Transforming My View

“You’re doing the Observation Deck?” my husband, Hank, asked.

I’d just finished reading him the itinerary for a walking tour with my friend, Anne, from Connecticut.  She was in L.A. for a few hours with her husband, Bob, who had a board meeting with Hank.

“It’s the one at City Hall. It’s not that high.”

“Ok, good,” he said. Hank was relieved, knowing my fear of heights. “I thought you meant the one on top of the US Bank Tower.

I looked out across from the 18^th floor of Hank’s office to the City’s current tallest skyscraper. My eyes slowly scanned to the top. “That one?”

“It’s the one with the glass Skyslide,” Jan, Hank’s assistant, said, stepping up to the tall window.  “It’s easy to get to, just cross over…”

I nodded watching her point here and there, but I’d tuned her out.  City Hall’s deck is 457 feet. I could do that.  But, the U S Bank Building at 1,000 feet?

I looked over at Anne eyeing the building.  She was no stranger to a challenge. This was the woman who when she turned fifty, took on fifty new things in her fiftieth year that she’d never done. “Not a Bucket List,” she told me. “It was more like that someday is today.”

“We can do Beverly Hills and The Ivy,” I said, trying to steer her away from the idea of the Observation Deck. “Or, how about Santa Monica and…”

“No. No,” she said, eyeing the skyscraper. “This sounds great.”

I don’t recall when my fear of heights started, but it got worse about twenty years ago when I found myself gripping the car door handle for dear life along the high cliffs of Pacific Coast Highway on a road trip to Big Sur.

“I’m not real good with heights,” I told Anne. “And I won’t do that slide thing.”

“Whatever you want to do, Heath, is fine with me. Really.”

I thought about my conversation with my friend, Joanie, the day before. We were discussing my sixtieth birthday in two weeks. “How was it turning sixty?” I’d asked her.

“Liberating,” she replied.

I picked up my handbag and the itinerary. “Ok, Anne. Let’s do it.  It’s time I step out of my comfort zone and deal with this fear.”

I started to lose my bravado, though, on the elevator ride up.  It was dimly lit and the small blue numbers in the corner just kept climbing. “Anne, you do know we’re in earthquake country?”

The elevator opened and we made our way to the deck – the enclosed deck.  The panoramic view was magnificent but my mouth went dry as I ventured over to the windows with Anne. I tried to keep my eyes on the view in the distance. A flight attendant had given me that tip once.  It wasn’t working.

“There’s the Hollywood sign,” Anne said. “What’s that to the right?”

I stepped back toward the center wall. “The Griffith Park Observatory.”

As we made our way around and past the entrance to the Skyslide, I tried to put Anne off. “Now, those are the San Gabriel Mountains… and below that…”

I spotted the Well’s Fargo Building. “I’m just going to call my cousin, Jonathan, over there on the eighteenth floor.”

I needed back up, someone to talk to. Channeling a game show, I made a “safety call.”

“Hi Heath! What’s up?”

I watched Anne meander back to the slide.

“Hi Jonathan, I’m across the way with a friend from out of town and she wants to ride the Skyslide. It scares the hell out of me.”

“Oh, you couldn’t get me on that thing. So, where are you going for lunch…”

“Hey, Heath, come on over here,” Anne called out.

Before I could say goodbye to Jonathan, the call was dropped. So much for safety.

Two young male attendants were at the entrance with a scanner. “Oh, see, the sign says that it costs $8,” I said. “I’ll treat you and just hang back.”

“No worry,” the taller one said, “the ride is free the month of November.”

“It’s meant to be, Heather…” Anne said with a smile.

Eyeing the entrance to the glass chute, my mouth got even drier. “Those things,” I asked pointing to a stack of thin mats. “Do you sit on them?”

“Yeah, it’s easy.” He picked one up and showed me the handles attached. “You hold on to the handles here and off you go. A four second magic carpet ride.”

“How old is the oldest person who’s ever done this?” I asked. “ I mean I’m going to be sixty this month.”

“All ages, Ma’am.”

