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.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all persons born on the North American continent must be in severe want of good breeding.

Photo by Steve Payne on Unsplash

This thought struck Elizabeth Darcy of Pemberley, Derbyshire, as she sat in her parlor awaiting a visit from Mrs. Josephine Bhaer, formerly March, of Concord, Massachusetts. Mrs. Bhaer was a literary lady of some repute in her native America, who was touring Europe and staying for a time with a neighboring family of the Darcys, the Chumleighs. Elizabeth was not a great reader, least of all of books which emanated from the former Colonies; but her husband, Mr. Darcy, who was hoping to sell to Mr. Chumleigh a prize pig, had during the course of their negotiations learned from his neighbor of the lady’s presence in the country, and had further understood from Mr. Chumleigh that the spirits of his eminent guest were of so unremitting a level of exuberance that her hosts would gladly sacrifice the honor of her company for a few hours; and so, out of a mixture of good fellowship and hopes to advance the sale, had issued an invitation for Mrs. Bhaer to spend a day at Pemberley. Elizabeth was to receive the visitor alone, Mr. Darcy having in the meantime been called to London on unexpected business, a circumstance which a less devoted wife might suppose to have been unusually convenient in its timing; but Elizabeth, beginning to reflect on this, reminded herself quickly that she was no ordinary spouse, but mistress of Pemberley, and that, along with the privileges of her position, it was incumbent upon her to extend the warmth of her welcome to all visitors to that great house, no matter how savage their manners might prove to be. And besides, Mr. Darcy was dearly eager to sell that pig.

Mrs. Bhaer was appointed to arrive at ten of the clock; at one minute past the hour, Elizabeth’s attention was caught by voices in the hall, that of the footman Jenkins alternating with an accent that was unmistakably Colonial. Elizabeth raised her eyebrows in astonishment. Surely Mrs. Bhaer could not be conversing with a servant as if he were her equal?

“A capital suggestion!” she heard then from the hall. “Humbugs it shall be, a pound of the finest for young Tommy Bangs’ birthday. Bless the boy, he will spoil his stomach with candy for all he pretends to study medicine. No, don’t trouble yourself, I shall see myself in.”

The door of the parlor was thrust open, and in strode Mrs. Bhaer, smiling broadly, and with her hand stretched energetically out in what Elizabeth could only suppose to be the American custom of greeting.

“Mrs. Darcy!” cried Elizabeth’s guest, seizing Elizabeth’s own hand and shaking it with some vigor. “What a trump of a fellow is Robert Jenkins! Here was I in a terrible pother about my friend Tommy’s birthday gift, and with the one word – humbug, Mrs. Darcy, Robert assures me there is nothing finer than a Derbyshire humbug – he has cleared my troubles completely.”

Elizabeth stood transfixed by her visitor’s ease of manner.

“What a regularly splendid room!” declared Mrs. Bhaer, inspecting the parlor freely. “And what jolly fellows above the fireplace!” Without awaiting an invitation, she turned her attention to a portrait of Mrs. Darcy’s two sons, Fitzwilliam and George, which had been painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and which Elizabeth had always considered to show the west wing of the house in a most pleasing aspect. “Are they yours?” she asked, pointing to the boys.

Elizabeth agreed that they were.

“Jolly fellows!” repeated Mrs. Bhaer. Then turning to survey the length of the room, “And what a capital house this must be for high jinks!”

“I do not believe,” said Elizabeth after a moment, “that I am familiar with …”

“High jinks!” said Mrs. Bhaer. “When they play at pirates or brigands or wild animals in the jungle, and cause as much clatter as they please. When my boys were small, we had high jinks each Saturday, and it sorted them out for the whole week. The dear lads, it did my heart good to see them overturning the furniture and sliding down the stair banisters, howling and racketing and making a regular uproar.”

Elizabeth began to feel a headache coming on.

“Such delightful countryside you live in,” continued Mrs. Bhaer, now moving to the window. “And what famous times you must have with all the other splendid women living nearby. It must do you heaps of good to be able to visit with the Miss Brontës.”

The Miss Brontës were the daughters of a country clergyman in the next county. The Darcys were not on visiting terms with any of the families who lived in their parish.

“I do not believe,” began Elizabeth, “that it would be proper …”

“Charlotte is a dear!” cried Mrs. Bhaer warmly, taking a tea cup from the tray and flourishing it with such energy that Mrs. Darcy began to fear for the Axminster carpet. “The middle sister is a queer prickly creature, I grant you, and I cannot forgive her Catherine Earnshaw for marrying that doltish Edgar Linton when she could have married Heathcliff. Can you imagine, Mrs. Darcy, anything more shameful than marrying a man merely because he owns a fine house and grounds? But take the three sisters together and they are altogether jolly. Oh, Mrs. Darcy, do let us make a trip to meet them for I know we would have such revels.”

Elizabeth, unobtrusively removing the tea service from Mrs. Bhaer’s further reach, could only hope that she had misheard.

“And we must ask Mrs. Shelley to be of the party,” continued Mrs. Bhaer. “My Teddy declares that her tale of Victor Frankenstein’s monster gave him the best nightmares he had had since the night he had broken into the strawberry patch. It’s a prime story, far better than any that I ever wrote – not,” she added quickly, “that I ever wrote anything of that nature, oh, dear me, no, I would think shame to do so. But if I had … oh, Mrs. Darcy, if I had …”

She stopped and appeared lost in a reverie.

“Perhaps some seed cake …?” offered Elizabeth.

“Then it is settled!” cried Mrs. Bhaer. “You and I and Mrs. Shelley shall travel together to visit the Miss Brontës at Haworth. What richness! Oh, if only Mrs. Shelley’s mother were still with us, I should not have a wish in the world better than to meet her.”

Elizabeth hardly dared inquire who Mrs. Shelley’s mother might be.

“Mrs. Wollstonecraft!’ announced Mrs. Bhaer solemnly, drawing up her height and placing her hand reverently upon her breast. “Surely you have read her Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman. Mrs. Darcy, I go nowhere without it.” She bent to produce from her reticule an object that gave the appearance of having once been a book, although so battered about was it, that its exact provenance was uncertain. “I read from it every day, and I always find something there that does me good.” She cracked open the book: a page fluttered to the floor but she appeared not to have observed it.

“’Men in their youth,’” read Mrs. Bhaer, “’are prepared for professions, and marriage is not considered as the grand feature in their lives; whilst women, on the contrary, have no other scheme to sharpen their faculties. It is not business, extensive plans, or any of the excursive flights of ambition, that engross their attention: to rise in the world, they must marry advantageously. How many women thus waste life away, the prey of discontent, who might have practiced as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and stood erect, supported by their own industry, instead of hanging their head?’”

Despite herself, Elizabeth found her attention attracted.

“Is Mrs. Wollstonecraft then suggesting,” she asked, “that, given sufficient education and opportunity, women’s abilities in life might prove to be equal to men’s?”

“It’s only the men who tell us they aren’t,” replied Mrs. Bhaer. “Come sit by me and let us read on. But … who is this I see behind the sofa?”

From behind the chaise longue arose Elizabeth’s daughter, Jane, who had concealed herself there earlier in the morning in the hope of catching a glimpse of the great author for girls.

