean and the winds begin to blow around the edges of the house, I find myself thinking of the evil monkey’s paw from that absurdly cheesy tale of my childhood, and, just sometimes, and just for a second or two, I might just find myself listening, shivering just a little, and wondering if I will hear the sound of the dead young man patiently knocking on the door …

Photo by Marcin Nowak on Unsplash

It’s generally considered to be an attractive accent, which is fortunate for me because it’s always nice to be admired, and this is for something I didn’t have to work for at all. But it does set me out, indelibly, as being from somewhere else, as being other. People will comment on an accent: I used to do it myself before I emigrated, but I had had no idea until I was on the receiving end just how darned often they will do it.

They will exclaim, “Oh! You have an accent!” as if this were something about myself that I had not until then noticed. They will say, “I love your accent!” which is flattering but not necessarily relevant if I am, for instance, complaining about my utilities bill. (I once had a friend whose husband I stopped referring to by name, because we were required to pause the entire conversation for expressions of surprised delight every time I called him Mahr-tin instead of Marrt’n. Every. Single. Time.) They will listen to me talk with an expression of rapt fascination, leading me to believe with smug contentment that what I’m saying must be really very interesting indeed, only to cut across my brilliant and incisive line of reasoning with a dreamy, “You know, I love your accent so much, I could listen to you read the laundry list.” Two women’s shirts and one deflated ego, by Saturday morning, please.

Having an accent means being placed into a category. It’s human nature: people make assumptions about people with accents anywhere. Americans from the Southern states are supposed to be one thing; Americans from New York, another. French people are supposed to be sexy, Germans, efficient, and I have an Irish cousin here in California, a steely academic with a mind like a scalpel, who waxes eloquent when her Leinster lilt causes the unwary to pigeonhole her as “whimsical.” When people hear my own accent, they assume that I’m upper-class, which I’m not. Or that I’m pretentious: I promise you I’m not that either, I just say toast-ah instead of toaster. They assume that I must love wet weather, and look confused and hurt when I suggest that the fact that I have chosen to live here in Los Angeles instead of there in England might just indicate that I might really not be quite so devoted to it as they suppose. They assume that I have intimate knowledge of, and am endlessly fascinated by, the inner workings of the Royal Family. I don’t. And I’m not.

It also means a steady stream of strangers asking me, brightly, where I am “from.” This is a fairly straightforward question to answer when I’m standing in line at my local supermarket, since a shopping cart containing a 20 pound box of cat litter, 32 fluid ounces of drain clog remover, and a giant bottle of Listerine will suggest to the observant that, from whichever part of the world I happened to emerge, I do set out my current garbage cans somewhere in the general vicinity. But when I’m in other places, it becomes socially fraught. If I say I’m from Los Angeles, people will look offended because I’m clearly not originally, and it sounds as if I’m making fun of them. But if I say London, Murphy’s law will guarantee that they have been there more recently than I have, and will plunge headlong into a spirited discussion of the heat wave, or the bus strike, or the current political upset, leaving me to nod politely and strive desperately for the air of one who has the faintest idea what they’re talking about. If I tell the truth, which is that I was brought up in London but have spent most of my adult life in California, their eyes will dart in panic as they begin to wonder uneasily just how much of her life story this crazy woman is planning to relate to them before her caregiver arrives to lead her, gently, away.

Heigh ho, you say, but surely it also means you must fit in better when you return to the Old Country? Well, no. Imagine, if you will, visiting a place in which you haven’t lived for decades, where you no longer have the foggiest notion of how anything works in the day-to-day, not where to deposit your recycling, nor how much to tip in a restaurant, nor even how to buy a ticket for the Tube, and yet when you open your mouth to ask about these things, you sound exactly as if you’ve never left, leaving the locals to reach the conclusion that you either are either having them on, or are, as a Liverpudlian friend once cheerfully suggested, “a bit simple.”

I know what you’re thinking: if that’s how she feels, why doesn’t she lose the accent? The honest answer is that I can’t. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I’m hopelessly non-musical; maybe it’s because I was well into my 20s when I emigrated; and my all-American husband Mr. Los Angeles is given enchantingly to suggest that it might be because I plain old don’t listen to a word anyone says; but for whatever the reason, my fussily up-and-down British trill refuses to flatten itself into the laidback Californian monotone. When I try to do an American “r”, I sound like Tony the Tiger; when I try to tackle an entire sentence, I apparently sound like Cary Grant. So I’ve learned to accept it and live with the fact that I will forever sound like a stranger in the country I call my home.

Inevitably, there have been Americanisms I’ve acquired over the years. It now feels natural for me to say gas instead of petrol, sidewalk instead of pavement, and bathrobe instead of dressing gown. I’ve also taught myself to pronounce a few easy words, like bay-sil instead of bassil, and skedule instead of shedule, mostly because I grew so tired of people stopping the conversation to say, “I love the way you said that.” In restaurants, I even ask for rannch dressing on my salad instead of rahnch because I have discovered that otherwise the entire table will expire of hunger while the waiter and I are playing Twenty Questions about what it was I just said.

It seems that I can run but not hide, however. I was recently having a lipsmackingly delicious gossip with a clued-up New York friend over breakfast in her local diner. She’d just reached a particularly juicy part about the latest celebrity chef saga when the waitress came to take our order: I glanced quickly at the menu, ordered the first thing my eye fell on, which was a cheese and tomato omelet, and turned eagerly back to my friend’s tale.

But the waitress was still with us. And she was not happy.

“Tom-ay-to?” she echoed mournfully. “Did you just say tom-ay-to?”

Her face fell over her order pad. Her shoulders slumped in disappointment.

“You said tom-ay-to,” she sighed. “I was so looking forward to hearing you say tom-ah-to.”

I actually felt a little sorry for her.

Photo by Chandan Chaurasia on Unsplash

All worthy causes, obviously; but if I am to treat them with the attention they all deserve, then something has to give. So, for the foreseeable future, I’m going back two and a half years to the beginning of this blog and re-running my posts since then, mostly in order.

I’m not going away by any means. I’ll still be here to respond to comments; if there’s something new I want to say, I’ll certainly say it; and meanwhile, the freed-up writing time will give me more opportunity to read and respond to the amazing other blog posts I’m seeing on Substack.

For those of you who feel they’ve had enough of me the first time around, thanks for riding with me so far on the journey, and happy trails for the future; for those who want to return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, stick around and see where it all began …

My co-writer was a local arts journalist, some years older than me, called Julia Braun Kessler, who had had the idea but needed a collaborator with experience in fiction and a grasp of British English to help translate her vision to the page. We took her first name and my mother’s maiden name, called ourselves Julia Barrett, and had the time of our lives researching the period, aping the literary style, and arguing ferociously over whether to write “gentlemanlike” or “courteous,” or “features” or “countenance,” or how often you could repeat “she said” during a conversational passage without becoming boring (Julia liked to vary it, I held that more obtrusive verbs were simply distracting).

At the inspired suggestion of Julia’s husband Jascha, a poet and professor of literature, we called it Presumption, partly in a nod to the audacity of our project, and partly because the plot had Darcy’s younger sister Georgiana somewhat irritatedly falling in love with a plainspoken member of the meritocracy. Despite the forebodings of the naysayers, it did get published, and while we narrowly missed winning that year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, it is still in print today, and I even receive the occasional royalty check in the mighty double digits, which never fails to cheer me.

The Jane Austen Society of the time were appalled at our effrontery. Pearls were not so much clutched as grasped in a stranglehold, sofas were fainted alternately onto, and the cry went out, in tones worthy of Lady Catherine de Bourgh herself, that two writers in Los Angeles, of all unspeakable places, had “tampered with a masterpiece.” I imagine the organization has clambered at least partially down from its high horse since the advent of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; but at the time, the name of Julia Barrett in Austen circles was synonymous with the very muddiest of brash Californian mud.

We didn’t mind too much about this. I had already reached the private conclusion that, for all of Jane Austen’s literary genius, she was also an unpleasant little snob; and besides, we’d soon fallen into much more congenial company with whom to pass the time of day.

There was at the time in Los Angeles a thriving section of society known as the ladies who lunched. These were the wives of the rich men: women of leisure with time on their hands and bottomless bank accounts, who were more than happy to shell out a donation to a good cause in exchange for an indifferent lunch at a fancy hotel and the thrilling opportunity to rub their designer-suited shoulders with the more shabbily clad scapulae of a couple of real live authors. Julia, who seemed to know everyone in town, had added our names to the lists for these events, and when Presumption was first published, we spent a most happy six months going from venue to venue, reading, speaking, signing book copies, and generally making ourselves irresistibly attractive to one and all. Jascha used to call us the dog and pony show.

The ladies who lunched were sweethearts. They were possibly not what a nitpicking observer might describe as women of towering intellect; but they didn’t claim to be, and besides, I’ve been around a few towering intellects in my day, and good lord, do they know how to tower. These ladies were friendly and unpretentious, and would gather eagerly around Julia and me, themselves fresh from vacation travel in private jets to fabulous hotels in exotic places, dripping jewels that could have bought and sold the both of us and our entire social circles several times over before breakfast, expressing nothing but enthusiastic admiration that any person could manage to put together two consecutive sentences, let alone a whole bookful of them. Their souls were as sweet as honey, and we had a wonderful time among them.

One day, Julia telephoned me in some excitement. We had scored the prize, she announced triumphantly, an invitation to Edna Lillich Davidson’s monthly Luncheon Salon at the Beverly Hilton, hosted by no less a luminary than Edna herself.

“That’s nice,” I said, politely.

There was a pause while Julia suppressed a sigh.

Edna Lillich Davidson, it seemed, was the leading figure of the Los Angeles literary scene; her … not merely lunch, you will note, but the full-on Luncheon … Salons had been the hot Los Angeles literary lunch ticket since the 1950s, they had hosted every important writer in town, this was a very big deal indeed, and was there any way in the world, in honor of just this one occasion, that I might under any method of persuasion even consider wearing make-up?

So up we both trundled on the appointed day, I cosmetic-unencumbered but spanking clean and sporting a cute British accent to boot, to do our double act. Edna Davidson was magnificently regal in bearing and thoroughly charming in manner, and if some might have questioned the decision of a woman who would not see 70 again to dress herself in the garb of an eighteenth century milkmaid, I quickly reminded myself, looking down at my own trusty attire, that I was hardly in a position to debate the sartorial choices of others. We chatted, we mingled, we were shown to our seats at the table of honor at the very front of the room, which we shared with Edna herself and the other guest, Buddy Ebsen, on-screen Jed Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies, off it an elegant and engaging man, full of stories of the time he had nearly played The Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz.

Our presentation was a roaring success. We made a good pairing, we two, Julia the tall and soignée native New Yorker who had seen it all, I her more Bohemian London-born counterpart. We read passages from the book; Julia gave a brief summary of Austen’s life and works; I compared my own life as single woman in the late twentieth century to that of Austen in the early nineteenth. We fielded questions and raised some chuckles. It was all going, so, so well.

I just wish someone had warned me of what would happen next.

After the presentations, an expectant hush fell over the jewel-bedecked audience. Then Edna rose gracefully from the table, made her way to the stage, and positioned herself at its center.

“And now,” she announced ringingly, “it is time for the Broadway section of our salon.”

A hum of anticipation ran through the room: this was plainly the high point of the occasion. Edna smiled, graciously, in acknowledgement.

“This month,” she said, “our musical selection is Rodgers and Hammerstein’s beloved work, Oklahoma!”

The hum grew.

“So,” added Edna, “without further ado …”

She thrust a dramatic arm to a not-young man sitting at a piano, who obligingly produced just two or three chords before falling even more obligingly silent. Then she drew herself up to fix her eyes upon a spot somewhere several inches above the audience’s collective head.

“There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow,” she observed, dreamily.

She paused.

“There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow,” she repeated firmly.

She paused again.

“The corn,” she continued, “is as high as an elephant’s eye. And it looks like it’s climbing clear up in the sky.”

Another pause while she gathered her resources.

“Oh!” she cried then, in wonderment. “What a beautiful morning!”

And, yes, here it came,

“Oh! What a beautiful day!”

It was at this point that I realized that this generous and warm-hearted woman, who had invited me to her gathering and been nothing but delightful to me since I had arrived, was proposing to recite, con brio and employing perfect elocution, the entire lyrics to Oh, What A Beautiful Morning, and very possibly, given her assured command of the stage, to every single song in the Oklahoma! score.