I peered beyond him at the glass tube, the knots in my stomach tightening. “I can’t Anne. You go ahead.”

Anne started to move to the steps up. “Wait,” I sighed. “I’m terrified, but I’m going to do it. “

I climbed the stairs. Tentatively, I took a seat on the mat that Jeff, the attendant at the entrance to the slide, had laid down. He was young with a clean beard and a soothing voice I swallowed hard, looking down the glass chute. “I can’t break the glass, right?”

“No, the glass won’t break. It’s quick. It’ll be over before you know it.”

“Now, hold on to these handles and sit straight. Don’t fold into the corners. You’ll feel like you want to but sit upright.”

“Oh, god…”

“You’ll be fine,” Jeff smiled. “You can do it.

I put my handbag between my legs, then, sat frozen, gripping the handles. I inhaled deeply, telling myself not to look down.

“Do you want me to push you to start?” Jeff asked.

“Nope.”

And, I was off! 

“Wow!” I said, shaking as I stood on the padding at the end of the chute. “Anne, I feel like I had six martinis and no slur!”

My legs felt weak as I stood. I was so high.

I’d faced it. Done it. And had come out the other side. Wearing a cape  - not a bib.

The Giver

My mother is resilient. I can always count on her, even at eighty-nine, to have that quick comeback. That wise, intuitive, feral answer to my questions.

Today I visited her. Bringing her lotion. Hairspray. Nail polish. Powder-blue eye shadow…I forgot the face powder. I’ll bring that on Thursday.

She pointed to the black Velcro tennis shoes by the wardrobe. “Take ‘em back.”

“Why Mom? You wanted black sneakers, right?”

“Well…”

I could see her grapple. It was not the Parkinson’s. It was that she didn’t want to upset me. I’d bought them for her. Thought they’d be safe. Easy to take on and off…

“Not sexy, right, Mom?”

“Well…?”

I picked up the shoes. Put them back in the box.  “It’s fine, Mom. I’ll return them.”

“Beige,” she said. “Looks better with the Velcro, you know?”

“I do, Mom.”

Yesterday, she dropped her television remote control on her leg. I got a call from the Jewish Home For The Aging where she resides. “She’s a bleeder,” they told me. “We’ve bandaged her three times but she’s fine.”

“Does it hurt, Mom?” I asked her today.

“Not really.”

We turned to the television news on in her room. At the top of the news  - The funeral service for the two Palm Springs officers killed last week.

“Oh, Mom, this is so sad…”

“This world,” she said, “I’ll be dead and I won’t mind leaving this.”

I turned to her. My mother has never talked like this. “Mom?”

“Look at me,” she said. “What’s left? This is it.”

This coming from my mother, the woman always in pursuit of a man, a new piece of gossip, a fresh face of makeup. False eyelashes…

I looked at her hard. Her hair perfectly coifed from the salon below, her elbow resting on the extra pad on her wheelchair, a cacophony of cheap beaded bracelets adorning her wrists. The gaudy chain hanging from her neck.

She pointed to her watch that I had given her last year. “It’s stopped. I need a new…” she groped for the word…

“A battery?”

“That’s it,” she said.

“Ok,” I said, looking at the worn watch. “I have a new one at home you can have. Pretty. Rose gold.”

“I can’t have the real stuff here, remember?”

“No worry, Mom, it’s fake, but looks good, trust me.”

The nurse came in to take my mother to lunch. In a cheery voice: “Mrs. MacDougall, it’s time for me to take you to lunch.”

“One more minute,” Mom said. Then, pointed at her bulletin board at the entrance of her room.  “Those are my Christmas presents to all of you. I have no money, so this is the best I can do.”

I glanced around the corner…pinned on the board, Mom’s artwork. My mother, always the giver…

“Mom, these are beautiful!”

“It’s not the Ritz, but what the hell.”

“You didn’t tell me you were painting again?”

My mother’s attention had shifted. “Isn’t he wonderful?” she said, smiling at the male nurse adjusting the footrests on her wheelchair.

