Days of Auld Lange Syne: Saying Goodbye to 2009 While I'm Stuck on an LA Freeway

Robin is spending NY's in Los Angeles, stuck on various freeways, but we'll get to that in a minute ...

One thing nice I'll say for the year '09: I don't think I've heard a peep out of that former U.S. President who has a red nose like Rudolph's. When Prez Obama appointed Rudolph's wife as Secretary of State, do you think they took Mr. Hillary to an Undisclosed Location? Good show ...

Speaking of the new administration--I wonder if one of the president's advisors could get him to stop speaking in that monotone, with a drop in tone at the end of every sentence? A little variety in his cadence would be a big help, especially for those of us conservatives in the audience who fondly recall the voice of the Gipper ...

And another whacko Muslim tried to blow up an American plane! I'm amazed by this because every time I try to get on an airplane these days, my bilateral hip replacements set off a couple of dozen airport alarms and I, a native-born-American-Lutheran-Practically-a-Senior-Citizen-with-only-one-traffic-ticket-in-twenty-years (and no record of explosive use, except a little explosive language against old boyfriends) am practically strip-searched by the TSA at every airport. They even took away a jar of jam my friend Leslie gave me on one of my most recent trips. Dangerous stuff, jam. And yet, this knucklehead from Nigeria, whose own father turned him in to the CIA, just waltzes onto a plane headed for Detroit with plastic explosives strapped to his pants. "Going to the U.S.? Carrying any explosives? (Sound of visa being stamped.) Next!" I think we should put the Israelis in charge of our airport security, and that would be the end of the problem ...

LA freeways: always a barrel of laughs.

I'm spending NY's Eve in Los Angeles with friends and I find the LA freeway situation so bad it is almost funny if it didn't control the lives of everyone here. "Can't meet you. I don't travel the 405 this time of day ..." is an oft heard refrain.

It has, admittedly, been more than three decades since I lived here while getting my Masters Degree at UCLA, and I just looked up the population statistics: from that time to this the population of the LA region has gone from about three million to more than nine million. No wonder the freeways are gridlocked: same freeways, with three times the number of people using them. When I lived here the freeways were busy except during rush hour and accidents when they were impassable. Now the freeways are impassable, except during rush hour and accidents, when they are impassable, only more so.

Aliens "Serving Man" in an old Twilight Zone episode.

It reminds me of the old Twilight Zone episode called "To Serve Man" about these aliens who come and befriend Earthlings and have this book with them, the title of which Earth people finally translate as To Serve Man. Hey that's great! It is only later, when Earth people translate the rest of the book that they realize it is a cookbook. Ooops. Thus it is with LA's freeways: at first designed to be at the service of Angelinos, the freeways have now cooked LA's goose ...

In 2009, as you know, I lost my mother. It happened shortly after my sister and I had to put our father in skilled nursing care. We had worried so long about how our father would fare when he was separated from our mother, that we hadn't even thought about how she would do without him. He went up to skilled nursing--with numerous terminal diseases--and she stayed in their home. And though he thrived in nursing care, she, living alone for the first time in 65 years, fell apart almost immediately and died. That was the shock we didn't see coming ...

I understand now why people believe in ghosts. My sister and I have spent time cleaning the family home where our folks lived for half a century--though like Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables, we have only begun to shovel. And though our mother has been gone now for three weeks, we still except to see her around every corner ... yelling at us for moving her furniture ...

Another thing that happens with the death of a loved one--something I learned in 2009--is that with their passing, so passes the bitterness. My mother's last decades were not happy ones and her unhappiness had many sad consequences, though the reasons for this none of us will ever truly know. But we are now free to remember and cherish the happy years, when she was charismatic and full of fun, and celebrate her beauty and her laughter ...

Perhaps the greatest joy of 2009, for me, was the chance to be there when both of my parents finally needed me. The last day I spent with my mother was full of sorrow, but I was better able to deal with it when I could bathe her face as the end came, and not just worry at a distance. Fewer regrets, that's for sure ...