And … oh, reader, the shame … I lost it. I suffered a full-on attack of the giggles: the sort that starts in your belly and works its way up through your chest to your vainly pursed lips, and your body shakes and your eyes tear up and your face turns purple, and try as you may you cannot suppress the eruptions of mirth that will burst from your throat.

It was terrible. It was frightful. It was the worst such attack I had had since the Fourth Form French lesson when Maureen Gallagher had drilled her pencil into my back and whispered, “Am I boring you?” except that then I had been simply a naughty schoolgirl who could be sent to the corridor to calm down, and here I was a grown woman, a featured author on the top table, no less, with the eyes on me of a roomful of perfectly nice women who had been looking forward to this afternoon with keen anticipation, and the impeccably gentlemanly Buddy Ebsen, and (oh, God), my increasingly infuriated writing partner, as I descended further into disgrace.

I tried everything. I tried thinking of rotting fish, of abandoned puppies, of Beth dying in Little Women. I tried counting backwards from 100, and composing my grocery list, and naming all American states in alphabetical order, which last did work for a while until I reached the letter O. At one point, I decided to go with the flow and pretend I was finding the recital so affecting I was moved to tears: I extracted a tissue from a pocket and raised my head to dab delicately at my eyes, only to be confronted by Edna, now in full flow, ethereally listing the qualities of “that … shiny … little surrey … with the. Fringe. On. Top,” whereupon I disintegrated again.

I truly couldn’t tell you how long the experience lasted. I don’t know if Edna went through the whole production: I know she did Beautiful Morning, and the Surrey With The Fringe On Top, and Kansas City (“it’s better than a magic-lantern show”), and I’m quite sure – although memory has mercifully blocked the details – that she did People Will Say We’re In Love. I do know that when she at last reached the grand finale of pumping her slender fist into the air and crying, “Oklahoma. OK!” I was wrung out, exhausted, destroyed, and that Julia was looking at me with, not so much daggers, as a whole armory of pointed instruments from poignards to stilettos, of which she was visibly calculating which to use on me first.

Julia declined to walk out with me. Edna bade me a most cordial farewell, my only consolation – because she was a really lovely woman – being that in her absorption in her performance she had apparently failed to notice my reaction to it. Buddy walked me to my car: a class act to his fingertips, he behaved for all the world as if the previous hour had simply not happened.

Julia did not talk to me for days. She also stopped signing us up for literary lunches; I missed hanging out with the sweet rich ladies, but could not in any honesty blame her.

When I was a young freelance journalist, my professional world looked very different from the way it is today. Researching an interview subject involved a lengthy and laborious trip to a reference library; filing copy from Los Angeles to London meant walking the printed out article to the Post Office and standing in line to pay $20 to have it delivered by the next morning. Telephone calls cost an arm, a leg and a firstborn child, and were rife with echoings, hummings, and unexpected cut-offs; if the editor needed to communicate with me urgently, she would do so by telegram, which for some reason would be delivered by telephone through the telegram center in Dallas, Texas. I was new to most American accents then, and when the voice on the telephone would inform me that “May-a-hayum, you hay-ave a tele-gray-a-hayum,” I would know that, between their accent and mine, we were in for a merry time.

But all of the minor inconveniences of supplying the copy paled into nothingness beside the very real challenge of getting paid for it. These days, payment for journalists is painfree. I email an invoice to an editor, they approve it, forward the email to the accounts office, the computers take over, and it all runs as smoothly as a jug of custard. Not so back then. First, the invoice must be made out by hand and mailed to the editor for approval; then the editor must hand it to the secretary to walk across the building to deliver it to the accounts department; and it was when it was in the hands of the accounts department that the really good times began.

The people who worked in newspaper accounts departments in those days were notoriously infuriating. Reliably surly men – and in those days, they were overwhelmingly men – they were rumored across the industry to have been hired deliberately for their incompetence, so that writers could be paid late and the publishers rake in extra interest on the money thus withheld. Nobody oversaw them; nobody questioned the ever-more labyrinthine methods they chose to use to process payments. Wresting money from them could take weeks, if not longer.

I once wrote a series of features for a large daily newspaper, which had earned me, in theory, a substantial pay check, only to realize a few weeks after publication that, of the several invoices I had submitted, not a single one had yet been paid. I made telephone inquiries around the office and was sent at last to talk to the accounts department, proudly staffed by two Neanderthal gnomes I’ll call Sid and Sam.

“Where’s my money?” I asked Sid.

“It didn’t go out this month,” Sid reported cheerfully. “We only have one pay run a month, see, so it’ll have to wait till next month.”

“But why didn’t it go out this month?” I asked.

“Because it didn’t,” he explained, patiently. “And there’s nothing we can do about it till next month, not now. We only have the one pay run, see.”

“But you’ve had it on your books for weeks,” I said. “I don’t understand what the delay is.”

At this naked display of wanton greed, Sid’s good humor evaporated.

“You’ll get your money,” he hissed darkly, in the tones of one witnessing a moustache-twirling landlord cast a grieving widow out into the snow. “You’ll just have to wait till next month for it.”

Another month passed, and there was still no sign of my payment.

“Where’s my money?” I asked Sam.

“It didn’t go out this month, love,” said Sam. “You’ll have to wait till next month now.”

“But why wasn’t it sent this month?” I asked.

“Don’t get yourself into a tizz, love,” reassured Sam. “Just be patient, you’ll get it next month.”

“But I need it this month,” I said. “I have bills to pay and it’s ridiculously overdue by now.”

“Try to calm down, love,” counseled Sam. “You’ll get your money. You’ll just have to be patient, OK?”

After a couple of months of such exchanges, it became apparent that Sid and Sam had agreed it would be a good joke to put the uppity woman into her place by continuing to block her invoice from each monthly pay run while hilariously assuring her that it would be included in the next. The pair were having audible fun with this witty wheeze, and I could hear them giggling into their fists with increased merriment with each month that passed; the sum I was owed was no doubt more than they felt any mere woman deserved to be paid anyway, and the more frustrated I grew, the better they enjoyed it.

It was a situation in which I was powerless. The articles I had delivered – on time, and to specification – had already been printed, read, and apparently enjoyed, because the newspaper’s circulation was booming; my editor, who, like many of his kind, had never himself been freelance, made it plain that any problems of mine with the accounts department were mine alone. It was just me, Sid and Sam, and their little joke.

“Should I write a letter to the managing director?” I wondered to a male colleague.

“I wouldn’t,” said my colleague, who knew the director on a bloke level. “He’d only show it to his friends and say, ‘Look who’s in a bad mood because she hasn’t had sex lately.’”

In those days, it was OK to talk like that.

In fact, I was otherwise in a particularly good mood that summer, and, since you ask, having a very nice time indeed, thank you, with my increasingly serious boyfriend, one Mr. Los Angeles, one of our proposed uses for the missing money being to fund a trip to Europe to introduce him to my family. Mr. Los Angeles had been following the saga of my invoices with interest, and when the next pay date rolled around, decided to pick up the telephone extension and listen in on one of the calls.

“Hello, love,” Sam greeted me genially: he made it plain that he thoroughly enjoyed our little chats. “All right, are you?”

“Did my invoice go out in this month’s pay run?” I asked.

“Ah, don’t be like that, love,” he remonstrated. “We’ve been talking to each other for weeks now, haven’t we?”

“We’ve been talking to each other for weeks,” I reminded him, “because I’ve been chasing my money for weeks. Did it go out in this month’s pay run?”

He chuckled forbearingly.

“Well, now, let’s have a look, shall we?” he suggested.

There was a pause, and the sound of a happily slurped mouthful of coffee.

“Well, would you look at that!” he identified, then, contentedly. “It didn’t make it into the system this time either! It’ll have to wait till next month now, love, won’t it?”

“But you said that last month,” I said. “And the month before and the month before that.”

Sam tsked gently.

“You’ll get your money, love,” he reproved me. “Just try being patient, OK?”

“How about you try doing your job?” I suggested, and he hung up on me.

When I called back, it was Sid who answered.

“Sam hung up on me,” I said.

“He did,” he agreed stonily. “You was rude to him.”

“But you haven’t paid me,” I said.

“You’ll get your money,” Sid told me sternly. “In next month’s pay run.”

Which was when Mr. Los Angeles started to laugh. Mr. Los Angeles is a large man, with a rich and booming laugh, which can sound most delightfully genial when he intends it to. This morning, he did not intend it to.

Across the international telephone line, we heard the faint whistling of Sid’s head whipping to attention.

“Who’s that?” he asked, sharply.

“This is Gabrielle’s boyfriend,” announced Mr. Los Angeles. “And I am getting tired of watching her being given the run-around. She has been owed this money for weeks, and she needs to have it immediately.”

Sid did not take to this new line of conversation at all.

“But we won’t have another pay run till next month,” he snapped indignantly. “What do you expect me to do about it till then?”

“I expect you …” said Mr. Los Angeles, and proceeded to outline, in stentorian tones and glorious Technicolor anatomical detail, a full and graphic description of precisely which digit he expected Sid to pull from precisely which bodily orifice in order to cut precisely which sort of colorfully described check and put it into the even more colorfully described mail system, like, now, did Sid hear?

Well, good-bye, money, I thought, listening in some awe as the tirade unfurled, but isn’t this fun?

By the end of the speech, Sid, too, had hung up, and when we tried to call back, no one answered at all. Mr. Los Angeles and I shook hands, agreed to dine on cornflakes for the foreseeable future, and I turned to the back of the sofa to search for loose coins.

I had underestimated the power of a voice fueled by testosterone.

Not five minutes later, the telephone rang.

“Is that Ms. Donnelly?” asked a nosebleedingly posh woman’s voice.

I allowed that it was.

“This is the editor’s secretary,” said the voice. “I’ve just been handed a cheque to be sent to you by express post. The accounts department have particularly asked that I confirm your address to make sure it goes to the correct place.”

My fury at the fact that it had taken one expletive-ridden diatribe from an unidentified man five thousand miles away to elicit the money, after fruitless weeks of reasoned requests from the woman who had actually earned it, was somewhat tempered by the fact that, in Sid’s haste to oblige Mr. Los Angeles, he had miscalculated the amount owed to me by several hundred pounds to my favor.

Of course I’m planning to give the extra money back. I haven’t quite gotten around to doing so just yet; but I’ll do it next month. They’ll get their money then.

And do not ever tell me that the old days were the good days.

“That made me sad,” she said. “What you said yesterday over lunch.”

Photo by Buddha Elemental 3D on Unsplash

For a terrible moment, I wondered if she were, not simply another conference attendee, but the creator of the chicken with mystery sauce about which I had been, if I do say so myself, really quite entertaining.

“When you said that you and your husband were disappointed,” she said, “that you couldn’t have kids.”

“Well, thank you,” I said, touched. Nobody has a perfect life, and for Mr. Los Angeles and me, a profound source of sorrow has been our inability to have children. We all of us have our burdens to carry in this weary world, and this of mine is not one I usually bring up in general conversation; but, because it had touched upon something we were discussing, I had briefly mentioned it. “Yes, it’s not how we wanted it, but we all deal with what we’re given, and that’s what he and I got. Thank you for your sympathy.”

She nodded, pleasantly.

“I have two myself,” she said. “A daughter and a son. They’re the best thing my husband and I ever did.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s nice.” Because I had not a shred of doubt that, for her, it must have been very nice indeed.

“They’re both of them just wonderful,” she said. “I can’t imagine my life without them.”

“I’m sure you can’t,” I agreed. Because I was indeed sure that they were. And I imagined she probably could not.

She smiled, fondly.

“It’s really a miracle when you think about it,” she said. “They arrive as these tiny little babies, and they’re just so cute and squishy and adorable and you can’t believe how much you love them. Then, OK, you go through the toddler years and the teenage years, and, yeah, that can be difficult, but you know it’s not forever, and you still love them anyway, right?”

I took a sip of my coffee, and began to wish I had picked up a cookie.

“I do hear that you do,” I said.

“And then one day,” she said, “you wake up and there they are, these amazing, interesting, charming adults, and they’re healthy and they’re happy, and they’re fun to be around, and you look at them and you think, ‘Wow! I made that!’ And it’s just the best feeling in the world!”

A chocolate chip would have been nice, I thought, although gingerbread rarely goes amiss.

“Yes,” I said. “I can believe it must be.”

“They’re in their twenties now,” she said. “Well, my daughter’s going to be thirty next year, can you believe it? Thirty!”

