Places I disremember

Mom collected spoons and pennants to mark our path around the globe.

I guess because they travel well. I never asked.

The spoons may still be sitting in their little slots atop the antique hutch Mom and Dad bought long, long ago in England. The slots were part of the furniture, high atop the hutch, made expressly for displaying commemorative spoons.

I guess spoons were a thing. Maybe they still are; maybe they're still for sale in every gift shop, tiny sugar spoons with an enamel emblem of the respective city or landmark, embedded at the end of the handle. I've never looked.

Pennants were the ideal souvenir: Inexpensive and durable. No one's going to play with a pennant. It's going on the wall, as soon as we get home.

The pennants cover walls of my office now, tacked haphazardly, mostly filling empty space. That's better than leaving them to moulder in the box where I found them, but not much better.

I am an ungrateful former child.

The pennants offer an incomplete and uneven narrative of my childhood. I don't remember half of what the pennants represent, and retain only odd memories for most of the rest, and remember one, maybe two, with lingering regret.

For some reason I have two Disneyland pennants, one in red and white, one in blue in gold. I'll bet one of them is my sister's; I'll bet they were the reason for quite a fight. She is welcome to one of them, and I'm old enough and magnanimous enough not to care which.

Disneyland holds mixed memories. I was sick there a couple of visits. I lost the group of high school seniors I was hanging around with on our grad night trip, and wandered the park at night among strangers, all my age. Disneyland is ideal for young adults with no particular place to go and no concern for long lines, no passion for this ride or that, and a bit of curiosity about what the park includes that doesn't include rides. I went there once in that scenario, and once again when our children were little and grandparents could go.

I have seen Disneyland in every possible reasonable combination. Time to cross it off my list.

We didn't take our children to the Trees of Mystery Park or the Sea Lion Caves, and I'm not sure that was a bad choice. I think I enjoyed them, but what I remember most is that by coincidence when I was a kid we camped alongside — and went to the same attractions at the same time — as a family from Hawthorne, Calif. (home of Mattel™® and Hot Wheels®™, I'll always remember) for the better part of the week. That family included kids our age. It got funnier each time we met up.

The Sea Lion Caves involves an elevator that takes visitors into a giant cave opening to the ocean, echoing with sea lion barking. I've been suspicious since that the sea lions we saw were pinniped mannequins, and the barking came from hidden public-address speakers, for the days when no actual sea lions appear.

We didn't take our kids to Glacier National Park, either, and I regret that often. Glacier is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen; even though I haven't seen that many places, I'd still put Glacier at the top. It also still has glaciers, for the time being. I'm glad our parents took us. I hope our
kids get to go on their own, soon.

My pennants include the 1974 World's Fair (in the city where I was born, Spokane, and the last big family reunion we had). I spent the entirety of it practicing a sleight-of-hand trick I learned from the TV show "The Magician," starring Bill Bixby. So obsessed was I in mastering the trick, I would run into strangers at the fair, and lose my family. I also remember Up with People! there, and wonder why I can't forget.

Do we even have World's Fairs any more?

I own multiple pennants from Los Berros Elementary School, the only school in the suburban enclave where I grew up. Some of these pennants must be my sister's too. Berros, in Spanish, are watercress. I never saw any watercress growing up, or didn't recognize it if I did. We were the Broncos, I think. I was there until third grade, then went to a school clear out to the other side of town until junior high. As far as I know, I didn't get a pennant from that school.

Most of the pennants are made of starched felt. Bend it, and it's finished: It will never lose that crease. I have a homemade pennant for when I played on the Expos in Senior Little League. Of all the Major League team names available, Expos was chosen for ours. I guess it was cooler then. Apparently we won a championship. Mostly I remember it was my first year on the big diamond, and hard to adjust to the longer throws. My knees acted up during puberty, so I could no longer play catcher, my favorite spot.

I remember we players were called in to testify at a Little League hearing about our coaches. I thought it was because the coaches worked us too hard, and made us run dozens of laps when we lost, but maybe it was about something else, which I didn't fathom then or now.

I remember going to Knott's Berry Farm and the Movieland Wax Museum, and the Lewis and Clark Cavern (strange elevator, like so many church pews stacked vertically, that lifted us to the cavern mouth). I don't remember going to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena; I think an aunt gave me that.

The pennants from Europe are smaller, sturdier, some even made of silk. I have pennants from the Vatican, Paris, Stratford on Avon, Milan (where our son just visited) and Venice and Amsterdam and Heidelberg and Holland and Aberdeen.

I remember nothing of these places, being just so much high-maintenance baby baggage for my folks to lug around while they tramped about Europe, courtesy of the Air Force.

Did our kids get any pennants? I don't think so. It skipped a generation: Our children are giving them to me.

Our son got me a pennant for when he went to spring training in Arizona to watch the San Francisco Giants a few years back.

Our daughter made many pennants for a video shoot at the production company where we interned.

They hold new memories, clear and unambiguous.

See and be seen

Cameras: Good or evil? Discuss.

I'm in a love-hate relationship with cameras. Eighty-five percent hate. No, 90 percent …

… Ninety-three percent hate, 7 percent love.

I'm lean on the love.

I hate being in front of a camera (creeping petulance) as much as behind one (childhood anxiety).

