Steve Dublanica Aka The Waiter: Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip--Confessions of a Cynical Waiter
Emmanuel Carrere: The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception
Debra Gwartney: Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love
Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
Amanda Ripley: The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (CD)
Nora Ephron: I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being a Woman (CD)
Nathaniel Philbrick: In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
Judith Freeman: The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved
Enjoy and prize Independence Day, my friends. I'm on deadline and so, inside. But tonight, we get on a plane and fly away, nine blessed days in Martha's Vineyard. No blogging, no tweeting, no She Writes, no Facebook. If you want to reach me, I'll be sitting on the porch at the Chilmark Store.
I had the great pleasure earlier in the year to meet author Debra Gwartney, author of Live Through This, a memoir of the years when her young teenage daughters ran away from home. I also got to meet the daughters (that's them on the cover), now grown, and to write about them. The piece, "Surviving with Two Runaway Daughters," appears this week in the LA Weekly. A clip:
The struggle over whether to keep reaching for children who
repeatedly reject her (about which [Gwartney's husband Barry] Lopez, who met Gwartney in 1990,
says, “She did not share or complain”), or to let them go (Gwartney’s
Idahoan father tells her, “Just cut your losses; you got two to take
care of”) lets us know, in a new and horrifying way, why parents freak
out when confronted with a daughter’s adolescence; that we are afraid
not (only) of what some man or men might do to her, but we are afraid of
her, of the awesome unhappiness and unfixable rage that inhabits her
body like a toxin, until she finds herself cutting (as Gwartney’s
oldest daughter did) to get it out, and which properly or perhaps
improperly harnessed becomes a cannonball that blows holes in the
entirety of existence, as it does when Gwartney watches, in real time,
the decision of her second daughter to follow her older sister, who she
has just learned is not coming home:
“Stephanie sank back, away from me, all angles and stiffness, and I saw a plan flit across her face that was unmistakable ... she’d go where Amanda was. As soon as she could. I reached for her again, terrified now and planning to squeeze the desire to leave me from her skinny body ... neither of us admitting to the other what was already set in motion, both of us frightened — she would not be without her sister, and I would not lose another child.”
My sweet friend Amy Alkon, who's attending the awards ceremony in Phoenix, called just now to say, "You won two seconds ago!"
It's for "No Exit Plan." I am of course pleased and honored. I won for feature writing once before, in 2001, for "Jena at 15."
And now, my husband is taking me to Fred Meyer to buy a mop.
*Updated: the winners list was not yet online when we went to Freddy's, but is now: many congratulations to my pals and fellow winners, Matt Davis at the Mercury, who nabbed two; Kevin Allman, editor in chief of The Gambit, which also took two; Jonathan Gold, who took (another!) first for food writing, and Willamette Week, which also won two. Congrats, my friends -- a toast!
Or, what my friend Amy Alkon (that's her left arm, bottom right) called these photos, taken by her boyfriend Gregg at last week's LA Press Club awards. I love them!
I am sorry it has come to this, but it has: I simply cannot answer any more emails from people, nearly always non-journalists whom I don't know, who ask by email how to break into journalism. I have spent hours and days and weeks answering these questions; I have met people for coffee, people who with one exception have not, as far as I can tell, done anything to advance their careers. I've said it a dozen times: I don't want to be anyone's mentor, and I am happy to share my editorial contacts provided you are serious. But replying to the random, tossed-off, "So, I'm thinking about being a journalist, what do I do?" No more. Sorry.
Why do people think it's any different from making it in any other profession, meaning, do a good job, a better than expected job, and do it again and again and again?
So here's my advice, once and for all: Be courteous, meet your deadlines; make your editors' lives easier. You sell the pitch, not the completed story. Remember, it's their publication, not yours. Don't call on deadline day, and frankly, don't call at all. Email. Don't expect an instant answer, and yes, it's OK to send one reminder email. Read a lot, write a lot; write better. Start a blog to keep yourself well-oiled and for connectivity (and for god's sake, don't be like the ninny who, when I suggested as much, replied, "But what about copyright?!") Get your facts and your spelling right; be generous in your writing. Never, ever, ever betray your subjects. Don't massage the material to suit your idea of the narrative -- that's called fiction. Strive to be great.
I just now tweeted a question to fellow journalists, asking what they do/what advice I should dole out. Here's what I've gotten back. I will refresh as well as paste in what I get in the comments:
Part IV about Amanda Jo Stott-Smith and her children. Part I here; II, here; III, here.
In the early hours of May 23, Amanda Jo Stott-Smith forced her two young children off the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon. Her seven-year-old daughter Trinity survived the 75-foot fall and, after more than a half-hour in the water, was rescued by two Good Samaritans.
Eldon Smith, her four-year-old brother, did not make it. By
the time rescuers found the boy, he had drowned. This very public death has had
public repercussions; newspaper editorials wonder what could have been done and
what might be done now. Portland flew its flag at half-staff in honor of Eldon,
and there’s debate amongst city commissioners as to how to pay for a new rescue
boat.