She nodded at me incredulously.

“Thirty,” I said. Then, since more seemed to be required, “Well.”

“She got married last year,” she said. “It was a beautiful day, just beautiful. My husband walked her down the aisle, and I have to tell you that the day you watch your husband walk your daughter to her wedding has to be, hands down, the most beautiful experience that a woman can have. Seriously. The. Most. Beautiful. You think you’ve had beautiful experiences in life, but when you see that one … well, your heart just wants to burst.”

During the hellish years of our fertility struggle, I suffered two miscarriages – the doctors had told me that both had happened too early to detect the sex, but I had known, deep in my bones, that the second had been a girl.

“Burst,” I confirmed.

“My son, now,” she said, “he’s still single. But that’s OK, because he’s a guy and guys have more time to find someone than women do, right? They can find the right person at any age, can’t they?”

“They certainly can,” I noted, because I do, after all, live in Los Angeles.

“Now, girls,” she said. “They have to think about the ticking clock. I say to my daughter, I say, ‘Phoebe, you’re OK to make me a grandma now, but you’d better not wait too long,’ because a woman doesn’t have forever to do this, does she?”

The reason that I had failed to carry Mr. Los Angeles’ and my children to term was quite straightforward: it was that by the time he and I had met and married, I had grown too old.

“I happen to know she doesn’t,” I said.

“Oh, Phoebe has time,” she reassured me. “She’s only twenty-nine. And if she’s anything like me, she and her husband will only have to look at each other funny and they’ll get pregnant. We’re a crazy fertile family.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” I said. “Aren’t you lucky?”

She beamed, proudly.

“I have to tell you,” she said, “I cannot wait to be a grandma. Can. Not. Wait. I’m already planning ways to spoil my grandkids, I’m going to be the spoiliest grandma on the face of the planet. My husband’s so funny, he says to me, he says, ‘Lynn, you’re already spoiling those kids and they’re not yet a twinkle in their Dad’s eye.’ He’s so cute.”

With the swift precision of an eagle, I swooped upon an opening for a conversation in which I might also participate.

“Husbands, huh?” I said, because, I, too, have one of those.

But I had swooped in vain.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” she said. “He’ll spoil those little ones even more than I do once they come along, he just doesn’t know it yet.’

She stopped and chuckled.

“He’s like my sister that way,” she added.

A little bird told me that I was about to hear about her sister.

“Now, my sister,” she said, “She used to say she didn’t want to have kids.”

… OK, about her sister and her children.

“She figured they were too much trouble,” she said. “And I’d say to her, I’d say, ‘Marcie, they may turn your orderly little life upside down for a few years, but if you don’t have them, you’ll be missing out on the most wonderful experience a human being can imagine.’ The. Most. Wonderful. You know?”

“So people tell me,” I said.

“But, oh, no, oh, no,” she said. “Children weren’t for her, she didn’t even want them. And then, get this, she got pregnant by accident! With twins!”

She nodded at me, delightedly.

“Twins, huh?” I said.

“And of course,” she said, “now her kids are the best thing in her life, she’s all about being a Mom, and I say to her, I say, ‘Marcie, was I right or was I right?’ and she says, ‘Oh, you were right all right.’ Hahahahaha!”

“Ha,” I affirmed.

She stopped, and thought for a moment.

“You don’t really know about love, you see,” she explained, “until you’ve had kids. You may think you do, but you don’t, not really. It’s like they open up a door in your heart that you didn’t even know was there, and on the other side of the door, there’s this whole, wide, enormous world of feelings that you’d never even dreamed about till then. I swear your heart just doubles, and until you’ve experienced it, you don’t even have the capacity to imagine it. I guess you haven’t grown up, really, not in the full sense.”

I pondered in vain an appropriate response.

“I always tell people who can’t have their own kids they should adopt,” she said. “You can adopt at any age, did you know that? And there are so many kids out there who need a home, it seems wicked not to offer one if you can. I tell you, if I couldn’t have kids and didn’t adopt, I couldn’t look myself in the eye. OK, I’d better go find my seat. I guess I’ll see you at lunch, huh?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think I’ll try the sandwich place down the street.”

She chuckled. “That chicken was pretty bad, wasn’t it?” she agreed. “Well, I just wanted to tell you I was sad for you. I wanted you to know that.”

And, humming contentedly to herself, she made her way to her seat to wait for the next presentation.

Photo by Les Taylor on Unsplash

The yucks for me started coming in early. I can’t have been more than four, and was skipping happily through the family home, singing a nonsense song from the 1940s of which my parents had remained fond.

“Ohhh,” I warbled adorably, and oh, how your heart would have melted to see me, “mairzy doats and doazy doats and liddle lambzy divey …”

And reaching the most scrumptious crescendo with the chorus, “A kiddly divey too, wouldn’t yoooou?”

My older brother, now a respected figure in the British political arena, looked up briefly from his building bricks.

“No,” he replied coldly, and returned to his cowboy fort.

When my younger brothers were in their teens, they had invented a running joke they called Pomposity, also known as “I say, young man,” which was an ongoing parody of the waggishly patronizing avuncular adults who in those days would sometimes turn up on television shows.

“I’m going to bed,” announced my 13-year-old brother one evening as we all sat around chatting in the family living room. He turned to his 16-year-old sibling, with whom he shared a bedroom. “Are you coming too?”

“Not yet,” said the 16-year-old. And, winking benignly as he slid into fluent Pomposity, “You just scamp off to bed, young man, and I’ll stay up and talk to your Dad.”

Maybe you had to be there, but this made us all laugh so hard that we all stayed up far longer than we should have.

The comedy followed me into my professional life….

“What I appreciate most about having you on my staff,” remarked an early editor, watching wearily as I scrambled through the teetering mountain of papers on my desk in search of the diary in which I had written the wrong date for the staff meeting, “is that I never have to worry you’ll be head-hunted away to be an office manager.”

… and continued into my domestic chores. Young, poor, and feeling protein-deprived, I once decided to treat myself to such meat feast as my budget would stretch to.

“A quarter pound of beef liver, please,” I requested the butcher.

“Throwing a party, are you?” he grunted.

He wasn’t a friendly man, and I don’t think he expected me to find this quite as amusing as I did; but I did anyway.

Even my journalist interviewees got in on the act. I was once granted an audience with the magnificent, if more than faintly terrifying, Dame Maggie Smith, whom along the way I asked, I thought non-controversially enough, a general question about the decorative style of her house.

For some reason, the pillar of stage and screen found this an unwarranted intrusion into her personal privacy, and fixed me with a basilisk eye of glacial blue.

“Well,” she drawled in full Dowager Countess of Grantham wither. “I’m surprised you don’t already know.”

Away from work, there was little relief either. When Mr. Los Angeles and I were scrubbing ourselves up to attend a Hollywood party, I decided it might be fun to open a bottle of champagne and ask a couple of friends around to admire us in our highly unaccustomed finery.

“Hello, Mike,” I greeted one of them on the telephone, feeling somewhat fizzy and glamorous at the invitation I was about to proffer. “Do you want to come over and see us off to the Golden Globes?”

“Why?” he inquired solicitously. “Do you fear you might not return?”

Over in London, the yucks keep coming…

“I’m not sure I have the correct ticket,” I fretted to my repulsively disrespectful godson as he drove me to Paddington to catch a train.

“Don’t worry about it,” he counseled. “Just explain it to the inspector, ‘Look, I’m old and I’m barmy.’ He’ll understand.”

… and have traveled to the Haute Savoie, where our chef friend Philippe prepared us a dish of shrimp and vanilla, not two tastes I would have ever thought of putting together but which, as it turned out, married like Cinderella and Prince Charming.

“But this is amazing!” I cried in wonderment. “These flavors match perfectly!”

Philippe sighed just a little.

“Oui, Gabrielle,” he explained patiently. “C’est pour ça que je l’ai fait.”

My family are a particularly witty bunch.

“What do you call a confused alcoholic lapsed Catholic?” asked my cousin Helen.

“I don’t know,” I replied, diplomatically declining to reel off the names of a selection of relatives near and far. “What do you call a confused alcoholic lapsed Catholic?”

“A mish-Mash,” she said.

I think she made that one up, which I find faintly flaunting of her.

… and some of them are even quite clever.

“And I suppose,” rumbled my learned cousin John, “you know how to spell fish.”

Mr. Los Angeles raised an appreciative coffee cup.

“Good one,” he agreed.

It appears that people like John and Mr. Los Angeles don’t spell fish the way that I, and I’m venturing to suppose you, spell it.

They spell it ghoti. Gh as in “laugh.” O as in “women.” And ti as in “facetious.” Ghoti.

Oh, how we chuckled.

Lately, even the very newest generation are getting in on the act.

“I bet I can make you say fifteen,” challenged our 11-year-old great-nephew Ethan.

“I bet you can’t,” I retorted, since there are few lows to which I will not sink.

“OK,” he said. “What’s two times two?”

While I do not claim noticeable mathematical skills, even I could do that one.

“Four,” I said.

“What’s two times four?”

So far, so easy.

“Eight,” I said.

“What’s two times eight?”

This was veering close, but – ha! – he was the essential one digit out.

“Sixteen,” I said.

“What’s eight times eight?”

So he was approaching it from the other end now, was he?

“Sixty-four,” I said.

“What’s sixty-four minus fourteen?”

Oh, lord, subtraction after multiplication. But I could apply myself.

“Fifty,” I said.

Ethan snorted triumphantly.

“Aha!” he cried.

Well, the little weasel wasn’t getting away with that.

“You didn’t say you could make me say fifty,” I reminded him sternly. “You said you could make me say fifteen.”

Ethan said nothing. Very loudly indeed.

Everyone’s a comedian.

No, I hadn’t been abducted by aliens, but I have been hosting everyone’s favorite house guests, Technical Difficulties. They have now been successfully dispatched by my in-house computer guru, otherwise known as Mr. Los Angeles, and we remain married, which I find somewhat impressive of us. Normal service is about to be renewed, with apologies for the delay …

Photo by Tiffany Nutt on Unsplash

The first person I talked to there was the film’s director, a man of many awards.

“It was a particular pleasure to direct this film,” said the director, frowning importantly. “And I have to add that one of the greatest pleasures about it was working with young Tousle-Haired. Tousle-Haired is not just an instinctively fine actor, he’s also a genuinely normal kid, too. Any time he wasn’t acting, he was off somewhere doing normal things like riding his bike. I tell you, that kid loves his bike! He’s a real normal kid, you know?”

“Well, how very refreshing, Mr. Director,” I said.

The director pointed at me a confirmative finger.

“You said it!” he commended me.

The next on the round was the apple-cheeked character actress who played the lovably eccentric family matriarch.

“And my land’s sakes,” twinkled the character actress, “let’s talk about that young Tousle-Haired! Such a young scamp of a thing, off riding his bike from morning till night!”

She stopped and went a little pale: Tousle-Haired was famously well-connected in Tinseltown.

“He was always on set when he needed to be,” she added hastily. “Don’t get me wrong, that kid’s a pro to his fingertips, you hear me? His fingertips.”

She took a deep breath, and her cheeks appled again.

“But when he wasn’t on set,” she continued, retrieving her merriment, “oh, my lord, you’d hardly see him! Off on his bike, hither and thither, and lord-all knows where. I said to him, I said, ‘You’ll grow wheels yourself, young Tousle-Haired, riding that bike the way you do.’ But I don’t think he even heard me, he was too busy off riding his bike again!”

“Why, that young rascal, Ms. Character Actress,” I said.

“Such a scamp!” chuckled the character actress, delightedly.

After the actress came Tousle-Haired’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Tyke.

“And you know what normal kids are like,” said Mrs. Tyke, rolling her eyes humorously. “And believe me, our young Tussy is as normal as any of them.”

“He’s not as normal,” sternly contradicted Mr. Tyke Senior. “He’s more normal. He’s the most darned normal kid we know.”

He exhaled to emphasize his point.

“He’s so normal he’s not normal, really,” he concluded.

“You see pictures of him at the Oscars and such and you think he must be different from other kids,” agreed Mrs. Tyke. “But really and truly he’s no different from any regular kid you’d meet. If it’s a choice between doing his homework and, well, just for instance, riding his bike, he’d choose the bike, any day.”

Mr. Tyke Senior barked a laugh.

“He does loves that bike,” he affirmed.

“I do hear that he does,” I agreed.

“You heard right,” declared Mr. Tyke Senior. “Just like any normal kid, you know?”

