Half Page a Day
I took many writing classes and attended a couple of writing conferences in the 80s and 90s until I realized that maybe I should stop. Teachers mostly encouraged us to write every day.
July 4, 1996
I used to live in a rear house on Harvard Blvd. with my two sons. During one summer, the owner hired Lee and Han, both originally from Korea, to paint the front and and rear houses.
One Fourth of July, Lee and Han invited us to see the fireworks display at Santa Monica Beach. When we got to the parking lot, Lee tried to pay for the parking with a fifty dollar bill. The attendant asked, “Don’t you have anything smaller?” Lee asked me why they print money in fifties if you can’t use them. We all sat on a blanket and waited for the fireworks to start. When they did, we noticed that Han hugged the ground, and he curled up with his body shaking. We went home shortly after that. Lee had told me earlier that Han was an orphan. We knew that day that he had to have been closer to bombs and gunfire than he had cared to tell.
July 20, 1996
There is a salad that I love called Tabuleh. (I’ve seen it spelled tabbuli.) It is a Middle Eastern dish and is made of bulgur, garbanzo beans, parsley, mint, green onions, olive oil, lemon juice and other optional ingredients such as tomatoes and olives. I never would have been introduced to this dish if it hadn’t been for a potluck dinner I attended about 24 years ago when my sons were in a day care center. Because we live in an ethnically diverse neighborhood, we tasted a variety of dishes that originated from all over the world. I think that if we ever have world peace, it will have started, at least in part, because of potluck dinners.
July 24, 1996
My mother did not like to wash dishes. When she did, it sounded like rocks in a polishing tumbler. I washed dishes the same way, clattering and banging dishes together until a neighbor slammed his window down in disgust. Shortly after that, I read somewhere that you tend to do things the way your parents did unless you make a conscious effort to change.
My daughter says that we wouldn’t lose so many dishes if I’d only change my attitude toward washing dishes. I tell her it’s a matter of statistics. Since I wash dishes more often than she does, of course I break more of them. She’s not convinced. We use Corelle dishes for everyday use — they aren’t supposed to break — but I’ve managed to break a few of them as well.
July 26, 1996
When I was in Paris in 1968, I purchased an expandable bag that looked like fishnet, of the type commonly used by Parisians to carry their groceries home. Because of that bag, people would walk by and ask me for the time, “Avez vous l’heure?” I sat on a bench reading a French newspaper and a very lonely old man started talking to me about how his wife had died, hitting her head against the bathtub.
In San Francisco, we knew a man named Kato-san who greeted me by saying, “Excuse me.” He thought he was saying “Good morning.” He had reason to go to the San Francisco General Hospital with his wife one day. He wore casual clothes and rubber thongs and wore his keys on a black cord around his neck. Employees at the hospital would walk by and nod in acknowledgment. He finally figured out that people thought his cord was a stethoscope and that he was a doctor. Funny how these fleeting glimpses, these first impressions, these things we carry are interpreted by the world at large.
July 27, 1996
I have friends and I have best friends. Ultramarine blue, violet, and orange are my friends. Cerulean blue, crimson red, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, and Hooker’s green are my best friends. They taught me that I have more choices than I ever thought possible — beyond primary, secondary, and tertiary — the palette has no limits.
If you wet the watercolor paper, add blue for the sky, run brushstrokes of red, yellow and brown in small amounts and fast, you can have the beginning of a beautiful sunset. Blue alone will give you a clear sky. Take some tissue and lift out some of the color and you can have clouds. Hooker’s green is for the trees that meet the sky.