Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

(A reprise post from … gulp… 2004)

It really takes a gift to find yourself on a soggy-wet mountainside on a Sunday afternoon in December, 1981, with a fine drizzle coagulating out of the fog in the higher altitudes, slipping and sliding on a muddy deer track with a tree saw in one hand, and leading a sniffling and wet (inside and out) toddler with the other.
Yep, it’s a gift all right, born of spontaneous optimism and an assumption based on the map on the back page of the Sacra-Tomato bloody-f#$*%^g Bee newspaper, and a promise to Mom. Said map made the %$#*ing Christmas tree farm look like it was a couple of blocks, a mere hop-skip-and-jump from the back gate of Mather AFB’s housing area, an easy jaunt on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, a lovely and traditional Christmas pastime, choosing your own tree from the place they were growing in!

I was taking leave the next day, and driving home to Hilltop House from Sacramento, and my job in the Public Affairs office. It would only be the second Christmas I had spent at home with Mom and Dad since going on active duty (and it would be the last one for ten years). And Mom had made a confession;
“I haven’t gotten the tree yet. The ones at the lot look horrible, all but dead.”
“I’ll buy one here and bring it down, “I said, spontaneously. “There was a bit in the paper this morning about a local Christmas tree farm. I can tie it to the roof rack.” My car of the moment was a VW station wagon with an immaculate interior and a very useful roof rack. If it didn’t fit into the back, like the unfinished chest or drawers I had bought for my daughters’ room, it went up on top, lashed about with bungee cords and rope. I had brought home a lot of stuff that way.
“Perfect, “said Mom. “Stick the trunk end in a bucket of water overnight, so it won’t dry out on the way down.”

We set out bravely enough, early in the afternoon, my daughter strapped into her car seat, and the map from the newspaper open on the passenger seat, where I could refer to it, easily. Past the housing area BX shopette and gas station, out the gate, a couple of turns, and there we were, tooling along a pleasant country road in the mild winter sunshine. On the map it looked as if I would stay on this road for a couple of miles, until it intersected with another road, one with a couple of wiggles in it… into hills, perhaps? It looked as if the tree farm were out in the country and fairly easy to find, not hidden in a jumble of other businesses, intersections and traffic. Soon, empty fields and meadows opened up around us… stood to reason a Christmas Tree farm would be out in the country. Maybe the next mile or two would bring me to the turn-off, the road with a couple of wiggles in it…

Fifteen minutes… twenty minutes… half an hour, still no intersection. Forty-five minutes, and it was very clear that the map was deceptive about the distances. I had gassed up in anticipation of the long drive the next day, so that was not a problem, but if I had not already told Mom I would come home bearing a fresh-cut Christmas tree, I would have turned around and gone back. An hour went by, and the road began to climb. Good heavens, we were nearly to the gentle dun-colored foothills, where the clouds had begun to pile up against distant jagged blue mountains of the Sierra Nevada. At last— an intersection ahead! I slowed down to verify against the map. Yes, the right one. Pretty soon, it began to climb, looping farther and higher into the hills, up into the cloud layer. I ran the wipers to clear away condensation, hoping that the distance along this new road was not as deceptively mapped. I had definitely not counted on two hours there and back. This had better be worth it.

There was a sign, at least… a sign, a gap in the undergrowth, a dirt road leading up into the trees, but the condensation had become a drizzle by the time I pulled into a parking lot, which was merely a couple of cars haphazardly stopped in a roughly mown field around a plain red-painted shed with a deep overhanging roof. The door was open, there were people there, but not as many as there were cars.
“Here, “said a teenaged girl at the cashbox. She handed me a tree saw, and a mimeographed sheet with sketches of the various types of trees with attention to their needles, and a list of prices— so many dollars per foot of tree. “Just cut down the one you want, bring it back here and we’ll figure the price.”
I took the saw, and stuffed the sheet in my shoulder bag, and looked around.
“Where are the trees?”
She pointed out the door, where the dirt road continued up to the top of the hill.
“Up there. They’re all over. Just find one you like.”

My daughter began to lag, halfway up the hill. I looped the tree saw over my arm, and picked her up. The ground was very wet, either sloppy mud, or slippery grass. We had at least come away from the house with coats, but my light-weight tennis shoes were soon saturated. Coming down the slope on the far side, I skidded and sat down rather heavily. Great, now I was wet and muddy to the waist, as well as my daughter. The trees were scattered, not in neat, easily accessed rows, among taller trees and long thickets of grass. It began to rain. I had to put my daughter down and let her walk, but she was not happy about that, and began to sob, quietly.