And they beamed at each other in the shared glow of a parental job well done.

At last, I was ushered to the presence of the Tousle-Haired One himself. His hair was impeccably mussed, his clothing was faultlessly average, and his freckles were as wholesome as blueberry pie.

“I rode my bike this morning,” he greeted me, flashing the gleeful grin that had adults’ hearts melting clear across the nation.

“That sounds like fun,” I said. And since a little mild humor rarely goes amiss, and the Tyke family famously lived in a flawlessly unassuming (give or take the home screening room and the 60’ x 40’ swimming pool) ranch house in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, “I guess you didn’t ride it all the way here, did you?”

The Tyke’s grin wavered just a little.

“Well,” he explained carefully. “Not all the way here, really. That’d be kind of a long way. But I did ride it.”

He leaned forward, the better to attract my attention.

“I love to ride my bike,” he announced, firmly.

“I understand you do,” I said.

The grin reappeared in all its glory.

“Right!” he agreed. “I really love to ride my bike! I ride it all the time!”

“Good for you!” I said. And thinking that by now we had more or less exhausted the topic of my young friend’s velocipedal habits, “But let’s talk about something else now, shall we? Maybe you could tell me some of the other things you like to do for fun, too? You know, when you’re not riding your bike?”

There was a brief silence while beneath the tousle, the Tyke’s brow furrowed in mild confusion.

“Not,” he uncertainly confirmed after a moment, “riding my bike?”

“Yes,” I said. “You know, when you’re doing other things. Do you like to watch TV? Listen to music? Play video games?”

The Tyke’s frown deepened as he attempted to navigate this new course of conversation.

“Not,” he repeated slowly, “… riding my bike?”

“Maybe there’s a sport you like to play?” I suggested.

Beneath the frown, the Tyke’s eyes were beginning to dart, and I swear his freckles had paled.

“Do you like baseball?” I prompted. “Basketball? Soccer?”

The Tyke’s eyes by now were saucer-shaped with panic, and it occurred to me that it would hardly boost my reputation around town if I were to become known as the adult who made Tousle-Haired Tyke cry.

“Well, let’s get back to the bike, then, shall we?” I said.

The Tyke’s face cleared as the grin shone forth once more, resplendent between the freckles.

“I love to ride my bike!” he said. “I ride it all the time!”

“It’s the best, isn’t it?” I agreed. “Bikes are fun, aren’t they? You get that wind in your hair and you feel like you can go anywhere, don’t you?”

The Tyke nodded enthusiastically.

“I ride my bike all the time!” he confirmed. “I love it!”

“OK!” I said. And since we had returned inescapably to the bicycle, it seemed that we might as well follow it to its wholesomely pedal-powered end, “So tell me, Tousle-Haired, when you do ride your bike … where do you like to ride it to?”

The silence that followed was as long as the climb to the top of Mount Everest, as wide as the sand-blown Sahara Desert, and as deep as the sapphire blue Pacific Ocean.

A few years after this conversation, Tousle-Haired Tyke reached legal adulthood, immediately upon which he dropped out of Hollywood, never to be heard from again. I wish him well wherever he is now, and will always wonder which method of transport he used to make his departure.

Photo by Tomas Martinez on Unsplash

That morning, I had some rare free time, so rose at my leisure and made it to the hotel’s restaurant for breakfast at around 9.00. There was something amiss in the room, I noticed. The tables were empty, and most guests were clustered around the bar, watching a ridiculous movie with far too loud special effects.

“What on earth is the matter with people?” I thought peevishly. “Have we all become so addicted to canned entertainment that we can’t be without it even during breakfast?”

Then there was a louder crash as American Airlines flight 175 plowed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

As soon as I decently could given the time difference, I called Mr. Los Angeles.

“Have you seen the news?” I asked him.

“I have some news for you,” he replied soberly. “Janine’s died.”

Janine was the lynchpin of a group of merry friends of ours who had met at Loyola Marymount University and remained as close as family ever since. A film production assistant, she had been driving to the set of her current movie in Bulgaria early that morning when, in a hauntingly apocalyptic twist, four wild horses (yes, really) had stampeded into her car, killing her instantly. Janine was brilliant-minded, golden-hearted, goofily funny, obsessed with Lord of the Rings, and counting the weeks until the opening of Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy later that year. She was 34 years old.

“I hate to think of you alone at home,” I told Mr. Los Angeles. “But I can’t come back right now.”

“Of course you can’t,” he said. “You’re working – see the week out.”

“You need to turn on the television,” I said.

There was a pause while he did so.

“Oh, my God,” was all I heard then.

There was no way any of us in Toronto could get home: with all airports closed, there was no way any of us could get anywhere. The management at our hotel, the Sutton Place on King Street West, could not have been kinder or more hospitable, inviting us to stay for as long as we need, helping us in any possible way they could: none of us will ever forget their generosity during our time of need. Nevertheless, we were stuck there, marooned in our own No Man’s Land, with nowhere to go – since, obviously, the Festival had shuttered immediately – and no clue as to what the future might hold, in America or anywhere.

For myself, I spent the time wandering the streets in the late summer sunshine, going nowhere, my mind a whirlpool. How could Janine be dead? How could the jihadists have done what they did? Oh, God, the people stuck in the Towers. Oh, God, their families. Would Los Angeles be next? Would I get home before something terrible happened there too? How would I get home anyway? Back up – could Janine really be dead?

Every so often, I would return to my hotel room to turn on the television in case there were news of the airports re-opening: every time I did so, I would see a repeat of what I had already seen on the Tuesday morning. Pretty soon, I stopped checking.

The silence in the sky above us was eerie. We take the sound of planes flying for granted, we complain about noise pollution, we rumble darkly about carbon footprints. It is only when there are no planes that we remember all the good parts of life they make possible. We start to ask ourselves – who is not going home today? Who is not able to take that joyfully planned, eagerly awaited international trip? Who will not receive their organ transplant? Who will not say good-bye to a loved one? When will I go home?

After a few days, a group of us rented a bus to drive us back into America, across the country and to LA. It was a coach bus with an odd layout, some seats facing forward, some facing each other, with little space and no hope of privacy. I did not like the look of it at all.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I said.

“Then don’t,” snapped Lawrie, the usually genial Australian who had emerged as our leader. “This is how it’s going to be, and if you can’t take it, don’t come.”

It was a deliberate tactic to force me to make up my mind – and it worked. I desperately wanted to be home.

And so we set off across the great North American continent, a motley group of ten or so journalists, an Australian, a German, a sweet-natured Swedish former hippie, two Japanese ladies, an Indian, a Portuguese, a lone American and a couple of Brits, all headed home to Los Angeles. Our legal statuses varied. Some of us held American passports; some had green cards but not yet the coveted citizenship papers; a couple held only the precarious protection of a foreign journalist’s visa, which allowed us to stay indefinitely on a “temporary” business trip, but forbade us to describe America officially as our home. I had recently acquired a green card myself; but as we approached the American border in this alien new post 9/11 world, I don’t think even the citizens felt entirely secure of what lay ahead.

Since we had left Toronto, we had been entertaining ourselves by cracking ever more silly jokes at which we laughed ever more hysterically. As we approached the border, Lawrie called us to order.

“Settle down,” he said. “No jokes, and no wisecracks. This is serious, and we need to get through it.”

As it was, the immigration officers were both warm and welcoming, and we passed through in the blink of an eye. I don’t think I’d ever hugged an immigration officer before, and I certainly haven’t hugged one since. This one was admittedly surprised; but he seemed quite pleased anyway.

Back at home, meanwhile, Mr. Los Angeles had been busy. The announcement had just gone out that the next day, the planes would be flying again: the scramble for tickets was ferocious, but Mr. Los Angeles is one determined man, and soon he had secured me a seat on the first plane out of Detroit. I knew nothing of this – extraordinary as it now may seem, I did not at the time possess a cell phone; extraordinary as it may now seem, this was not uncommon. The first I heard of it was when one of my more tech-savvy colleagues answered her own cell phone while we were bowling past the green fields of Michigan, and passed it over to me.

“Ask the bus driver where you are,” Mr. Los Angeles instructed me.

Obediently, I wove my way to the front of the bus.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Beats me,” the driver replied. “I was just told to drive to Los Angeles.”

“Please talk to my husband,” I said, handing him the cell phone.

I am still unsure how Mr. Los Angeles elicited the information that we were approaching Flint, but not long after that, the bus dropped me and my baggage off at a dingy hotel somewhere on the outskirts of the city. We were still finding everything funny on the bus, and when we saw that the hotel was attached to a British pub that served fish and chips, this was the funniest of all: I left in a flurry of well wishes and pre-orders for the mixed seafood platter next time everyone was in town.

How the hotel staff privately reacted to the appearance of a hysterically giggling woman with a large suitcase and a British accent ordering a taxi to take her to the Marriott Hotel at Detroit Airport some 80 miles away, is unrecorded. But they were impeccably polite nevertheless, and the taxi arrived in record time.

I arrived at the Marriott late in the evening, exhausted, hungry, and wanting nothing so much as a shower, a meal, and bed.

“Name,” snarled the receptionist: she too was tired and hungry and made scant secret of the fact that she could hardly wait until the end of her shift.

I gave my name.

And that was when the already surreal occasion became more surreal still. Instantly, the receptionist’s face cleared, illuminated, became bathed in awe.

“It’s you,” she breathed.

She pressed a button under her desk, and four of her colleagues, similarly weary, similarly enraptured, ran to join her.

“It’s her,” she told them.

They exhaled a collective sigh of ecstasy.

“You,” the receptionist informed me, “have the cutest husband in the world.”

Now, for the record, I do kind of like Mr. Los Angeles. However …

“He wanted to send you flowers,” the receptionist announced incredulously. “Flowers!”

It appeared that Michiganders do not send flowers as freely as do Southern Californians.

“Well, that was nice,” I said, politely. “What room am I …”

“’Course, we don’t have any flowers in town,” said the receptionist. “No planes to deliver them. But get this.”

She leaned over her desk impressively.

“He’s sent you champagne instead,” she reported. She paused, for further effect. “And chocolates.”

Her four colleagues swayed in unison, a Rust Belt Greek chorus of appreciation.

“The cutest husband,” they agreed, “in the world.”

It seems that Michigan husbands are not ones for the romantic gesture. For the rest of my short stay at the hotel, I was treated by the entire female staff as a blend of Aphrodite, Helen of Troy, and Marilyn Monroe. Of all of the bizarre elements attached to that strange and dreamlike week, this – while undoubtedly agreeable – was possibly the most bizarre of all.

I arrived at Detroit Metropolitan Airport the next morning expecting I knew not what. As it turned out, the remarkable part about the flight home was the sheer ordinariness of it all. The same line as usual to check in, the same red and blue upholstered seats on the plane, the same recorded message of “Thank you for choosing to fly United,” for all the world as if America had not been irrevocably changed a few days earlier. We took off on time, flew without turbulence through the calm September skies, and landed on time in Los Angeles. And when the cutest husband in the world met me at the airport, we held each other as if we would never let each other go.

I’ll be thinking of Janine this September 11, as so many of our circle do every year. I’ll be thinking also of the people who died so terribly in the Twin Towers 25 years ago this year; I’ll be shedding a tear for their families, and raising a glass to all of the first responders who became heroes that warm September day.

Meanwhile, let’s all of us hold our loved ones close, today and every day.

Photo by Rob Wicks on Unsplash

“I see you’re happy,” said a nice assistant catching me gleefully grabbing a jar of Dijonnaise mustard.

“This,” I informed her, brandishing the jar exultantly into her face, “is The. Best. Mustard. In the world.” If you want to know, it’s called Amora, it’s not an upscale brand, but a French friend had served it to me with a plate of charcuterie one long, light evening in Paris and I had fallen in love. “It’s absolutely delicious, it’s extraordinarily hard to find in LA, and now …”

I was required to pause for a moment as my emotions caught up with me.

“… and now,” I finished at last, “I’ve found it.”

The assistant smiled sympathetically.

“Good feeling, huh?” she agreed.

“The best,” I asserted. “And even better …”

I rummaged through my shopping cart among the Japanese wasabi crackers, Salvadoran pupusas, and Ethiopian injera bread, to produce a package of andouillette sausages.

“If I have my way,” I announced, “an andouillette with mustard will be my last meal on earth.”

