Pet Parade

I saw my first Halloween pet parade last Sunday morning in Sunnyvale. I used to believe that such activities were too silly for me to participate in or support by watching. However, now that I've seen what is possible in pet dressing, I won't miss another opportunity to share in the fun. The parade started with a troop of Boy Scouts and their trusty black labrador friend, followed by a policeman and his K-9 partner, tense with the uncertainty of whether he was out for a stroll or actually working. Next came a big, red fire engine blasting its sirens to alert us that the parade had officially begun. Then a community marching band of older duffers in Halloween costumes passed loudly and briskly by.

Most of the nonhuman participants were dogs, but other pets were also represented. There was a tree-limb size boa constrictor hanging languidly around its owner's shoulders that tolerated a plethora of petting from several small children. An especially unique entry included tiers of terraria on a rolling cart whose occupants were too small for me to identify from where I stood. A few horses and a pony, riddenby young girls of course brought up the rear of the parade. One of the horses appeared to be dressed as an elongated pumpkin with its orange neck- and saddle-cloths and a burst of green netting at its tail. The placement of the equines at the end of the parade was a thoughtful planning move by those sensitive to the other participants.

Three small dogs twirled along as bunches of green grapes, while their vintner owner pulled a vat full of fake grapes on a Radio Flyer wagon. A stout American bull dog marched along placidly in its sleek blue dragon costume dotted with purple spikes. A little, long-haired dog fluttered by with its owners, the threesome all in matching, sparkly purple capes. There was a fawn-colored pug that looked like a half-peeled banana, and a bundle of bee costumes on several different breeds. A weiner dog with the obvious stuffed hot dog buns on either side of its body trotted by, thankfully oblivious to the message it was carrying. My personal favorite was a black mini dachshund creatively dressed like a red lobster sitting in a pot of simulated water with paper flames rising up around it.

I have noticed the trend at my local pet store to carry not only decorative collars and leashes but actual dog and cat clothing, games, toys, and, yes, costumes. While I never really gave much about purchasing a costume for any of my pets, I did at one time consider buying a raincoat for my dog, Max. The $40 price tag dampened my enthusiasm. Out of necessity, I fashioned a workable coat using an old dish towel duct-taped to a custom-cut black garbage bag and embellished with red ribbon ties. This worked so well that I have never replaced it. I once purchased and encouraged my Welsh corgi, Katie, to wear a headband with reindeer antlers for Christmas. She would have none of it, and the antlers ended up dragging the floor, like the wings of a sad albatross.

I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed my first pet parade. Aside from the purple cape wearers mentioned above, I have no recollection of what the other human participants wore. I was too busy chuckling about the animals to notice. The cleverness of the pet costumes and the unabashed way all participants had such a merry time was impressive and infectious. It turned out to be a great way to start the day: a bit of cheerful jollity with no purpose other than to create and spread smiles.

Designer Fish

The first time my mother became interested in tropical fish, I was astounded. While she had tolerated my cat, an assortment of frogs, lizards and horned toads and a parakeet, my mother never seemed to me to be a person who cared much for pets. One Friday evening I was sitting home mopey because I didn't have a date and had to spend the evening at home with nothing to do but watch TV. I was 16. My mother danced in after work with a water-filled plastic bag in one hand and a small aquarium in the other. She commandeered my help in setting up the aquarium.

We carefully read all the instructions together and decided to place the aquarium on top of the TV. The plastic bag contained a tiny blowfish and miniature seahorse. These were saltwater fish, so we had to add salt and check the salinity of the water until it was at the optimum level for the fish. Then the fish in their bag had to float in the aquarium water until the bag water and the aquarium water temperature was the same. When the fish were released into the aquarium, they explored their new home cautiously. My mother could not stop exclaiming about how cute they were, and she relayed every movement each fish made with all the excitement of a sports announcer. I went to bed several hours later with the image of her eyes, distorted through the water, staring intently at her new darlings.