Eldon’s former preschool did not acknowledge his death, or not more than sending home an email to class parents. Perhaps the administration was trying to protect the kids; perhaps the silence was a bid at self-preservation; maybe they felt they should have known more. But I am looking at pictures of the kids in Eldon’s class, seventeen smiling four- and five-year-olds, and Eldon is smiling, too, showing his baby teeth, and there is no way to tell, from this photo, that he will be the child that’s soon murdered.
“There
hung an awkwardness in the air today, as adults gave fake half-grins to each
other, slowly greeting each child to the last day of preschool.”
This comment posted to my blog at 10:40 PM, the day after my first piece about Stott-Smith and her children. It came from a woman whose son had been Eldon’s best friend. The woman, who I will call Sarah, was disturbed by what she’d seen at preschool. Also, at the treatment Stott-Smith was receiving on blogs and in the press, people calling for her public execution and branding her a monster.
“She
has stood right next to me. If she is so evil, why couldn’t I tell? And if
she’s not evil, what ‘broke in her’? ‘Broke in her’ are the words my homicide
detective-friend used to try to help me make sense of it all (everyone should
have one of these kids of friends) … As
disgusted, and horrified, and frightened as I am by what she did, I can’t bring
myself to believe she was evil. That seems too easy.”
“At the church, any
parent out of a particular box, that would have been noticeable,” said Sarah,
of her fellow parent’s comment. “All
these people can write these comments after she’s done this thing. Well, if
they felt she was evil and creepy, why didn’t they go and intervene beforehand?
They should have been concerned for the kids if they thought she was that bad.”
Before Sarah, blond with watchful eyes, leaves for summer
vacation with her two children – a 12-year-old daughter and five-year-old
Stefan (not his real name) – we meet for coffee. We talk about coffee. We talk
about restaurants. We are both on our feet to rush after a two-year-old who’s slipped
from her mother and run out the front door.
“My mom was a teenage mom, and I guess I look at it from the perspective of what my childhood was like, and think of Eldon that way,” says Sarah, when we re-seat ourselves. “I had the mom who was very immature, and sporadic, and violent, and screaming, and trying to keep me from my dad when they divorced. And I keep thinking, my god, my mom was probably not much more different than Eldon’s mom. And I could have been, maybe under a different circumstance, thrown off a bridge.”
Sarah’s voice is even; she is not asking for special
consideration. The steadiness of her eyes, the stillness of her hands in her
lap, says she is on to the next part of her life; I know she lives a good life,
with her husband, in Lake Oswego. She will ask, later, that I do not make her
mother out to be a villain; that those times have passed.
“My mom’s grown-up now, and she’s wonderful and an amazing grandmother,” she says. “But as a teenager, having a little kid – she was ostracized by her parents, and my dad left her, and I’m sure I wasn’t always easy and she had no money – you kind of wonder what all those pressures can do.”
Perhaps those pressures are what the mother on the
Oregonian blog referred; maybe she saw the cracks. Sarah doesn’t think so.
“She [Stott-Smith] sat in those meetings just like a normal
parent,” she says. “There was a picture of her with him [Eldon] in her lap, on
the first day of school. Just like, normal. It was just normal.”
I say to Sarah, she was the mom next to you.
“Yes,” she says. “She was like every parent, suburban mom, driving a station wagon.”
I ask how her son and Eldon became friends. “Stefan didn’t talk about anybody for maybe the first week or two, but then it was clear: he always talked about Eldon,” she says. “You can go into a preschool class and you can observe the boys, and there are those boys that throw themselves on the floor and they make loud noises and they’re jumping all over the place. And then you have boys who are really rules-oriented and quiet and much more reserved and not as rambunctious. My son and Eldon were very much the same, not rambunctious, very calm; very rules-oriented.”
Sarah’s smile loses some of its warmth. “He [Eldon] was so quiet and rules-oriented, it made me wonder if he wasn’t just a classic example of a child who…” She pauses. “You know, when you’re around a parent who’s so incredibly volatile, or you’re being hit, you always try, you walk a very tight and narrow path, and you have to read people quick. So every time he saw his mother, he probably had within an instant to read whether or not this was going to be a good moment, or a bad moment. I’m not surprised about any hitting or any of that, [but] I never saw marks on him or anything like that.”
She takes from her bag a photo of Eldon and Stefan in the
Christmas pageant, standing over a cradle holding the baby Jesus, in this incarnation, a Cabbage Patch doll
“So, he’s four,” she says, of Eldon. “His birthday is in
August... There were talks about having all the boys over in April, for my
son’s birthday, but it never happened.”
Never happened because in the midst of the divorce proceedings with her husband, Stott-Smith pulled Eldon out of school. “That was March,” says Sarah, and that she did not see Eldon again.
And again, she reaches into her purse and takes out a copy of the children’s class pictures. “He was the most adorable, out of the whole class. He’s a cherub,” she says, running her finger over Eldon’s face. “He looks a lot like [his mother]. She has that American Indian or Hawaiian or Polynesian look, and she has that beautiful hair. I still remember what his hair feels like because he had one of those, I wouldn’t say a buzz cut necessarily, but it was… clipped. And I just remember running my hands over his head and he’d have the prickly little feel but it was still soft. I remember doing that because I was so happy to meet him.”
