Family Archives - Laurie R. King

Things I will miss…

July 4, 2012 by Laurie King 6 Comments

…when I move from the present house, not when I leave this life. Although I suppose that applies, too.

The house I’ve lived in for 15 years is very rural, with live oak and redwood in all directions. Since no dogs have lived here for all that time, and since the fines for allowing dogs to wander are very high hereabouts, the wildlife has developed a certain insouciance about their human neighbors. Raccoons, skunk, and opossums are regular visitors; wild turkey and coyotes pass through the yard. The other day I stepped out the front door and had a rabbit burst out from under my feet, walked into the driveway and frightened a chipmunk, and took a few steps more and startled the young buck that adores my roses. I felt like a Disney heroine.

Now, having not lived in the new place yet, I can’t be sure all those creatures won’t have relatives there, and the chances of its not having raccoon and skunks is relatively small. But less likely, and therefore among The Things I Will Miss, is the resident bobcat, who passes through in the half-light, trotting purposefully across the lawn or drive on his way to breakfast or bed, depending on the time of day. Bobcats are shy creatures, although they will face you down with an impressive growl if you happen across one.

If you look closely, you will see him, standing by the gate to the paddock, in a rare contemplative mood. Whether he is sniffing something, or thinking about it, this time he stood in one place long enough for me to find the camera, turn it on, crank forward the telephoto a bit, and move close to the window (doing most of the moving out of his line of sight.)

Moving, house

June 25, 2012 by Laurie King 10 Comments

In 1997, which my fingers tell me was 15 years ago, I moved house. I was then part of a family with two adults and a pair of high-school aged kids, and part of the reason we came here was the room.

There’s now me. And the family center has shifted to the northern end of a county that gets longer with every highway renovation and tourist season. So after fifteen years here, preceded by fifteen years with small children on a farm in Watsonville, I am gearing up to move again.

The place I’m looking to buy is not only closer to the next generation, but it’s in a perfectly beautiful place. It’s a little smaller, and better, I like the layout and some of the nice touches. But there are things I will miss about this place, and because most of those things have a story about them, I thought I’d do a few posts, and talk about this house I have loved for a decade and a half.

Dick Francis had a novel called Decider where his architect protagonist mused on the reasons people fell for the houses they did. In his case, the character’s deciding factor was a tree, one broad and sturdy, that he could picture his sons climbing.

In my case, the decider of this house was the texture of the walls.

Most walls these days are of dry wall (also known as sheetrock) with a thin cover of plaster that serves mostly to hide the seams of the panels. It’s quick and cheap and in any event, it’s the paint that people see, right?

Except for people like me. This place has sheetrock, yes, but over it is a heavy layer of texture that resembles what you get when you try to spread too-cool butter frosting on a cake: you can see the pass of the trowel, the direction of the arm laying it, the effort it took to spread that stuff up there, all the way up to the apex of the ceiling.

It invites the hand, to feel it. And I know it was work, because whenever I’ve tried to have someone duplicate it in small patches, I heard about the difficulty. Oh, the grumbles and low-voiced cursing that plaster has evoked.

And more: downstairs, where the ceilings are flat and would normally meet the walls in a simple right angle, here it is curved. A job that entails a whole lot of fiddly work, and no doubt cursing and self-doubt, but makes the rooms sing.

The man who laid that plaster on the walls—and this is a big house, with high ceilings—did so as a labor of love. He knew that the effort made all the difference between walls that hold paint, and walls that hold a family.

I’ll miss the walls.

Dance of sun and moon

May 20, 2012 by Laurie King 4 Comments

This is what the side of my house generally looks like when the sun is low in the sky, the light coming through the oak leaves:

And here is what the wall looked like tonight, as the moon slipped in front of the sun, turning the circles of light to arcs:

Other duties

June 2, 2011 by Laurie King 17 Comments

This week’s post on writing was superseded by grandmaternal duties. Meet the newest pirate in the King’s realm. Arrrgh! grandson.

Moving on

January 12, 2011 by Laurie King 3 Comments

As of today, I no longer own a house in England. And I’m surprised to find how disturbing that is.

This was my husband’s house, which he and his first wife bought in 1967 when he got a job in California, and she wanted a place in England for when their children were on holiday from their boarding schools and universities. She died a few years later, and when Noel and I married, it welcomed me with one of the few paranormal experiences I’ve had, a friendly nocturnal visitation from three ladies who had died there in its 100+ year history. We never lived in the house for more than a few months at a time, but in the early 1980s, I made the house my own by painting it, top to bottom. There’s nothing like painting woodwork and replacing wallpaper to lay claim to a building.