“My dear Jane!” exclaimed Elizabeth, mortified. Jane was a headstrong girl, who early on had caused some disquiet to her parents by proving herself indelicate enough to master her pothooks more speedily than had either of her brothers: Elizabeth was now observing with concern the warmth of the girl’s affection for her bookish Aunt Mary. “Mrs. Bhaer, I cannot sufficiently apologize for …”

“The more the merrier!” cried Mrs. Bhaer. “Sit with us, Jane, and let us all three learn together.”

In London at that moment, Mr. Darcy was seated in his club preparing to address a large plate of bacon and grilled kidneys. He felt a sudden twinge of unease in the pit of his stomach, which he attributed to indigestion.

Photo by Rick Lobs on Unsplash

Every July, I travel to Concord, Massachusetts, to the wonderful and magical Louisa May Alcott museum, Orchard House – check it out here,

https://louisamayalcott.org/

– to take part in the Summer Conversational Series, quite possibly my favorite week in the whole year, when a bunch of Louisa May Alcott nerds get together to talk Alcotts, books, women’s history, and anything else of that genre that strikes our fancy.

The year, my speech is on the substantial number of women who cut their hair and signed up to fight as soldiers in the War, and I’ve been having the time of my life finding out about them, discovering stories funny (the recruit who tried to put on her pants over her head, anyone?), poignant, and, above all, stirring, because these women were a doughty crew.

I’ve gathered a lot of good stuff to talk about, but it does need to be organized, so that’s what I’ve been doing this week. If anyone wants to hear the talk, either virtually or in person, it’s happening on July 14 at 10.00 a.m. American Eastern Time, and you can buy tickets here

https://louisamayalcott.org/summer-adult-ed-series

Normal service will resume on Monday evening California time on July 13, by which time the speech had darned well better be ready, and meanwhile, as a nod to the mighty Louisa, I’m about to re-print a post from last year that features my own childhood heroine, the irrepressible Jo March

…

Photo by Luka Savcic on Unsplash

But lately, my non-American friends are starting to ask it of me in a very different tone. What’s it like to live in Trump’s America? What’s it like to live under the regime of a person who is not only mentally questionable and casually corrupt, but also openly, indeed gleefully, cruel? What’s it like to go from day to day feeling – in a pithy analogy that Mr. Los Angeles is given to quote – as if you’re tied to a chair and watching a toddler play with a loaded pistol?

So, for the average left-leaning liberal in sunny, let-it-all-hang-out Southern California, what is it like? Well, for those of us who have been so far lucky enough not to have had our entire lives torn apart, it’s in many ways not so very different from how it was eighteen months ago. We still wake up in the morning and go to work and come home and eat meals and pay bills and celebrate birthdays. But, yes, there are changes too, and some of them have crept in so gradually that, in the fine amphibian tradition of Kermit the Frog on the stovetop, we have more or less stopped noticing them.

We now, for instance, find it altogether unremarkable that the leader of our nation expresses himself in rambling bile-filled diatribes during the day and stays up for much of the night on his social media platform posting ever more outrageous fantasies about himself and ever more jaw-dropping lies about his opponents. When his staff insist, ever more loudly and in the face of ever more compelling evidence to the contrary, that no, no, really, he’s perfectly competent and doing what is best for the American people, we simply shrug. We accept without question that for most of this year we have been engaged in a war that no one asked for, no one can agree what is about, and no one seems entirely certain whether is still going on or not. In normal times, all of this would be the stuff of Alice in Wonderland as filtered through Franz Kafka. But for us by now, the abnormal has become so normal that we no longer have the capacity to be surprised by it.

There are other changes that affect us more practically. Our grocery bills have risen and our fuel costs have rocketed: we think hard before we take a car trip, and pour a stiff gin and tonic before we even consider pricing plane tickets. When we go to public spaces, we see fewer tourists than we used, and our overseas friends and family are flatly refusing to visit us. On our televisions, our funniest and most-loved talk show host has had his entire show canceled because he made jokes – jokes, for heaven’s sake – that offended the government. We find ourselves crying when we see footage of the Obamas, and sometimes ask each other, “Did you think there’d ever come a day when we’d miss Doubleya?” When we open our emails, we are flooded with messages from political and social campaigners begging us, each more urgently than the last, to sign this petition, fill out that survey, donate money here, read about this, listen to that.

And it is this last that signals the most consequential change of all. Because above and far beyond the surreal reportage of today’s news and the hypothetical threat of tomorrow’s, we are also facing real and immediate darkness; we must now live hourly with the knowledge that, as safe as we might individually happen to be – and I am fully aware that, as a reasonably solvent heterosexual Caucasian Californian, I am so far so infinitely much safer than are so many others – very bad things indeed are being done right now to other people all around us.

We know that men in masks are dragging our neighbors from the street and sentencing them to detention in sub-human conditions, and that there is nothing that we can, or the law is apparently prepared to, do to stop them. We know that, in many parts of our country, women are being denied essential treatments by doctors who know full well what they are doing but have been pressured by the authorities into doing it anyway. We know that the LGBTQ rights which so many of us had fought so hard for and been so proud to have won, are now under serious threat from a band of people who call themselves Christian without, apparently, having ever troubled to listen to the message of the man whose name they have co-opted. We know that this is not an America any of us had chosen to live in, or can feel anything approaching comfortable with living in. And yet here we are living in it.

The comparisons with Nazi Germany are inevitable, and I’m sure I am not alone in waking up most mornings remembering Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous lines, “First they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out because I am not a Socialist….” What I had never before realized when reading those lines was just how echoingly empty it can feel to “speak out” to those in power when those in power simply do not care to listen. Because Mr. Los Angeles and I and so many other people have been speaking out, vociferously, in large ways and in small. We sign petitions. We march in protests. We send every penny that we can afford to the places where we feel it will do as much good as it can. I have joined a collective of immigrant activists called All-American Story –

All-American Story

All-American Story celebrates the beauty, strength, & wisdom of ALL Americans and our shared humanity by sharing our stories.

– dedicated to collecting, recording, and publishing the true stories and other works of American immigrants from all over the globe as a gentle counter to the false narratives we are being fed by the xenophobes in power (check the stories out, here on the Substack blog of the same name, we have some good stuff). Meanwhile, Mr. Los Angeles’ Old Glory lapel pin, the one with the heroic family backstory that I am forbidden to reveal and that he has worn every day with pride and joy for so many years, is currently turned, pointedly, upside down. We could none of us look at ourselves or at each other if we didn’t do this. Has anything changed because we do it? Well, so far not a lot that is obvious, and it’s sometimes tempting to think that nothing has changed at all.

And yet, and yet. Along the way, there are starting to be shifts – small, sometimes barely visible, but shifts nevertheless – in the people as a whole. Yes, brawny young men with tattoos, and honey blonde and heartless “Christian” matrons will continue to espouse the views of these monsters. But others are changing. I don’t know many Trumpers personally, our circles just don’t cross. But a friend reports that her hairdresser, who commutes thirty miles each way from the Valley, has changed allegiance after the hike in gas prices. Another adds that her accountant has declared it was the killing by ICE of Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis last January that was the last straw for him. (We could complain that it was the killing of one white person that affected him after so many unremarked on of Black and brown; but Renée was a person too, and at least he has been affected). At the top, there are rumblings of discord between Republican members of the Senate; there is evidence of serious concern about the upcoming midterms in November; and, in a rare piece of solidly good news, Florida’s infamous detention center “Alligator Alcatraz” is set to close down this summer. Maybe, just maybe, the ship is beginning to turn; maybe, just maybe, the voice of the people is beginning to be heard at last.