We would have to find a tree, soon… and close enough that I could drag it… and the saw… and my poor daughter back to the shed. The most convenient trees were either too large, or the more expensive varieties.
There… there was a tree, with the long graceful bunches of needles. It sat on a slope, but it was just a little taller than me. I sat my daughter down, and put my purse in her lap—
“Here, watch this, for Mummy,” and picked a place on the tree’s trunk, about four inches above the clay and clinging soil, put the saw to it and went to work. Mercifully, it only took a few vigorously-expended minutes. I slung my purse and the saw over my arms, picked up the tree and my daughter, and began the long, unhappy, sodden forced-march up over the top of the hill and down towards the sales hut. Some Christmas excursion— wet, pissed-off, on a soggy mountainside with a lopsided Christmas tree, a wet and wailing toddler, and a hour-plus drive, and a longer one in the morning… oh, Christmas tree!

I did soak the trunk of it in a bucket of water, before lashing it to the luggage rack for the drive south the next morning, though that may not have made much difference.
“It’s so fresh!” Mom said, rapturously. “It smells marvelous! Never mind about the flat place, we’ll put that against the wall, and no one will ever know… really, I wonder how long it’s been since the ones in the lot have been cut! I really wonder about that, now.”
“You probably don’t really want to know, “I said. “Merry Christmas… and you owe me $10.”
“Is that all?” Mom said.
“Oh, yeah, “I replied. “That’s all. Merry Christmas.”

My daughter and I are off on a binge of watching Christmas movies, as it seems that episodes of Cadfael, starring Derek Jacobi and a cast clad in lamentably Ren-fair costumes, inspire nightmares in Wee Jamie. So to my regret, we ditched Cadfael … honestly, why is it that the top English actors are generally so ordinary, and individual in appearance? Too many American actors look like underwear models, one indistinguishable from the next, peeled out of the same mold…

Anyway, we started with Home Alone, and Home Alone 2 … although I do note that McCauley Culkin was one of those kid actors who did not ‘adult’ well as he grew. But it was sad to look back at the Home Alone franchise from a nostalgic point of view. No interminable wait to go through security at the airport, for example. And once upon a time, my children, it was possible to go straight to the gate to meet someone arriving. And Home Alone 2 was even more of a punch to the nostalgia gut – the top of the World Trade Center tower, shining and silver. The Plaza Hotel, with Donald Trump in a brief bit part, when he was just a flamboyant TV and tabloid celeb with a penchant for dating models … New York City streets without crazies punching out total strangers. No one wearing masks because they feared the Commie Crud. The first Gulf War was over and won, the Russian Iron Curtain had fallen … and oh, things weren’t perfect, by any means … but most of us didn’t fear our local cops and we trusted the professionalism of the FBI. We could be sure that our politicians and national media didn’t hate the guts of half the American population with a white-hot passion, and we were also pretty certain that kids in most public schools were learning the basics, and not being perved on by teachers and bullied by the urban thug element … well, mostly.

Life was pretty good – and we didn’t even know it.

So I was wandering though my YouTube subscription channels and noticed this one particular bit of restorage – a mid-century modern Moroccan brass coffee table on a wooden stand, which rather decayed object was being renovated and restored. And it reminded me very much of a similar table which served in my parent’s various houses for nearly four decades, until it was destroyed in the 2003 Paradise Mountain Fire in northern San Diego County. That fire pretty much obliterated Mom and Dad’s retirement house. All that was left standing was a quadrangle of conblock walls … everything else in the house burned to a crisp, unless it was a few things that Mom threw into the back of her car, or which the firemen grabbed when the fire began exploding the glass windows inwards. When all was said and done, the insurance claim paid off and the house rebuilt, I think Mom rather had fun replacing the furniture and contents to her own taste, rather than what had been a random collection of family hand-be-downs and stuff acquired because it was available and either inexpensive or free.

The Moroccan brass table that my parents had in their various living rooms looked more like this one on eBay: almost five feet across, engraved overall with an ornate deckle edge and a matching wood and brass “spider” stand, which folded flat. Mom usually had the current issues of her magazines arranged on it, with an antique globe-shaped bowl with blue irises on it in the center. When we were expecting guests, it was usually my chore to remove all the issues of Harpers, The Atlantic, American Heritage and whatever, to apply about a quart of brass polish and the equivalent amount of elbow grease and polish the darned thing, before replacing the array of magazines. But when Mom and Dad refurnished their house, the Moroccan brass coffee table wasn’t something they were fond enough of to replace. The one like it that I located on eBay is on offer for almost $900, nearly half again what it originally ought to have cost. The insurance would have paid for a replacement … if they had wanted one. And why did Mom and Dad give houseroom for so many years to an expensive, high maintenance but distinctly flashy bit of mid-century exotic modern? They didn’t pick it out or pay for it – it came as a gift from Great-Aunt Nan. And thereby hangs a bit of a family story.

