A Bride in Blue

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by cheri block

Out on the beach with the stunning mountains of Maui rising in the north and Hawaiian music playing quietly in the background, a wedding was taking place,  the vows exchange scheduled to coincide with the setting of an orange sun. The groom was wearing a light green Hawaiian shirt with  sea turtles swimming on the front and back. The family members giggled at times, the after-effects of a pre-nuptial Mai Tai, perhaps.

We stopped to watch the ceremony somewhat nostalgically, remembering our honeymoon in Hawaii a long time ago.

The bride in a gorgeous white gown, escorted by her proud father wearing a suit, began her walk from the Mauna Lani Hotel pool to the beach and to all of those waiting with anticipation.

We, the uninvited,  backed up onto the lawn to watch her come down the sandy aisle.

As she approached, the white of her gown contrasted the dark blue of her tattoos, which crept out of the bodice  and then exploded like a paint ball all over her shoulders and back, disappearing again under the satin buttons on the back of the dress.  She looked like a beautiful mermaid with chain mail for skin.

Oh, doesn’t she look radiant, like a 40′s movie star, so subtle, feminine, and sexy?

Not.

Posted in Life | Tagged , | 4 Comments

The Gates to a President’s Hell: Water and the IRS

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by cheri block

At the end of August 1973, after spending the summer eating ice cream sundaes and pistachio nuts, guacamole and whipped cream, I gave birth to a baby girl. I was twenty-three years old.

Most women in those days remember the months leading up to their deliveries as ones festooned with baby showers and serious decision-making about cribs and rockers, nursery colors and strollers. Not I. I spent the entire summer on the sofa watching the Senate Watergate Hearings. Gordon Liddy, H.R. Haldeman, Archibald Cox, John Dean, Herb Kalmbach–these names I knew well.

I am a small person–at the time of my pregnancy I weighed about 100 pounds and by June of 1973, my body weight was approaching 118 pounds. My ankles screamed at me; my lungs cried out nightly, “More air, please!” In short, I slowed down. These were not the days when women worked out at the gym up to the night of delivery or spent their last moments on a yoga mat before their water broke. These were the days when, like Homer Simpson creating a permanent divot, or should I say crater on the sofa, it was perfectly acceptable to lounge while pregnant.

I was no exception. My husband, in law school from August to May and in Officer Candidate School for the National Guard that summer, was not clerking for some high-powered judge in San Francisco. We were married, damnit, and he had a child on the way and a wife on the couch.

He worked, therefore, at Pacific States Steel, a filthy (now condemned and cleaned up thanks to the EPA) sooty company in Union City, California. His job was to keep the underground ovens going and to do this, he had to wear wooden sandals strapped to the bottom of his boots to keep the rubber from melting. Metal-toed boots would surely roast his toes like peanuts.

He would come home from work with soot so ground into his  face, I thought we lived in West Virginia outside of some coal mine. Nightly, dropping his lunchbox on the counter before going upstairs to shower,  he would find me watching the Senate Watergate Hearings. Dinner was not ready.

Like my husband  shoveling coal in the bowels of Pacific States Steel, Richard Nixon, too, was on the hot seat of American politics and I wasn’t going to miss one minute. And I didn’t.

You see, I had a personal connection to the Watergate scandal: my college roommate had married the son of Richard Nixon’s personal attorney, Herb Kalmbach. I wanted to see him testify. I wondered what my roommate  might be thinking about her father-in-law. I also wondered if she ever felt guilty wearing my dirndl skirts and stretching out the waist bands while I was away on weekends.

But most of all, from the outset, I was positive that Richard Nixon had lied to the American public about his role in the cover-up and, as a seasoned Sunnyside Day Camp Counselor by day, ordering small children around, and a clerk in the Mervyn’s Department Store Mens’ Department by night, I did not approve of lying or shoplifting. Or secret break-ins. I wanted justice to be done.

I will confess that at that time, I was a registered Democrat and did not like Richard Nixon, whose shifty eyes and sweaty upper lip during the 1960 debates with John F. Kennedy made me, as a precocious 4th grader, vote for JFK in a straw election in Room 6.

We all know how Richard Nixon was brought down: Arrogance. Narcissism. Ignorance. Prevarication.

