Zlateh the Goat

Two nights ago, as I was tucking Theo in, he said, "Mommy, read this story. I like it a lot. I want you to read it and tell me what you think."

He passed me "Zlateh the Goat," a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The book itself is a gift from his poet, intellectual cousin Susan.

I opened the story so curious. He has told me about stories, before, and asked me questions. But this was different. This was like when you are older, and you give a story, or a music tape to someone you love. You are telling them, "Read this, Listen to this and Know me. Hidden in these words, this music, this art, is something very important to me that I cannot put into words. Also, I love it and I want you to love what I love."

The story was beautifully written. Several cuts above most children's modern literature. It is a touching story about a Russian boy who must take the family goat he loves to be slaughtered, because his father is a furrier, the weather has been warm, no one wants fur coats, and they have no money. The whole family loves the goat, but the boy most of all. And it is he who must lead this animal he loves to his death.

So the beginning is awful. You know the goat is going to die. And you know the boy's heart is going to be broken. And the goat is going along so happily, trusting the boy completely, because it is his very best friend.

But shortly after they set out for the next village a horrible blizzard arises and they get lost and they have to take shelter inside a haystack. They are there for three days and three nights. The goat eats the hay, the boy makes the hole. The boys finishes his food, but then the goat lets him drink milk from her udder, which the boy squirts right into his mouth. They survive. After three days the storm stops and the boy digs out. He has made up his mind. He returns home with the goat. HIs family had given him up for dead, and he is alive, and the goat gets to live, and because of the snow his father gets lots of furrier business and all is hunky dory.

It is a very moving story.

Still, I asked Theo what he liked about it. He said he liked the adventure. He said he liked the surprise in the story, that it did not turn out the way you expected. And he said he liked that you thought the boy was going to save the goat's life, but instead the goat saved the boy's life.

All true.

It is hard to put into words. But I do feel like my emotionally enigmatic boy shared some deep part of himself with the story.

I am grateful.

Has that ever happened to you?

Marathon Advice

Week 8 and I am hanging in. Truth be told my twingy knee is doing better than before I started. Maybe my leg is getting stronger and I needed to be running. Maybe I am getting lighter and my body is happy. Maybe I am always sore so my knee doesn't stand out as much. Anyway, I am so delighted my body is holding up, and I have now run farther than I have since I was 33.

Here are tips that wise friends have given about how to keep going without getting injured:

Alison Shore-Lopez: Don't do too many miles. I did too many miles and I was completely addicted, and I did not need to run that much and I did not get to do the marathon. Postscript: Alison, an amazing runner, is still suffering from a pinched nerve or some such and trying to recover. She is tough, and my cautionary tale.

Goldie at the Y: Eat lots of protein. I did two marathons on carbs and one on protein, and my body broke down much more slowly on proteins. Always drink water. I was so dehydrated when I was training I started just drinking all the time, even when I was not thirsty. (This happened to me, and her advice made a huge difference). Run hills. Then when you hit a hill in the marathon you will not mentally collapse. (Don't need hill work for the LA marathon, but still great advice). Swim for an hour a week. It makes a huge difference.

Doug: Don't run too much. I ran the New York Marathon and people were limping across the finish line like it was a war. It was not good. My bad leg held up (he broke his leg as a college student) but my good leg, which had never given me trouble, freaked in the race. It was really really hard. This is not really advice, except to say, do not injure yourself.

Tired today, so I cut my run a little short, but I am hanging in!

Weather is beautiful and warm and clear, and the sunlight was sparkling on the reservoir, the path smelled like warm pine needles and the Sierras. I love being outside.

Barnsdall Lives!!!

After a year of up and down, budget cuts and not, endless meetings and rallies and letters and begging and crying and weeping and nashing of teeth, the good news is, the Barnsdall Art Center lives. Classes are offered this winter session, starting January 22.

If you have not partaken, these classes are one of the L.A.'s great treasures. Classes are held in East Hollywood at the Barnsdall Arts Center, willed to the city by Aline Barnsdall, independent woman, thinker and lifelong supporter of the arts. Her Frank Lloyd Wright Hollyhock house is right next door for inspiration.

Classes are affordable, come in manageable 6-week chunks, and are taught by truly top of the line, working artists.

Today was registration day for kids classes. I arrived exactly when the flyers said to, at 8:45, and I was last in line. The hard core Korean mamas had been there since 5 am, camping out with fuzzy blankets, Ugg boots and folding chairs. I heard in the past the line has gone up and around the block. But with the center under seige for the last year, the public has grown confused. Lots of people don't even know classes are underway again.

So I am putting the word out. Sign up. For the foreseeable future Barnsdall and all its amazing teachers are here to teach us about what they love. Art will make you happy. I promise.

Try it.

A Little History

The following is excerpted from Time Magazine, 1938, about Guild Strikes:

Southern California journalism is dominated by two aged titans, William Randolph Hearst (Los Angeles Examiner and Herald and Express) and Harry Chandler (Los Angeles Times'). A lonely liberal voice in the midst of this die-hard desert is the little Hollywood Citizen-News, published by a pious progressive from Minnesota, Judge Harlan Guyant Palmer. Publisher Palmer likes the New Deal, dislikes the utilities.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,771095,00.html#ixzz1AO92Te4M

I love it. And I love the gorgeous art-deco building. I long to be inside it.

Let the tradition continue.

Oh NOOOOOOOOO!

Three days from the end of the year my billy goat child was leaping down stairs in the Skirball garden when he landed wrong and fell hard. He broke his ankle.