She’s back, I thought. Thank heaven for men.

He stood up to wheel Mom out, his dark hair combed neatly to the side. “We love your mother here.”

I swallowed hard, emotions rising.  “We do, too…”

Return to Guilin

“There it is,” I whispered to my daughter, Hilary, next to me on the plane landing in Guilin, China.

I just had to see those karst mountains and the Li River again. To introduce this natural beauty on a special trip with Hilary - the daughter my husband, Hank, and I had almost named Guilin a little over a year after our visit there back in August of 1984.

Of course, things are never the way you remember and Guilin today is not the Guilin of 1984.  It’s grown. Cranes dot the landscape next to tall empty block-style buildings by the small airport.  The city center is more modern, yet motorbikes still reign and mere blocks away it is third world living.

On our day trip down the Li River thirty-two years ago, Hank and I were in a wooden “top-deck” boat puttering alone amongst the backdrop of the sloping limestone mountains. The food was a cooked Chinese lunch served on china with stainless flatware.

 In 2016, the “boat cruise” was a double-deck boat with assigned seating.  And our boat was not alone with a line-up of similar boats behind us like an LA freeway at rush hour.  The “catered” lunch was Jasmine rice, chicken nuggets and mushrooms, sectioned off in a Swanson TV dinner-style tin and a plastic fork.

Our transport didn’t matter, though. The peaks framing the Li were still majestic. The shoreline was still as picturesque. And, Hilary was taking it all in like Hank and I had all those years ago. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen, Mom.  So beautiful…”

“David” (his American name), our guide for the day, was a native of Guilin who had learned English by listening to “Voice of America.” 

“They speak slow,” he said of the radio program. “Easier to learn English.”

David had helped us navigate the crowds waiting to board the boats. “Government boats,” he’d told us, clutching his worn canvas briefcase, adding: “They don’t wait. So stay with me like sticky rice.” 

During the cruise, he’d point at a rock formation: “Imagination time! Can you outline the seven horses in the rock?”

“Imagination time! Do you see the human face in that slope?”

David, thirty-two, had been raised on a farm and at four learned to drive the water buffalo to plow the fields. “My father taught me not to waste,” he told us. "My father said that a single grain of rice should not be wasted. If it falls to the floor, you’ll come back in the next life a water buffalo!”

David is of the new China. He’s read about “Mr. Warren Buffet.” But he’s still a country guy. “Wow,” he said when I asked about life in Guilin and how families live in today’s China. “That’s complicated.”

He is married and he and his wife have a small house on the outskirts of Guilin. “More affordable.”

“She sells clothes,” he added. “Not like Chanel.  I never heard of Chanel before. This, Chanel,” he said, “she likes Chanel.”

I peered out of the van at the squalor of some of the outlying streets. Laundry hanging on dingy windows sills. A string of motorbikes, sporting attached elongated umbrellas as a makeshift hood, whizzed by leaving two women on the sidewalk to deal with the dust in their wake as they sold their red boxes of mooncakes.

“You’re not near those empty buildings by the airport we saw driving in?”

“Oh, no. No.”

“What is it with all the tall empty buildings?”

“Government,” he said. “It’s complicated.”

“So you like living outside of town?”

“Oh, yes,” he smiled. “Location. Location. Location.”

                                                   _________________________

The entrance to the Shangri-La Hotel Guilin boasts a “five-star rating” with cheap marble, gaudy chandeliers and a freezer case of Haagen-Dazs ice cream in the hotel lobby lounge. Only a handful speak English and we were the only Westerners on sight. The “signature” Chinese restaurant was just a little too dicey to try after looking at the menu so we ended up in the U bar, a tavern-like spot near the children’s buffet with some interesting  “décor” at the entrance - a giant stuffed Panda bear lying on the floor “passed out” cradling the local brew in his fluffy paw.

