It’s a strange feeling when both your parents have passed, a kind of changing of the guard between generations. And yet, immersed in memories at the moment, in many ways I still feel like a child.

I think my parents were two very lucky people to get to be together so long, and they gave lots of love to others, especially their children, their grandchildren, and great grandchildren, as well as foster children they cared for before their own came along. They lived most of their married life in California, except for several years in Oregon, where my three older siblings were born, and a few weeks that I barely remember in Arizona. Our vacations when I was young were road trips, with my dad at the wheel.

For most of his working life, in fact, my dad was a truck driver, mostly driving cement mixers. Concrete lasts quite some time, so it’s possible there are remnants of his work remaining all over parts of Oregon and Southern California. But the most important legacies he leaves behind are the memories that we, his offspring, family, and friends, hold dear.

In 2006 I wrote my dad a Father’s Day letter that touched him so much he read it to numerous people, including his and my sister’s dentist. That’s the kind of guy he was. He had friends everywhere.

I’m sharing that letter below, along with a photo I took of my dad at a family reunion in 2007. (As usual, click on the thumbnail image for a larger view.)

In remembrance:

Dear Dad,

Some of my earliest memories are of waking up on cold mornings in Oregon in the secure knowledge that you already had a fire going, that you’d ventured into the cold morning before anyone else to warm up the house. Then there were those fish ponds that froze over one winter, and the big aquarium in the living room.

Fish. Fish dinners. Fishing. Pictures of family members and friends with fish they’d caught all lined up on the front lawn. Wading in a river to fish. Standing on a pier to fish. Waiting under a full moon for the grunion to run.

I remember drives, too. Lots of long drives to places I never would’ve seen any other way. Stopping by the side of the road sometimes to sleep with eighteen-wheelers whining past in the dark. Mattresses on the floors of motel rooms, long freight trains keeping us awake. Watching the road out the window in the upper bunk of the camper. The other day I saw a DVD player for kids to use in a car, and I felt sorry for any kids who don’t just look out the window and actually see where they’re going. Watch a movie while Dad drives? But there’s so much of the world to see out a car or camper window.

Fishing. The fire fall at Yosemite. Weekends in the desert at Red Hill or Salton Sea. Camping in the redwoods and listening for bears at night. Almost getting struck by lightning in Cuyamaca, but not, because somehow Dad knew. Finding wild roses growing along a creek. Attempting to camp with a cat. The night at Virginia Creek, after a day spent fishing, when we heard the rumble of a big herd of dusty sheep that came down to drink, then rumbled away leaving another cloud of dust and muddy water. Succulent fresh trout for dinner outdoors. Fishing.

I wrote a book in which a man whose son had died regretted that he hadn’t fished more with his son. That’s certainly not a worry in our family. We did lots of fishing. Funny thing is, in all those years I don’t think I caught a single fish—but I sure had a good time.

Thank you for giving me so many pleasant childhood memories.

So, let’s see if I understand this. We’re supposed to sell our fiction as memoir now? Is that what I’ve been doing wrong? Is this what they mean by creative nonfiction? I’m confused.

I guess the little hand slap mainstream media gave James Frey, not to mention his second book contract, weren’t very good deterrents to the hot new trend in books — memoir fraud.

Readers expect a memoir to be true, if from a limited perspective of the writer’s personal experience and memory of events, which can of course be slightly skewed. We don’t all remember events that happened when we were growing up the same way our siblings or parents remember them. Obviously a lot of other nonfiction is opinion, or facts mingled with theories, presented from a single biased viewpoint. But a memoir isn’t supposed to be deliberately made up and then presented as the author’s own story. That’s called fiction.

These so-called memoir authors sold what they wrote as their own life stories, when they knew the stories either weren’t true or weren’t their experiences. They could’ve called their stories novels, or fictionalized accounts, but they didn’t. They called them memoirs. Some of them (Frey, at least) made a lot of money.

I don’t know about you, but when I spend hard-earned money on a book, my expectations are still pretty high. Those expectations are being fulfilled by books less and less often these days. I’m starting to think it’s no wonder people are reading fewer books, and I think the problem boils down to simple greed.