She smiles at the photo, of a boy with big dark round eyes
and the apple cheeks of a young child. “Very, very sweet,” she says. “Quiet,
very quiet.”
Sarah told her son about Eldon’s death just after she received, as did all the parents in Eldon’s class, an email from the school, informing people what had happened.
“Unfortunately, my husband was leaving for Europe within half an hour of us finding out, and he didn’t want me to tell Stefan, but I didn’t want Stefan to find out at preschool,” she says. “So I waited, and as soon as my husband got in the town car and drove away, I sat down and told Stefan what happened.
“I made it so simple. I said, ‘I have some bad news.’ And he said, ‘Is that why you were crying?’ And I said, ‘Yes. And I just want to let you know that Eldon died and he’s up in heaven’ – because I honestly didn’t know what to say. I said, ‘And he can’t come back.’
“Stefan started crying and he asked what happened, and I said that Eldon drowned in the river. And I didn’t go any further than that; it just seemed pointless… I actually never heard him cry like that. It was so mournful. And he said, ‘Can we write a letter to his mother? I want her to know how much I liked Eldon.’ And it just broke my heart.
“After he’d had a little bit of time to mourn, I said, ‘Did
you know, people can get mail in heaven?’ I really didn’t know what I was
talking about, but we went and bought roses, and then I walked Stefan to the
bridge, and we wrote him [Eldon] a letter, and we released it on these three
balloons, and as luck would have it, it went straight up, and looked as if it
had just been plucked out of the sky. And then Stefan said, ‘My sadness flew
away with the balloons.’
“But I know he is angry, too, because he said, ‘Why did his mom let him swim in the river?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ He goes, ‘Well, why wasn’t she watching him?’ It was very much like: she wasn’t doing her job. And there was nothing I could say.”
Sarah says she does not know how many parents in the class
have told their children about Eldon’s death, and does not know because “no
one’s ever talked about it or brought it up.”
“We went to graduation and they had a little carnival for everybody. This was on a Friday [six days after Eldon was killed],” she says, her voice taking on a little steam. “Eldon’s name was taken off the graduation list for the class; there was no mention of it, nobody said anything. When the pastor spoke, there was no mention of, ‘Let’s remember all those who aren’t with us.’ I can see them not mentioning it to the children, but there had to have been at least subtle ways to at least honor the fact that he had been at that school.”
She pauses, seeming to summon some patience before
she continues. “At the carnival, I
went specifically looking for the photos of Eldon, because I knew we could take
whatever photos [from the more than two hundred] we wanted off the wall,” she
says. “I thought, there have to be some – because I had seen them before –
pictures of Eldon and his mom and other photos of him in the classroom.”
She stops, her eyes
asking, can you guess what’s
coming? “They had all been
removed. He’d been gone, not even a week, and he was erased. Like someone had
taken a little eraser and he never existed.”
What prompted such action, what they were afraid of, Sarah has no idea. “It’s not the way I live my life,” she says.
We talk about what I previously wrote; how I thought Stott-Smith
had walked the kids onto the bridge. Sarah disagrees.
“I don’t think she
walked her children down that bridge,” she says. “I walked my son down that
bridge, and it took a long time, dragging a five-year-old. I couldn’t imagine
taking him if he were tired. I think she was screaming on the phone with her
ex-husband; I think she snapped, I think she just stopped the car right there,
and just, in a very short amount of time…”
She does not finish the sentence. And though it will not be released in the news for ten days, Sarah is correct; Stott-Smith was on the phone with her estranged husband, to whom she’d recently lost custody of the children, crying and telling him, “You’ve taken my joy away” and “Why have you done this to me?” – just before or after the children were forced off the bridge.
“You have to wonder why would anybody throw… what would make
that break?” Sarah asks. “Whether it
was a series of poor choices, or bad parents, or whatever; she got driven to a
point of desperation. And I just feel so sorry for her, because she
can’t take it back. And I bet you she has these moments of panic when she opens
her eyes in the morning and she just wishes she could backpedal and that it’s
not real. But it is real. And she just can’t change it.”
Sarah does not think the murder premeditated. “She [Stott-Smith] didn’t wake up that morning and say; she was going to kill her kids,” she says. “There’s no way she woke up and thought that.”
I tell her, I agree and I don’t. I think, somewhere, the seed of doing what she did took root; she may have been able to ignore it, maybe for a long time, but that day, through the convolution, it was the option that made sense. That this has to be the case, because it happened. Yes, Sarah says, but can there be any other reason except that Stott-Smith sought to destroy herself?
"I don’t think that
Eldon’s mom believed that anybody loved her, and I think everything that she
loved she threw off the bridge,” she says. “That’s what I really think. She
punished herself; she punished her soon to be ex-husband, she punished her
parents, she punished life. It’s almost like she threw all her anger, all her
sorrow, all her joy, everything; everything that was her; that she actually
had. There was nothing left for her but these kids.”
I tell Sarah what I
learned a few days earlier: that Stott-Smith was over the rail of the
ninth-floor parking garage when she was apprehended; that she was falling when
a cop grabbed her wrist and dragged her back from where she wanted to go.