Mr. Los Angeles does not care for an andouillette. You do not, in fact, want to know how Mr. Los Angeles describes an andouillette. You indubitably do not want to know to what Mr. Los Angeles compares the smell of an andouillette. Mr. Los Angeles, however, would be out that evening, at his third viewing of The Odyssey, and you can do great things with a fan in three hours.

“Aren’t there some wonderful foods in the world?” I was moved then to muse. “And aren’t you lucky to work in a place that has so many of them all under the same roof?”

The assistant nodded confidently.

“Well,” she said, then. “I know what you’re really looking for.” She turned and raised an authoritative finger. “Come,” she ordered.

Still salivating over my sausage, I followed, wondering the while exactly what it was that I was really looking for: I supposed that inner contentment and justice for all would come top of the list, but on most days I’d settle for finding my glasses. Still, the assistant seemed to know something I did not, so obediently I tracked her through the aisles of nuts and spices, honeys and oils, past Scheherazade’s food from Arabia, past Omar Khayyam’s food from Persia, past García Lorca’s food from Spain. At last, she stopped and turned back to me, her face ablaze with triumph.

“Voilà!” she cried, flinging a dramatic arm towards the bounty on offer.

Now, it’s not that I have anything against British food per se. Some of it, in fact, is excellent. A plate of tender Welsh lamb, a jammy-centered Scotch egg with maybe a Cumberland sausage coating, a bowl of Jersey Royal potatoes, still in their nutty young skins and glistening with butter, are all sights to cheer my heart. Many pre-packaged British foods are tasty, too. I always enjoy a dab of Branston pickle on a cheese sandwich. Although I don’t myself see a burning necessity to swell the coffers of the British Royal Family by buying them, I won’t turn down a Duchy Original biscuit if offered. Show me a bar of Green & Black’s Maya Gold, and I’ll show you a happy, and soon to be chocolate-smeared, woman.

This display appeared to have been concocted with the specific intent to capture a rainy Tuesday in Margate. Sawdust-like shortbread fingers rubbed glum shoulders with bilious-hued battenburg cakes and caramel wafers whose cardboard nature you could taste through the cellophane. There were baked beans in blue cans and dried gravy granules in brown boxes. Simply by looking at it, I was transported to Café Forlorn on Marine Parade, complete with cross waitresses, a stale ham sandwich, and despair fogging the window panes.

The assistant beamed at me, delighted.

“Well?” she demanded eagerly.

“Well,” I agreed, after a moment. Then, since more seemed to be called for, “That’s quite a display you have here!”

“Don’t we!” she congratulated me. “You’re lucky you came in today because it wasn’t even here yesterday. It just went up this morning.”

“Wow,” I said. “That was a stroke of luck then, wasn’t it?”

“It was meant to be,” she concluded. And extended a bounteous hand.

“Go for it,” she urged.

Now, this was awkward. Despite what Mr. Los Angeles might tell you, I do on the whole attempt to be polite; and she was a perfectly nice woman who had done me no wrong and wished me nothing but well. But the very notion of sullying the cornucopia of deliciousness inside my beautiful shopping basket with Bourbon biscuits and (oh, God) Lucozade was such as to have my heart running clear down Margate Sands and plunging into the icy North Sea, never to return.

“What are you going to start with?” the assistant asked. “Jam? Marmalade?” She raised an impressive eyebrow. “We even have Marmite.”

In the curious way that British people have of fastening their passions onto the unlikeliest of objects, they have adopted the salty yeast spread called Marmite as an intransigent social divider: people either adore it or detest it, and the Montagues and the Capulets could not be fiercer in their loyalty. While myself not about to make worms’ meat of anyone to defend its honor, I am one of the people who do, within reason and when the occasion calls for it, enjoy Marmite. With the result that every single British visitor I have ever entertained in Los Angeles has brought me on every single visit a fresh jar of the stuff, delivered with a knowing wink and the stern, and believe me unnecessary, recommendation not to eat it all at once. I sometimes wonder to whom I will leave my collection after I am gone.

The assistant was now looking concerned.

“Are we missing something?” she asked anxiously. “We can always order it if you tell us what it is.”

“Not a thing!” I assured her. “It’s a … a super spread.”

It seemed I had said the right thing: the assistant’s eyes lit up.

“Super,” she repeated happily. “I feel like I’m in Piccadilly Circus just listening to you.”

Now, here was an area where I could spread good cheer

“And so it is super,” I told her. Hastily, I riffled through my mental British lexicon. “It’s not only super, it’s smashing. It’s cracking. It’s corker. In fact, it’s downright brilliant.”

The assistant by now was beaming. As I beamed back, inspiration struck.

“Hang on half a tick,” I said then. “It would be a jolly bad show to be standing here and buying all this lovely British grub all on my sad little tod. I think I’ll pootle off and find some chums, and we’ll all come back together and have a … a bash.”

The assistant gasped in wonderment.

“A bash,” she murmured to herself.

“A bash,” I confirmed. “A knees-up. A push the boat out. A do.”

The assistant clutched a jar of pickled onions and stroked it tenderly.

“Push the boat out,” she whispered.

“Cheery-oh then,” I told her. “TTFN.”

I took my basket of the sort of food I do like, and made my way to the cash register, stopping en route for a bar of Swiss chocolate as a reward for diplomacy.

Photo by Pat Donnelly

Mary Donnelly, née Barrett, was the youngest of five children of a successful civil engineer, and a classic youngest she was, pretty, charming, admired by all, required to take responsibility for very little. She was, by accounts, a merry girl and a carefree young woman who larked her way through the WAAF during the War, looking fetching in her blue-grey uniform and quickly winning the attention of handsome young airman Pat Donnelly, whom she married a few years later, after he had sufficiently established himself professionally to be able to support a household. When the reality of domestic life arrived, it delivered a severe shock.

To many, Mrs. Pat Donnelly’s life must have seemed an enviable one. Her husband was handsome, her children were healthy, and she had never once had to wonder when the next pay check would be coming along. For Mrs. Donnelly herself, however, the picture was darker. Like many women of her generation, she had never had it suggested to her that she might pursue a career that would interest her outside the home; like many of them, sketchily educated and assured by society that they needn’t worry their pretty heads about matters of weight, she wouldn’t have known how, anyway. Which left her to her default profession, that of what is now called homemaking.

Mary was not a natural homemaker. She was bored by housework, and, depressingly, she knew she wasn’t good at it. Her children were large and untidy and always wanting food: she wasn’t noticeably good at preparing that, either. She tried to make up the shortfall by reading to us when we were small and joking with us as we grew older. But she was never comfortable in the domestic sphere; she never pretended to be.

I was the second of her five children and her only daughter, and as the testosterone count in the family rose, she and I became each other’s best friend. She was the most interesting and exciting person I knew, and I would follow her around the house, desperate for a conversation with her; she would talk to me about books, and her schooldays, and her teenaged crush on Tyrone Power; she would sympathize about the awfulness of school, but insist that I study hard nevertheless so that I could go to university and achieve the career that had been denied to her. We would laugh together about the males in the family; on soccer Cup Final day, when all five of them were ensconced in the living room with the blaring television, many bags of chips and their beverage of choice, we two would take ourselves to the Gaumont Cinema on Green Lanes for a matinée, preferably featuring Michael York, and a box of chocolates. It was all, really, lovely.

And then I grew up.

We all have our faults; and one of my poor mother’s was the particularly uncomfortable one of envy. It had been established during my young years that, amusing and endearing as I was permitted to be, it was she of the two of us who was to be the glamorous heroine, and I the dumpy sidekick: that she was to be Lucy and I Ethel, she Mary Richards and I Rhoda. When she turned around one day and saw that the awkward girl whom she had urged to study hard, to go to university, to pursue a career, had done all of those things and now had a happy life and a job she enjoyed and was good at – and all this, moreover, while having the audacity to look strikingly like her but thirty years younger – she did not like it one little bit.

Her jokes became brittle and sarcastic; she looked around for a weapon to remind us both of what she had that I did not, and quickly fastened on my, at the time, disastrous romantic life. She started to smirk and make pointed comments about “my husband,” and “my sons.” She would stand sideways in front of the mirror, pat her stomach approvingly, and say, “Not bad for five children!” She would hold tenderly hilarious conversations with the (spayed) family dog, Sally: “Yes, my darling, I know that you’d love to have a husband and puppies, what a shame you have no sex appeal.” I loved my mother, and must emphasize that for much of the time she was both lovable and loving. But good lord, she could be vicious when she had the mind to be.

Gradually, I stopped telling her about my life. I had learned that if I told her something difficult, she would become angry with me for not appreciating the good things; if something happy, I would be flaunting my perceived good fortune over hers. So, to keep the peace, I would slide back into Rhoda mode, listening to her doings and making admiring wisecracks about them, saying very little about my own. She never noticed this. She thought we still each made the other laugh equally.

I didn’t mind too much: Mary was Mary, I loved her anyway, and besides, I had other matters to occupy me. Like most writers, I had always dreamed of writing a novel: now, I had begun to do so, working hard and alone, creating, rewriting, correcting, creating again. It was brutally difficult work – and, as any writer will agree, one of the most inspiring forms of work you can ever luck into.

Meanwhile, Mary had begun to write a novel of her own. It was about her family, a colorful but quarrelsome bunch, to most of whom she no longer spoke because somewhere along the way they had offended her, but about all of whom she ruminated constantly, and with obsessive anger. The book was to be an unflinching exposé of the misdeeds of them all, and to say she was excited about the project would be an understatement. Mary was not a professional writer, and the atrocities she recounted consisted mostly of people irritating Mary: nevertheless, she was confident that the book would be snapped up for publication, confident that it would bring, not only glory to her, but, more gratifyingly still, mortal embarrassment to her kin. “There are going to be some red faces when my book comes out!” she would snort triumphantly. She could hardly wait.

When she had almost finished writing her book, I learned that mine had been accepted by the respected British publishing house Victor Gollancz. For me, this was a lifelong dream come true. For her, it marked the beginning of her decline.

For most of her life, she had kept a diary, a flimsy little pocket affair in which we would tease her for her daily jottings – “Monday: went shopping 9.30. Tuesday: Pope died. Wednesday: went to hairdresser 11.00.” On the day we heard about my book, the entry was, “Wonderful news! Gabrielle’s book accepted by Gollancz!!”

The entry for the next day was, “Feeling ill.”

In itself, this was not so remarkable. A sturdy peasant woman blessed with the constitution of an ox, Mary was a lifelong, card-carrying hypochondriac: regularly, she would announce, ringingly and in tones of faint accusation, that “I think I’ve got flu;” as regularly, a couple of days later, she would have seen something on the television that had made her laugh, and have forgotten about it.

Except that, this time, she didn’t forget. She stayed feeling ill for weeks. She went to her doctor. He could find nothing wrong with her. She went to another doctor, and another, with the same results. Nobody could find anything wrong with her at all. And yet, for the five weeks following the “wonderful news,” her diary entries ran, “Still feeling dreadful.” “No better.” “Had fight with Gabrielle.” (Oh boy, howdy, did she have a fight with Gabrielle during that time.) “Still feeling terrible.” “Had fight with Pat.” (It seemed it wasn’t only me: Pat later reported, remorsefully, that she was in so toweringly bad a temper throughout, that she had alienated even him). She went for tests. “I won’t mind,” she told me, darkly, over the telephone, “if they find something bad. I’ve had a good run so far.” The tests came back as clean as a whistle.

At last, desperate for an explanation, the family checked her into the local hospital for more exhaustive tests, where the doctors inexcusably kept her lying in bed, immobile, for several days. After about a week she was discovered – not altogether surprisingly after having been left lying on her back for so long – to have developed pneumonia. Vindicated, she sent Pat out to buy her a new toothbrush. Then, those days of lying inactive in bed apparently caught up with her, and she collapsed of a pulmonary embolism and died.

Of course I mourned her – she was my mother, for heaven’s sake – but as time has moved on, I have also started to ask questions. The timing of her illness was so particular, and she was only 65 and had been so strong beforehand. Was it simply a coincidence, or could it have been connected with my book? Could her body have been demanding an attention grab – and a most effective one, as it turned out – that then went horribly wrong? Could her daughter’s success have made her feel, literally, physically sick? Could she possibly have died of jealousy?

Am I ridiculously self-centered to want to connect Mary’s death with my own achievement? Many people might hoot with derision at so inflated an idea of my own importance; many people might well be right. But then, I look again at her diary. I knew my mother; I knew the force of her will and the ferocity of her competitive drive against me; and the story that the diary tells, of a furious woman unshakably insisting ill health when not a single doctor could find a single ill that ailed her, is a story that I cannot altogether ignore.