And my reunion with my father--that has been joyful too. He has spent most of his life as a stoic man and quiet: he served his country and his family without complaint. Did his duty. Expected little in return. Affectionate and warm to my sister and me when we were children, he withdrew from us as we entered the mysterious world of womanhood. This year, as his dementia broke down the barriers, he and I became beloved father and daughter again. "I love you Robin," he said to me the other day. "I hope its not too late." But of course it is never too late when there is life and breath ...

Robin dressed in Dad's work clothes, hoping he'll notice how much I love him.

He does think I'm considerably younger than I am--maybe college age or thereabouts--a lovely side benefit of his dementia. "You are a very pretty girl," he said to me one night as I helped him with his dinner. "Any dating prospects?" (That's so fatherly, isn't it?) It cracked me up, so I smiled and shook my head no, making a pretend sad face, and he said, "Well, you must not be trying." Aside from the love and kindness in his statement, I realized he was probably right. I probably haven't been trying. Note to self: something to work on in 2010 ...

So many challenges in this year past and so many joys. And, though I hate to leave it behind, it must be done. On to the New Year ...

P.S. I'm being kidnapped and taken to the Rose Bowl on NY's Day. If I survive this giant tailgate party (honestly, they have rented an RV!!! They have a satellite dish and a barbeque!!! They're packing enough food and liquor to feed our troops in Afghanistan!! I'd rather be shopping at Hermes!!!), I'll be sure and report on my safari into this strange land. Perhaps it will be comparable to my last trip up the Limpopo ...

Click Here to Learn about the Twilight Zone "To Serve Man" Episode

Click Here For the Real Time Traffic Info Angelinos Live By

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Christmas Eve's Magic

Christmas Eve started out so well for my father. I had bought him a new cashmere sweater, I had found a new plaid shirt in his closet at the house, and I gave him a brand new pair of trousers. He looked so handsome, not at all like a man who is dying of about five different diseases.

We had breakfast together with a special caregiver I've hired for him and he was chipper and ate well. But at about 11:00 a.m., she called to say he had thrown up. An indication, perhaps, that his pancreatic cancer is beginning to impact his stomach. Not to mention the impact it had on his new cashmere sweater and shirt.

When the family arrived to be with him for Christmas Eve dinner, he was angry and paranoid and the nursing assistant was panicked about what to do to get him out of bed and into his wheelchair. He wouldn't budge and looked like he might be violent.

It occurred to me, that in losing his breakfast, he had also lost his anti-psychotic medicine. So I asked the nurse to give him his emergency pill and gradually, he calmed down and allowed us to take him in to dinner.

The medicine is strong and he gradually grew quiet as we fed him. It was Christmas Eve and we all felt a little down because Dad still can't understand why our mother isn't there, though he often forgets to ask about it--a blessing of his dementia.

And then, as he finished up his dessert, my sister suggested we sing a little--something Dad liked to do during the last year he was at home. Songs are stored in some special area of a person's brain. Dementia patients often remember them when they've forgotten everything else. So I wrote the words "Silent Night" on his pad, and he looked at it and quietly began to sing. We joined in. Five voices in our own choir.

The dining room grew quiet around us as we finished "Silent Night" and launched into "O Little Town of Bethlehem." These old carols are fixed in Dad's fading memory, like signposts from his childhood. They are fixed in all our memories and bring to mind darkened chapels, burning candles, sparkling trees, and families going home together on this special night.

My sister's eyes teared up as we sang, remembering perhaps, all the many Christmases we've spent as a family, the many we've spent not as a family, and the many Christmas Eve's we've marked.

We finished up and began to wheel Dad in his chair out into the hall. An older man stood and spoke to us. "That was so lovely," he said. "It sounded like carolers had come to visit us. I always love to hear those songs."