Every night when my mother arrived home from work she would go immediately to the aquarium to study the fish and see what new tricks they were up to. The blowfish became quite friendly and would stare back at my mother and follow her finger on the glass with equal interest. The seahorse, on the other hand, attached its tail to the stem of the green plant and bobbed blandly back and forth among the upright leaves, its tiny eyes constantly scanning for food. Once in awhile it would break loose and float about, the tiny fin on its back whirling like a small fan. It's true these fish were incredible creatures. Although I preferred furry pets you could touch, I have to admit that I grew to enjoy watching the fish, too. There seemed little need to turn on the TV for entertainment. I'm not sure how it was for the fish, but watching them had a soothing effect on my mother and me. It was a sad day when I returned from an overnight with a friend to learn that the seahorse had passed on to happier trails. The blowfish did not last too much longer. We kept the fascinating seahorse skeleton as a memento for many years. 

Although I never had the enthusiasm for fish that my mother had, I and my youngest son have had various fish pets over the years. There was Bright, my son's pearl scale goldfish, that he found floating belly up one morning. We held a meaningful funeral service for Bright by scooping out a place at the base of the rosebush by our front gate, carefully placing Bright in it and covering the pet gently with dirt. I said a few words about how Bright would now provide important nutrients to the rose bush. My son shed a few tears before bravely announcing, "Bright, you were a good pet," and then we rushed off, he to Kindergarten and I to work. And there was Alpha, the first in a line of several blue Bettas I owned. Alpha survived one especially cold winter in his small bowl wrapped in a sweater under an incandescent light and went on to live for three more years. I found him one morning, a dry blot on the bathroom floor where he had fallen after jumping out of his bowl.

My interest in fish could not come close to that of my ex-husband's aunt and uncle. We visited them once in their Sacramento home where the kitchen and family room were stocked floor to ceiling with fish tanks full of fancy guppies. They spent every moment we were with them catching fish in small nets, moving them to other tanks and changing the water in still other tanks. Conversation was challenging, but they never dropped a tank or spilled a fish. When I inquired about why they had so many, they said they had started with just a few which had quickly had babies and the babies had babies and now here they were. The guppies were fascinating because of the variation in tail color that occurred within just a few generations. I could see why they had trouble getting rid of any. It would be hard to flush them down the toilet, and the pet stores could not purchase enough to keep up with the birth rate. I was sure that by the time we came to visit again, there would be no room left in the house for us.

This afternoon I attended a meeting at the home of Tom Berg, President of the California Literary Arts Society. Tom has two huge aquaria in his home, and each is different. One has lots of leafy plants and colorful fish in it, and the other has few plants with an interesting assortment of black and white fish that have red on their snouts, fins or tails. These fish have models of classical ruins in which to move about and hide. I was immediately impressed by the cheerful busy-ness of the more brightly colored fish and the aura of calm the black and white fish with their red highlights projected. I could imagine myself, depending upon mood, buoyed up with enthusiasm by the interaction of fish and plants in one tank or brought to deep reflection on the meaning of life by the ruins and placement of red on the fish in the other. Television cannot offer anything to compete with this.

A House of My Own

From the time I was five years old until I graduated from college, I had mostly lived in apartments. There was a four-year period where I actually lived in four different homes. I first spent two years living with my maternal grandmother and great grandmother, followed by another two years (what I fondly recall as the "Cinderella years") living with my father, stepmother, stepbrother and half sister, first in their cramped tract home, then in an even more cramped rental home while their new house was being built and finally in the spacious dream house for a few months before their marriage fell apart. By the time I left college I had recorded 12 different addresses.

After college, I shared a small house with two other girls in San Francisco. When I got a job in Woodside for artist Walter Keane, I moved to a studio apartment, and soon moved again to a one-bedroom apartment where I comfortably remained until, in a fit of temper one morning, I stood up and quit my job. I had been at work just nine months at that point and had saved no cash. This left me with few options. My grandfather convinced me to return to Long Beach and take a course in shorthand. Although he had willingly financed my four years at Mills College, Papaw never believed that I would go very far with a college education. Secretarial training, he predicted, would be my true gateway to a good job. So, I returned and reluctantly moved in with my father and his new wife.

Despite the attraction of sharing not-the-dream house with my father, a different stepmother, a black Great Dane named Valhalla and Kee Soo, their Siamese cat, I longed for a place of my own. Even riding in my stepmother's Mark IX Jaguar or driving my Dad's 1946 Cadillac Coupe was not enough to keep me there. Within a few months I had learned all the shorthand my fingers could absorb and struck out again for the Bay Area.