I’ll never know for sure. But it’s a very strange thing to be left having to wonder about.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

The previous couple of weeks had not been easy. There is no delicate way to tell your loved ones that you have decided to inhabit a different continent from them, and the time had been fraught with tears, recriminations, and accusations of failure, in love, in friendship, in family loyalty. Oh, dear, I hear you murmur kindly, that must have been challenging. And I’m sure it undoubtedly was, for those on the receiving end. But since I was the one doling out the abuse, I’m really not the person to ask about that.

The truth was, that, having made one of the biggest – although as it would prove, one of the best – decisions of my life, I now had no idea of how it would turn out. Cautionary tales abounded in London of people who had eagerly swapped gloomy England for sunny Spain, or sophisticated Paris, or buzzy New York, only to receive a harsh shock when the reality of day-to-day life there sank in; and, yes, I knew Los Angeles well enough to know that I liked what I saw of it, but on the other hand – setting off as I was to a place with no living accommodation arranged, no friendships that were older than a couple of years, and a freelance journalist’s career that had never claimed to offer stability – how well did I know it really? As I handed over to the Heathrow departures desk the venerable blue suitcase that contained all of my possessions, picked up my portable typewriter and the passport containing my foreign journalist’s visa stamp, and made my way onto the plane, I was composed enough to go through the necessary motions; but you would never have confused my temperature with that of a cucumber.

I had a nice surprise soon after the plane took off. Two of my very dearest London friends, and two to whom I had therefore been particularly unpleasant a couple of nights before, had sent me – and in those dear lost hedonistic days had been allowed so to do – a bottle of chilled champagne to speed me on my way. Well, this was the way to do it, I thought, offering a glass to the man sitting next to me, who took it as a cue to open a conversation of so spectacular a level of tedium that I limited him to just the one glass and kept the rest for myself.

I can’t now remember why I had booked a flight that changed at Boston instead of taking my usual direct flight, but it’s just as well that I had because it meant that even I didn’t have time to drink the whole bottle. Nevertheless, I had made a respectable inroad by the time I disembarked from one plane, waved my visa in front of the immigration officer, and ambled, hazily and in admirable time, onto the next, there to kick off my shoes, pull on my flight socks, and settle myself in for a peaceful pre-flight doze.

Only to be roused by a stern announcement coming over the loudspeaker. Would Miss Donnelly please make herself known to the cabin attendants?

When Miss Donnelly did so, she discovered that the cabin attendants were not best pleased with her. Had Miss Donnelly not been aware that when she went through immigration at the airport, she had also been expected to check her luggage through customs? (In fact, I hadn’t: this was the first time I had used a flight that required me to change planes, and the question of where to clear customs had not occurred to me). Because the customs officials were now holding a suitcase that had Miss Donnelly’s name on it, that she needed to claim, have inspected and loaded onto the plane before the plane could take off, and would she please consider doing so, like, right now?

Still in my socks, I slunk in disgrace past the accusing eyes of my fellow passengers, off the plane, down the hallway of the airport and to the customs desk. The customs officer was burly of build and commanding of presence. He was also, it became immediately apparent, the latest recruit to the growing movement of people who were unhappy with me that day.

“Why didn’t you clear your luggage?” he demanded.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I’m changing planes and I didn’t know I had to do it here.”

The officer – whose life, after all, revolved precisely around the customs desk – stared at me in incredulity.

“You didn’t know,” he repeated slowly, “that you were required to clear your luggage at the port of entry?”

Amid the ravening horde of questions that had rampaged through my mind over the previous few weeks – of my life, my future, my career, my duty, my heart, my happiness, my community, my nationality, my very identity, for heaven’s sake – somehow, that of whether I should clear my luggage in Boston or in LA had failed to register.

“Sorry,” I said. “I really didn’t.”

I didn’t catch exactly what the officer said under his breath; but I received the impression that he was not admiring my accent.

“Well, remember it next time,” he said then. “OK, let’s see what we got here.”

He bent to examine the idiot woman’s suitcase. I was, in fact, particularly fond of that suitcase. It was roomy, and a comforting shade of blue, and had traveled with me to all sorts of lovely places – to America, now, several times, and also to Spain, and to Ireland, and to Rome and Paris and Edinburgh and to all manner of delightful destinations where I’d had all manner of delightful times. It was, by now, a very dear old friend.

A very dear, and a particularly old friend, as the customs officer discovered when he grasped the slider of the zip fastener to open it, only to have the entire slider – not just the pull tab, but the catch-box that slides through the teeth to open and close them – detach itself completely and fall apart in his hand.

The officer gazed at it, his incredulity now amplified to sheer stupefaction

“How am I supposed to open it now?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think you can.”

As I stood there, shoeless, no longer a Londoner but not yet even arrived in Los Angeles, with a planeful of irritated people behind me, an unknowable future ahead of me, all of my worldly goods stuffed into a broken suitcase, and an irate customs officer who would be well within his rights to force open the suitcase and fling all of its contents pell-mell around the area, it occurred to me that this was, hands down, the single most amusing thing that had ever happened to me in the course of my entire life.

I laughed. I howled. I doubled over in mirth.

The officer regarded me stone-faced.

“You think this is funny, huh?” he asked after a moment.

I saw little point in attempting to deny it.

“Yes,” I wheezed, all but speechless with merriment. “I do.”

The officer regarded me for a few moments more, then frowned sharply as his attention was caught by a ticking sound coming from the case.

“What’s that noise?” he said.

This was getting better by the minute.

“It’s my alarm clock,” I spluttered delightedly.

He continued to look at me. This was the 1980s, when the Troubles in Northern Ireland were raging, and here he was, a customs officer in Boston Logan International Airport, confronting a passenger with a British passport, an Irish name, and a broken suitcase with something inside it that was ticking loudly. I simply could not believe my good luck.

“Your alarm clock,” he repeated.

By now I was beyond speech.

One by one, the officer considered a variety of reactions; one by one, he discarded them all.

“Lady,” he said after a few more moments. “Where are you headed?”

It took me a couple of tries, but I at last was able to locate my vocal chords.

“Los Angeles,” I whimpered, clutching my sides in glee.

The officer sighed.

“It figures,” was all he said.

He handed me my suitcase and sent me on my way. And so I shuffled, still in my socked feet, still chuckling, and tenderly bearing with me my weary and broken baggage, back to the plane that would carry me off to my thoroughly lovely new life.

Photo by Heather McKean on Unsplash

In the British tradition, this was a trip out of town that would last for two weeks and, in the days before cheaper air tickets made foreign travel available, would invariably involve a stay at the seaside. We never visited a different city for the holiday, because we were Londoners and why would we want to spend two weeks exploring a different metropolis? We never visited the countryside because … well, I’m not entirely sure why we didn’t, but we didn’t. So the seaside it was, with buckets, spades, and swimming costumes, and confident, if reliably unrealistic, expectations of rich blue skies with a fat and jolly sun beaming benignly through not a wisp of a cloud. We children looked forward to it all year around. How our parents felt about the prospect of spending two weeks with five children removed from friends, cousins, library, public swimming pool, and Broomfield Park, is something we never thought to question. But we five were thrilled at the prospect.

We would began planning where to go around the middle of spring. Annually, we children would beg to be taken to Butlin’s, the large chain of holiday camps where the staff wore red jackets and were unremittingly cheery, there were dodgem cars on the property, and an unending stream of competitions for titles such as Knobbliest Knees and Most Glamorous Granny; annually, we were both outraged and baffled when our parents failed to leap on the suggestion with delight. When I was small, we would stay with a safely Catholic family called O’Brien, who ran a boarding house somewhere in Sussex, had a dizzying number of children themselves and went to Mass with us on Sundays; but as our family had increased we had outgrown their space and were forced to venture out, rosaries close to hand and eyes narrowed warily in suspicion, beyond our Papist fastness and into England at large.

We never again found a place there that we liked well enough (or, it is entirely possible, who liked us well enough in return) that we would visit twice; but over the years we did see more or less all of the Southern English coast. We saw Sussex and Kent and Hampshire and Somerset – where we drove past Bath and my mother mentioned Jane Austen and I, having seen her books in the library, asked if she were the one who had written Pride and Pre-Judice, and my parents and sophisticated elder brother laughed, which was a fair cop, but so did my grubby younger brothers, about which I remain bitter – and Devon and Cornwall, where we walked for what felt like miles to what we were promised would be King Arthur’s castle, but turned out to be just a collection of ruined walls, with not a knight or a wizard or a round table in sight. We saw a lot of seaside and built a lot of sandcastles. But in order to do so, we first had to get there.

Our family car was a battered grey Vauxhall Velox, known, affectionately to us if less so to the street in general, as the Cronk, and real estate inside it was hotly contested. To secure a seat beside a window was optimum, or failing that, to snare a seat beside a person who had grabbed the window but was smaller than you; points were lost if you landed next to the one who fancied himself fashionable and would entertain himself by warbling his way through the Top Ten with ringing enthusiasm and varying accuracy of key; more still if you found yourself between that person and the youngest, who always wanted to go to sleep but must be kept awake at all costs so that he would be able to sleep at night while our parents were enjoying a glass of wine; the worst fate of all was to be stuck in the middle of the front seat with our father’s tweed-clad left elbow digging into one ear and our mother’s sensibly cardiganed right digging into the other, adult conversation booming incomprehensibly overhead, and, inside, a sea of solitary desolation dragging the spirits to a watery doom.

Wherever you were seated, I cannot in candor claim that the conversation during the journey was harmonious. To the horror of both of my parents, neither of them what you’d call imperturbable at the best of times, whoever was sitting by the window would insist on rolling it down to expose their face to the breeze: if they did this on the traffic side, my mother, who inhabited an inner life of glorious and bloodthirsty technicolor, would be convinced that a bus would roar past that would rip their head from their shoulders; if on the hedgerow side, my father, a townsman to his bones, would conjure spikes of grass leaping maliciously from the perfidious country lanes with the specific intent of inserting themselves directly into the center of an eyeball. “They can do wonderful things with glass eyes these days,” he would prognosticate gloomily.

My father was also afflicted when driving the family car with the need to be constantly reassured that he had not somehow run over and killed a pedestrian without noticing. Yes, you are correct, this was indeed an unusual personality quirk, and one which I now know to have been a classic symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; but back then, we had no textbook explanation for this gruesome requirement and certainly no guidance on how to deal with it: we were simply told that Daddy was an unusually virtuous individual who was more concerned than most people with the wellbeing of his fellow man, and that it was our moral as well as filial duty, at every single crossroads we passed, to notify him in tones of bright alertness that, no, he had left no bloodied corpse lying mangled on the road in our wake, and yes, we were sure, and yes, we had checked, and yes, of course we’d turn around to check again, yes, right around, not just our heads but our whole bodies so that we could view the entire sweep of the road, and no there still wasn’t, and oh look, here came another crossroads and the hunt for random neglected corpses was on again. Fun times.

After ten minutes in the car, we would be hungry; after two hours, we would be starving and it would be time to stop for lunch. This was by no means as easy a proposition as it might have seemed. Of the seven in our party, three were semi-feral, four presented a raging battleground of conflicting dietary demands, and very few were capable of communicating with each other for any length of time without dissolving into either raucous cackles of laughter or bloodcurdling howls of fury. Time after time my father would stop the car outside a country restaurant and walk in to check out the lay of the land, until at last he found an accepting harbor: he was a tall and handsome man, and I now imagine that many a winsome waitress’s heart might have skipped a beat to see him sauntering in unaccompanied, only to fall with a thud when he described the contents of his car outside.

At last, lunch would have been located and consumed, the long drive completed, and we would have arrived at our destination.

Well, almost.

There was no GPS in those days, and a talent our entire family shares is the ability to get lost in the best laid-out of spaces. Around and around the small seaside town we would drive, passing the beach, and the fish and chip shop, and the shop that sold buckets and spades and – ooh! – colored handheld windmills, passing everything, it seemed, but the address we were looking for: the youngest would be crying, and the fashionable one would be onto his nineteenth rendition of Something Tells Me I’m Into Something Good, and I would be screaming at the fashionable one to give us some peace or I’d kill him, and my father would be hot on the hunt for corpses, and my mother would be shouting at us all that we’d never have survived the War, when at last we’d declare defeat on the search and stop to ask for directions.