We all need to make a living. But most of us try to work hard and put in an honest effort at something for our living. We don’t resort to cheating, theft, fraud, and sloppy ethics. So who’s to blame here? Are these people just laughing at all us dummies who bother to actually be honest about our work? Laughing all the way to the bank?

The LA Times has published another opinion on why this type of thing happens in Why we fall for the fakes, an editorial that blames not just the writers, but the publishers, and finally the readers who keep purchasing these books.

What do readers think about this? If you pick up a memoir to read, do you want to know the person is at least attempting to be honest and accurate? Do you want to believe the publisher did their part in making sure they weren’t helping to perpetrate a fraud, or even instigating it? Do you think the writer is making a promise he or she is responsible to keep? Or when you pick up a memoir do you expect a certain amount of fiction?

What do you consider getting your money’s worth from a book? What are your expectations of authors and publishers as far as honesty? Are consumers partly to blame when we keep buying and don’t demand quality and integrity from the companies selling us products? Are we the readers to blame for books that fall below standards in either quality or integrity? Are we voting with our dollar for dishonesty? Or is that just an easy excuse for those who knowingly sell us shoddy or misrepresented products? Isn’t that blaming the victims, something like the purse snatcher saying, “Well she was just walking along the sidewalk. What was she doing there if she didn’t want it stolen?”

Perhaps most important of all, how does this make you feel about telling young people they should read more books?

In truth, each person tends to accomplish the things that are most important to that person. I know that sometimes in the past I wasn’t even conscious of what was really important to me. I was more conscious of what I thought was expected of me, or what everyone else seemed to consider important. I wanted everything for the people I loved, forgetting that what everyone really wants is . . . love. I felt guilty about what I didn’t do, or sometimes even resentful about what someone else didn’t do to help. But the important things got done just the same. Why can’t we be content with that and spend the rest of the time enjoying each other’s presence, or our memories of those who can’t be with us?

Sometimes it’s better to focus on what does get done and simply be happy with that, especially around the holidays, which seem to overwhelm all of us with expectations of perfection — whether out of a need to recapture our childhood and a feeling of being taken care of, or to recapture our childrens’ childhoods, or for some to capture a childhood they didn’t get but have always wanted.

I have wished many times that I could get everything right, for even one day of the year, but I don’t. I never have, no matter how hard I worked at it, no matter how frantic I got or how I urged others to take part in my visions of the perfect whatever — and I can be as much of a control freak as the next person. Expectations of perfection tend to leave us unsatisfied and always wishing we could do better. And yet our expectations seem to increase each year, working us into a kind of frenzy.

My new goal is to be happy with imperfection, for this season and all future ones, in fact all year. I want to look at what I accomplish and say, “This is enough. I did my best for now, and I am enough.” If I can achieve a day of joy with myself and those around me, maybe that’s the best I should wish for, regardless of whether the table is perfect, or the turkey perfect — or, in our case this year, the chicken. I can be joyful, whether everyone gets exactly the gift they want, or a card on time, and even regardless of whether I get to be with the people I want. I have lots of memories with my loved ones, and I cherish them this year as much as ever, right here in my heart, as always. They know I love them, and I know they love me. That really is the most important thing, isn’t it?

If this is supposed to be a time that we celebrate peace and love, then why do we get ourselves so wrapped up in these perfectionist delusions? Maybe it has to do with winding down the old year, and some pressure that builds from the notion that we needed to make this year better than any past year, or that we have to make next year even better, on and on until the years run out. This is madness, isn’t it? Where does it come from? It reminds me of working in a place where doing one’s work well and on time means future expectations are even greater, that the quality/production machinery gets cranked up, and pretty soon everyone’s running around like Lucy Ricardo and Ethyl Mertz trying to keep up with that crazy candy conveyor belt. Those are the kinds of jobs that kill people before they have a chance to retire and enjoy all they’ve earned — if there’s anything left.

My wish for everyone I know is that they’ll step off that track filled with holiday madness (or any other flavor of perfectionist madness) and simply enjoy a pleasant time with loved ones, basking in the lack of any need to be perfect. Laugh about the errors made attempting to get everything to the table on time, or the overdone food, or the dust on the mantle. The world only needs one Martha Stewart, really. She’s wonderful, but unique. Heaven help us if anyone ever decides to clone her. Or me, for that matter, with my trail of dustbunnies scattering behind me at the other end of the housekeeping spectrum. You ARE perfect, each of you, just the way you are. That’s why the rest of us seek to be with you all year long, or wish we were when we aren’t. You, just as you are, are the true gift we all cherish, right here in our hearts. My suggestion is to throw out the To Do List, and replace it with one that has only two goals on it:

• Have fun.
• Be happy with whatever you and your loved ones get.