I once visited a friend in Chicago at the tail end of a long, brutal winter.

“It’s lovely to see you,” I said as we strolled down Diversey Parkway in a break between howling gales. “And you know I love Chicago. But, lord, doesn’t it look grim with no leaves on the trees and no color in the sky?”

My friend stopped dead beneath a tree and pointed triumphantly to the ground around it, where, if you bent very close and squinted very hard, you could make out tiny points of green struggling to surface from the ice-hard soil.

“Look,” she urged me. “Crocuses!”

As our nation approaches its 250^th birthday, I pray for crocuses to bloom in America soon.

Photo by Marcel Strauß on Unsplash

As I did so, a car drew up beside me and began to hover hopefully. I shook my head with an apologetic shrug in the universal parked car sign language of, “Sorry, I’m not leaving yet,” and continued into my seat. The car continued to wait. Well, it could wait, I thought, until it figured it out for itself, and turned my mind to my texts.

Soon, I began to hear the honking of a horn, at first polite, and then impatient. For a while, I attempted to ignore it. There is a particular etiquette to parking in automobile-choked Los Angeles. At the Farmers Market on Sundays, where parking in the lumber yard lot next door is free but stalls limited in number, we regard it as only considerate to vacate our space as soon as we have loaded in our fruits and flowers; but here on the public street, I had officially paid the city of Santa Monica $2.50 of money earned by the honest sweat of my brow for two hours of parking time, of which there remained 43 minutes left to me, and which I regarded it my full civic right to enjoy. If the other car didn’t understand that, I thought, it was the problem of the other car.

The honking continued, and I turned to look more closely at the waiting vehicle. It was big and expensive, gleaming white and shiny new, occupied, I guessed, by a sleek business executive endowed with a fat bank account and a battalion of minions back in his nineteenth floor office to scurry to do his bidding. I, however, was not his minion and had business of my own to attend to.

The honking went on. And on. And on.

At last I had had enough. I arranged my features into their most aggressive scowl, climbed out of my car, slammed the door, and went to confront the noise polluter.

Peering up at me through the window of the big white car was a little old lady directly from a fairy tale. A silver halo of fuzzy hair framed an innocent small wrinkled face from which enormous blue eyes blinked innocently; the delicate hands on the steering wheel were as fragile as aspen leaves. My aggression quickly faded as my heart began to melt.

“I’m not the one who’s honking, dear,” she whispered sweetly. “That’s the car behind me.”

I looked past her. There was indeed another car on the street, a smaller and more battered black car in which a harried-looking middle-aged man had paused his honking in a silent howl of frustration. Which, on closer inspection, it occurred to me that he had every reason to feel, since the little old lady’s very large car was occupying the whole of the narrow street, rendering it impassable.

“I think he wants to get past you,” I said kindly.

“I know he does, dear,” she said. And twinkled merrily at me. “But you see, I’m waiting for you to leave.”

“Well,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m not leaving for a while.”

Her twinkle faded slightly as her brow furrowed in confusion.

“Not leaving?” she repeated uncertainly.

“I’m afraid not,” I told her. “I have some texts to send first.”

“Texts?” Her brow furrowed further, and my heart turned further to goo: it was a very long time since I had been required to explain technology to someone less savvy in it than myself.

“You know texts?” I said. “Messages people write on their phones? Some people have been sending them to me, and I have to write back to them before I can leave.”

“Oh,” she said thoughtfully, and momentarily looked pensive. Then her face cleared.

“That’s all right, dear,” she said then. “I can wait.”

Except that she couldn’t really.

“You know, I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ I said. “You’re blocking the guy behind you and he sounds like he really wants to get through.”

The little old lady smiled, showing regular small teeth as pretty as pearls.

“I’m fine, dear,” she reassured me. She gestured her little ringed hand towards the car radio from which floated the soothing strains of Debussy’s Clair de Lune. “I’m always happy when I have my music.”

“But the person behind you,” I began. Then noticed that behind the black car was a blue car and behind the blue car was a beige. “The people behind you,” I corrected myself. “None of them can get past you, you see, because you’re holding them all up.”

The old lady twinkled again.

“Oh, I think they can wait, dear, don’t you?” she said. “People these days are in too much of a hurry, don’t you think?”

She sat back contentedly in her seat, and my heart began to unmelt.

“There’s usually more parking on the next block,” I suggested.

She shook her pretty little silver head.

“That’s too far for me to walk, dear,” she said. “I have a hospital appointment just around the corner, you see.” She twinkled up at me, encouragingly. “Don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong me with at all, but my son will insist I have check-ups. He does take wonderful care of me, dear boy.”

I was familiar with the hospital she was about to visit: its parking lot was small and crowded, but, like most hospitals in the area, it offered a valet parking service.

“The hospital does valet parking,” I said.

The little old lady tinkled merrily,

“Oh, heavens no, dear,” she chuckled. “I’m not going to spend my money on silly old valet parking!”

I do not claim to be an expert on personal wealth assessment; but even I could see that the rocks that glittered from her pretty little ears could have bought and sold both me and all three car drivers behind her several times over before we’d any of us sat down to our separate Trader Joe’s Very Berry granola breakfasts.

The little old lady leaned forward confidentially through her window.

“Besides,” she added, “I never feel I can quite trust those valet parkers with my car, if you know what I mean. You never know where they’ve come from.” Tenderly, she leaned down her hand to caress the car’s shining white exterior. “Isn’t it pretty?” she said. “My son gave it to me for my birthday, just this very month. Would you believe I turned 85? I still feel like a girl!”

As the beige car joined its honks to those of the blue car and the black car, I began to wonder if when the little old lady had been small, anyone had ever thought to spank her on her dear little bottom.

The little old lady sat back again in her seat and nodded at me.

“Don’t you worry about me, dear,” she said. “I’ll just sit and listen to my music and wait for you. I’m fine if I have my music, you see.”

The man in the battered black car was now gazing at me with an expression of open pleading.

“I might be quite a long time,” I said. “I have these texts to deal with.”

“I can wait, dear,” she said. “I have my music, and I’m really not in a rush.” She dimpled again, roguishly. “Doctors always tell you to arrive on time, but my Doctor D. has a little soft spot for me, so he won’t mind too much if I’m late. And now that you know I’m waiting, I’m sure you’ll be able to hurry up with sending your textbooks, won’t you?”

The man in the black car lifted meaty hands from his steering wheel and clasped them towards me in entreaty. It was time, clearly, to impose some discipline.

I turned to the little old lady, folded my arms, and spoke slowly and clearly.

“I am not,” I said, “going to hurry with my texts.”

At last I had caught her attention.

“Not?” she echoed doubtfully, her voice quavering just a little in surprise.

“Not,” I corroborated. “They are concerning a particularly serious matter, and I intend to give them the full attention that is their due.”