For our family, still in mourning this Christmas, it was like a twinkling star in the East on Christmas Eve. Our father's baritone, softly singing these ancient hymns of hope, was the highlight of our evening--reminding us amidst the darkness of that night, that morning would come and we would, one day, be joyful, restored, and united again for the very first time.

God bless us every one and Merry Christmas.

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William Ashley Chapman Turns Ninety

There have been many days in the last year, that I seriously doubted my 89-year-old father would survive to celebrate his 90th birthday. But amidst all those worries, never did I imagine that it would be my mother who would miss the celebration. Since that is what happened, we invited family and friends to the nursing home on Dad's birthday so her absence would not be as obvious to him. He had a wonderful morning.

Dad in his Christmas sweater marking his three-days-before-Christmas birthday.

My sister Kimberly and her youngest daughter Lena, pose with Dad and his birthday cake.

We put pictures of him from previous decades on the table in the nursing center's library, and he laughed to see photos of him when his hair was its original dark brown. Both of his daughters--me and my sister Kimmy--joined the party, along with his son-in-law Dan, his granddaughter Lena, neighbors, church friends, and even his favorite neighborhood dog Sunny. Sunny is fifteen, and, as my sister pointed out, that is pretty close to ninety in dog years.

Neighbors Donna and Mickey P. brought their dog Sunny to visit Dad on his 90th. What a kind thing to do.

Sunny looking up for a treat as my beautiful niece Lena poses with her grandfather.

We know that each day with Dad is a gift, and though his life isn't easy these days since he can no longer walk nor feed himself, we're doing everything we can to make sure we don't waste the remaining days. I have been the chief instigator of events like this one, and they are events my engineer father used to think of as silly. But nowadays, he survives them with good humor and seems to enjoy seeing the familiar faces. At this event, he recognized everyone.

At right is my Dad, almost 90 years ago, in a photo we set out at the party. "I remember I was crying that day," he said. "I think my diaper was wet."

"No need to ask who planned this," he said with a sigh, looking a me, as if he's been worn down, having spent a lifetime trying to put a lid on my hyperactivity. "It had to be Robin." So I reached out to hug him, and as I did so, he turned to his nurse Alem and said: "And now, I suppose, I am going to get hugged." Which he certainly was and I certainly did. I think he almost smiled.

Postscript: I learned twelve hours after I completed the above, that my father's Los Altos, California, flying buddy, Ollie Frasier, has passed away. The two met at the Palo Alto airport one day and discovered they were both from Birmingham, though Ollie attended the University Alabama, and my father was an Auburn grad. They managed to set aside their differences to spend many happy hours together in the air. They discovered later that my father's sister was in Ollie's sister's wedding, proving once again, that six degrees of separation is far too separate for most of us. RIP Ollie Frasier.

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Solitude With a Difference: A Guest Post from Michele Slung

Michele Slung's 18th century farmhouse near Woodstock, New York.

Robin writes:
I've spent a week in tribute to my remarkable mother. Now it is time to return to the world of Christmas, with its annual beauty and its promise of renewal. Thus, I asked my friend, writer and editor Michele Slung, for a guest post from her East Coast farm, which, like Michele, is beautiful, old-fashioned, traditional and warm.

Woodstock, New York, December 2009
Snow & Commonplace Books

by Michele Slung

Last week was the first snowfall of the season in my corner of upstate New York. Here in the Hudson Valley, at the edge of the Catskills, every rise in the roads around my house comprises its own microclimate. Up at my friend Bob’s house --- higher than town but still at the foot of the mountain, Overlook, that looms above it --- where I stopped for a quick visit around 6pm, it looked like your cliché Currier & Ives Christmas scene. The fir trees were tall marshmallow-coated silhouettes in the moonlight, and every bush and stone wall glowed whitely.

But such a perfect glimpse of the winter landscape actually wasn’t a sure thing: if you were only a quarter of a mile lower than Bob’s or traveling in a different direction, you were just as likely to be greeted by that old weatherman’s staple, “snow mixed with rain.”

Bliss, however, doesn’t accompany a sleety drizzle.

