It's Not Tundra

While most Targets are SORT OF laid out the same, Targets in California don’t sell a LOT of snow shovels, so I had to go looking. When I saw what I thought were them down an aisle, I walked down there and went past a woman with a baby in a shopping basket. As I walked by I thought: “Hm. That looks like Stephanie and Fiona. But they live in Amherst so it can’t be…” And then I stopped. Oh. Yeah. Reality check. This was going to take awhile. Right. We had moved. Check. Luckily, Stephanie, who we had seen just a few weeks before when we were looking for a rental, was just as surprised to see us. We chatted for a bit and then chose our snow weapons. They had a snow shovel with a cooked handle that they called “ergonomic”. Now I’ve looked it up since and I guess it means that it’s easier to shovel because it has a crooked handle. It’s also designed as a “pusher” [1] , but I’d been taken in by that before. Still, it looked like the best bargain and we got two of those and one sm...

Saturday morning I got up, put on my snappy all-cotton genuine Japanese kimono and walked downstairs. I turned at the bottom of the stairs, heading for the kitchen and then stopped, thought for a second and walked back to the front door. Did I really see what I thought I saw? Why, yes. I did see what I thought I saw. There was a dead deer on my front lawn. Now that was something I never saw in L.A. Dead cats once in awhile, yes, usually with their innards chewed out by a coyote who went only for the tasty parts. Perhaps by a raccoon. I'm not Daniel frikkin ' Boone. But not a deer. You'd see them sometimes in the Hollywood Hills, very occasionally. A few times I'd seen them at the corner of Coldwater and Mulhullond and they WERE near Dead Man's Curve, but the deer were alive. Once during a heavy rain I'd seen a family of deer on the 405. Well, actually I'd seen them on the side of the 405. Traffic moves slow but still not slow enough for deer. But even thos...

IN HONOR OF THE FIRST BIG SNOW IN THE 367 DAYS WE'VE LIVED HERE... THE DRIVEWAY!!!!!! [1] “Oh, how can you handle shoveling all that snow!” people would say. The cold was the first thing people commented on, the snow was the second. And it’s true. You did have to move it out of the driveway and the sidewalk. God knows that I was yelled at often enough to get off my ass and go shovel the driveway. My father would get pissed off occasionally at my lack of concern for snow removal and would bestir himself to do it. My mother would then go into something resembling a religious fervor [2] and scream: “Your father’s going to have a heart attack! Your father’s going to have a heart attack!” And the implication certainly was “Because of you”. And I would drag myself outside. Begrudgingly. [3] We had a large collection of snow-removing implements in my childhood. My father, far from a handy man and who I don’t think I ever saw swing a hammer, seemed incapable of parting with ...

The next three days made me re-think my opposition to euthanasia as I lay, alternately on the couch, the bed or the floor [1] while my temperature went up to around a hundred-three at least once and was surely over normal most of the time. And every morning I’d wonder if Ingo was going to call and interrupt my fevered delirium and what I would do about it, surely too weak to drive myself anywhere. Would he just bring them into the house and tell them to ignore the sweaty, smelly two hundred pound guy on the couch and try to picture it with their Alsatian hound there instead? For two weeks I didn’t really have the energy to change the channel, let alone get the house ready to show. I have never been that sick before in my life. [2] One day, about a week in, I struggled to the bathroom [3] for a, thankfully, normal moment and in washing my hands I looked into the mirror and experience one of those Universal Horror Movie What Have I Become moments where a different, pale, gaunt, unsh...

They rolled me out the door and into the ambulance. CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! [1] And we were off to the hospital. Which luckily was right around the corner. Except… There had been a fire in downtown L.A. that day and the emergency room around the corner was full. Here’s the deal: There have been a couple of scandals in L.A. emergency rooms. Little things like, oh, people DYING while waiting to be taken to see a doctor. Partly this is because emergency rooms have been closing, leaving the remaining emergency rooms to take care of the overflow. A lot of this is uninsured people looking for basic care or letting things go until they HAVE to go to an emergency room. [2] And people keep coming to Los Angeles, compounding the problem. Luckily, when they wheel you in on a stretcher bleeding from places you’re not supposed to bleed, you tend to get attention. That and we were carrying my wife’s insurance. But the face remains that there was an emergency room less than a mile away...

It was around eleven in the morning. The kids were at school. Patricia was at work and… …Dare I say it…? I had fallen. And I couldn’t get up. And without one of those alarm things, too. It’s not very funny when you’re inside of it. When you’re hot and uncomfortable, there’s a grabbing feeling inside your stomach and it won’t let go. Add to that the room spinning and not enough strength in your arms to push yourself to even a sitting position and there’s not only no one there to help you, but there won’t be anyone for hours. I managed to turn myself around and crawl out of the bathroom enough to reach my cell phone [1] , like someone suffering from poison gas in an old Republic serial. I called Patricia at her office and told her she needed to come home. And then I noticed the blood [2] . I’m not going to tell you WHERE the blood was coming from. And there wasn’t a lot of it. But, as a general rule, when blood is coming from any part of my body that blood shouldn’t be co...

About a week later we had another showing. Ingo was really excited about this. It was a guy we’ll call “Mr. Fifteen Percent” who was looking for a house for his ex-wife and child. Ingo was unsure about the details, but this seemed the perfect house. They were divorcing and they wanted to stay near the school down the block. Only two people were PERFECT [1] for this tiny house. And a little kid ---- how much time would they spend in the one bathroom! Hell, there would hardly be any pile up at all [2] ! He seemed REALLY interested, but… “He said it was priced fifteen percent too high for the current market.” Fifteen percent? Where do you come up with a number like that in conversation? Ten percent, twenty, sure. But fifteen? Does your coach tell you to give a hundred and ten percent or a hundred and fifteen [3] ? “Should we talk about it?” “Not yet. It’s too early,” Ingo said. “We’ll let him think on it. But I really think he was ready to write and offer for five-fifty.” ...