"I really believe she had no other choice," says Sarah, as we gather our things. "That's the hair between life and death, and obviously it wasn't meant for her to die. Why? That's what we're hopefully going to find out."
I won Best Feature last night at the LA Press Club awards, for "No Exit Plan."
My pal Amy "Advice Goddess" Alkon won for (ha!) best headline, "From Beer to Eternity." That's us, at left, after the third glass of wine xx
Tonight, Friday, 6:35 PM, the Victoria Taft Show, KPAM 860, talking about "Anatomy of a Child Pornographer," my article in the July issue of Reason magazine.
Fly to LA tomorrow for Press Club awards, and to see the peeps.
I am not deranged! But really, how can anyone look anything but a proper mess compared to Izadora, the beautiful, perpetually-smiling, hair-maven daughter of Matt Welch and Emmanuelle Richard? We all had coffee today, as well as with Michael Totten, at Ristretto Williams. And while it was wonderful, super-wonderful to see them, and to talk shop, the highlight for me may have been being able to feed Izi a bottle.
"You miss it?" asked Emmanuelle. Gee, what gave it away?
My first piece for the Oregonian's Sunday Opinion section, "Honeymoon's Over," runs today. When I referred to it last night as "Part 3" of my writings about the Stott-Smith case (part 1, here, part 2, here), my husband said, "But comparatively, light." The lead:
Among Oregon's top news stories in 2003 were those about men who'd killed with such indifference to human suffering, the physical shock of their actions threatened to blow the citizenry right off its pins.
First, there was Christian Longo, convicted of murdering his young son and daughter by tying pillowcases filled with rocks to their ankles, stuffing them into a sleeping bag and throwing them, while still alive, into an inlet on the Oregon coast; his strangled wife and toddler's bodies were found in a nearby bay. Then, there was the ongoing case against Ward Weaver, who eventually would plead guilty to the rape and murder of two adolescent girls, whose bodies, one entombed in concrete, he hid in his yard in Oregon City.
I hadn't read a thing about either of these crimes until I bought a house in Portland that same year. Where, I wondered, was I moving?
My article, "Anatomy of a Child Pornographer," just posted at Reason online. It will be in the July issue of the print magazine. Here's the opening:
“She said, ‘I think it’s about Laurie,’ ” Alex recalls. “My stomach kind of dropped, and I thought, ‘This is not going to be good.’ ”
The previous Friday, after coming home from football practice with a few teammates, Alex had exchanged text messages with Laurie, a 14-year-old freshman (whose name has been changed in this story, as has Alex’s and his family’s). While his friends played Guitar Hero on his PS2, Alex, captain of the football, basketball, and tennis teams, read a message from Laurie saying she wanted to be a cheerleader.
“I said, well, I needed a cute cheerleader this year,” recalls Alex, a deep-voiced kid with an open face, dark eyes, and the synaptic quickness of a natural athlete. “And she said, ‘Oh, yeah? Well, is this cute?’ And then…”
And then Alex made what he now calls “that little two-second decision to mess up my whole life.” He opened photos Laurie took of herself with her cell-phone, in her bra and panties, and then just her panties. Alex texted back, asking for more and noting that the reception on his Verizon LG phone was crap. No problem, Laurie replied. She would send the photos to his email address. They soon arrived along with a bonus attachment: a video clip of Laurie performing a striptease. Alex was happy to receive the images and says Laurie seemed happy to send them, “like she was willing and she wanted to show more, I guess.” That might have been the end of it, had the files not, as digital files will, leaked onto the Internet. Within a day after Alex saw them, so did Laurie’s mother, who phoned Betty to say, “You need to talk to your son.”
So Betty and her husband Bill sat Alex on the stump that serves as a stool before the hearth of the home where three generations of Betty’s family have lived and asked Alex, a leader of their church youth group and recipient of several good citizen awards, what had happened. Alex told them. He said he was sorry and wanted to apologize. Betty called Laurie’s mother, who told her that an apology would be insufficient. Alex texted Laurie to ask what was going on. She answered that her father really wanted “to lay down the law.”
And now the law stood at Alex’s front door, asking on behalf of the Genesee County Sheriff ’s Department how the pictures came to be distributed. Alex explained that he had left the email inbox open on his Dell desktop. His buddy had forwarded the images to his own address. (According to Alex, he hadn’t shown the photos to anyone or posted them to his MySpace or Facebook pages, so he assumed this was how they made their way onto the Net. Later he would learn he was one of four boys who had received snapshots from Laurie and from whose computers the images had, like mononucleosis, spread exponentially.)
The trooper printed Alex’s statement on a printer he’d brought with him and watched while Alex signed it. Charges, he said, were pending.
500 Things to Eat Before It’s Too Late: And the Very Best Places to Eat Them
Jane Stern and Michael Stern. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $19.95 paper (448p) ISBN 9780547059075
Veteran road dogs and James Beard Award-winning food journalists Jane and Michael Stern (Roadfood, Two for the Road)
have what may be their best offering yet in this easy to use,
consolidated guide to America’s best off-the-beaten-path eateries.
