You may remember that last July, we planted our 60-tree olive orchard. Since that time, the Judge has pruned, fertilized, watered, and shepherded his trees, hoping for olive buds this spring.

The bees have completed their coursework. The wind, too, has spread the magic dust.

The experts tell us this time–June and July–is “pit hardening” season. See the tiny olives, now protected (we hope) from the olive fruit fly. Balls of yeast and sticky paper traps hang like ornaments to confuse the male fruit flies and catch the females.

A sturdy oak tree and a pile of rocks guard the western entrance of the orchard.

Dinah does her best to clean up anything that falls from the trees, the sky, or our pockets.Approaching five years old in July, she refuses to grow old. Her diet of kibble and other delicacies Nature provides, along with wood, assures her of gastric upset and dental problems.

On the orchard side of the creek, she pauses to chew redwood. A weed looks on indignantly.

Bad dog.

Over the creek she leaps but not before stopping to lie in it, like a Labradorian water buffalo.

Up to the house we clamber, assured that the olive trees are on schedule.

Waiting for us is Bobb, who along with the Great Horned Owls, patrols the orchard for gophers who may foolishly pop their heads out into the darkness for a look at the trees.

Soon, the Bird Man of Sunol will visit the Rancho, bringing with him an owl box.

We would like a family of supreme hunters–the barn 0wls–to set up shop in the orchard.

May and June signal prom time in American high schools. You know,  the Junior Prom and the Senior Ball, lavish dress-up galas where fully blossomed women wear tiny satin purple dresses and stiletto pumps and boys who look five years younger than they, dressed in patent leather dress shoes and purple paisley cummerbunds, bring them  purple orchid corsages that need a sharp pin with a fake pearl on the end just to stay on a spaghetti strap or no strap at all.

Have you ever walked by an old pond full of algae and listened to the melodious croaking as male frogs compete for female attention?

Prom season is much like a frog pond.

I had the distinct privilege of being a part of this “scene” for at least 20 years, as juniors and seniors (and some lucky sophomores) vied for the best dates. Because the boys viewed the women with the hottest bodies and most sordid reputations as the best dates, and because so few women in high school met that description, the ratio of hot dates to awkward boys was small. Most boys ended up taking very sweet women.

Granted, things have changed since I left public school in 1998.  The dresses, the shoes, the tattoos, and the after-prom activities come to mind, but one thing rarely changes: the angst that male frogs go through in making the right connection. You know, the fear of rejection and the worry that their date might drop them when the right request comes in, one that  now ( I understand from my nieces and nephews), arrives sometimes via text. Booo! How unromantic!

During those hot and frenzied pond-days in my classroom when the din reached orgasmic proportions, many of the guys and the girls sought out my advice, privately, of course.

What I heard and what I said in response to OMG, what I heard, will remain confidential, in case any of my former students who are now in their mid-forties, happen to read this story.

During class time, especially for those in 5th or 6th period, a time in the afternoon when blood sugar dropped and the smell of freshly cut lawn wafted into Room N-9, I resorted to a different lesson plan. To soothe the ache and quell the urge, I used a strategy employed by my 4th grade teacher who used to read us Charlotte’s Web after lunch to calm us down: I would read a story to my high schoolers–one of the funniest stories on the planet–for three days leading up to the prom.

You have to understand that for an academic slave driver like me–who rarely showed a movie and whose students had to read 150 pages of a classic novel a week–to read for three straight days was not only shocking, but odd. My students tilted their heads and murmured how juvenile this activity seemed. That is, until the story got going…

I read them Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories by Jean Shepherd, the tale of three awkward young men in a frog pond, so to speak. This story I read my students for over 20 years, five times a day, for three days and it never got old for me.

On Monday after the Prom, for those who showed up and weren’t nursing a hangover, I feasted my eyes on some of the most exhausted green faces I had ever seen. But hey! It’s a Monday.

“How was your weekend? Did you all do your homework? Did you read those 150 pages of The Winter of Our Discontent?  Or were you kissing your Frog Prince over the weekend?”

I almost croaked laughing.

This morning  I forwarded an article from The Wall Street Journal to my son about the SARS-like virus in the Middle East. You see, their nanny is traveling in Tunisia at this moment and will be home in several weeks to resume taking care of my granddaughters.

My son and his wife may have had a good laugh or may have begun to worry that a genetic predisposition called FFN (Forwarding  Frightening News) has now crossed into their lives.

Case in point:

What most of you do not know about me (because of my inherent modesty) is that at the age of ten,  I was one hell of a ukulele player. My teacher, Herbert Westphal, an old German who told us he had also taught several high-ranking D.C. politicians’ kids and knew the President of the United States, ensconced himself into our family in 1960 or thereabouts. While most children I knew were taking piano, clarinet, or flute lessons, we were plucking the plastic strings of an instrument revered 2500 hundred miles to the east, oh say, around Oahu. 

Let it be known that my little brother Stevie was much better than I on the ukulele but what I lacked in raw strumming talent I made up for with my musical swagger. While Stevie went on to play the Hawaiian steel guitar, the banjo, and all types of  guitars, I  blossomed into an admirable dog trainer, horseback rider, comedian, and sibling torturer.

My best songs on the ukulele, the ukulele that still sits quietly in our basement, protected in its black case with a velvety material and flanked by my many brindle-colored picks, was the Hawaiian War Chant and Ain’t She Sweet. I moved on to master Sentimental Journey  before embarking on one of my own, one that forced me to  shave my legs every day and wear large pink- foam hair rollers the size of orange juice cans every night so that I might attract boys instead of a 65-year-old German music teacher and a pesky little talented brat of a brother.

Mr. Westphal hoped to make child stars out of Stevie and me. Around our pool on hot summer evenings, Stevie and I would entertain my parents’ friends, sipping their tall drinks.

My father would say something like ” Cheri, why don’t you and Stevie put on a little show for us? You know what I am talking about.”

I’d feign interest and answer blandly, ” What do you mean, Dad?”

Before long, say in about one minute, we’d retreat to our family room, and begin “setting up” on the pool deck.

Two music stands, one chair (mine) and a Hawaiian steel guitar on its pedestal and plugged in to an amplifier, all materialized out of thick air.

We’d regale everyone. Cindy, the third child, too young to hold a ukulele in her hands, would zoom in from the dark side of the pool deck and there in the reflection of a lighted blue pool, the water wavering from a bay breeze blowing in, she would dance around to Hawaiian War Chant like a frenzied troll doll.

This morning, as I sent an article via e-mail about the talented and sexy Magnus Carlsen–the world’s number one chess player–to my son-in-law in my ongoing fixation on how to get my 10-year-old grandson admitted to Stanford, a memory of another older lady impacting the life of a family came bubbling up.

That woman was my grandmother, Rosie. In her old age, she had taken to cutting out articles from the L.A. Times that related in some way to our family up here in Fremont. She once sent a story of a dentist  who had put razor blades in trick-or-treat candy. I remember my father, a dentist, asking my mother, ” Joan, why the hell would your mother send us an article like this? “

Then, the article arrived in our mailbox, the one that would end Stevie’s Hawaiian steel career.

It told the very sad story of a boy being electrocuted somewhere in Bel Air or Westwood when his Hawaiian steel guitar and the amplifier fell into a pool.

Rosie, this week you would have been 113. If you are around, say in the wind blowing down from our redwood trees this morning or perhaps in the misty fog that caresses them, please stop in and have a cup of coffee with me. You will be pleased to learn that you live on.

Let’s see now, that article this morning in the Personal Journal section about “Vegetarians Living Longer” or maybe that one about the blood pressure drug Benicar causing lung cancer…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.