It is a terrace house just south of the river in Oxford, three stories of yellow brick held upright by the neighbors on either side, opening onto a narrow garden with an old lilac at the back. The basement floods when the river rises, the ceilings occasionally shed great hunks of heavy plaster on unwary sleepers, and the fixtures of the gas lights it had in 1967 still protrude from the walls. (Replaced by electrical fixtures, as the outdoor toilet facilities it also had at the time were replaced by something a bit more modern.)

For a long time, it was rented to students, who cared for it with less attention than one might have wished, but for the last few years it has sheltered Kings, family who came out of Kenya needing a house and intending to move on after a bit, but who stayed, and found a community in Oxford, and now, today, have made the house their own.

So I am happy to have handed over the house that was mine for a short time, knowing that its new owners love it and are at home there. But I am also sad, for I can no longer say that I own a house in England.

They do, however, promise that I can visit any time I like.

A gem among men

May 27, 2010 by Laurie King 4 Comments

Sometimes with family, you really luck out. True, sometimes family saddles you with serial killers and moustachioed aunts with lethal halitosis, but sometimes, that sprawling entity known as family presents you with a gift.

One of my husband’s granddaughters brought an extraordinary man into our family. I mean, we all knew he was a great guy and he’s a gas at a party, even before the juggling and the kites come out, but there’s nothing like a life-threatening illness to strip a person down to his true nature.

And he’s a gem.

His blog is here. Anything I might add to his story would be an anticlimax. He’s trying to raise a little money for the Lymphoma Association, too. Send them a few dollars, to let Martin know you’re behind him.

Thanks.

Flowers for Christmas dinner

December 16, 2009 by Laurie King 14 Comments

Jeezie Louisie, I look up from digging myself out from under a pile of papers and computer tasks and find that in nine days we’ll be sitting down to the traditional pumpkin pie breakfast with a heap of wrappings burying the carpet. How the hell did that happen? What happened to the memo cancelling November?

I blame two of the women in my life: my editor, who deliberately chose to drop the proofs onto my desk the week before Thanksgiving, and my daughter, who dawdled overseas instead of coming in the door on December 1st demanding that we set up the Christmas tree. And since the tree is usually the thing that gets me moving (must be the smell that triggers the reaction of Fir tree=shopping impulse) and we’re not getting the tree until Monday (and I just don’t want to think about the Charlie Brown trees that’ll be available then) I’m only now turning my mind to the question of Christmas.

And to the Christmas meals.

The night before Christmas, I like to keep the food light but festive. Some years we’ve done crab or shrimp along with a soup that balances those flavors, but since I don’t much like seafood in general and shellfish in particular, I can now use an excuse a new Jewish family member to remove them from the options. I may take another look at the take-away menu of the Gayle’s Bakery & Rosticceria (fabulous food, as are Gayle and Joe themselves) so I can join the festive and put off the work.

But for the 25^th itself, my family is adamant: Christmas equals turkey. Even if we’ve just managed to get the bones and leftovers out the door from Thanksgiving, we have to have turkey, a form of protein that rivals tofu on the boringometer. Which means that I have taken to playing with all the peripheral elements of the meal. One year I substituted celery root for some of the potatoes in the mashed potatoes. I often start with a small serving of tart crunchy salad (again I often depend on celery root here) balanced by a tiny cup of sweet, rich soup (cream of carrot with a pear tossed in, perhaps, or something with chestnuts) just to set up the taste buds for dinner. And although parsnips are not a part of our traditional family diet (my mother must not have liked them) I often make the yams roasted, tossed in a bag along with some cut up parsnips and a bit of oil and salt, and roasted high after the turkey comes out.

But I’m thinking this year of doing delicata flowers instead.

Delicata squash are one of the gifts of the modern foodie movement, that has brought us arugula and brown mushrooms. They’re small and elongated, the perfect size if you want to split them lengthwise and fill them with anything—sauteed vegetables and ricotta cheese are a favorite here—but the great thing is, the skin is tender enough to eat. So if you choose the delicatas with the most raised ridges to them, and just slice them crosswise, you end up with these very interesting rings. Drop them into a plastic bag with a little olive oil, salt, and whatever spices go with the dinner you have planned—Chinese five spice powder, Mexican chili mix, Moroccan spices or just cinnamon and nutmeg—then roast them in a nice hot oven for twenty minutes or so, turning once on the cookie sheet. Voila: delicata flowers.

Your family won’t even notice the turkey.

People of the Book

November 11, 2009 by Laurie King 10 Comments

When I heard the news from Fort Hood last Thursday, my heart sank. Not only because of the terror and grief visited on this community of soldiers, but because of the undeniably Muslim name of the man accused.