My mother would round on us all a basilisk glare that would freeze even the youngest into terrified immobility. Then, assuming with the speed of Superwoman the persona of a mild-mannered matron, she would wind down the car’s window.

“Excuse me,” she would coo at a passerby in a tone we children had not heard since our last dental appointment. “Would you be so kind as to give us directions? We seem to be lost.”

Directions noted, the passerby profusely thanked, and soufflé-light pleasantries exchanged, she would wind up the window and we would all revert to our previous selves.

“It’s all part of the fun of the holiday,” she would snap, darkly, as Armageddon broke out again.

Even we would find our way eventually, the luggage would be unpacked (how had we fit it all into the car? I now wonder), and, most importantly, the location and times of Mass at the nearest Catholic church ascertained, and it would be time to begin the vacation.

The English seaside vacation. Rife with rainstorms, thunderstorms, seeping drizzle and stinging wind, goose-pimpled flesh, sandy sheets, family fights, kicked-over sandcastles, upset stomachs, jellyfish stings, and, on at least one occasion, an emergency trip to the hospital for a broken arm. For two whole weeks.

My parents were not perfect people; to be honest, I wouldn’t even describe them as particularly good parents. But I hope now that, as a reward for the summer holidays alone, they are enjoying at least a corner of Parent Heaven. At least for two weeks of the year.

Photo by Owen Bjørnstad

The leadup to the trip had already been strange. The Dowager Mrs. Los Angeles, of whom I was extremely fond, had suffered a long and difficult deathbed, which had finally ended the previous January, when the icy North Dakota ground is too hard even to think of digging graves; when it at last came time to return her to her family plot, we had discovered that it is illegal in America to carry personal cremains on a plane, and it had become my task to send the ashes to the mortuary by the unlikely means of the parcel post. “What’s in this parcel?” the woman at the UPS had asked. “My mother-in-law,” I had replied and, because the situation was so bizarre, we had both found ourselves sobbing with laughter. When I got home, I had sobbed again, this time with grief.

Now, Agnes Olson Los Angeles was safely in the ground, having been blessed on her way by a Lutheran pastor who could not have been kinder or more gentle, and it turned out that the weekend when we were in Lakota was that of the annual turkey barbecue, the day when the entire town descends on City Park to feast on spit-roast turkeys, barbecued corn, and other delights.

Well, this was perfect timing, I thought. Agnes had talked so often and so fondly of her home town, and here her former neighbors would be out in force and available to talk to. What stories we could tell them of Agnes in her Los Angeles days, I thought, what memories of her youth we could coax them to share in return.

As soon as I had swallowed my own meal, I approached a table of folk of a likely-looking age.

“What a pretty town you have,” I said. “I’m traveling from Los Angeles and I think it’s beautiful.”

They stopped eating and looked up at me with brows furrowed in mild puzzlement.

“I’ve come with my husband and sister-in-law to bury their mother, Agnes Olson,” I explained. “She grew up here, then married Gerry from the farm, and they left for California around 1941.”

They continued to observe me thoughtfully, as one studies an exhibit of uncertain purpose in a museum specializing in primitive farming implements.

“Yah?” said one of the more gregarious after a moment.

“We’ve driven past the house she grew up in, and it doesn’t seem to have changed much,” I offered.

“Yah,” agreed Ms. Conviviality, her expression deepening from perplexity to outright bewilderment.

This was not going as I had expected.

“She went to the local high school,” I attempted. “And so did Gerry.”

“Yah,” confirmed Ms. Conviviality, shooting at her companions a sidelong glance of befuddlement.

“Do you,” I floundered desperately “… do you … remember … either of them?”

There was a pause as they all eyed each other in mutual mystification.

“Yah,” corroborated Ms. Conviviality, then. The others continued to study me for a while, and then, slowly, returned to their meal.

Broken, I trailed back to Mr. Los Angeles and his sister to describe the encounter to them.

“Welcome to the Midwest,” they said.

Back in Europe they didn’t really tell us about Midwesterners. The Americans we saw on the screen there were excitable and emotional: they were either speaking lines that had been scripted for them in movies or appearing on television talk shows to promote the movie they were appearing in – they were upbeat and enthusiastic and we used to laugh at them for describing everything and everyone as “wunnerful.” When I arrived in Los Angeles, I found to my delight that Angelenos really are like that anyway, and so – although they tend to use longer words – are New Yorkers. I had grown to think of Americans as people who wore their hearts on their sleeves.

Not in the Midwest, they aren’t. Midwesterners, I was to learn when at last I visited, guard their words and their emotions with the jealousy of a mother her newborn child. They live hard lives out in the Midwest, lives of blizzards in winter and tornadoes in summer, of farming accidents and failures of crops, and mile upon mile of prairie separating one town from another: they eat plain food and wear plain clothes, and if they yearn for some experience so inessential as attending a play or a concert, they must drive, sometimes for half a day, into the nearest city to do so. Midwesterners are good and honorable people; but they simply do not have the energy to squander on fripperies, either practical or – as I discovered at the turkey barbecue – conversational.

When I had met Mr. Los Angeles, he had told me, proudly, that his family were Midwesterners. What he had not made plain was that his family were the sort of Midwesterners who had … well … left the Midwest. Who had sat down one day in Lakota, North Dakota, where the ground is stubborn and the crops are unpredictable and the temperature dances at freezing point or below for five months out of the twelve, had figured out that there is a different place to live right here on this very globe where life is easier, and had taken themselves off to live there.

It was true that when they had arrived in Los Angeles, they had brought with them many of their Midwestern ways. They were thrifty and unpretentious and would none of them, man or woman, consider leaving the house without a full set of household tools in case of emergencies: Mr. Los Angeles still talks with pride of our first trip to London, where our hosts’ teenaged son had broken a wooden curtain rail high up in their tall Georgian house on a quiet Saturday night, which Mr. Los Angeles was swiftly able to whip out the pair of vice grips which he had packed in his luggage in order to repair on the spot. “Fixed it!” he boomed triumphantly to the fascinated circle of witnesses who had gathered, bemused, to watch. To this day, he thinks that this story reflects abnormality on them, not on him.

The family were also fiercely Lutheran in faith, and, although the Dowager stepped gallantly to the plate to accept my own slippery Papist background (truth to tell, I suspect that by the time I entered her wayward son’s domestic life, my lack of an extra head alone would have had her turning cartwheels to seal the deal), her real feelings would out themselves sometimes nevertheless. “I never thought I’d see my son married there,” she whispered faintly when we announced we were to be married at the Sacred Heart chapel of Loyola Marymount Jesuit University. I once took her to visit a Catholic artist friend who specialized in religious art: the Dowager tiptoed past the paintings of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catherine of Siena with ever-widening eyes of panic and ever-ashening complexion of alarm; when she at last reached that apogee of Rome-driven monstrosity the Virgin Mary her own immaculately conceived self, she was overcome and retired discreetly to the bathroom, where she found immediate relief to discover the walls decorated in the impeccably respectable Old Testament theme of Noah’s Ark: she positively skipped out, rosy-cheeked and smiling, and the two women were firm friends from then on.

Practicality, Lutheranism, and please let’s tiptoe quietly past my father-in-law’s beloved Ole and Lena jokes, and all, you would never now confuse the Midwestern Los Angeles family I married into with the Midwesterners who have stayed there. Whether California has changed the Los Angeles family or whether it was personal qualities of their own that drew them to California, I couldn’t say; but certainly, after nearly a century of living in the Los Angeles sunshine, they are one hundred and eighty degrees different from the North Dakotans they left behind: they are lighter in bearing, sunnier in outlook, more open in manner; they tell stories – oh, how the Los Angeles family loves to tell stories – they even make jokes.

It turns out that even their vocabulary has changed. We once had a visit from a young Norwegian relative, a charming, if earnest, young man with his nation’s stick-straight blond hair, with whom we spent an immensely pleasurable first afternoon talking family, Norway, and, inevitably in the Los Angeles family, household tools.

“That was delightful,” said the Dowager to him as the occasion ended. “Well, I guess we’ll see you mañana.”

The youth blinked in confusion. “But I thought we were meeting tomorrow,” he said.

As confused as he, the Dowager blinked back. “That’s what I said,” she said. “Mañana.”

It seemed the staunch little Lutheran lady had not realized to what an extent the language of the dreaded Los Angeles Catholics had infiltrated her own.

“Hello, Keri,” I greeted her, not especially remarkably, as I unrolled my exercise mat at the truly appalling hour of five to eight in the morning.

Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash

“You know,” she said, “there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Oh?” I said politely, hoping that the topic would not be complicated: aside from inventing fresh terms of invective to hurl at our trainer, my brain really doesn’t kick into useful gear much before 11.00.

“You see, I used to be a hairdresser,” she began.

“Oh,” I said, my heart beginning to sink ever so slightly.

“So I know something about hair,” she explained.

“I suppose you would,” I agreed, not liking the look of where this was going at all.

“And believe it or not,” she said, “I used to have difficult hair myself. It was dry and frizzy and I just couldn’t do anything with it.”

I had not until then had cause to examine Keri’s hair. But now that I did, I saw that it was relentlessly yellow and ramrod straight, with each strand falling to alarmed attention like soldiers called to parade by a particularly aggressive Sergeant Major. As hairstyles go, it would not have been my personal choice; but then my general policy on other people’s hair, unless it is actually standing up and blowing poison darts at me, is to live and let live.

“It was plain old ugly,” she said. She nodded at me confidently. “Well,” she added. “I don’t have to tell you about that, do I?”

With my exercise mat barely on the floor, I found myself struggling for a response. I am aware that my opinion here might be a niche one, but I actually quite like my hair. It’s true that it never looks particularly tidy; but then, neither do I. It’s true that it will insist on standing up where it should be lying down, and sticking out where it should be waving smoothly; but as an unruly woman myself, I can’t help but admire its independence of spirit. More to the point, it’s my hair, the hair that has surrounded my face ever since I have had a face to surround; and I tend to suppose that most people would assume that if I didn’t like it the way it is, I’d have found a way, here in this city where every second person is a celebrity wannabe and every third person their beautician, to have changed it.

“Then I found this product that works wonders,” she said. “You really need to know about it, it’s called Gleem, that’s with two ‘e’s, OK?, you can find it in the beauty supply store, you apply it after you’ve shampooed, and ...”

“Thank you, Keri,” I said, politely. And, feeling we had satisfactorily exhausted the topic, “This is a tough class isn’t it? Did you feel as sore as I did yesterd…”

“… it works right away,” she continued. “It’s really amazing, especially for difficult hair like yours. It ...”

“Thank you, Keri,” I repeated, my pleasant tone beginning to fray just a little at the edges.

“... adds all the moisture you’re lacking,” said Keri, “ and it smoothes out that ugly disgusting frizz: believe me, it really makes a ...”

I do not come to my exercise class in order to engage in arguments; but I was beginning to feel that a firm hand was starting to be called for here.

“You know, Keri,” I said. “I really don’t like being given advice about my hair unless I’ve asked for it.”

“ ... difference,” said Keri. “It’s so important with difficult hair to use the right product, and particularly in your case ...”

It was time, I felt, to employ transparency.

“Actually, Keri,” I said, “ I’m finding this conversation quite offensive.”

There was a pause while Keri blinked a little in surprise.

“You see, I’m just telling you this to help you,” she explained, then. “Because, as I said, I do know about hair. And if you find the right product, even the very worst hair … ”

“You know, Keri,” I said, maintaining, I thought, a frankly impressive civility of tone, “I cannot believe that I am having to spell out to you that I am finding this conversation offensive.”

There was another pause as Keri pondered the scale of my folly.

“OK,” she shrugged, then, cheerfully, as we all prepared to assume the cat and cow.

Except that it wasn’t OK. You must never, ever tell my trainer this, but my morning exercise class is my happy place. It is where I go to work out my body while making silly jokes with people who make me laugh, to return virtuously exerted and luxuriate in a refreshing shower and a chocolate-covered peanut butter cup (you might want not to tell my trainer about the peanut butter cup, either). It is not – as, on reflection, few places are – where I go to receive unsolicited advice on how I can improve my hair.

“I need to talk to you, Keri,” I said, falling into discreet step with her in the parking lot after the class. “I have to tell you that what you said to me before class really didn’t make me feel good. I come here to feel better, but after what you said, I’m now thinking that people are looking at my hair and thinking it’s ugly, and that hurts my feelings.”