I think Great-Aunt Nan worked a lot of different jobs in her lifetime – I am not entirely certain what some of them were; secretarial positions for certain, possibly up-scale retail sales, a telegraphist in the 1930s, a government job in WWII and an enlistment in the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. She might also have had income from what remained of the family fortunes established by her father, my Great-grandfather George. She lived very simply in small rental apartments, and traveled when the urge took her … anyway, one day in the mid-1960s, she was tootling around one of the high-end department stores in downtown Los Angeles. It may have been Bullocks, could have been May Co., or Robinsons. For some reason, Nan went wandering through the furniture department – and spied the Moroccan table and stand.

Holy cow! It was priced at $60, which even then was a steal! Obviously, someone marking the price tag on that table had made a howling blunder by misplacing a decimal point; it should have been marked $600! Well, never one to disdain a bargain, Nan insisted on buying the Moroccan brass table (and stand) for $60, over the strenuous objections of the salesperson, and the department head, and for all that I know, the store manager. No, (said Nan, standing her ground as only a spinster lady of independent means and irreproachable English upbringing could) – she knew the rights of retail sales. What the price on the sales floor was marked as – that was what it would sell for, and she would have that Moroccan brass table (and stand) for the $60 marked price, or else… I have no doubt that Nan would have raised the matter all the way to the Bullock’s company president and the board of directors.

Of course, Nan emerged triumphant, with the $60-dollar Moroccan brass table (and stand) in her possession – an item for which she had about as much use for as a goldfish does for long winter underwear. It was the principle of the thing, and too good a bargain to pass up. She gave it to Mom and Dad, who also appreciated bargains, even if it wasn’t for an item which they liked particularly well. Free was an even better deal than $60.

And that is the tale of the inadvertently marked-down Moroccan brass coffee table (and stand.) You’re welcome.

Seeing this article, about the auction of original art for the Church Mice book series brought back memories of the first Church Mice books, which I bought from an English book catalog when I was stationed in Greece with my then-preschool-aged daughter. There was a Stars and Stripes bookstore on base, and a tiny children’s bookstore in Glyphada then, but for anything else, I had to order by mail. I think I had a subscription to the Hatchard’s catalog, or some book service which specialized in providing books to English-speaking readers scattered far and wide, in localities without books in English. I bought regularly, for myself and for my daughter and we loved the Church Mice series for the very witty and lavishly detailed illustrations of the adventures of Sampson the cat and his mouse friends, who lived in a church. The illustrations were every bit as charming as Beatrix Potter’s little animal paintings. It appears that all the original paintings are to be sold at auction – the author wished to benefit a charity with the sale of his art, and his art kit, too.

When my sisters’ children were small, and I wanted to get books for them, I looked for the Church Mice series – and they weren’t available in the US, since this was before Amazon went in for UK children’s books. I had to give money and a list for the Gentleman With Whom I was Keeping Company, so that he could buy them in Britain for me, and mail them to my sister. Most of the series are available now on Amazon, albeit mostly at a hefty price. I’ve been looking at them for Wee Jamie, now, the ones that I didn’t have for my daughter. I’d love to have one of the original art pieces, but it looks like having a few more of the books is slightly more doable in these economic times.

Misty, watercolor memories of Hawaii, have been brought back by news of the awful, catastrophic fires on Maui; memories of the Girl Scout troop that my buddy Esther T. and I moved into for our senior high school year did a camping trip there in the summer of 1971. My memory has the trip being two or three weeks in duration and hitting all four main islands by local puddle-jumper airline transport and inexpensive rental cars. There had been two senior Girl Scout troops in Sunland-Tujunga at that time – Esther and I had gone to Europe the summer before with the most enterprising troop, but because we were a year younger than the other girls, we had to fill out our last year in Scouting with the other troop which was … well, better than not being in a troop at all. Esther and I had much reason to suspect that the leadership of that second troop was in fruitless competition with our first in organizing trips to interesting destinations. That leadership was also dead keen on camping and backpacking, and not really good at it, which hardships Esther and I and the other girls endured stoically. One of our weekend expeditions put us at a campsite in the San Bernardino mountains, early in spring, before the snow had melted. The snow melted in late afternoon, soaking our bedrolls and freezing at night – I had a whole new appreciation for the hardships of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, after that experience. I was usually sick for several days after one of these excursions, but that is by the by. Hawaii for a couple of weeks wasn’t a patch on Europe for the whole summer, but it was doable from money that I saved out of my allowance, lunch money and babysitting … and anyway, Hawaii was temperate and tropical. No hazard of frostbite from camping out at Little Jimmy Spring with a thin sleeping bag and no tent. And we all had read James Michener’s Hawaii and watched Hawaii-5-0 on TV, so we had some vague idea of what to expect.