Over a meal of vegetables and fried rice, we were entertained by a duet of young male locals. As I maneuvered my chopsticks through the rice, the men began the set. The one on vocals, wearing a fedora, the type I’d seen on a souvenir stand that morning, leaned into the microphone and out came a perfect rendition of a Cat Stevens ballad. Next, it was Chris Martin from Coldplay…and it continued through dinner.

His voice was beautiful, melodic, and graceful.

“Where did you learn to sing like that?” I asked him as we were leaving.

He smiled revealing teeth going every which way.  ”Excuse me,” he nodded quickly, “my English…its not so good.”

“But your music. How did you learn your music?”

“The Internet.”

“Ahh,” I nodded. “Well, you’re really good.”

He smiled wide, revealing even more wayward teeth.

As we lifted off, heading to the next city, I looked down at those dramatic limestone peaks.

This time, it wasn’t just the beauty of the mountains that drew me in. Not the Li River either…it was the people we met.  Living in a country that is not free, they were finding ways to express individuality, to grow beyond the confines of their tightly controlled surroundings.  And they’re doing it all on their own.

I leaned back in my seat as the peaks disappeared from sight, leaving me once again in awe.

The Lipstick Challenge

I did it! Sort of.

I was just one day shy of my challenge to go three months without buying a new lipstick.

These past few months, I forced myself to shop my makeup drawer. I shuffled through all 76 tubes (and that’s after I gave the duplicates – I always buy 2 - to my hairdresser with the same addiction as me). I even tried standing them upright to look more like a store. Testing them on my hand. They were all just ok.

Nothing gave me a that lift I got when I shopped for a new nude pink on display under shiny lighting, music playing in the background and a salesperson to dote on the big decision. “What do you think?” I’d ask.

The fresh new look on my lips lasted, at best, a week. Then, I was back at it again - my quest for the holy grail of nude pinks.

During this time, I found myself stopping into Sephora and circling the displays like a shark to prey. But I didn’t pounce. Instead, I would call Hank.

On my computer, the Google sidebar, hip to my previous searches, would slide in, touting Charlotte Tilbury’s latest nude pink lipsticks. Dangle. Dangle. I know your addiction…I zeroed in. “Hot Lips Penelope Pink.”  Yum. Dare I?

Nope. I clicked on the “x” and went back to work.

Then, a month ago I almost fell off the wagon. In a weak moment after the end of a stressful day, I found myself at the lipstick counter eyeing the latest “Liquid Nude Pink.”

I took a breath. Who’s going to know?

“I’ll take one of these,” I said, lifting the clear plastic tube out of the sample display at Nordstrom.

I glanced around like a cautious thief as the saleswoman rifled through the drawer below.

She popped up and straightened her skirt. “We’re out of it but I can have it sent. Just takes a few days. No shipping!”

I’m going to know, I thought, that’s who. “No thank you,” I said.

I was almost to the finish line this past Sunday when I landed in Bloomingdale’s seeking to soothe myself. It had been one of those weeks and what better fix than the department store, right?

There I was, right in front of Lancôme. A pretty young salesgirl with a thick Russian accent approached me.

I was practically breathless. “Nude pink.”

She furrowed her brow. “Excuse me?”

“Sorry. Sorry. Does Lancôme have a good nude pink?”

“Natural? Perhaps with a little coral?”

“Yes. Yes.” I began to perspire.

“Here,” she said handing me #232.

It was perfect. Awww. Just the perfect pink.  

“I’ll walk around now,” I told her, “and see if it’s the right shade.”

Then, I called my lifeline.

“What’s Up?” My husband, Hank asked.

“Help, I’m at Bloomingdale’s in lipsticks.”

“Leave,” he said. “Go somewhere else.”

“Ok, I’m walking over to handbags. I saw a gorgeous Burberry on the way in.”

“No!” he laughed. “Not there!”

The next four days I “visited” #232 at Sephora late in the afternoon. I’d tried it on. Didn’t buy it. Just tried it on.

Yesterday, with only one more day to survive the challenge, I stopped in to visit my lipstick. I looked at the name on the tube. “In Love.”

I bought it. One day shy…

But, I didn’t wear it. I wrapped it.