And having given appropriate weight to the question of whether I planned to meet Candy and Vanessa that afternoon at the coffee place at 3.00 or at the chocolate place at 3.30, I decided to leave no further margin for misinterpretation.

“And after I’ve finished with the texts,” I continued, “I’m going to get out of my car and put more money into the meter. And after that, I’m going to go away and have lunch.”

“Lunch?” the little old lady managed after a moment. I had a feeling that lunch in her world was not a hurried event.

“Lunch,” I confirmed. And lest there remain any confusion, “Appetizer. Main course. Dessert. And coffee afterwards.”

Now, I had hurt the little old lady’s feelings. Her silver curls shivered as she stared up at me piteously. Her pretty little lower lip trembled, and moisture glimmered behind the azure of her enormous eyes. With one searingly reproachful look, she closed her window, shifted her big, expensive white car into drive, and led her dear little self safely away from the stonehearted harpy in the dusty blue Prius.

I was pretty popular with the cars behind her, though.

I had an actual father, too, and by many standards he was a good one. He was solidly married to my mother, he kept mostly moderate habits, and as the sole breadwinner for a family of seven, he worked tirelessly and with more than adequate success. He told me often and firmly that he was a “marvelous father,” and I am sure that by his lights, he undoubtedly was.

But he was also a man’s man to his bone, who saw no reason either why he should attempt to mask his preference for his four sons over his daughter, or, curiously, why he might expect that daughter’s feelings towards him to be colored by this. My father provided for me when I was a child, and when I was an adult occasionally said things that made me laugh; but he never made me feel particularly loved. Uncle Tony did.

The Reverend Joseph Anthony Barrett S.J, my mother’s eldest brother, stood 6’3” tall, and boasted a booming aristocratic voice and a commanding presence. He wore his spirituality proudly, and took his priestly duties with full seriousness – there are bad priests, yes, but there are good priests too, and he was one of them; but he also loved the world. He loved wine, and history, and good books, and word puzzles, and arithmetic, and astronomy, and gadgetry, and off-color jokes (he told me some ripe ones, and my male cousins report he told them even riper), and, most of all, telling stories.

Oh, lord, Uncle Tony loved to tell stories. He spent most of his life traveling between Farm Street, the British Jesuit mother church in London, and a range of locations in Rome, and had stories to tell from all of them. He told stories from Ancient Rome. He told stories from Tudor London. He told stories from his childhood. He told stories from the priesthood. He told stories that friends had told him from who knows where. At one point in his career, his superior, the Provincial, whom he had somehow offended (my mother’s family were blessed with many qualities, but tact was not among them), decided to punish him by sending him away for a spell from fashionable Farm Street to rainswept downmarket northern Manchester to be chaplain of the infamously bleak Strangeways Prison: to the surprise of both men – and I imagine the fury of the Provincial – Uncle Tony had the time of his life there, and came back with some of his best stories of all.

When Uncle Tony would visit our ragtag family branch in Palmers Green, it was an occasion. He would arrive at the door, rosy-cheeked with having been twittered over all morning by the nuns at the local convent, greet my mother with a kiss and my father, with whom he was very good friends, with a resounding bellow of “Hello, Broth-ah!” and we would all pile into the family car to be taken, exotically, to lunch at the Curzon restaurant on Green Lanes, where Uncle Tony would order the food in Italian from the waitresses. On one occasion, there was gooseberry tart on the menu. “Order it in Italian,” we asked Tony. He consulted with the waitress and they both shook their heads. “They don’t have gooseberries in Italy,” he told us. This was the first inkling I had had of a world so different from North London that gooseberries didn’t exist there, even in theory.

Uncle Tony liked me. He would ask me which books I was reading, and tell me stories of Roman restaurants where I imagined women in jewel-colored dresses wearing lipstick and smoking cigarettes. Once, after watching me struggle with cutting my chicken at the Curzon, he demanded we two ditch the car ride home so that we could walk past the butcher’s window where he could educate me in fowl anatomy. Used as I was to being ignored by the men in my family’s circle, I for years found this avuncular attention confusing, even a little alarming. It wasn’t until later that it occurred to me that it was, in fact, really rather nice.

When I was an adult, I began to visit Uncle Tony in Rome. His Italian was fluent, but I hadn’t realized, I at first thought, how pronounced his English accent was. “I-o son-o Padre Barrett,” he would introduce himself delightedly to puzzled strangers on the banks of the Tiber, and to their further befuddlement proudly including his niece in the introduction, “e cuest-ah è mi-ah nipot-ah.” It was only when I met him again in London that I remembered that, when ordering food in Italian restaurants there, his accent became worthy of Petrarch.

One of my brothers swears he once accompanied him to a trattoria in Soho, where they were waited on by an olive-skinned and Botticelli beautiful young man whom Tony addressed in a mellifluous speech in which the terms Roma and bottiglia di vino featured prominently, only to have the youth reply in broad and apologetic Cockney that, “I’m sorry, Farver, I don’t speak Italian.”

Bad Italian accent or good, his company was fabulous. And he drew towards him an array of other colorful characters – American heiresses, Italian politicians, retired Colonels, Sixties drop-outs, scholars, artists, and prison workers – and loved nothing better than including his beloved nipota in their midst. Time after time in Rome, my feeble suggestions that I might visit, for instance, the Sistine Chapel were brushed aside with a breezy, “You don’t want to do that, sweetie, it’s full of bloody too-rists. Come and have lunch with the contessa instead.” To this day I haven’t seen the Sistine Chapel. But I’ve had some remarkable lunches.

Before Mr. Los Angeles and I got married, I took him to Rome to meet Uncle Tony. Tony was polite but wary: he liked most Americans, he enjoyed their directness and humor, but this one was planning to marry his nipota, and the stakes were high. One morning, when he was leading us through the Centro Storico, expounding on the use of concrete in the Pantheon, he noticed Mr. Los Angeles, who is a talented amateur photographer, busily capturing a nun eating ice cream.

“Are you still taking bloody photographs?” he called across the ancient cobblestones. “You look like some bloody American too-rist.”

Mr. Los Angeles beamed upon him a sunny Californian smile.

“Well, Tony,” he explained genially. “I am a bloody American tourist.”

There was a pause while respect dawned gradually in Uncle Tony’s eyes.

“Ah,” he said then. “Right. Carry on.”

Uncle Tony loved me; but he also loved my father, and it saddened him deeply when we two became estranged. Being a man of his generation, he naturally took my father’s part, and wrote me a number of letters reminding me to honor my father and my mother, and quoting Christ’s injunction that if someone strike me on one cheek, I should turn the other. I think even he realized that this last was not what you’d call a ringing endorsement of a caring parent, and when I wrote back that after turning and turning again, I could surely be forgiven for at last walking out of the room, he (mostly) dropped the argument. It was the closest we two ever came to falling out.

The last time I visited Uncle Tony was for his ninetieth birthday celebration in Rome. This was an affair several days long of cousins and friends and lunches and dinners and a large and riotous party, at the end of which he made a speech culminating in a lengthy joke whose punchline was “hemorrhoids for the h’aristocracy.” (You probably had to be there). Mr. Los Angeles captured the session on his handheld computer, with which Tony was fascinated, and he remarked, wistfully, that, had he been younger when computers came along, he would have very much enjoyed learning to use them: I can just see him now, slamming the latest model exultantly onto the kitchen table. “I say! Look at this!”