When a man with an “American” name (ie, Germanic or Irish or Polish or Italian or Spanish or…) vents his madness on his fellow man, we don’t even see the man’s ethnicity or religious identity, looking straight past those details to the question of Why? But let a man whose mind cracks for personal reasons carry a name redolent of the Middle East, and the instant assumption is: Terrorist.

This must be what Japanese people experienced during WWII, and Germans during the Great War. (Along with Chinese and Philippinos and Asians in general, or Austrians and Swiss during the Great War—as now Sikhs and Palestinian Christians and other unrelated but be-turbanned innocents get slapped with the “Islamic terrorist” label.) And one might indeed find a fractionally higher percentage of would-be terrorists among the Islamic American population than one would among, say, Buddhist Americans or Amish Americans, just as the chances of locating a Japan sympathizer in 1943 might have been a tiny bit higher among people by the name of Takahashi and Suzuki than among the O’Douls and Kaufmanns.

I adore the diversity of my homeland. I cherish walking down the street and seeing faces all the color of the pigmentation spectrum, hearing accents from near and far, seeing hair that runs the gamut from floss-thin blond to wavy-copper to heavy-curly-black. I find it startling to see a crowd, in person or in a picture, that shows a field of white faces, and am pleased that those pictures are growing increasingly rare.

We are a small, fragile world in a big, cold universe. We are all brothers and sisters, with the closeness of a family—and all the animosity.

Hence, my sinking heart at hearing the name Nidal Malik Hasan connected with the shooting, a man whose troubles bonded with but went far beyond religious belief, whose dual nature as psychotherapist and madman is difficult to wrap one’s head around, and whose gunshots dialed the image of his community back eight years, to the fall of 2001.

We are people of the book. This is a Muslim term, used to point out that Christians, Jews, and Muslims are all built upon the foundation of one set of scriptures, for the most part what Christians know as the Old Testament. We do not agree with the interpretation the others make of the book, no more than we agree with the interpretations of others within our own religion, but we are children of one Book.

Islam means submission. A Muslim is one who submits to the will of God. And yes, there are those Muslims whose death-dealing fury makes a bitter irony out of the meaning, just as there are Christians whose espousal of violence flies in the face of the peace message carried by Jesus of Nazareth.

My son was a soldier for four years, and in the Guard for two. He was based at Fort Lewis, not Fort Hood, and he was lucky enough to make it home unwounded. On this Veteran’s Day, perhaps we can spend a moment of thought on the many stable, responsible, and patriotic Muslim soldiers wearing American uniforms, and give them a particular and fervent thanks for their persistence in serving the country they, and we, love.

Seders and other riotous entertainment

April 10, 2009 by Laurie King 8 Comments

I went to a seder on Wednesday with my new family—the family my daughter married into—and found it…unlike other seders I’d been to.

Sing to the tune of “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”:

Just a tad of haroset helps the bitter herbs go down,
The bitter herbs go down, the bitter herbs go down,
Just a tad of haroset helps the bitter herbs go down,
In the most disguising way.

(Note: That last line is “disguising,” not “disgusting.”)

We didn’t attempt the tune for “Matzo, Matzo Man” (These are Sephardi Jews, not Ashkenazi, and I believe geneticists have determined that Sephardi people lack the gene for Broadway Musicals. Tunes Wednesday night were kept by the lapsed Catholics and Episcopalians in the gathering.) however, “These are a few of my favorite things” adopted well to the words:

Cleaning and cooking and so many dishes—
Out with the hametz, no pasta, no knishes
Fish that’s gefillted
Horseradish that stings,
These are a few of our Passover things.

When the plagues strike,
When the lice bite
When we’re feeling sad
We simply remember our Passover things
And then we don’t feel so bad.

Matzo and karpas and chopped-up haroset,
Shankbones and Kiddish and Yiddish neuroses,
Tante who kvetches and uncle who sings,
These are a few of our Passover things.

I won’t go on (Is that a roar of approval I hear?) with “Take me out to the seder, take me out to the crowd…And it’s root, root, root for Elijah…” or the Eight Nights of Passover, but you get the picture.

A high point were the plague bags (containing small stretchy frogs, wind-up locusts, and small Styrofoam balls for boils, such, all of which were brought out and often tossed about at their respective mentions in the reading. The plague of darkness? Sunglasses, of course. Can you guess there were a lot of kids here?)

But there was one thing I truly loved. While the head of the family was carrying the platter of matzo around and brushing each person with it, accompanied by a nice catchy if somewhat repetitive tune, I looked up and found half the people there on the phone. The middle of a religious service, and they were checking their voice mail? But no. They were ringing absent friends and family members, that they might participate in the service. An aunt in LA, a mother in the hospital, all were linked through these little scraps of electronic technology to a group of Jews-and-others, gathered in Fremont to celebrate a miraculous event 4000 years old.