These fatal flaws can eventually trip up even the most well-insulated politician.

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Marriage in Oxymoronica

IMG_0751by cheri block

I live with a logical man who speaks in logical vocabulary, thinks to himself logically, and espouses logical fact-based opinions often; that is, his posturing takes place about as often as I think intuitively, elliptically, and emotionally. He is the type of man you want when the ship is going down. I am the type of woman you want to party with. He is the type of man who others ascribe to emulate. I am the type of woman who others, well, who others look at with the big eyes waiting for someone to say, “Tag, you are it!!!” and run.

Occasionally we have role reversals. He takes a motorcycle safety course. He buys a lavender sweater. He puts on black leather flip-flops for the first time. I become indignant that there is a mistake on our tax return. I consult  an Atlas.

I register a big negative at the motorcycle safety course which seems to me an oxymoronic title. I buy more life insurance for him. I wonder if the flip-flops will hurt him between his toes and so it goes.

These two parallel cognitive universes have co-existed, co-habitated, and co-llided for over 40 years.

We have both practiced patience throughout that expanse of marital bliss and blissters; he, by knowing intuitively that he is right; I, by logically asserting my right to intuition.

Last night, we had a collision of sorts.

We’ve been on vacation for a number of days and arrived home to bills, the dog, weeds, the cat, and an empty refrigerator.

He enjoys himself on vacation having tropical drinks loaded with umbrella power and he orders dessert at every meal.

I show tremendous moderation and will-power on vacation, worrying that the scale will speak out loud when I return.

We returned. The scale, like the swaying palms which sound like rain when brushing each other, spoke.

Shock. We didn’t gain much weight. He is emotionally elated. I am factually concerned.

He, self-satisfied, drops into bed, not unlike a large cedar tree falling to earth.

The fact-based me lies there,  suspicious.

He rests his weary large limbs and is just about to drift into a deep compostian sleep when I observed, ” The scale is working perfectly; it’s just inaccurate.”

So much for the facts.

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The Present Moment

by cheri block

Yoga has taught me to push my mind back to the present moment every time it strays.

I find this effort rewarding but challenging. Staying in the present moment is experiential; that is, we guide ourselves into, through, and out of the moments of our lives, even if they are sad, scary, or maddening.

Life becomes as rich as cheesecake.

The person yapping in the airplane seat next to you becomes an opportunity for character study.

The new wrinkle you notice on your face becomes impetus to focus away from the physical and toward the spiritual or mystic or intellectual.

The sense of self-importance we feel in certain situations becomes a way to view our own insecurities.

The disappointment, annoyance, frustration we allow to invade our sacred and cherished beliefs become growth hormones.

At this present moment on the balcony, I watch a zig-zagging electric line of ants picking apart a dead moth carcass and I am reminded of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage: in one stark scene, Henry Fleming sees a young dead soldier’s body propped against the trunk of a tree. Ants crawl up and down the body which was once someone’s son or husband. Crane illustrates the temporal nature of the human experience, but more importantly, of our relationship to the natural world.

Cheesecake.

Posted in Life, On fiction | Tagged , , , , , | 19 Comments

If your life were a book

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by cheri block

We all have a life story. It has a plot and subplots, many settings, and a host of characters. Most of us like to focus on our life theme. We might remember ourselves in this way:

My life has been about service to others. I am very unselfish and devoted to my family. When I am gone, people will remember me for my interest in other people. Etc.

But the truth of our life story is that people will remember us not for the big themes but for the details. That cup of coffee you brought up to my bedroom this morning. That note you left. That look on your face.

We all have a protagonist in our life story and as with all  narratives, an antagonist.

Who is your protagonist? This character moves your forward in meaningful ways. In your short 80-year-or-so lifespan, this part of who you are is present when your nerves are calm, your heart is pure, and your mind is clear. This part of you is your very own hero or heroine, that character that rises above the mundane and profane. Unfortunately, the protagonist in you is often caught by the ankle, tripped, and muddied. And you did it to yourself.

A Buddhist quotation  asks that we not bend to the power of our antagonist.

Who is your antagonist? This character is often the more interesting part of who you are. He or she is present when your nerves are frayed, your heart is spoiled, and your mind is self-consumed. This part of you is your very own villain, that character that refuses the kind and pure and is motivated by self-interest, greed, and vanity.