The very last time I said good-bye to him, we were standing outside the sacristy of the Chiesa del Gesù, the Italian Jesuits’ mother church that over the years had become, along with the Irish pub across the street and the Ristorante Abruzzi ten minutes’ stroll away, his personal fiefdom. The previous night, we had had, once again, the inevitable discussion about my father, and had come, once again, to the inevitable consent to agree to disagree. Now, he looked down at me from his tall, familiar height, lifted his chin across the church towards Mr. Los Angeles, busy examining the carpentry work on one of the confessional boxes, and cleared his throat.

“You happy, sweetie?” he said.

This was not a question it had ever occurred to my father to ask.

“Yes, Uncle,” I said. “I’m very happy.”

“Good,” he said. And that was that.

He died a couple of years later, of what he ruefully described as “a bad case of anno domini.” He spent his last few weeks in a nursing hospital in Rome, being cared for by nuns, who allowed him to have wine in his room, with which he entertained the series of visitors who came to pay final court.

“Are you frightened?” one of them asked him.

“No,” he replied thoughtfully. “I’m curious.”

One morning, he woke up, and said to the nun who was tending to him, “Io parto oggi” – I’m going away today.

“È Dio che decide, non Lei,” the nun told him. That’s God’s decision, not yours.

They were in the middle of debating this when he died, having had, for the last time, the last word. It was March 19, the feast of St. Joseph: not only his name saint, but the patron saint of a happy death

.Photo by Owen Bjørnstad

His funeral was in the Gesù, and a splendid occasion it was, with multiple priests on the altar and eulogies in both Italian and English: I attended with a group of cousins and we were made much of, being i nipoti, the representatives of the family which had given Padre Barrett to the world and to Rome. After the ceremony, the long, long coffin – Uncle Tony had never shrunk physically with age – was driven to a mausoleum in a cemetery on the outskirts of the city, where it was placed in a crypt: this was apparently a mark of honor, although I didn’t like leaving him there, it seemed far too cold and lonely for my sociable uncle. But he himself would remind me that what is in the crypt is only a shell: the important part of Joseph Anthony Barrett is off somewhere else now, I hope having his curiosity satisfied.

The next day, I went back to the Gesù, and for the first time in all the countless other times I had visited, was struck by how darned big it was. And it is massive – 75 meters long and 35 meters wide, abundant with high altar and side chapels, lavishly decorated with gold leaf and bronze, tall marble pillars, and soaring frescoed ceilings. The guide books now tell me it is one of the most impressive Baroque edifices in all of Rome.

It had just seemed so much smaller with Uncle Tony in it.

Photo by Marisela Leon on Unsplash

For those who do not know, diner lingo is a slang employed by wait staff in some of the more basic restaurants in the city, created originally for the waiters to entertain themselves while transmitting to each other order after order of mostly the same food. Eccentric and semi-humorous names have been given to regular dishes: some of them self-explanatory, such as “bad breath” for onion, or “wreck ‘em” for scrambled eggs; some of them faintly Biblical, such as “Adam and Eve on a raft” for two poached eggs on toast, or “Eve with a lid” for apple pie; an occasional few are mildly punning; and another will sometimes appear – “drown the kids” for boiled eggs, anyone? – that will be such as to make you wonder exactly what was going on in its creator’s brain.

It is a tradition that stretches back to the bustling days of the nineteenth century, when the city of New York was busy about inventing itself, and I, for one, find it thoroughly charming that, among the wave after wave of newcomers to the city earning their daily crust in the diners that still provide the backbone for its work force – dreamers of dreams arriving from Europe, from South America, from Asia, from Africa – all have embraced this odd offshoot of the English language as their own and allowed it to continue. It’s true that you can no longer find diner lingo in every single diner in New York; but it’s there if you want to hunt it out, and that morning, I was congratulating myself for having run it to ground.

“I would like a mushroom omelet,” I told the server: while a healthy breakfast dish, it is nevertheless a relatively newfangled creation and one for which there exists no slang equivalent. And, having suitably addressed my nutritional needs, I went on to treat myself to a juicy excuse to hear the lingo. “With rye toast, please.”

“Sure,” said the server, who was a thoroughly charming young man. He raised his voice to call across the room to his buddy at the griddle.

“Una omelet de champiñones y una tostada blanca!” he shouted.

Which latter part was not by measure of either menu item or slang idiom at all what I had had in mind.

“Not tostada blanca,” I corrected him politely. “Rye toast.”

He turned back to smile patiently at the ignorant gringa.

“Is what you said,” he reassured me kindly. “Tostada blanca. It means white toast.”

“I know it does,” I said. “But you see, I don’t want white toast. I want rye toast.”

The server’s smile became a trifle puzzled.

“White toast,” he agreed. “Tostada blanca. I just order it for you from my friend there.”

“But I want rye toast,” I said.

Subtly, the server’s expression shifted from the puzzled to the mildly concerned, and his eyes shifted just a little: a thinner-skinned woman might have wondered whether he were scanning the room for the whereabouts of my caring companion.

“Tostada blanca,” he repeated. And, yet again, because he was a young man who wanted nothing but the best for me, “That means white toast in Spanish.”

“But …” I began, and then stopped as the source of the disconnect became clear to me.

For all the years I have lived in America, for all the Thanksgivings and Fourth of Julys I have celebrated, for all the high school graduations I have attended, for all the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I have consumed, for all the “have a nice days” I have bid my fellow Americans, I have never yet been able to master the sound of the American “r”. This is particularly frustrating as I actually have some success with it in other languages: French people have praised my authentically guttural Gallic version, and I can roll the Spanish edition with all the verve of a Rita (“I like to be in Amai-rica”) Moreno. But to this day, the American “r” eludes me. During my brief incarnation as an actor (it’s a long story), I was cast in the mercifully minuscule role of Lydia Lubey, downhome Midwestern American next-door neighbor, in a production of All My Sons, in which character I was required to deliver the line, “Frank, the toaster’s broken”: I do believe that I required as much coaching for that one line as the rest of the cast did for Miller’s entire tragic masterpiece, and even so, I heard someone comment at the first night party that, “the British girl did fine, all things considered.”

Experience has taught me that the only way I can have my American “r” accepted for what it is, is by the effective, if less than dignified, process of channeling my inner Tony the Tiger, the genial cartoon commercial face of Frosted Flakes breakfast cereal (“They’re GR-R-REAT!”). Without wishing to be too precious, I can’t honestly claim that pretending to be an oversized cartoon jungle cat in a TV commercial for sugar-crusted corn flakes would be my preferred method of presenting myself to the good people of Manhattan; but these were desperate times. Drawing on the acting skills I had acquired all those years ago, I cast my ego to the winds, thought orange and black stripes and a big cartoon grin, and summoned to my sense memory a large bowl of cereal flakes, glistening with sugar in the morning sunshine. I sat up straight in my chair, and opened my mouth.

“I want rrrrrrye toast!” I cried tigerishly.

“Oh.” The server’s face cleared as comprehension dawned on him. He nodded once, and turned back to his buddy. “No tostada blanca,” he shouted. And, launching to my delight without a pause into impeccable diner lingo, “Gimme whiskey down!”