Along the way, the Sterns identify the best of everything crave-worthy:
regional specialties like cheese steaks in Philly, southern sweets like
banana pudding and key lime pie, as well as (admittedly subjective)
national rankings for classics like ribs, burgers and French fries.
They even scour elusive vendors like Connecticut hot dog wagons and San
Francisco taco trucks. Other notable suggestions: a cool glass of the
Latino rice milk beverage Horchata at Guelaguetza in L.A., the
Northwest’s best cup of coffee at Ristretto Roasters in Portland; and
the best cherry pie in Michigan at Beulah’s Cherry Hut. Homebodies can
make do with a handful of recipes (including Cincinnati five way chili,
and Massachusetts’s Dirt Bomb, a cinnamon and sugar-rolled muffin), but
the Sterns’ lyrical and enthusiastic field reports, topped off with
suggestions for after-meal exploring (Philadelphia’s medical anomalies
museum, New Orleans’s Audobon Insectarium), should be enough to get any
reader with a taste for mom-and-pop Americana hungry for the road. (June)
I went on Friday to the Sellwood Bridge. I told my husband I was going to buy watermelons, but instead I drove to the bridge. I wanted to see where Amanda Jo Stott-Smith took her children last week and, so far as we know, threw them over. I wrote about this. Today, Sunday, they buried the little boy. I did not attend the funeral because it was private.
But I did go to the bridge. To get there from the east side, you must drive on SE Tacoma Street, and then, lest you wind up going over the bridge, turn north. The closest cross street is Sixth; I parked there and wondered if Stott-Smith had, too.
I walked the long block to the east end of the bridge and
saw the sort of memorial that is spontaneously set up for children who are
murdered. There were stuffed bunnies and teddy bears and one Mylar balloon that
read, “We’ll miss you.” There was a white board, onto which people had written
their good-byes and god blesses. Some of the writing was in children’s large
wobbly script, “To the bravest girl in the world! We are sorry to hear about
your brother.” Tucked amongst the wilted bouquets were notes, including one
from a little girl that read, “I hope you new birthday life goes well.”
I continued on the bridge itself. The walkway is narrow, perhaps four feet. Approaching cyclists do and must ring their bells; two people cannot easily pass. The bridge has two traffic lanes, one in each direction. There is no walkway on the other, south side of the bridge. If Stott-Smith walked her children onto the Sellwood Bridge, where I was walking is where they walked.
I don’t know what happened on the bridge that night. Only
two living people do, the little girl, who’s been released from the hospital in
good physical condition and who has been interviewed by police, and
Stott-Smith. I have no idea whether she’s given any details. I can tell you
different versions of what I think happened, and you’re not going to like any
of them. I am telling you now: you may not want to keep reading. It’s going to
make you mad and very sad and perhaps angry with me for letting my mind go
where it’s gone. As I wrote last time, I am trying to understand. Saying
Stott-Smith is “the definition of evil”; suggesting, as someone did on the
Oregonian’s website, that the thing to do, the thing that would make us feel
better, is bind Stott-Smith’s hands and feet and throw her over the bridge,
doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t explain anything.
As I walked the bridge on Friday, I thought, maybe
Stott-Smith did not park and walk. Maybe she stopped the car on the roadway.
This seems unlikely. Had she stopped the car, she would have caused cars to jam
up behind her, and been seen by cars coming from the other direction. Even on a
dark night on the poorly lit bridge, someone would have seen her taking
children from the car and thought, what the hell? I don’t think she
could have taken that chance.
The next time you are out, or perhaps you can do this in your own living room, look at the size of four- and seven-year-old children. They’re very small. You can lift them from beneath their arms and pass them over a waist-high rail with no trouble. Two would be more trouble if they were kicking and screaming. They would have been dead weight had she taken them warm and sleeping from the car.
But I don’t think the children were sleeping, because I don’t think she could have parked on the roadway, gotten them out, thrown them over, and sped off without being seen. It’s too busy and too tight a roadway. I am not even taking into consideration that she might pause for a moment after throwing her two children over the rail and into the river seventy-five feet below.
Did she look down? Did she see them in the water? How long did she wait? She would have heard them, not merely because we know the girl, at least the girl, was crying and moaning, but because a mother, whether she wants to or not, recognizes her child’s cry. I had this happen in a hospital full of squalling newborns. Under orders to walk, I was on the other side of the building when I heard crying and knew it was my newborn and, as fast as the stitches allowed, got back to my room to see she’d been brought there, where she waited, screaming for me, for someone.
We have no idea yet how long Stott-Smith waited on the bridge after she threw her children down, or if she waited at all. If she parked her car on the roadway, she could not have waited. She would have to have gotten back in the car and driven off.
But as I said, I don’t think she did park on the bridge. I think she walked the children onto the bridge. Is it possible she made a game of the walk? This seems an unlikely scenario; that she could have had the largeness or smallness of heart to tell her children, we’re going to play a game. One does not want to see the children skipping, at one in the morning, along that narrow walkway. Though one is inclined to think, there would be no skipping. It’s scary enough in the daytime, for an adult, feeling the velocity of the passing cars, walking astride the waist-high rail. It’s too easy to go over that rail. Even when you know you have no intention of going over. Looking at the water below, I experienced the hot, wavy feeling you get in the backs of your thighs when you look down from a great height.