There would be four drivers of the rental cars to tour the first three islands; Hawaii, the Big Island, Maui, and Kauai, with a final stop on Oahu, and a stay at the YWCA’s hostel on Waikiki beach: Troop Leader, Troop Co-Leader, Troop Leader’s Husband and Co-Leader’s Husband, with the twenty girls parceled out among the rental cars. Esther and I did privately decide that we would do our best to ride in the rental driven by Troop Leader’s Husband; in our judgement, he was the one sane adult of the lot. And so we winged our way Hawaii – first stop, Hilo on the Big Island, which was everything that we had expected of a lush green tropical paradise; palm trees, plumeria, frangipani, ginger, jasmine, fields of pineapples, and stands of thick undergrowth tangled with passionfruit vines. Most houses that we drove past on the outskirts of Hilo on our way to where we were camping were single story cottages, with verandahs open to the sea breeze, and shallow metal hipped rooves that gleamed like tarnished old silver, nestled among lush greenery.

And oh, the beaches – every one of them spectacularly beautiful; white sugar sand and blue, blue water, like blue satin trimmed with foaming white lace as the waves broke. The only exception to this was a black sand beach, sand worked up from black volcanic lava – that beach was at Hana, on Maui, where we went the whole twisting way of the coastal road, and I was probably vilely car-sick most of the way. We went to see the volcano, of course; it was not active at the time, and frankly, looked more like an open pit made of rough black lava stone. The fern grotto on Kauai was a bit of a disappointment, though – the ferns were mostly dead and dried up.  I don’t have any particular memory of Lahaina, although we might have passed through. I have a better recollection of Kailua-Kona, an old whaling station on the Big Island – a modest several blocks along the waterfront, with an old missionary church and the remains of King  Kamehameha’s royal fishponds, where the owner of a little souvenir shop along the waterfront picked some fresh bananas from the tree by her shop and gave them to us – and they were about the best that I had ever tasted. There was an older gentleman with his family, camping near us at one of the beaches who told us what to do if we stepped on a broken bit of coral and it embedded in our foot, the tour bus driver who explained to us how the missionaries who came to Hawaii did an enormous amount of good, early on – it was their descendants who turned out to be somewhat less of an ornament to society.  There was a Navy retiree who had actually been at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked – he had been on his bicycle, on Ford Island, on his way to duty at his post when all hell broke out. I have good memories of all the people we met along the way, although honestly it is hard to imagine anyone being deliberately hostile to a group of earnest and friendly teenagers who were basically doing a modest budget trip to the Islands. I’ve since drawn on such memories in my own books, mostly for My Dear Cousin, and the short Luna City story, Radio Silence.

We had one slightly more luxurious stay at the Kaheely Mountain Camp – likely again on the Big Island, where room-sized tents were set up on masonry foundations, and there was a hot-tub under the stars, surrounded by a hedge of fragrant tropical plants. That was sheer heaven, basking in the warm water, in the twilight – but even nicer was that a member of the staff came around on a little electric golf cart of an evening to collect the dishes and pots that we had used to fix supper; they had a central dishwashing facility. We finished out the trip with three or four days at the Waikiki beach club, which was on the second story of a tall modern building overlooking Fort DeRussy, the Army’s recreation center. The beach was gorgeous – especially the sunsets, and we did the usual tourist things – a venture to Pearl Harbor and the Arizona Memorial, an evening luau at the LDS-sponsored Polynesian Cultural Center, and spent some little money at the International Village Marketplace, which was within walking distance of where we were staying.

The last few days were slightly marred, when three of the girls slipped the vigilance of Troop Leader & Company and went out partying and got disgracefully drunk with some soldiers at Fort DeRussy; two of them were caught by Troop Leader in the wee hours of the morning throwing up in the bathroom of the YWCA, to be sent home early in disgrace. (The main disgrace being that one of the girls was Troop Leader’s own daughter.) I slept through the ruckus – Esther briefed me the next morning, as we stood waist-deep in the surf and out of earshot of anyone.

And that was my misty-water-colored memories of Hawaii, brought back to me by the horror of the Maui fires – you’d never think of such a thing, when Hawaii is supposed to be a soggy tropical jungle, but in point of fact, large parts of the Big Island and Maui are basically high-altitude desert, once away from the coast, and terrifically vulnerable to brush fires. But a firestorm such as blasted through Lahaina is a particularly awful disaster, akin to the mainland fires like the great Hinkley fire which obliterated whole communities without much warning, more than a century ago.