The moment of suddenly glimpsing the year’s first snowflakes cascading down outside the windows has been, since I was little, an ecstatic one. The beauty is so transformative: what was banal --- a car, a wooden lawn chair, a forgotten rake, a clothesline, a clay pot holding a dead plant --- becomes simultaneously exciting and hypnotically soothing.

What’s taking place is the most basic of earth-magic, and few fail to experience the spiritual as well as the physical line between the pre-snow and post-snow world.

Michele, with her 15-year-old friend Minnie.

Thus, it bothered me quite a bit, when once, more than twenty years ago, waking to a beautifully blanketed outdoors, I for the first time felt nothing. “I noticed the absence of joy in myself. (I’m very worried, as a consequence.)”

How do I know exactly my sensations of that morning? The answer’s easy --- I found the above entry recently while browsing in my commonplace book, a personal patchwork of quotations, ideas, phrases, interesting words, observations and other prose bits which to this day I continue, irregularly, to maintain.

Different from a diary, a commonplace book is meant to be a compendium of wisdom, and, for centuries, people copied their favorite passages down into these journals. Explains the ever-helpful Wikipedia:

"Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests."

Not unlike a blog, you might say. In fact, my own commmonplace book actually offers the occcasional News from Myself --- bulletins from my state of mind --- along with notable quotations jotted down from books I once was reading. (There’s even a lock of my 40-year-old hair taped in --- and I stare at it sometimes, hoping to find there a glimpse of my former self, as if reconstructing the person I was back then from this DNA-filled snippet.)

I learned about the practice of keeping commonplace books from W. H. Auden’s A Certain World: A Commonplace Book, published in 1970. It was, he said, as close as he “would ever come to writing an autobiography,” calling it "a map of my planet." It took a while, though, to begin following his example; my own opens with a line copied from Persuasion in the spring of ’77.

Today, on Planet Michele, I’m pleased to report my failure that day to respond to the sweet stimulus of snow was a short-lived phenomenon. It didn’t last til the next winter, although it did signal change. And, meteorologically or otherwise, there’s nothing but inevitability about that.

Before I disappear to haul in more wood for the stove, here are just a few samples from my commonplace:

“To be free is not the result of a moment’s decisive action but a project constantly to be renewed. More than anything else, freedom requires tenaciousness.”
Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage

“There is no collection so valuable as a collection of adjectives. Everything depends on adjectives.”
Frances Hodgson Burnett, Through One Administration

“Her peace of mind was dependent on lists . . . “
May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“Dreams have always had an importance for me: ‘the finest entertainment known and given rag cheap.’" Graham Greene

“To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods.”
Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds

“She had known no one --- but her solitude had had a difference. Then, as she walked about the streets alone, she walked an adventurer.”
Olivia Manning, The Doves of Venus

“It occurred to me as I gave her hands a quick clasp that hell was not, as Sartre had proclaimed, other people. Hell was being obliged to pretend to be someone quite other than one’s true self.”
Susan Howatch, Absolute Truths

“‘But this is something quite new!’ said Mrs. Munt, who collected new ideas as a squirrel collects nuts and was especially attracted by those that are portable.”
E. M. Forster, Howard’s End



Robin note on 12/19/09: Just after Michele filed her report, a huge snowstorm began to drench the East in snow. We will check in with her, just to make sure she can shovel her way out.

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Read About Michele's Books

Forever Young

Faye Ellyn Latta in an undated photo, probably about 1942.

We gave Faye Ellyn Latta Chapman, my mother, a wonderful funeral on Wednesday, December 16, 2009. The rain held off for the graveside service, and many more people came to pay their respects than we had expected. "All my friends are dead," she had taken to saying in recent years. Her service and the reception that followed were testament to the fact that this was not true.