I briefly lived in the closet of a huge two-story Victorian house occupied by a college classmate, her husband and an assortment of transitional folks. I found a job in the University of California President's Office in Berkeley, and moved again into a tiny apartment just two blocks from work. I was thrilled to be there and mistress of my own time and space. I recall earning approximately $150 a month. On that salary, I could keep my own apartment, feed myself, maintain a car and have money left over to spend. I was very comfortable in Berkeley for several years until I gave up the single life.

My husband and I moved several times after our marriage, usually over Memorial Day weekend so we wouldn't miss any days from work. We first lived in a charming Ben Lomond, California rental. Then, when the Air Force intruded, we moved to Biloxi, Mississippi. Our residences there included a slave shack where slime mold grew with impunity under the claw-footed bathtub, a room in a shirttail relative's home that had survived Hurricane Camille on Highway 90 and then to a miniature concrete block house where foot-sized roaches shuffled about at night.

After Biloxi, there was North Little Rock, Arkansas, where we bought our first house for $24,000. I loved this modern brick house. It was the first house we owned together, and it had three spacious bedrooms, two bathrooms, kitchen, dining room and living room -- all with air conditioning! We were able to use the money I received from my UC retirement funds as a down payment. And we got a good deal on the house because the white owner was anxious to sell and move into a neighborhood where his children would not have to attend public schools desegregated for the first time. We had very little furniture, but we enjoyed sitting on cushions on the floor in the dining room eating our meals on a door I had set up on concrete blocks and painted a glossy black to serve as our Japanese-style table. It broke my heart to leave our lovely home and return to California three years later.

Back in California, we moved in with my husband's parents at their orange ranch in Fillmore for six months before buying our own place just down the road. Our new ranch didn't have much of a house. It was just a small, board-and-batten affair with a shake roof, but  it had an ivy-covered porch and the property included a screened-in barbeque house, a huge cement-floored garage that the previous owner had used to house his farm labor workers, a tractor shed and a chicken coop. There was lots of room for the three horses we had trailered from Arkansas and a place for the mare and foal that would be shipped out later from Fort Smith. After the Sespe Creek flooded in 1978 and washed out five acres where our alfalfa field had been, I was eager to find a property with higher ground. For years after whenever it would rain heavily, I would lie awake at night listening to the boulders crashing and rolling down the creek unable to sleep. We were lucky to purchase a much larger orchard up the road that was safer from creek flooding, but we sometimes had flooding from the road. We lived in this house for a bit more than ten years, and it was here my children spent their earliest years.


After I divorced, I moved to a house of my own in Ventura. I have lived in this house for more than 20 years now. It has been the perfect place for me to raise my two boys among friendly neighbors, close to good schools, and just a skip to the freeway to head north, south or east. I can walk to the Post Office, grocery and drug stores. I am just minutes away from downtown and the beach. During the time I have lived here, several relatives have passed away, and I have brought their precious items into my garage. I have stacked boxes of photos and an entire wall of books in the garage. The garage also houses my 8-harness loom, boxes of fleeces from sheep raising days, spinning wheel, tack box with my English saddle and boots, none of which I have been able to part with.

While I have to say that living in a house is superior in many ways to living in an apartment, it does have its drawbacks. It seems that no matter how large the living space, I am always able to fill it to overflowing with items I can't live without. In the past, moving from smaller to larger houses only enabled me to pursue this lifestyle. Living in a house makes it easy to take in and collect things that apartment living won't allow. Gone are the days when I could pack all my possessions into the single bed of a pickup truck. Now, looking ahead to retirement, I am faced with the problem of how to get rid of items that have a lifetime of memories attached to them.

I have never been good about getting rid of things, mine or those of deceased relatives and children who have moved away but are not yet settled. Neither am I any good at getting rid of something that has not completely outlived its usefulness. I have joked on occasion that I would welcome a cataclysmic event that would sever me from my possessions. I imagine how freeing it would be to start out again fresh and new. An earthquake, a fire, even another flood would do. The time is now for me to make those bloodless decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of. I can no longer continue bringing things into my house and garage: there's simply no room. I fear becoming the kind of person people read about in the newspaper who dies in her home and the firemen have to tunnel in to find her surrounded by every magazine she ever subscribed to.