It’s unlikely the children experienced this. It was dark. It was late, past young children’s bedtime. Their adrenaline would have been pumping for other reasons – how mad was mommy? What was happening? And in any event, they were too small, too short to see over the railing, to see how far down the water was. What could they know of their fate? They couldn’t have known. Being thrown off a bridge was out of their purview, out of their range of experience, outside the parenthesis of what four- to seven-year olds need to know.
I am having a difficult time thinking their mother told
them what she was going to do. But I have read the following, and it makes me
very unhappy to know it:
“A massive search was launched about 1:20 a.m. when 9-1-1 calls started coming in from people who heard the screams of children and an adult woman coming from the river.”
So she was yelling at them. Where were they? Did she make them stand together, with their backs against the concrete railing, with its church-window-shaped cutouts? It is possible the boy was small enough to crawl through one of these cutouts. Certainly, neither of the children stood as high as the rail. They may have been stood with their backs against it, facing their mother, the wind of the cars pushing them against it. They have to have been terribly frightened: what were they doing here, with the cars passing, perhaps people honking? Perhaps their mother had to wave cars on, to say, “We’re okay, we’re fine,” and the children would have thought, are we?
I think it is more likely the mother was ranting. Perhaps she was holding the boy, squirming and crying, and pulling the girl by the hand. Perhaps she was in a mood so bad, a mood the children could not hope to navigate, that all was chaos. Perhaps she told them what she was going to do. While it seems even more heartless to inflict the information on them, I prefer this to seeing them tossed in their sleep, or being made to jump. They knew their fate, impossible as it was, and in the case of the girl, was somehow able to gird for it.
The boy, who drowned, had no chance. How, at four years old, in a moving river, in the middle of the night, do you survive? You don’t. You take in some water, and you take in a little more. I imagine his sister would have been holding onto to him; that’s what I would have done for my little brother; it’s your job. We have no idea how she held onto him; we do know they were found right next to each other. We know this from the two people who went out on their boat and found the children.
Haag and his companion Cheryl Robb are being called heroes, and I think they did act heroically, no doubt. I think everyone who has heard about what Stott-Smith did to her children wishes they could have helped; perhaps, in our minds, we are lined up on the bank of the river in the middle of the night, each offering Eldon, the little boy, one more breath. He had only his sister in the water with him. She did the best she could. She screamed. She yelled. We know this from the TV news:
A splash. One splash. They went in together.
Where was their mother? Can we imagine her standing on the bridge, watching her children drift north, wondering when they would stop crying? Was she afraid someone would hear her children? Was that what got her back in her car and gone, the fear of being caught being broadcast with each of her daughter’s cries?
Or did she just walk back to her car as the children drifted north. Or did she run? Was she crying? Was she yelling? Was she white and cold with shock? Was she pleased? Did she feel victorious? Was she afraid? Did she think twice and then say to herself, well, too late now? Did she call their names?
And would they have heard her? It was a windless night, the only reason, David Haag said, that he was able to hear the girl's screams. As I am sure her mother did.
Like books? You are going to love love love love love this section, with authors aplenty telling you what books they love, which ones they're sorry they finished, which ones they've never finished. Plus this year's great beach reads; literary pull quotes, books on the horizon and those authors you really, really should be reading. Plus my take on Kindle, all courtesy of City Arts Magazine (which puts out three editions, Seattle, Tacoma and Eastside, so pick on up, will ya?)
This past Saturday morning, at around 1 AM, Amanda Jo Stott-Smith, 31, apparently threw or otherwise caused her two children to fall off the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon. The children, four-year-old Eldon Jay Rebhan Smith, 4, and a 7-year-old girl landed 75 feet below in the Willamette River. People living along the water heard moans, and at about 1:30, residents David Haag and Cheryl Robb took their boat onto the river, and found the children. Haag jumped into the water and retrieved the boy, who was dead, and the girl, still alive despite having spent up to 30 minutes in the 56-degree water. She was taken to the hospital, where her condition continues to improve.
Stott-Smith was found later that morning, around ten, on the ninth floor of a downtown Portland parking garage. When the police confronted her, she threatened to jump, but was talked out of it and taken into custody.
Today at 2 PM, she was to be arraigned. I arrive at 1:30, and walk in just behind a photographer for the Oregonian. Doug Beghtel and I are the only two people in the gallery. When one of the women working on the other side of the divider ask if we're with the Oregonian, Doug says yes and I say, "Not yet." I am there simply because I am compelled, as well as having been urged by a friend to write about Stott-Smith.
Doug and I are joined by James, a cameraman for Channel 12. We talk about whether Stott-Smith will appear with her face down or facing forward; what her condition might be and what caused her to do this; we talk about other cases, other murders. We talk about the helplessness of schizophrenics, and the coolness and calculation of psychopaths.
"When they start letting people in, it's going to get really crowded," says Doug, which is when I realize, I'd ridden his draft; I am not supposed to be in the room yet at all; that they let in the photographers early in oder that they might secure good angles.