Consider that failure is impossible. The one with the most gifts or the least doesn’t usually notice. If they’re aware of the world around them, they know they’re lucky to get any, and if they don’t know that, we’ll leave them to their innocence this once. Most guests don’t see the table setting, especially what’s missing from it. If the turkey takes too long to cook, you can eat the pie first. The dessert police won’t arrest you. They don’t work on holidays. Keep peanut butter and jelly or canned soup on hand in case the oven breaks (it happens).

I wish you fun, laughter, and contentment this year, creating or reliving memories that are special and uniquely yours, rather than magazine-like, cookie-cutter perfection where people are afraid to touch anything. May you be content in a life and in love well spent. Love to all of you and those close to you — just as you are.

When I woke up this morning, I couldn’t stop thinking about this song that I learned as a kid for Thanksgiving:

Over the river, and through the wood,
To Grandfather’s house we go;
The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
through the white and drifted snow.
(read the rest of the lyrics at Wikipedia)

It might seem a silly thing to remember during serious times, and on yet another holiday that seems to offend so many people. But holidays can be a good way to remind us how we’ve changed and progressed, and to find new ways to change and keep moving forward. It might interest you to know that the song quoted above, titled “A Boy’s Thanksgiving Day,” was written by a woman who was well ahead of her time — or perhaps a better way to say that would be that she wasn’t as behind as the rest of her people of her time. According to Wikipedia, “Lydia Maria Child (February 11, 1802 – July 7, 1880) was an American abolitionist, women’s rights activist, opponent of American expansionism, Indian rights activist, novelist, and journalist.” The entry goes on to state this:

She was a women’s rights activist, but did not believe significant progress for women could be made until after the abolition of slavery. Her 1833 book An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans argued in favor of the immediate emancipation of the slaves, and she is sometimes said to have been the first white person to have written a book in support of this policy. (read entire Wikipedia article)

It’s good for any society to be able to review its errors and learn from them, to evolve as a people and keep working to make things better for every member that it carries into the future, so this seems a good song to use to celebrate this day of thanks.

As for memories of grandfather’s house, I don’t have any. My maternal grandfather died before I was born, and the other lived farther away than we could afford to travel. But I knew my maternal grandmother. We took trips to Oregon see her at other times of the year, until she came to live with us when I was a teenager, and we spent Thanksgiving with her at our house most of the years that followed. I also remember trips as a small child, mostly around Easter, to what had once been her father’s little homestead in Potrero, CA, a tiny town pocketed in the hills north of Tecate, Mexico, and made famous recently by wildfires and mercenaries.

My great-grandfather’s house was a favorite place for my mom to visit when she was a girl, and I can imagine her going there for Thanksgiving, though not through “white and drifting snow.” Even at Potrero’s altitude of about 2300 feet, snow rarely falls there. I remember the house where my great-grandfather lived only as a fireplace still standing long after a fire had destroyed it. There was a newer house by then that a great uncle lived in, but it seemed that every family member found a reason to walk past or through that burned-out structure on each visit to the property, imagining the past, until it was sold off sometime in the late ’60s or early ’70s.

Even though there’s no snow in Potrero, or here, on Thanksgiving, there is this memory of place special to me and my family, a place I wouldn’t know how to get to today, and a man named Christian Nelson, whom I never met. He was originally from the island of Læsø, in Denmark, where his father was a fisherman. Chris herded geese as a boy, and left home at 14 to spend years at sea, on merchant ships, until he decided to settle here as a young man. His name should probably have been spelled Nielsen, but he spelled it Nelson when he came here in 1881 because he thought it seemed more American. He later joked that it turned out he’d made a Swede of himself.