Keri stopped dead, and turned her magisterially coiffed head to look directly into my eyes.

“You know,” she said, “this happens to me all the time. People are always telling me how I can do better.”

Ah, I thought, so she, too, know how it felt.

“Well, there you are,” I said.

“And do you know something?” she continued then. “I love it!”

There was a soft thud as my jaw hit the asphalt.

“Wow,” was the sole response I could access after I had retrieved it.

Keri preened just a little.

“I do,” she assured me. “Really, I love it. Because that’s how I learn things – by listening to other people. It’s really helpful to me.”

I could think of no further comment to improve on my original

“Wow,” I repeated.

Keri nodded, impressively.

“You’d be amazed,” she said, “at the things I’ve learned from what other people tell me. I think of it all as feedback, and it really helps me to grow.”

It was becoming apparent that what we had here was a failure to communicate.

“You see,” I explained, “I don’t mean Wow as in Wow. I mean Wow, as in, I’ve just told you that ... and you’re not even going to ... and I feel … and you say … Wow.”

It was becoming further apparent that the communicational deficiency lay on both sides of the conversation.

“I listen to what other people tell me,” Keri repeated, patiently. “I learn from it, and I grow from it. It’s a really useful tool.”

I at last located my vocal chords.

“Well, maybe that works for you,” I said. “But it doesn’t work for a lot of people, and it doesn’t work for me. And I have to tell you that I found what you said to me about my hair offensive and hurtful.”

It was a sunny California summer morning; nevertheless, ice shards arose to engulf our small corner of the parking lot as Keri at last processed this latest piece of feedback.

She did not, it appeared, intend to learn from it.

“Right,” she snapped, furious with my ill manners. “OK. Got it.”

She turned on her heel, slammed herself into her car and gunned the engine. As she reversed, she leaned her gleaming-haired head out of the window.

“You need to broaden your mind!” she shouted at me before roaring off Oceanwards, never to be seen at the class again.

I have apologized to our trainer for costing him a client, but he didn’t seem to mind too much.

Photo by Dan DeAlmeida on Unsplash

Well, me, for one. I don’t like hamburgers, which, once consumed, sink instantly to the pit of my stomach, there to squat like a leaden toad and ruminate, darkly, on unforgiven slights and unforgotten wrongs. If I’m going to eat chicken, I’d rather have had it roasted in the oven, please, with a squeeze of lemon and a great deal of garlic. I don’t like chasing half a red pepper clear across my compostable bamboo plate in an ever more frenzied attempt to spear its shinily impregnable skin with the virtuously inoffensive tines of my compostable wood fork. And I particularly don’t like perching that same compostable bamboo plate precariously on top of my knee and attempting to digest my food while around me some other people are eating and some other people aren’t, and some are walking this way past and some are walking that way past, and my befuddled lower intestine is wondering confusedly if it really is still in our friend Mike’s back yard or has somehow transported itself instead to Grand Central Station during rush hour. If I’m going to eat with my friends – which, to be clear, is something I very much like to do as I’m very fond of eating and pretty fond of my friends, too – I like a dinner party.

For some reason, Angelenos don’t give dinner parties. They like any other sort of party just fine. Show them a birthday and they’ll have whipped out the grill faster than you can say many happy returns. Mention a televised event – the Oscars, a baseball playoff, a back-to-back Monkees marathon – and the table will be groaning with wittily themed canapés before Micky has slid down the spiral staircase. But the idea of gathering just a few people to sit around a table together in order to eat the same meal together, is one that seems to have been wafted from their collective DNAs at birth and blown with the dust in the Santa Ana winds to the ocean and beyond.

Which is a source of disappointment to me, because I’ve always liked a dinner party. In London when I was young, all young women and many young men learned to give them almost as a rite of passage, and looking back now on the time and effort we used to put into them then, I can only conclude that we either had a couple of extra hours in the day to kill, or were all stark raving bonkers.

Everything was made from scratch, and nothing was simple to make. Impossibly fiddly little items called stuffed mushrooms were a favorite starter – you spent an eternity and a day chopping mushroom stems into teeny-tiny little pieces with onions and garlic and various herbs which you then sauteed in butter and mixed with cheese which you had also grated, then laboriously stuffed the mixture into the mushrooms’ caps and put them into the oven to bake, they took all afternoon to prepare and were wolfed down in seconds, but it never occurred to us not to make them because that was what we all made. Home-made chicken liver pâté took less time to cook but was hell on a plate, so to speak, to clean up after; and my friend Patti would serve globe artichokes, bursting with plump leaves, a whole one for each guest, which would arrive all at the same time, hot and steaming from the tiny kitchen of her tiny flat, and even she can’t remember what on earth she would have cooked them in.

The nature of the main course would depend on your budget. Chicken was a staple, browned in olive oil, braised in red wine, adorned with sliced mushrooms, chopped bacon, peeled pearl onions, crushed garlic, squeezed-in tomato paste, melted butter and flour, and a hey nonny no as the cook slid silently to the floor in exhaustion; “spag bog,” as we used alluringly to call spaghetti Bolognese, was popular too, it being the height of sophistication to check the pasta for doneness by throwing a strand at the wall to see if it stuck – it was years before it occurred to any of us to fish a piece out to taste it instead, and when I now picture my former haunts, I sometimes wonder, a little sentimentally, whether the kitchens have residual pasta pieces clinging starchily to their walls to this day. Once, I was once entertained by an impossibly hip husband and wife couple, anthropologists, no less, and in their thrillingly cosmopolitan thirties, who gave me a dish of bananas wrapped in bacon and baked in cheese sauce, which tasted very much nicer than it sounds. Sometimes I would even make a cassoulet.

Desserts were an alcoholic’s Paradise. Kirsch rained like summer showers on everything from chocolate mousse to ever more elaborate concoctions of fruit salads; there were prunes in Armagnac, cherries in brandy, bananas au rhum (the extra “h” was non-negotiable), and a Scottish flatmate had a recipe that seemed to consist simply of whisky, whipped cream and more whisky, with maybe a solitary raspberry on top if she were feeling elaborate. How we managed to wash the dishes afterwards is a matter I now find in equal parts impressive and inexplicable.

All these years later, I’m still giving dinner parties, and my Los Angeles friends, although still slightly bemused by the eccentricity of this activity, do seem to enjoy them; the menu, however, is as very different animal from those of youthful yore. A starter will be a big bowl of chips and a selection of the delicious dips you can buy at the Farmers Market, the spread usually rounded out by the sour cream and dried onion soup mix without which Mr. Los Angeles insists, firmly if a trifle mysteriously, that a party is not worthy of its name. The main course will be a lazily simmered casserole, with a lentil option for the non-meat eaters and copious use of the various vegetables and salads that are on permanent offer in the Eden that is Southern California. Dessert will be more of same – fresh fruit and/or a pie purchased at that same Farmers Market, or, if I’m feeling inspired, I might pick a couple of lemons from our tree and stir the juice into a bowl of heavy cream and sugar to make a posset that sits in the refrigerator for a few hours and emerges tasting like what angels eat on Sundays. People seem to like it as much as they did in the labor-intensive days, and I’m not too tired to enjoy it either.

The soul of a dinner party is never just about the food anyway. There is an alchemy that arises when six or eight people are sitting around a dinner table eating and talking together. Themes will announce themselves, epigrams be invented, and running jokes take fire that will flame with brilliant hilarity for just that one evening and one evening alone; secrets will be confessed, life stories disclosed, personalities will blossom, sometimes even romances will bloom. It is the communality of it all that provides the magic, the shared food, the shared table, the shared room, the shared humanity.

Even when dinner parties are bad – and, oh, trust me, some of them are – they have each their own unique personality. One of the most memorable I ever attended was given by an unremittingly earnest acquaintance who wore a cravat and was obsessed with European politics of the mid twentieth century, a fascination he was unshakably convinced I shared, because one of my brothers was for a time a Member of the European Parliament. (I don’t). Over the veal goulash, the talk led to a discussion of the policies of Imre Nagy (1896-1958), onetime leader of the Hungarian People’s Republic; and, because most of the people my host hung out with were the sort of people who – and God bless them for it – were interested in this sort of thing, grew quite animated. My host, who was a kind-hearted man, at last noticed my own lost expression, and gallantly leaned over to include me in the fun.

“I always find it interesting,” he murmured to me waggishly, “how people will forget that Nagy was a Titoist.”

He nodded, and sat back, the better to savor his own bon mot.

It is not a comment I have ever forgotten or ever will forget. And I submit that it is not one you would ever have heard at a barbecue.

Photo by Toni Pomar on Unsplash

“What do you want to do while you’re here?” I asked them on the first evening of their stay.

“The thing we most want to do,” they said, “is go to Disneyland.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said, because it’s a fun trip for those who like it, and very Los Angeles, and, dearly as I love spending a week entertaining my English friends, I am also not entirely horrified by the prospect of having a day to myself along the way. “Which day do you plan to go?”

“Which day are you free?” they said.

“I think I’ll let you guys do that one on your own,” I said. There are two sorts of people living in Los Angeles, those who love The Happiest Place on Earth and those who do not; and, intending not a shred of disrespect to those in the former camp, I happen personally to fall squarely into the latter. “It’s a straight shot down the freeway to get to, and Mr. Los Angeles can tell you the best things to do while you’re there.”

“Oh, we couldn’t go without you,” they said. “That would be rude.”

“It wouldn’t be rude at all,” I said. “You want to go and I don’t. You have your own car and each other, so go for it.”

“It would be rude,” they said, firmly, and that was that.

The next morning we had breakfast on the patio.

“What do you want to do today?” I said.

The husband looked at the wife and winked, which in a certain sort of Englishman is a sign that he is about to say something which might, or then again, given the curious nature of the English male’s sense of humor, just as easily might not, be a joke.

“What we really want to do,” he said, “is go to Disneyland. We were really looking forward to going to Disneyland.”

I love my friends, I enjoy their company and wish them nothing but good things; but as a conversational thread this was beginning to grow just the smallest bit weary.

“You can go there very easily,” I said. “You have a car, it’s very simple to get to, you can spend as much time there as you want to, and when you come back here afterwards, I’ll have dinner waiting for you.”

“I think a good hostess would go with us,” said the husband. He sat back, sipped at the juice that his hostess had squeezed from her best friend’s oranges, contemplated the remains of the eggs that his hostess had lightly scrambled to order, the bread that his hostess had brought back from the local bakery and toasted, and the strawberries and cantaloupe melon that his hostess had procured at the Farmers Market, and winked at his wife again to show that he might – or on the other hand might not – be only joking. “I think if we had a hostess worthy of the name,” he expanded, “she’d understand that we can’t go without her because we are good guests and don’t want to be rude.”

“But, you see, I wouldn’t think it rude,” I said. “If you went without me, I wouldn’t mind in the least. I’d be happy,” I added, striving not to betray too unseemly a level of enthusiasm at the notion, “to know you were out there enjoying yourselves.”

But the husband was on a roll.

“I think if we had a good hostess,” he said, “she’d come with us so that we could all go together. We’re only in Los Angeles this once, and Disneyland’s the thing we want most of all to see. I think a caring hostess would respect that and find the time go there with us.”

I’ve known the husband since he and I were 18 years old.

“Then call me the hostess with the leastest,” I said. “What do you want to do that doesn’t involve my going to Disneyland?”

In the end we had an action-packed and enjoyable week together. We went to Hollywood. We went to the beach. We went to the big Wednesday Farmers Market in Santa Monica and bought flowers and tomatoes and fresh peaches. We went to Beverly Hills and gawped at the prices in the stores and at the plastic surgery on the streets. We met up with a friend at a movie studio and saw The Rock eating a salad in the commissary. One day we drove down the coast to San Diego and had lunch in the hotel where Some Like It Hot was filmed.

“Thank you,” said the wife when I bade them good-bye at the end of their visit. “That was a lot of fun and we had a really lovely time.”

The husband winked again, as he had, reliably, each and every morning and each and every evening of their entire trip. “Except for not seeing Disneyland,” he noted, as he had noted – probably, although not absolutely certainly only jokingly – on each and every such occasion. “We’d been so much looking forward to seeing Disneyland, and now I suppose we never will. If only we’d had a hostess who cared about us enough to want to make us happy, she’d have let us go there.”

“You could have gone to Disneyland,” I said. “Any day you wanted.”

The husband sighed just a little and shook his head.

“But we couldn’t have gone without you,” he explained, patiently. “It would have been rude.”