At 2:10, the room fills, with 22 people on four rows of pew-like benches. Someone from the Tribune hands Doug his card and says, "Make sure we get a photo, too." One of the deputies in city-park-green uniform tells people, no cells phones, no cameras, or we'll be asked to leave. I see only one laptop. There are perhaps four reporters there, tops. I am not sure who the other people are. But I think perhaps the young man in the back row, the one flanked by two women and snuffling loudly, is related to Stott-Smith in some way; he looks as though he's been crying. If he is here because of her, or is some relation to her, I think, I want to speak with him. I glance back. He meets my eye.
There are a dozen people on the other side of the divide, women filing and talking and using computers. Something one of them says makes them laugh, and I think, this seems an affront, in light of what's happened; it seems almost cruel, but then I think, it's another workday for them, and how, in fact, I'd like to write about one of them, perhaps the heavy-set one drinking a diet Shasta. I'd like to know how she lives through her days.
I look back again at the young man. I give a very small, hopefully respectful smile. He gives me one back. I think now, if I can get him in the hall later, I will say, do you want to talk? And then we will talk, or I can walk him over to the Oregonian; I can stand in the lobby with him and his mother and who I think is his sister, and I can ask the receptionist to call George Rede, the Sunday Opinion editor, and I can say, George, can you walk this young man upstairs to talk with whomever is writing about Stott-Smith? I will do this not for glory, but for the story.
A DA comes in and reads off ten names of people who are not facing criminal charges right now. I don't know what this means. The young woman next to me audibly exhales.
At 2:27, Judge Julia Philbrook enters. We all rise. The DA tells her, she will be seeing three defendants today, whom I will call AH and NJA, in addition to Stott-Smith. They call AH. The young man in the back row, my snuffling boy, gets up -- he is AH. He's accused of third degree assault. He pleads not guilty. He's ordered to come back on such and such a date and then, he leaves. His tear-creased mother meets my gaze before she joins her son, and they all walk out. I think, they have no idea who they were on the docket with.
Next, from the back of the room and led in by a guard, is NJA, in prison blues. He's charged with murder. The judge asks if he can afford an attorney; he answers in the affirmative, but it seems he has misunderstood the question. She appoints him an attorney and instructs that he will reappear on June 3rd,9:30 AM.
The judge is informed that Stott-Smith is not yet ready to appear. Instead, it's W, also in prison blues, tall, lanky, with rocker-boy hair. He's accused of possessing heroin; the judge asks if he understands this.
" 'K," says W.
He is told, he can go to the STOP program, and then come and report back to her. W says to a woman near him, who speaks for him to the judge, "Will I be released today." She says, he will.
"Cool," he says.
Next is another young man, charged I think with second degree assault, though some priors may move it up to a felony. The judge asks whether he can afford a lawyer.
"It depends on how much it costs," he says.
"Do you have a bank account?" asks the judge.
"Yes."
"And how much is in it?"
"Well, it's overdrawn," he says. The judge assigns him a lawyer.
All four have been dispensed within maybe eight minutes.
Stott-Smith is led in by two guards. She is wearing a sleeveless forest-green top; it's hard to tell, because she's in the corner and flanked by the guards as well as a tall attorney, if this is prison issue. She is not looking down. She has a wide, coffee-with-cream-colored face, and her thick glossy hair is loose and not untidy. Her expression is unreadable from this distance, besides to see, she is not smiling, nor is she crying. What she is going through, where she finds herself now, is as yet unnameable. I imagine it's like being pinned in chaos, no release, no relief, no hope of being let go.
The judge reads the charges: aggravated murder and attempted aggravated murder. She asks the lawyer to speak.
"I am James McIntyre, M-C-I-N-T-Y-R-E," he says, and adds some sort of ID number, and that he is here as a courtesy for attorney somebody Gray; I wish I had heard the first name but I am too busy looking at Stott-Smith. She looks worn. She looks as though standing is taking some effort, as though the weight of her shoulders is dragging her forward and down.
"Do you understand the nature of the charges against you?" the judge asks. Stott-Smith does not answer. The judge says again, "Do you understand the charges against you?" This time, Stott-Smith appears to move her lips, but all that comes out is a syllable that sounds like, "Muh."
The judge orders Stott-Smith to remain in custody until she reappears on June 3rd, 9:30 AM. Stott-Smith is physically turned by the guards, and moves back out the door as though she were moving through deep water.
To be continued.
Part II: On the Bridge
Readers of this blog -- and again, my apologies for being so absent of late -- know that a few weeks ago, I followed Dan Baum's Twitterfeed regarding his unrenewed contract with The New Yorker. I later emailed with Baum, and also, wrote an editorial for LA Observed.
Baum's original tweets contained a few links to pitches he'd sent to various publications, as well as noting whether the pitch had sold or not. I read one or two of them; they were well-written, writing we learned was helped to get that way by Baum's writer/editor wife, who edits not only his articles (and book) before they go to his editors, but the pitches. I am not going to get into the discussions I've seen online, and also had with several colleagues, about Baum's wife working for no byline; that's their business, and those interested in her services can read about them on Baum's/(their) website.