I had ordered a blanket of white roses for her casket, having it in my head that it would somehow look like one of those blankets of flowers they put over the saddle of the winner of the Kentucky Derby. I thought that would be subtle and pretty. But the florist had a better idea and turned it into a spray of white roses that reached from one end of the casket to the other. "Tell me there were eighty-eight roses in that tribute," a neighbor said to me, thinking it mirrored my mother's eighty-eight years. No, I told her. That was four hundred roses. And it was stunning. Faye, the thrifty girl who sewed her own wedding dress, would have died again if she knew how much we spent. But you can only go once.

We surrounded the casket with red poinsettias and the white and red and green spoke of Christmas and snow and holly and ivy. All the things she, as a gardener, would have loved.

And when the ceremony was over, we gave the poinsettias away, one to each family. And people loved that, as they said, because they would have the red and green plant with them and would think of her during the holidays.

So many people came to the reception that we would have been overwhelmed, except that three friends from out of the past came to our rescue. My college roommate Phyllis flew up from Los Angeles and took over in the kitchen. My high school friend Leslie brought a wreath for the front door and dessert for all. And our neighbor from childhood, Gene, stayed at the home with my sister and her family and kept things organized. Her mother was a good friend of our mother, and since her mother died some years ago and Gene could not bring herself to have a service for her, we mourned the two women together.

(We did not have my father come to the service. We didn't think he could handle it. He was told that my mother was gone, but he doesn't remember this and we've decided not to hammer it into his head.)

I was struck by how many people told me my mother had been a mentor to them and such a lovely friend. She always found it so much easier to be kind to people whom she was able to keep at a distance. Intimacy so frightened her, she always found ways--sometimes cruel ones--to keep it at bay.

At the heart of all this was such low self esteem that near the end of her life I despaired for her. She was given so many gifts: beauty, brains, a great figure and good legs, pretty blond hair, a stunningly handsome and kind husband, two accomplished and loyal daughters, a strong religious faith, prosperity, longevity, fidelity. The list could go on. But it was never enough to give her the one thing that might have brought her some peace--self confidence.

But if she had been watching on Wednesday, she surely would have seen how much she was loved, and how many people thought she was wonderful.

"Mom's not there, I know that," my sister said when I asked her if she stayed to watch the casket lowered into the grave. "And now she's young and beautiful forever, just the way she wanted to be." And I guess that's right. It was a long, long road. But she finally reached the place where she will not have to do one more thing to make herself feel good enough. Where someone else, other than her flawed fellow men, will handle the judging part, and where He, if all we believe is true, is bound to be more merciful to her than she was to herself.

Faye and Ash at Peace Lutheran Church in 2007.

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Obituary Notice: Faye E. Chapman

Long time Los Altos resident, Faye E. Chapman, died December 11, 2009 of pneumonia at the Forum Health Care Center, in Cupertino, California.

She was born May 18, 1921, in Spokane, Washington, the second of four children of Lena Verwolf and Harry E. Latta. She attended Washington State College (now Washington State University) and was a member of Alpha Gamma Delta sorority.

At a wartime dance in Spokane in 1944, she met Capt. William Ashley Chapman, of Birmingham, Alabama and the couple married that same year. After World War II, they settled first in Palo Alto and then in Los Altos, where in 1949 they built a house on Clark Avenue, now called Echo Drive. For forty years she was active in Peace Lutheran Church in Santa Clara, California. Mrs. Chapman is survived by her husband of 65 years, her daughters Kimberly (Mrs. Daniel D.) Moore of Denver, Colorado, and Robin Chapman of Los Altos, three granddaughters, three great grandchildren, as well as by her brother Jack Latta, a retired Spokane police officer, and her sister Ruth (Mrs. Joseph) Peterson, of Lincoln City, Oregon. Graveside services are planned for 11:00 a.m., Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto.

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Faye Ellyn Latta Chapman: May 18, 1921-December 11, 2009

Faye and Ashley with the Thunderbird in the 1970s.

Ashley holding Faye's hand on the night she died. We don't know if he understands that she is gone.

This rainbow appeared this afternoon in the hills above the nursing home where my mother died last night.

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