Social media, then, has rendered me useless.

If ever you see a selfie I've taken, know that the Apocalypse has come.

The 7 percent love I reserve for good photography and photographers. Also I'm not above using photos for reference in drawing. I'm just not good at photography. Likely I'm jealous. Maybe because I have always liked to draw and deep down I think photography is cheating, somehow. Sure, stand before landscape, press a button and leave, while I'm still drawing this umpteenth leaf!

Which is stupid, of course, because I know photographers who can make the world sing fuller than life with their work. Thankfully our kids did not carry my aversion to carrying cameras, and like them as a tool of art and documentary.

My grandma gave me a Kodak®™ Brownie® when I was eight or nine. I think it was a Brownie® Hawkeye™, a round-edged cube of bakelite™® the color of dark roast coffee. You looked down into the magnifying-lens viewfinder, pressed the button, then turned the knob on the side to advance the film.

It was the age in which things are tossed at children in hopes something sticks, a future forged. Here's a book: Maybe you'll be a scholar. Here's a microscope, kid: You're gonna be a scientist! Models, paint sets, magic tricks, all part of the parent-child parry and thrust of Whatever Will He Become?!


Parents long to see this in their hometown newspaper: "Well, my mom brought home a chemistry set, and that's really all it took. Sorry, is my Nobel Prize blinding you?"

The camera was one of those offerings of hope. And I loved it.

I loved the potential of it, anyway.

The Brownie was the ideal gift since we were just then making a trip to Disneyland®™, grandma in tow. Not only joy, but archived joy!

I got sick. Really sick. Earache, flu-like, what-the-heck-is-the-matter-with-him? sick. Not sick enough to cut the trip short, just too sick for me to care about Disneyland®™ or living or breathing.

At night I lolled in agony in the motel room, keeping my parents up round-the-clock.

By day the PeopleMover®, now defunct, became my friend, snaking about Disneyland®™ at not quite enough speed or amplitude to induce vomiting. On the occasions when my vision cleared, when extreme gravity wasn't pulling the camera violently from my hand to the ground, I took pictures.

None of which you'll see. None exists.

Excited to look back on my Disneyland®™ trip and reclaim good memories from the barf bag, I got my film back from the base exchange to find: I had doubly exposed every image. Every single one. Even triple exposed some.

Grandma ghosted into the topiary … the Matterhorn collapsing into the parking lot … Cinderella's castle crash landing on Knott's Berry Farm … Mickey Mouse as the manic gremlin in your daymares.

See that knob on the side of the camera? You have to turn it after every press of the button. I forgot and forgot and forgot.

I've disliked cameras ever since.

Silly, right? But there you go.

Bad luck, too, since I had to use a camera in my early years as a news reporter. Humble apologies, still, to my readers.

I just could never get what I see with my eyes to come out on film. I took one photo class in college. Ansel Adams was in the class, I think, and shredded the curve. Even when I got the blacks black and the whites white and the midtones ideal, it was always the same: C+.

Being in front of the camera is another matter, to which I summarize: Harrumph!

Also, Why?!

I'm of the age in which all would-be photos of me are group shots, mostly with family, some with friends. Different combinations of people, different backgrounds, same basic concept.

Stand close together. Closer! You're going to have to lean in. Lean in, I said! Now smile! Come on, smile! You always do that!! Why can't you smile?! Now we have to take another!

My dad delighted in screwing up group photos, pulling a face or flashing a finger. Maybe he just didn't like photos of himself, either. If given no other choice, I carry on the tradition. There aren't a lot of photos of me. Memories suffice for me; my pockets are chronically empty of cameras.

Here's the thing: In my mind I'm tall and thin and lithe. A mirror, conspiring with my brain, will sometimes even bear this out. A camera, with one exception, will betray me.

The miraculous exception: My son
captured this of me returning from
Alcatraz. Everything flexes except
for flab, cleverly hidden by limbs.
(Also, it's nearly four years ago,
so less flab to camouflage.)

I know at my core I'm not supposed to fret about body image, but the superficial me has a big mouth and won't shut up.

What few photos emerge of me anymore involve swimming, where after a lifetime of feeling need to cover up, I have laid myself nearly naked to the world, and do so almost daily. That's a big deal for a lot of swimmers, I think, this coming out. It may even be a needless barrier that keeps people from swimming.

No illusions remain for a body stuffed in jammers — the longish swim shorts I wear — and the camera's truth is brutal.

Recent swimming candids reveal: I am not thin and lithe! One could say, with oblique politeness, that I probably float well.

Oh, well.

The truth hurts, but also helps. The camera's honesty reminds me I could stand to lose some weight, for a variety of reasons. Faithful swimming alone is not enough.

Stringent additional measures are called for. Vigilance is all, less for vanity than vitality.

Maybe in the near future I'll have blundered into view of a camera and look closer to the person in my mind. Just don't expect a photo op.

. . .

In other news: Gov. Jerry Brown got hold of my Tuesday post, thank goodness, and finally implemented emergency measures to save water in California's unprecedented drought. Maybe two years too late, but it's not nothing.

"We're in a new era," Brown said yesterday. "The idea of your nice little green grass getting water every day, that's going to be a thing of the past."

 You're welcome. Now, do your part!