I haven’t been much for genealogy, not having children of my own, and I don’t think about Chris Nelson very often. But a couple of days ago I sorted through some old books and came across two that mention him. One is a memoir my grandmother wrote about growing up in Potrero, and the other was written by a woman named Ella McCain, who happened to be with my great-grandmother, Josephine Gray, on the day she met her future husband. Ella described the Danish farmhand Chris Nelson as a “big, barefoot boy.” He worked for a local rancher they were visiting who’d just married into Ella’s family, and Ella mentions how she and her sisters teased Josephine about Chris, which leads me to think there must have been an attraction from the start. Ella also wrote that Chris Nelson had landed in San Diego Harbor on the four-masted sailing ship Trafalgar, and that information sent me searching the Web for more. It took a while to get the right search words, but I finally found a listing for the ship, which no doubt looked something like this.

I couldn’t be with the rest of my family this year, only my spouse and my dog who are both very special to me. Still, snow or no snow, in the past two days I’ve been over the hills and through the woods of my memories and family history, to my great-grandfather’s house, where he kept bees, won ribbons at fairs for his peaches, and provided eggs, butter, milk, and honey to my grandmother and her family during the Depression, when such luxuries were hard for them to come by in San Diego. He spoke four languages, that I know of, and he raised eight children, four each with two consecutive wives. (Josephine died 13 years into their marriage, when my grandmother was five.) He set a standard for the whole family, of love, hard work, honesty, generosity, and care for the land, lessons that have stayed with us for generations.

The riches we leave our families have little to do with money, or even genetics. I grew up with two adopted siblings, and we all learned the same love and values. Those were what we carried forward into our lives, a gift partially from Chris Nelson of Læsø, Denmark and Potrero, California, and partly from others before, after, and beside him, including my dad’s family back in Missouri. Both Chris Nelson and my dad have given their children and grandchildren a legacy of values that are worth a fortune, the same kinds of values I’ve done my best to adhere to through my life. Today I’m keeping those memories and ideals that count most in my mind, and I feel very grateful to have the memories and family that I do. But I also remember now, which I didn’t with as much awareness as a child, that there were people here before my grandparents, great-grandparents, or anyone else in my family came here. The Kumeyaay lived in Potrero well before my great-grandfather or any other white person ever heard of it or named it. The Kumeyaay considered the mountains near there sacred, and had their own names for them.

I understand why many people are offended by celebrations of Columbus Day and Thanksgiving that only recall a portion of the past, that glorify the western expansion of white people and the raping of a land that was just fine before we ever landed here. I think it’s important to remember that bitterness and the wrongs that have been done, as well as our growth as a combined people, the lessons learned that are worth salvaging. We learn from our mistakes, if we’re humble and respectful and we bother to look back and see clearly. We can’t change history, but we can remember it, the good and the bad, and do our best to make the future better.

In enjoying that song that I learned as a child, and in learning more about the woman who wrote it, I have to ask myself what voices of healing we may be ignoring today, just as her message of healing was ignored at the time she called for abolition. What voices, even before hers, tried to tell us not to begin slavery, or not to begin to rob Native Americans of their lands and way of life? When we gather around tables and talk about football games, or watch the news, what voices can we hear, behind the media’s hype, behind the conversation at the table? What voices are calling to us to do the right thing? How much weight and importance do we give them in our lives — everyday, not just on holidays?

None of that detracted from a sight, late in the day, of sunlight striking the slope of a nearby mountain. It shone through a faint haze just dense enough to make golden sunbeams slant onto the trees on that hillside in such an indescribable way I wanted to memorize the scene. For some reason it made my heart ache just a little, so sweet was that light. We held tightly to our tablecloth as we folded it, and drove away. The memory of that golden light has stayed with me for some forty years. I’ve looked for sunlight like that ever since and sometimes glimpsed it, always ever so fleeting.

If you ask what my five favorite birds are, I may list the last five species that visited my yard and forget I’ve ever seen an osprey, a roadrunner, a California quail. I might forget the red-tailed hawk that dropped the pigeon it had just caught when it saw my van driving toward it, or the two times I came across a great blue heron standing beside my path while I walked.

But sometimes I come across a name, an image, a sound, and I think, “Oh, how I love that.”

Do you have favorites or memories you don’t recall when someone asks, that come in odd moments like patches sewn to older thoughts?