I have recently made a start and am encouraged by actually being able to throw out the half-empty bag of rat food belonging to a pet long since departed. I even donated to charity a gift kite my eldest son never flew. I just hope I can move from these simple gestures to more significant sacrifices that will allow me to finally throw off the oppressive blanket of possessions and their burden of care. I can only imagine a future wondering what I will do with my time. I might even be able to mark off some of the items on my "Things To Do Before I Die" list. One of those things is to be able to park my car in a well-organized, clean garage.

Default Soloist

Bolstered by the belief that anyone can learn to sing with practice, I joined the church choir five years ago. I was gratefully accepted into the choir, and no one visibly cringed when I sang. I began in the alto section and then moved to the soprano section, where I had always dreamed of being. At my Sixth Grade graduation, our class sang "You'll Never Walk Alone" for our graduation ceremony. I resisted my placement in the alto section and sang the soprano part whenever I could get away with it. No one ever encouraged me to sing. Not my Sixth Grade teacher. Not even my mother, who herself would often break into song. When I warbled as a child, she would invariably roll her eyes and say, "Oh, my! You couldn't carry a tune in a hand basket."

For most of my life, I avoided singing in public and rarely sang in private. I recall hearing a story about Barbara Streisand as a youngster belting songs down the stairwell of her apartment building. And Pavarotti saying in a radio interview that the way to learn to sing is to begin by screaming and then learn to control it. I wondered where they got their nerve to begin. I couldn't imagine singing where others could hear me, yet alone screaming. Streisand and Pavarotti surely had an inborn passion to sing that could not be squelched.

I was well past middle age when I worked for an arts organization that offered an inexpensive series of group voice lessons. I observed the class a few times before I could bring myself to sign up. At the first lesson, I was thrilled to find that there were people just like me who were so inhibited by past experience they could not bring themselves to sing out loud. The student with the best voice was almost brought to tears whenever she was asked to sing for the group. We limped along together, leaning on each other and gaining courage. With practice we improved. But it would be several more years before I felt ready to join the church choir. By the time I did, I knew that if I ever wanted to sing before I died, I had better get at it.

Joining the church choir was a good move. I did not have to audition, and everyone was glad to have me. I could safely learn to sing where I felt like I was contributing to a greater cause. The first Sunday we sang, I was just one of two in my section. Although I was pretty shaky, my partner soprano had a beautiful, strong voice, and I did OK. It really felt good. After a few seasons with my church choir, I took a Summer school course in choral singing and then added Gold Coast Concert Chorus to my activities. The chorus had approximately 100 singers, and I absolutely loved being part of it. The second performance I did with the group was in the Oxnard Performing Arts Center with the Master Chorale of Ventura County and an 80-piece orchestra. This was my absolute dream for being a singer! I thought that if I never sang another note, I would have accomplished all I had hoped for.

Several years have gone by since then, and I was feeling pretty good about my singing. That is until last week at church choir practice. Our soprano section had increased to a robust five voices, and I was really happy about that. However, at last week's practice, I was just one of two. When we were called on to sing, we sounded pretty thin, and my fellow soprano dropped out on a piece she didn't know and was having trouble sight reading. So when the choir director said, "OK, sopranos only," I was the only one who began to sing. At first I was just painfully aware of how flat I sounded, but as I continued on, my voice wobbled, cracked and refused to respond. In trying to give more support to my voice, I failed to reach higher notes well within my range. Even remembering how several of our really fine solo singers often sounded pretty bad during reheasals, didn't help me. I was walking alone through the storm and it didn't feel good.

Later, thinking about how things had gone at practice, I realized that I had gotten sloppy about working on my music. With others in my section to depend on, I had stopped practicing every day and, more often than not, would simply breeze into rehearsals thinking that once a week would be enough. I knew that if I really wanted to contribute as a choral singer, continuing in this manner would not get me there. So, while I'm not quite back to square one, I've realized how much work it takes to sing well. Now I've got to get back to putting in the time to warm up before singing, learning the pieces and practicing like I really mean it.