We are often Connie instead of Rose of Sharon, Kino instead of Juana, Willie instead of Mama.

Best selling books capitalize on antagonists because  what they do appeals to that dark side of us all. Who wants to read a book about people with clear hearts and kind souls?

As I grow older, I am more attracted to the protagonists in each of my friends and family members.

The only antagonists I want to know are in fiction.

I can deal with Tom Buchanan but I certainly would not want to live with him.

Posted in Education, Life, On fiction | Tagged , , | 30 Comments

From the mouths of old babes

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by cheri block

Took my mother Joan to her monthly infusion at the local hospital this morning.

There, sitting with a drip line in her tiny arm and a Glamour Magazine in her crooked fingers, she said,

How did I get to be this old so quickly?

She’s had several strokes, so her memory isn’t what it used to be. She’s also deaf, one of many byproducts of a vicious attack of meningitis when she was 67 years old, but for all who know her, these things haven’t stopped her from living her life.

Mother, this is a question all of us ask, but few of us answer. More importantly, was the story your caretaker Belen told me this morning true?

As I said, my mother’s memory is short. I wanted to tell her the story again.

You told Belen that when you turned 100, you want to dance on a table and in case your memory has gone bad,  you wanted Belen to remind you of your wish.

Belen told you that when you turned 100, she would be 87. Perhaps her memory would be poor by then, she confided.

Belen told you that she would ask Cheri to remind her to remind you to dance on a table when you are 100.

Mother seemed please with this plan, so pleased, I felt it was my duty to disrupt it.

Mother, I will be 80 when you are 100, so perhaps I won’t remember to remind Belen to remind you that you must dance on a table when you are 100.

Her brow furrowed and she waved her arm, the one with the drip-system delivering her drugs.

How old will Sara be when you are 80 Cheri? She can remind you….

And so the story went.

Posted in People, The Dragon in the Lobby: a fairytale about Assisted Living, Writing and Teaching | Tagged | 27 Comments

The Atlanta Teachers’ Onion, then and now

by cheri block

Reading this morning about the teachers’ union in Atlanta, Georgia, blaming their conspiratorial cheating on the tests themselves, as if tests were life forms, reminded me of why I abhor the teachers’ union: it is a bureaucratic agency that was formed to protect teachers rather than to improve public education.

My first inkling that some California Teachers’ Union and American Federation of Teachers’ members might not be the best behavioral examples for children came in 1973 during the first of three strikes I was to experience during my 26 years in public education.

Just twenty-three years old and teaching English and as  naive as a little filly, I parked my Dodge Colt in the faculty parking lot and trotted in with my saddle bags full of corrected papers.

I  walked through the picket line and couldn’t help but hear some of my colleagues hooting and hollering at me, six inches from my ear.  Having served for seven years  as the famous Ladybug, a day camp counselor who was known for her resiliency to the  potty mouths of ten-year-old boys, I ignored my colleagues by humming B-I-N-G-O is my NAME-O.

But what was to happen in the Faculty Commons, a place Joe had named in the spirit of academic collaboration (I don’t remember too many academic discussions during that year but I do remember Moe, Larry, and Curly playing poker during the lunch break), shocked me so much that I have never forgotten the image.

The image?

The largest man on the faculty was Bruno, the wrestling coach whom Joe had plucked, well plucked isn’t the proper verb, let’s say hoisted, from a rival high school only three miles away.

The most sensitive man on the faculty was Claro, the choir coach, whose wife was known as the finest Armenian cook west of Tehran. Were wit packaged and sold, Claro would be wealthier than the California Teachers’ Union itself.

All I remember that day is the sound outside the door to the Faculty commons, the sound one hears before a tornado hits the house, a deep foreboding rumble, accented by high-pitched bystander screams. I had just visited the coffee pot, where Principal Joe hung out. He said that morning to me, “Baby, you are going to get an education this week.”

The door flung open and in ran Claro, briefcase in hand, his wispy black hair blown back, as if he had been in a ferocious wind. The only wind that day came from the line of union members who drummed, Fair Contract Now, Fair Contract Now. Claro was running at breakneck speed and only needed, I thought for a split second, a white outfit with a red kerchief around his neck. Could this be Pamplona, Spain?