Just the other day, while thinking about peace, I remembered a favorite song. “From A Distance” is most famous because Bette Midler’s 1990 recording of it won a Grammy. It’s written by Julie Gold. Here’s the snippet of the lyrics that came to mind a few days ago:

“From a distance
You look like my friend
Even though we are at war
From a distance
I just cannot comprehend
What all this fighting’s for”

All five people who were in the house got out okay, with only their clothes—or in my dad’s case his pajamas—on their backs.

Life is strange, how it plods along, and then—poof!—a puff of smoke and a pile of charcoal is all that’s left of everything you own, as if it was a cruel illusion—which I suppose it is. Physical things create an illusion of permanence in an impermanent life. Love is all that lasts.

I’m still in shock, and I wasn’t even there. It barely affects me except in my heart, because it happened to people I love in a house where I lived as a kid. A house in which I spent good times and bad with people I love. Some of my dad’s things (some once my mom’s), my niece and nephews’ things, and their mother’s things that can never be replaced are gone, and they’re all traumatized. I’m rambling because I really don’t know at this point what to feel or what to say. Blogging is futile and inconsequential, it helps no one, yet I feel compelled to write.

Life can be as fragile as a house built of tinder, filled with things that in the end are meaningless except for their connection to memories, to people we love. Sometimes love is the only glue that holds us together. Love and memories.

I’m grateful for the helpers, and for those they help.

I love you guys, and I’m so glad you’re alive.

–

Still rambling . . . the family is already on their way to recovery. Relaxing, letting the adrenaline seep out of their systems. The family dog is safe and has a place to sleep tonight. Dad will have to wait an incredibly long time for new teeth (his dentures were lost in the fire), but he has new keys to his van, thanks to my brother, something to wear, thanks to my sister, and is in good spirits.

The strangest thing is, just yesterday my husband and I read this website with avid interest, and just minutes before we heard about the fire we’d been talking about how an earth dome like that would be more resistant to damage from fire than a conventional wood frame house. Then my sister called with the news.

The problem with wood houses is they are fuel. Aside from the fact that they cost the lives of trees. I wonder why, in our world where we consider earthquake safety essential, we still consider it normal to live in tinderboxes.

I think my next house is going to be something like this.

***

After a quiet day yesterday, I woke early this morning (early for me, anyway), to sirens, thinking I’ve never lived in a place with so many sirens, even when we rented within a couple miles of Montgomery Field and one of the busiest intersections in San Diego. But here we’re right off the main road that runs through town. This morning the sirens were especially disconcerting, and I decided maybe I’d had too much coffee.

Then I realized yesterday began the fourth anniversary of the Gavilan Fire, which started in Fallbrook on February 10, 2002. During the course of that fire we were surrounded by flames, the air so full of smoke we had to keep all the windows closed. Wildfires came within a mile of our home on three sides—west, north, and south. For a few hours I sat with packed suitcases, the cat in her carrier, and the dog on a leash, so I could leave in a hurry if needed.

We avoided disaster then, but many others in town didn’t. An amateur radio repeater system went into use. People were evacuated. Forty-three homes were destroyed. A total of 5,000 acres burned, much of it on Camp Pendleton, as well as along De Luz Road, which runs through a beautiful stretch of the Santa Margarita River basin and includes a wildlife study area full of sycamores, live oaks, and other trees, as well as animal life. Hillsides were denuded of chaparral, transformed into brown, charred earth.

That fire wasn’t as large or nearly as devastating as the Cedar Fire, two years ago, but it struck so close to home it’s no wonder, after the past couple of weeks of dry, summer-like weather and an earlier forecast of wind for today and tomorrow, the sirens made me nervous this morning.

As of a year ago, the De Luz preserve has wireless wildfire sensors. Wildflowers bloomed profusely in the burned areas by spring of 2003. (Scroll down the linked page for wildflower photos.) And in fact, some of the plantlife in Southern California actually depends on our preponderance of wildfires.

***

Now that I’ve talked myself out of fire and siren anxiety, and gotten carried away again with online research, I’m headed back into the mystery novel. I’m on the third draft, and that’s nearly done. I’m happy with how this is going, feeling enthused about this book, and anxious to finish, to get on with the final edits—the minor, nit-picky stuff—then finish and send it off.

I’ll be off-line for a few days.