I heard him and sprinted across the landscaped riverbed to my boy's side. It is hard to explain what that cry of pain from a child is like to a mother. This was different than any cry before. I got there and he was crying and crying, but also rocking back and forth. All he could say was: "I wish I could go back in time. i wish I could go back to one minute ago. I wish this never happened."

So true.

At the time we thought it was a sprain. My father told him to walk on it. The security guard gave him ice and we sat in the lobby with his ankle on ice and his head on my lap. An old Jewish man who looked like he had survived the Holocaust was working as a docent. He had a soulful kind face so open it felt young again. He comforted Theo, then turned to me like an oracle. "You will dance at his wedding," he said.

We went to the doctor and got an X-ray, all family members in tow. They could not see anything. That night Theo crawled to the bathroom on hands and knees, never complaining, and in the morning he hopped around the house on one foot. We took him to an orthopedist who felt him and said it was broken. Not shattered. A hairline crack so small she can't even see it on X-ray. But the way he jumped out of the chair when she touched it she knew it was broken.

On went the cast, a little boot wrapped in green. But then he could walk again. Already he can run and hop so fast I bet he could beat half the kids in his class across the playground in a race. And he is still trying to leap off things--with one foot!!! He spins around on the bottom of his cast like a ballerina, delighted with himself. So fun! At night his foot swells up inside and he cries.

But the doc says it will heal. At this age she said it is better to break than to sprain. A hairline break like this in his growth plate will heal completely. Ligaments never really do.

Couldn't write about it until now. But it stirs you up somewhere deep when your child is injured. I cannot even imagine with something permanent, or possibly permanent, or whatever.

He is OK. That is all that matters.

"Maybe he will stop leaping around like a madman now," Jonathan said. "He needs to learn. To be more cautions. To know he can hurt himself."

Maybe he will stop. Maybe he will not.

I don't know.

Right Under My Nose

For Christmas my mother gave me this book:



Written by Charles Fleming, it lays out 42 walks around Los Angeles, up and down historic steps. The day after Christmas my mother and I did a walk that starts a half mile from my house. I take pride in knowing my 'hood, knowing the secret staircases, and knowing the local history. I did not know ANY of this. We did walk #35, Temple Hill, 45 minutes, two miles, 2.5 difficulty (out of five). The walk went right by our piano teacher's house, a street I drive every week, but most of what I saw was new. Or else I got a story I have been searching for, but never found.

The walk begins with this explanation:

This is a most spiritual walk, a hillside stroll without too many stairs through an area once dotted with temples, monasteries, retreats, and church buildings.

I won't give it all away, you have to buy the book and do the walk yourself, or come and do it with me. But what joy, to finally find out what all those houses with the onion domes were from (Theosophists!) or to walk into a tiny incense-filled chapel practically under the freeway (Vedanta!). Walking, rather than driving, these hills I could feel the spiritual energy. The power is as strong as Ojai, Sedona, Esalen, Big Sur, and other places in the West (you know them, if you live here, you have been). I drive it, I move through it, and most of the time I am blind/unmoved to/by it. But when I got out and walked, I felt it. I wondered if that is why I am drawn to this place, as to the others. I am not even conscious. But I feel the pull of the earth, and its power.

I am in a sacred place.

We can pave it, cover it with neon, but the power is still there.

This morning after my run I dropped by the Monastery of the Angels and bought some pumpkin bread, baked by Dominican nuns.




Not fresh. But I toasted it and nibbled while I drank my Illy coffee. Yum.

Happy 2011

I just KNOW 2011 is going to be great. I do not feel this every year. I did not feel this last year. But this year I feel it.

Each year everyone in the family puts their resolutions/goals/dreams in a dream box I made years ago at the Skirball Noah's Ark exhibit. We write them in January, the check them in December. All of us do it. Last year I had accomplished fewer of my goals than I could remember in recent history. It didn't feel so great. There were reasons. Benji was bored out of his mind at Canyon School. It was the end of an era and I felt nostalgic. I began laying groundwork for things that will happen this year, but have not happened yet so they do not feel complete. Check off-able.

This year I hope I will run the LA Marathon, start a community newspaper, and take my boys to Italy--because they are the age I was when I lived there. And the place changed my life. The light, the food, the spirit is in me, and I want it to be in them, too--even if in a different way. I also hope we will travel to Baja to see the baby whales. It is a big trip, a time-consuming trip, and under the current political and economic conditions, perhaps a dangerous trip. But I want to drive to the end of the world, set up a tent, go out in a little boat with some Mexican naturalists, and watch the mama whales nudge their babies up to the boat. For me, this is one of the great wonders of the world, like seeing the Monarchs in Morelia, and I want to go before the world gets too polluted and sick to support the whales anymore.

I am the kind of person who scours the world for inspiring quotes. Because words, music, art and nature are the places from which I draw my inspiration. I can return to them when I am sad and they give me such strength. So here is my quote for 2011, cribbed from another web site (the happiness project) where it was excerpted from an interview with a British author, who quotes his favorite Japanese psychotherapist (who knew there WERE any Japanese psychotherapists???):

"Give up on yourself. Begin taking action now, while being neurotic or imperfect, or a procrastinator or unhealthy, or lazy, or any other label by which you inaccurately describe yourself. Go ahead and be the best imperfect person you can be and get started on those things you want to accomplish before you die."

--Shoma Morita

Perhaps this quote is appealing to me because I am a) a perfectionist b) feeling all my imperfections and c) now in the second half of my life, so I think about the end-point.

How about you, brilliant readers. Do you have a quote to hold onto for 2011? Will you send it to me? Will you share? What gives you strength when you are stumbling, moving forward, dreaming, acting?

Share your wisdom. Post your quote here!