It was possible because close behind Claro, in fact, right by his rear end, came a bull of a man, Bruno.

Bruno entered the building, still yelling something unintelligible to my ears and picked up a folding chair and threw it at Claro. Threw it at Claro.

I’m happy to report that the chair missed its mark that day. As for me, I never joined the union after witnessing behavior that well, didn’t become a teacher.

Back in Atlanta this morning in 2013, the teachers’ onion there, peeling its layers to get to the truth, has blamed the cheating scandal on the tests themselves. Never mind standards. Never mind ethics, but we do mind having to administer standardized tests.

To show you all how we feel about standardized tests, we will cheat on them for about six years. We will open the packages with exacto knives to learn the answers to the basic questions. We will doctor our students’ tests by erasing incorrect answers. Our scores will go up. A money stream will continue to flow.

Oh, we got caught? Let’s deny the charges. Let’s chase the opposition into the building and maybe heave a chair or two.

After all, it’s the test’s fault, not ours.

Posted in Education, People, Writing and Teaching | Tagged , , | 43 Comments

Belly fat

Ikeda's burger

Ikeda’s burger

by cheri block

This is a big week.

My brother Steve, also known as Stevie in my blogs, turns sixty on Wednesday. I’m not sure how he feels about it. We celebrated on Saturday and he seemed fine with moving into a new decade but he was not particularly philosophic. I sang happy birthday but didn’t eat the flourless cake.

My dear friend Kayti Rasmussen, known also in the blogosphere as Pacho Fa, turns eighty-something tomorrow, but we will celebrate her birthday lunch on Friday of this week. I shall encourage her to have dessert, but I will refrain.

My thesis advisor, Herbie Lindenberger,  turns eighty-four on Thursday. He and I are meeting then at Stanford at 2pm for an espresso. (He doesn’t know I am taking him a jar of olallieberry jam for his birthday present. I hope the jam will make him forget the fact that I was supposed to have a chapter ready for him to read.) I will order a low-fat latte.

My friend Pam Mah turned sixty on Saturday, so I am taking her out for dinner at Tamarine, a Vietnamese restaurant in Palo Alto on Thursday night. This will be a tough culinary menu to navigate.

All in all, other people’s birthdays are wonderful excuses to dine out.

Except, I have cut back on sugar and carbs in the last three weeks in an effort to stave off any belly fat that is trying its darndest to make  its way to my mid-section. Belly fat is like a homely lost puppy that shows up at your door: it’s hard to get rid of once it’s there.

Posted in Life, People | Tagged , , , , | 16 Comments

Oiling a wheel

Morro Strand Beach, Morro Bay, Californiaby cheri block

We are all teachers in some way.

The best teachers are patient and knowledgeable. They usually like to laugh.

I read a marvelous quotation about the Art of Teaching yesterday. It goes like this:

To teach another something is like oiling the wheels of a heavy cart so that they will turn.     (Nicheren)

Inherent in this quotation (note not quote, which is a verb) is the learner, who is likened to a heavy cart.

By the time most of us who have spent a lifetime trying to teach others our skills–for me it was how to write, how to read carefully, how to analyze literature, how to punctuate, how to know when to use possessive pronouns, how to be curious, and how to stay focused, among a few language arts necessities– we have lost our patience.

The greatest teachers are the ones who, like my friend Kurt Richey, have passion and the inherent intellectual abilities to persuade learners to follow them toward mastery of that passion.

Kurt is funny, vulnerable, fierce, gentle, self-deprecating and generous, but most of all, he is smart. If only the public school system had more English teachers just like him.

Why, this morning, he is still out there in his barn at Foothill High School repairing carts and going through gallons of oil on those wheels we hope are turning.

Posted in Education, People | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Vantage Point

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by cheri block

What would your current frustrations look like from the vantage point of the final days of your life?

I read this quotation this morning in a little book of Eastern wisdom.

The point, obviously, is that our current frustrations when compared to death are really chickenfeed.

But we humans trudge on, rarely with good posture, toward the next something.

In that spirit, I am going downstairs and fixing myself oatmeal.

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