Later I taught myself to type on an old Smith Corona typewriter my mother or her mother purchased when Mom was in her teens or early twenties. She was born in 1923, if that gives you a clue to its age. It’s one of those typewriters that could be used to trace a murder suspect because of the way it slightly superscripts certain characters. I used it while seated on the floor of my bedroom beside my bed. Sometimes the typewriter rested on the floor, sometimes on a little castoff maple end table.

When I was about eighteen my parents bought me an electric typewriter for Christmas, and when I opened it my mother recalled hearing me pound away on the old one to finish up a term paper a few evenings earlier. She had almost given me the new typewriter then. I used this typewriter on an old sideboard from a great aunt’s house that originally had extra leaves one could add to extend it into a spare dining table. The leaves had, by the time I used it as a desk, been converted into storage shelves under my parents’ breakfast bar.

I later bought my own more modern electric, with a little daisywheel that whirred back into position at each return, instead of the whole carriage moving. I used this typewriter on an old wooden desk my husband bought at a friend’s garage sale. This desk has a center section that lowers to hold a typewriter, which I thought was pretty snazzy. It reminded my father, the first time he saw it, of a desk he used when he was in the Army during WWII. The most frightening detail of this story is, we still own that desk–though not the daisywheel typewriter. We also still own the castoff maple end table. (Oh my God, do we need new furniture.)

I’ve never dreamed of building an office over the garage as a place for me to write (as the man did in Eric Mayer’s post). I’ve been too busy writing. I write where I can, sometimes in bed like Colette, though that doesn’t seem to help me write stories like hers. But then, she never had a laptop computer she could carry anywhere she wanted.

I still do some of my best creative writing on a yellow lined pad with a pencil—and a good eraser.

I also, like Eric, prefer those chunks of uninterrupted time. Even when I think I should have time, I’m interrupted or distracted by pets, by spouse, by my own ineptitude, by the Internet, and by the dryer buzzing, or by guilt and self-loathing over house or yard work left undone. It’s always something.

The writer simply writes through it all. But sometimes it is a real pain.

A lot of changes took place during that time. In the course of just ten years, my siblings and I went through big changes in what clothing was acceptable, and who was expected to make it.

When my oldest sister was in junior high school, she came home one day upset because her friend had been sent home for her skirt being too short, a crime proven by use of a ruler. My guess today is that either the fabric shrank in the wash, or she’d gone through a sudden growth spurt in the legs. After all, she wasn’t “that kind of girl.” In high school my oldest sister belonged to an organization called Future Homemakers of America. Many of the girls who belonged made their own homecoming and prom dresses. One girl in my sister’s class earned the reverence of her peers when she stitched hers completely by hand.

Four years after her, when I was in junior high, we felt as if we were taking our academic lives in our hands if we wore culottes to school instead of skirts. But we apparently enjoyed putting our academic futures at risk, because we devised means, using pleats or folds, to attempt to hide the fact that they weren’t skirts, and wore them anyway, making secret pacts with each other to wear them on the same day. Around my second year in high school the rules changed and girls could wear pants—one day a week. Later we could wear them anytime, but if I recall correctly blue jeans were still limited to certain days.

Six years after I started junior high, my younger brother reached 7th grade. When I mentioned to him that girls weren’t allowed to wear trousers to school when I was in his grade, he didn’t believe me. Attitudes had changed that quickly—at least among kids his age.

I’d learned to sew as a little girl, making horrid looking doll clothes. My first results made me want to buy them instead. In junior high, girls in 7th grade were required to take Home Economics while the boys took Industrial Arts. In that first Home Economics class we baked cookies and sewed aprons. Both activities irked me as tiresome and juvenile, since I’d been baking and sewing for years. A few years later I’m happy to say the younger girls wouldn’t have believed me if I told them I had to take home ec. instead of shop.

Now here these aprons are in this magazine, making me feel nostalgic. Why is that? And what ever happened to aprons? If more women go off to jobs now, why don’t we need aprons more than ever? Are we better about changing out of our good clothes before we cook? Is everyone eating takeout? Would we rather wear cooking stains on our jeans and T-shirts as badges of our newfound freedom? Has the apron become a symbol of the past’s Stepford Wife controls over female activities? Do too many women my age remember being forced to make cookies and aprons in 7th grade?