My earlier studies of the Method had paid off. I sat back in my chair, sipped contentedly at the reliably revolting coffee that is the hallmark of any self-respecting New York diner, and squinted through the window at the throng of sodden New Yorkers scurrying through the rain to avoid the muddy puddles thrown up by the passing buses. It was going to be a good morning.

Who was alive and is dead.”

A cricket ball is a potentially lethal weapon. It has a core of cork covered with tightly wound string encased in a cover of leather the menacing color of oxblood and reinforced with a sturdy raised seam. It weighs a powerful five and a half to five and three-quarters ounces, and if it hits you in the wrong place, you can be seriously injured or even – as, reputedly, in the case of King George II’s son, Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707-1751), referenced in the satiric verse above – killed. You do not, to sum up, mess with a cricket ball

.Photo by Craig Hughes on Unsplash

And yet it is one of the many anomalies of English life that it is the particular timbre of the thwack that is produced by the densely packed leather of the cricket ball striking the lightweight willow wood of the cricket bat – the hymned “sound of leather on willow” – that evokes all that is gentlest and best of an English summer.

Cricket, like many of the finest of English traditions, is proudly ridiculous. Its rules, even by those who understand them, are all but impossible to explain; its matches can take up to five days to play and still sometimes end in a draw; it has fielding positions with names like Fine Leg and Silly Mid-Off; and should the famously parched English climate dare at any point to squeeze a drop of moisture from the heavens, there will be an amazed cry of “Rain stops play!” as batsmen, bowlers, and fielders will make their incredulous way to the pavilion to fortify themselves with beer and sandwiches while they consult the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern Method (yes, it is a thing) to calculate how many runs they would have scored had the weather co-operated. As earlier advertised in these pages, I personally loathe most sports; but I actually quite like cricket.

Cricket, in my preposterously male-heavy family, filled my childhood summer days as football my winter; but, oh, it was so much quieter than football and, oh, so blessedly less intense. Games would drift through the hours as the clouds drifted across the blue summer sky; there were long periods of reflection while new batsmen ambled from the pavilion to the pitch, wickets tumbled and were re-erected, and in the background hummed the sweet honeybee buzz of the famously long-winded cricket commentators passing the time of day by shooting breezes as gentle as the Zephyr. Years before The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the young television writer Douglas Adams once entertained himself mightily by having Doctor Who’s Tardis land briefly in the middle of a cricket match, solely for the purpose of showing the two commentators discuss it with placid interest (“my word, this really is extraordinary”) and thoughtfully ponder the chances of an historical antecedent, before the machine took off again (“well, that wasn’t too bad, was it?”) into galaxies unknown. I have always considered that that short scene – barely two and a half minutes long, airily unencumbered by character development or plot, and jubilantly dotty – was in itself the very essence of the spirit of cricket.

The men in my family took the game greatly more seriously than did I. Endless hours from June to August were spent with the majority of the family barricaded in the living room, the curtains closed with Fort Knox-worthy precision against any chink of sunlight that might intrude to reflect off the television screen, as two-inch tall black and white figures with names like “Fiery” Fred Trueman and “Lord” Ted Dexter (who was posher than Fiery Fred, was married to a former model, and appeared with her in the television adverts for Noilly Prat, God, the glamour) bowled and batted and googlied and leg before wicketed while brothers and cousins and uncles would cheer and groan and curse and cheer again and outside the lovely sunshine slipped away to dusk.

It wouldn’t have been my own choice for spending a summer day; but then, it being summer and not winter, I had other opportunities available to me. I could go swimming with a friend; I could take my pocket money to Winchmore Hill, where there was a second-hand bookshop on the Green and an old-fashioned sweetshop on the way that sold delectables like humbugs and pear drops from glass jars and when they had less than a couple of ounces left in any one of the jars would tip the residue into a spare jar, which disgorged “penny bags” of thrilling unpredictability; or I could simply slide around the corner to the library, come back, and plump myself and my borrowed booty into the hammock under the apple tree, and read and read until my eyes dazzled and my mind distended to bursting point at the stories I was devouring in the dappled summer shade of the tree.

And that was another thing I liked about cricket: it meant it was summer, the brief but beautiful English summer, when the sun shone benignly and the birds sang early in the morning and the daylight stretched luxuriously late into the evening, when there were strawberries and cream for tea and ham and salad for supper, when I could at last liberate my itching legs from the terrible scratchy tights that had encased them all winter long, and at school we swapped our navy blue gym slips for cotton dresses the color of the sky that made the blue-eyed girls’ eyes even bluer, until we even stopped going to school at all and started on the six weeks of heaven that was the summer holiday.

But of all the good parts of cricket, the very best and most delightful of all, was that when my brothers weren’t watching it on the television, they were out at Lord’s or the Oval, watching it in person. And since cricket matches, unlike the niggardly ninety minutes long soccer matches, stretched the whole day through, it meant I had the house to myself for hour upon blissful hour. What was not to love?

As for the cricket ball that reputedly killed Frederick, Prince of Wales, back in 1751? Well, had Prince Frederick lived, it would have been he, not his son George, who would have inherited the throne of England when King George II died in 1760. And since Frederick apparently had a considerably greater interest in and skill for politics than did his science nerd, madness-approaching son King George III, it is not entirely impossible that when the American colonists started to act up in the 1770s, King Frederick might even have found a way to thwart the rebellion and keep America as part of the British Empire.

A rousing hip hip hoorah, then, and a hearty chorus of “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” for the sound of leather on willow.

As she spoke, I felt each single hackle on my body arise, stand tall, and vibrate in fury.

Photo by Anastasiya Badun on Unsplash

“Do not ever,” I directed her, “use that word in my presence. Ever.”

“Why not?” said Candy.

“Don’t ask her,” said my English friend Vanessa. “She’ll tell you.”

“Tell me what?” said Candy. “I’ve never had a problem with acupressure. Did something bad happen to you with it?”

“I told you,” I reminded her. “Not to use that word in my presence.”

“Don’t ask her why,” sad Vanessa. “Really. Just don’t.”

“Well, if something bad happened to you,” said Candy, “I’d want to know.”

“Oh, God,” said Vanessa. “She’s going to tell you.”

“That word,” I said.

“What word?’ said Candy. “Acupressure?”

“Oh, God,” said Vanessa.

“That word,” I said.

“Has anyone tried the new coffee shop on Lincoln?” said Vanessa. “The latte is good but they don’t have oat milk, which I’d think would cost them some custom these days.”

“That word,” I said, “is a flat-out insult to the Latin language.”

My Latin teacher at school had had the almost too perfect Latin teacher’s name of Miss Winthorpe. She was a small woman, with permed white hair and an icily condescending smile: her parents, unlike the immigrant forebears of most of the pupils at St. Angela’s Convent grammar school, North London, had been not only English but voluntary converts to Catholicism instead of former babies who had once been shoved indignantly into the baptismal font: she had received her degree from Oxford, went when she was sick, not to the National Health doctor, but to the private Catholic hospital near where Paul McCartney lived, and never, ever, ever split an infinitive. She thought, with some justification, that this made her posher than the rest of us. She also thought, erroneously, that it made her better, and rendered it several shades clearer than crystal that she had expected life to have led her somewhere markedly more uplifting than to spend her days reciting amo, amas, amat to a ragtag bunch of working class girls in Wood Green, London N22. Miss Winthorpe, in short, was a stuck-up old bitch.