Because three months ago, I thought on the 25^th of August I’d be at the Bobbie Brown counter whooping it up. Piling on the pinks.

Instead, I was with Hank, out to breakfast presenting him with the wrapped box.

“Uh oh,” he said, grabbing his phone to check the date. “What have I forgotten? What’s the date?”

“Stop,” I told him. “Just open the box.”

He slipped the ribbon off and burst out laughing when he saw the lipstick. “I thought it was tomorrow!”

“Read the label,” I said.

He turned it around like a foreign object in his hands. “Rouge in Love.”

“You see, Hank,” I told him. “Instead of turning to the lipstick counter, I’m learning to turn to you.”  

Grandma Jo

It's 9:30am and my mother-in-law, Jo, is in the kitchen. She's asked me to call her, again, on her cell phone, after my husband, Hank, downloaded Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody for her ring tone. She wants to hear it again.

I call her. She hums along, then, returns to the orange juice maker. The whirring starts up again. “Orange juice, anyone?”

Is she for real?

Yes. This is my octogenarian mother-in-law of sound mind, who embraces the wrinkles on her face with a dusting of light make-up. Her grey hair is femininely cropped and laced with white.  She wears skinny jeans and tailored shirts. “Tucked in!” My mom says in awe. “She tucks everything in and wears a belt!”

We are on our annual summer trip with Jo in Newport Beach, where she rents a beach house. Our adult children drop in and out depending on their work schedules. They bring with them a slew of their friends who enjoy the surf. The action never stops and Jo is right in the middle of it taking pictures. Everyone affectionately calls her “Grandma Jo,” whether they’re related or not.

But this is no ordinary grandma. 

Jo is eighty-eight going on twenty-two. She’s Internet savvy. She’s on Instagram and often drives two hours just to to be with her grandchildren or to visit her friends in Los Angeles. She’s well read and current on all the latest news.

“How’s Jo doing?” Mom asks when I checked in earlier today on the phone.

“Unbelievable,” I say.

“I hate her,” Mom laughs. “She leaps and dives and runs around. It’s all that Christian Science clean living. She never drank or smoked like me.”

“You had fun, Mom.”

“Sure did. But I’m paying for it now.” Again, she laughs. “And I have no regrets.”

I can hear Jo getting out the cast iron skillet. She’s making her “crispy eggs.” Hank’s favorite.

As soon as that’s served up, she’s making a list for the market and wiping down the counter. I look over at Hank. “You are so lucky. Your mother never ages.”

Jo’s attitude is what keeps her young. She doesn’t resist change. Yet, Jo’s the consummate lady. She’s all about good grammar and napkins in the lap, but can talk surf and navigate a complicated television remote like a pro.

A widow of twenty-two years, Jo has created a full life for herself in Santa Barbara in the home where she has lived for thirty-two years.

My mother-in–law’s i-phone dings as she heads toward the laundry room.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“It’s Ann and Susie (her daughters) figuring out what to bring down here and wanting to know what I need.”

Unreal. My eighty-eight year-old mother-in-law does group chat texting on WhatsApp...

Jo has told me to make sure to tell her if I see a spot on her clothes. “It reminds me of my mother’s friend, Alma. She had spots all over her clothes when she got old. Don’t let that happen to me.”

I promised her that I would, but doubt it will ever be an issue.

Like her grown children, I have become accustomed to her vitality and agelessness. I think nothing of her traipsing up the beach with our son, Joe, after watching him surf for two hours.  Or reading the instructions for Hank’s new drone.

The kitchen is tidy now and Jo bustles about the beach house, moving up and down the steep spiral staircase, wearing her favorite fresh white Converse sneakers - her shoes of choice - with jeans and a crew neck sweater. Her late mother’s gold “S” chain (that she never takes off) catches the light from the large picture window.

After I’d called her cell phone this morning so that she could hear Queen’s tune again, she told me that she wants a Christian Science Hymn, The Lord’s Prayer, and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody played at her memorial when the time comes.

Somehow, I’m not too worried about that just yet.