But she did teach us Latin – maybe not as much as she might have if it had ever occurred to her to be kind to us, but she did teach us some. And one of the words she taught us was acus, or needle. It was reflected in both Latin and English, she said, not only as a sewing implement but as a mark of precision: it showed up in the English language in words like accurate and acuity, and for the ancient Romans, the equivalent of the blunt English carpenters’ expression, “you’ve hit the nail on the head,” had been the notably more elegant rem acu tetigisti – “you’ve touched the matter with a needle.”

Acupuncture, therefore – the ancient Chinese practice of pushing thin needles into specific parts of the body to stimulate energy points and thus relieve pain – makes perfect sense to me, both etymologically and medically. It is a practice that goes back for at least 4,000 years, and some say even longer; and, while I don’t pretend to understand the science that lies behind it, I have no question that it does work. I’ve undergone it myself and found its effects pleasing, if, on my own unromantically robust body, subtle; I have had friends whose systems are more finely tuned than my peasant own, who have experienced effects that have ranged from the dramatic to, in at least one case, the near-miraculous. As medical practices go, I have nothing but respect for it.

Nor do I have even the ghost of an argument against the idea of applying thumbs instead of needles to those same body parts in order to stimulate those same, or presumably very similar, energy points. Energy is energy, after all, no matter how it’s sourced, and I very much like a thumb: as digits go, it’s solid, hardworking and unpretentious; it’s useful in preventing my wine glass from slipping through my fingers; it even occasionally allows me to indulge my fantasy that it is I, not the cat, who have first dibs on the most comfortable armchair. So if some kind person wants to apply their own thumbs to making me feel better, then I say an enthusiastic yes, please. Dig those opposable digits into my pulse points; burrow them in between my toes; drive them deep into the back of my skull, and the harder you press, the happier I will be.

But when I examine the word that is currently used to describe this most agreeable practice, then my entire world view is thrown into chaos. Because, while the second part of the original “acupuncture” has been appropriately replaced with “pressure,” the “acu” part remains exactly the same, invoking needles where there are none, and altogether ignoring the honest thumbs that are actually doing the work. And if we begin to confuse thumbs with needles at this stage of our evolution, then we have to ask ourselves quite seriously where it will all end. Will we start to refer to a clumsy person as being “all needles?” Will we take to including emojis in our texts showing hypodermic syringes pointing up for approval or down for lack of? Will Mick ‘n’ Keef come together for a glorious last hurrah to re-record that shamefully steam-inducing paean to male arrogance Under My Hatpin? The ramifications could be catastrophic, and it will be squarely the fault of the person who had the depravity to launch upon an unsuspecting society the excrescence of a word known as acupressure. And when I consider that person, I wish for nothing more than a cloud of plague-bearing, bloodsucking, many-fanged harpies to descend on them and bear them away, shrieking, to burn in hell’s hottest oven for all eternity.

“I told you not to ask,” said Vanessa.

“Well, see,” said Candy, who is a sweet soul and likes to see the sunny side of life, “I think that’s very interesting that you know that, I just wish I knew Latin too. Did you learn it at school? I always think that would have been so cool.”

“Do you, now?” I said. “Well, let me tell you about my Latin teacher.”

“Oh, God,” said Vanessa.

“I am,” I agreed

Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash

“I have driven many people from Britain in my car,” he announced. “And I always ask to them the same question, which is this. Why is there in Britain such an importance on the society class you are in?”

Now that, I thought, was a very good question.

“Now that,” I said, “is a very g…”

“I ask to them,” he said, “but they will never answer because it is something you do not want to discuss.”

He was on the money there, too: British people hate talking about class.

“It’s quite a probl …” I said.

“But it is something you should discuss,” he said. “because it is something that is wrong. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I absolutely did and was in full agreement.

“I absolutely d …” I said.

“You have three people,” he said. “One, two, three. In my country they are all equal, but in Britain they are not. One is a lord and he lives in a castle and everyone he admires him. And one is a businessman and he lives in a big house and everyone he treats him well enough. And one is a digger of ditches and he lives in a small shack and everyone he spits on him. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

To be fair to the people of Britain, I haven’t seen too many actual gobs of saliva being launched in the way of the working class there lately. But he certainly had a point.

“You certainly have a p …” I said.

“Why is one person more important than the other?” he said. “One person here, one person there, they all do their job, they all pay their taxes, they are all equal, and that is the end of it. That is the way it is in my country, and that is the way it should be everywhere. But it is not the way it is in Britain and it stays that way it is there because you do not want to discuss it. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I couldn’t have agreed more.

“I couldn’t ag …” I said.

“Now,” he said, “if the person who is digging the ditches does not pay his taxes, then he should go to prison because he has done something that is wrong.”

I personally would have pegged the businessman for the more obvious suspect for tax avoidance, but I saluted the general idea.

“That’s absolutely tr …” I said.

“But why do you continue to spit on him on the way?” he said. “He has done wrong, he is paying the price. That is fine, and it should be enough. You do not need to spit on him too. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

For the record, I have never knowingly spat on any person, whether I caught them en route to prison or to Buckingham Palace. But there was no disputing his argument.

“I certainly d…” I said.

“But no,” he said. “You spit on him when he is in prison, and you spit on him when he is coming out of prison. And even when he has paid his price and he is out digging the ditches again, you are still spitting, and he himself, he is no longer the guy who digs the ditches, he is the guy who digs the ditches who was once in prison who everyone spits on. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I was beginning to hope that the unfortunate reformed offender had at least invested in a sturdy handkerchief to mop his face.

“I …” I said.

“And meanwhile the lord, he is in his castle with his lady and they are having a fine time,” he said. “And the businessman, he is in his big house with his wife and they are having a good enough time too. And the guy who digs the ditches, he does not even have a wife anymore because his wife, she has said to him, ‘Why were you in prison and why can you not buy me fancy clothes and jewels like the businessman buys for his wife?’ and she has left him and he is on his own. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

There comes a point where it becomes necessary for one woman to stand up for her hypothetical other.

“Women are not all …” I said.

“And he will stay on his own,” he said. “Because no woman will marry a guy whose wife has already left him and who has no money and who was once in prison and who everyone spits on.”

It was true, I thought, that life could be unfair.

“Life can be unf …” I said.

“And he will get more poor,” he said. “And he will die still alone while the lord and the businessman, they will get more rich and their wives they will stay with them until they kick them out for the younger models.”

Sad to say, he was very possibly right.

“You’re very poss …” I said.

“And that is the doing of your British society class,” he said. “And it will never change, and do you know why it will never change? I will tell you why it will never change. It will never change because you will never discuss it.”

It occurred to me then that the art of discussion was an underestimated one.

“The way I see it …” I said.

“You cannot have discussion until you learn to listen,” he said. “But the guy who digs the ditches, he is at the bottom of the heap. There is the top of the heap and there is the middle of the heap and there is the bottom of the heap. And no one will ever listen to the guy who is at the bottom of the heap. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Oh, boy, did I understand what he was saying.

“And this is why it will never change,” he said. “Because one person will not listen to another. Well. Here is your house.”

So it was, I noted gratefully.

He nodded at me, with grave benevolence

“We have had discussion today,” he congratulated me. “We have not always seen eye to eye but I have learned about your country and you have learned about mine, and maybe we have opened up each other’s minds a little. And that is why discussion it is good for us all. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I do,” I said.

He was really quite a nice man.

This was not in the least degree the fault of the journalists. They were delightful people, as the majority of my ragtag colleagues are, friendly, funny, and with stories to tell they could sell by the yard. My problem was that the company into which I had, by an involved set of circumstances, fallen was exclusively British, and, as far as they were aware, so was I. So their conversation, inevitably, revolved around Britain: British politicians, British TV shows, British in-jokes and cultural references which sailed as far above my Southern Californian head as the high clouds float over Dover Castle.

Photo by Documerica on Unsplash

My own keen journalist’s nose for a story had already ferreted out the information that when British people get together, they might reasonably be expected to talk about matters British: however, when I meet a group of them these days, it is usually when they are visiting America or I Britain, in a setting in which I have already been identified as someone who lives in Los Angeles; and, while I obviously don’t expect them to tailor their entire conversation exclusively towards me, there is nevertheless an awareness – even occasionally some interest – that my current frame of reference is different from theirs.

All that these people knew about me was that I wrote for a British magazine, and my stubbornly British vowel sounds give no clue that I might live anywhere much west of Shepherd’s Bush. To them, I was simply someone who talked with the same accent that they did, but had remarkably little to say in it: someone who was, at best, extraordinarily dull company, and, not entirely implausibly, also suffering from a brain damaged by extreme and relentless drug use. Had anybody ventured to ask me a question about myself, I could have maybe had the chance to explain my situation. But since to the average Brit, asking a personal question is somewhat on the level of disgorging the contents of one’s breakfast over the Royal Crown Derby bone china at afternoon tea, the only way I could realistically have broken my silence would have been to leap onto a tabletop and shout, “Hear ye, Hear ye, I live in California and have no idea of half of what you’re all talking about.” So I stayed quiet.

Which left the other option, of talking to French people. In usual circumstances, I very much enjoy talking French, and, while far from fluent, can generally make myself understood for an entertaining enough conversation. My family were good friends with the tough-minded order of Breton nuns who taught me at school – I was even named after one of them, Mozzair Mairy Gabriel, who met my pregnant mother one day outside Palmers Green train station and ordered her, if ze bébé were a leetle gerrl, to name her after the Archangel Gabriel, and when Mozzair Mairy Gabriel said “sautez,” one sautait – I’ve heard French spoken around me since childhood, and am usually relaxed and happy to join in. Usually.

The Cannes Film Festival, however, showcases, not only films from all nations, but also French bureaucracy. Tickets to screenings require a degree in astrophysics to secure, and invariably, for my hopelessly disorganized self, involve standing in the wrong line, wearing the wrong color badge, and being shouted at by one or another ferociously stern Frenchman to turn around and go là bas, là haut, à gauche, à l’autre porte, up to la claire fontaine, across le pont d’Avignon and often stopping off to pick up la plume de ma tante along the way. It is exhausting simply to decipher – let alone feel inclined to seek out more conversation on top of. So I kept quiet there, too, and as the days passed, began to feel the waves of loneliness lapping ever more insistently at the shore of my own personal ever more desert island.

On the Sunday morning, I found myself at a loose end in Festival terms, and walking past a church and seeing Mass about to start, I decided to slide in and attend. As soon as I entered, I felt my shoulders begin to relax. I’ve been being prayed over by Frenchwomen since, very possibly, before I was born, and know au nom du Père et du Fils as well as I know how to make the sign that goes with it; although these days far from a regular church attendant (sorry, Grandma), I also know what Mass is about, when to stand and when to kneel, what is happening in it now, and what is about to happen two prayers down the line; after a while, the comprehension dawned on me that, for the first time since I had arrived at the Festival, and being now neither shouted at in French nor talked over in British, I actually understood what was going on. It was really quite refreshing.

And it was to get better. It turned out that this Mass was not just any old Mass, but the most tender and touching form of Mass that you could ever hope to stumble upon in the church year. It was the children’s First Communion Mass.

To say that Catholic children are excited about making their First Communion is akin to suggesting there might be the occasional hole in Blackburn, Lancashire. The Catholic Church teaches that during Mass, each Communion wafer is quite literally transformed into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. This is admittedly an unusual sort of assertion, that adults may argue for as long into the night as they choose: for children, however, it is simply another new piece of information, and a thrillingly magical and mysterious one to set against the other facts that are presenting themselves, like the eight times table and the inexplicable spelling of Wednesday.

First communions are a big deal: they happen en masse, at a specified Mass during the early summer of the school year the children turn 7, and for the weeks leading up to it, the children’s lives are given over to its preparation. They attend special lessons dedicated, not only to the meaning of the sacrament, but also, in this excitingly grown-up and responsible new spiritual world they are about to enter, to the technique of receiving it: how to file out of the pew in an orderly line to approach the altar, how to take the small round wafer in the hand or directly onto the tongue in an appropriately reverent fashion, how to slide it past the palate and swallow without biting on it (a practice session will have been involved with unconsecrated wafers brought dramatically in from the church itself), how to return to the pew and immediately kneel down to say prayers of thanksgiving for the miracle in which they have just partaken. The anticipation is intense.

The day itself is one of glorious celebration. The boys will wear new suits, the girls, white dresses with wreaths of flowers in their hair over which their mothers have been agitating for weeks. Relatives will descend to make a fuss of the communicant and the communicant alone (this a first and incontrovertibly last experience in my own family of endless cousins), and there will be presents galore – sometimes, even, too many: I was given a white-covered prayer book by my grandmother and one similar but not identical by my godmother, which provoked hours of agonized choice every Sunday morning thereafter because we all went to the same church, and what if one of them noticed me using the other’s gift instead of her own? There’s a jubilant procession to the specially reserved front pews of the church, and a big celebratory breakfast – featuring orange juice, no less – afterwards. It’s not quite a wedding day: but for a 7-year-old, it’s not so far behind, either.

For the adults in the congregation, to see forty or so 7-year-olds, all dressed in their angelic finery, first tiptoe nervously to the altar, and then bounce back to their pew, bursting with the sheer magic of what they have just done, their eyes triumphantly seeking out their families to confirm the heady reality of it all, is a sight against which some hearts might manage to remain proof, but I would estimate not many, and certainly not mine. It was drama that by far outshone anything I had seen on the film screen all week long; and best of all, I understood every single element of it. I was overcome with joy: stick a white dress on me and a prayer book in my hands, and you’d have been hard put to tell me from the First Communicants.

After the Final Blessing, I floated from the church, made a quick pit stop at le tabac to buy a replacement package of paper tissues, and took the bus into town to meet the Brits for lunch.

“What did you do this morning?” one of them asked me.

“Well!” I began, and then stopped. Although the famed British upper lip has softened considerably from that sported by previous generations, it is still not precisely what you’d call tremulous; and the British approval rating for disclosure of church attendance is below even that for personal questions.

“I went for a walk,” I said at last. It seemed simplest.