At the time I read the pitches, I felt they might be useful to beginning journalists. I've had at least a dozen beginners ask me how to write a pitch; I am happy to tell them and to share an example. It seemed a generous act on Baum's part to include links to the pitches.
Since the whole brouhaha has died down, I've checked Baum's blog once a week. A few days ago, I came across a post in which he explained there'd been a slight uproar over his saying, in a recent Q & A, that when he's researching a piece for a magazine but before he's actually sold them the piece, he represents that he is already writing the piece for such-and-such magazine. For those who do not understand the process of selling an article: in the main, you write up your idea (i.e., the pitch) and submit it to an editor at a publication. Once they give you the green light -- meaning they are going to buy it --you're now working on the piece for this magazine. But not before. During the research phase of a pitch, it's just yours. You're out there with no big name giving you credibility, but nevertheless must harvest enough information to make your story appeal to that big name.
Baum doesn't see it this way. From the Q & A:
When you are calling people and you don’t have an assignment yet, how do you convince them to talk to you?
I say, “I’m working on a story for The New York Times Magazine.” Or “I’m working on a story for Wired magazine.”
So you don’t let them know you don’t have the assignment in hand?
No, I say I’m working on a story for Wired magazine and I am. My relationship with Wired magazine at that point is none of their business.
He later clarified in a blog post:
For example, if I’m working up a proposal for Wired, and I call a source to ask some questions, I don’t say, “I’m working up a proposal for Wired,” or “I may be doing this story for Wired.” I say, “I’m working on a story for Wired.” And if I have to leave a message, I say, “This is Dan Baum. I’m working on a story for Wired; please call me.”
Is that dishonest? I don’t think so.
The truth is, in such a situation I am working for Wired. Wired doesn’t know it yet, but I am out there gathering information that I will send to Wired’s editors in the form of a proposal. So not only am I working for Wired, I’m working for free.
It is true that I am engaging in a trade with Wired without its consent. I am doing a bunch of legwork for its editors for no pay, in return for the use of Wired’s name and reputation.
It’s fair, I believe, because I’m working in good faith. I am genuinely trying to develop a story that Wired will want. To use Wired’s name in any other context would be dishonest.
Really? I've been a journalist for fourteen years; I know a lot of writers, and I don't know any who would do this in good faith. We've all had to make cold calls -- recently, I had to make some for an article I hoped to sell and did sell to Wired. If the people you cold-call ask who you're writing for, you say, you're working on a pitch; in the past you've written for so-and-so, and they can see some of your work on your website.
As a journalist, I do think it's dishonest to say you're writing for a publication from whom you've yet to get a contract. Baum is a road-tested journalist with good credentials, but who's to stop Joe Blow from calling and saying, "I'm writing for the New York Times"? The person called now feels a certain security (or, as the case may be, hostility) to speak, to open up; to rely that his story is going to appear in the New York Times.
To me, prematurely (one might say, hopefully) using a publication's name is a line that cannot be crossed. But what galls me, and I guess why I am blogging this, is that Baum is doling out this advice as acceptable protocol to junior writers. Think I'm exaggerating about the possible impact? Read the comments, which include "Massively inspirational," "comforting" and "He's so tenacious!" Which makes me think that Baum may be creating for himself an empire along the lines of what Robert McKee did for wannabe screenwriters. I cannot count the number of people I knew in Hollywood who shelled out for McKee's classes, and to whom he became a Svengali.
I could go on; about how much I hate the word "mentor" (want to learn how to write? Read. Write. Write badly. Write better); how having an editor before your editor seems decadent; how I finally last night read a New Yorker piece of Baum's I printed out weeks ago, and how painful it was to see how little his subject wanted the reporter around. Instead, I reprint here what my editor emailed me, after I sent him Baum's Q & A:
Dear Dan Baum,
Woman, 40s: "So I'm going into Safeway, the one of Broadway with a Starbucks in it, and this homeless guy comes up to me and says, 'Can you get me a Frappacino?' I told him, a Frappacino is like five bucks -- I'd buy him a cup of coffee."
Man, 70s: "I had my flag out there at five this morning -- I'm a veteran. Some gal from down the street comes up later, with another gal, and asks me what war I was in. I tell her to guess. 'Korea?' she says. I tell her, a little before that, and her friend says, 'World War 1?' I tell her, no, that little war in between."
Anyone here remember, back in 2005, when the LA Times decided to relaunch its Sunday Magazine? When they hired Rick Wartzman to be editor in chief, and had staff writers along the lines of JR Moehringer and Mark Arax? These are best selling authors, people who understand how to tell a story about place. I was honored to work in this company, to write this cover story, and this one.
All these folks have left the paper, and the magazine, which has tried and failed to reinvent itself I don't know how many times in past two years, is now reduced to an ad-vehicle. What's the frigging point? LA Observed reported on its death throes this morning:
The second publisher has departed LA, the monthly magazine inserted in the Los Angeles Times by the ad side's editorial staff. And the new weekly insert LAetcetera is suspending publication "for the foreseeable future" after Sunday. The memo from marketing chief John T. O'Loughlin is after the jump.
Effectively immediately, LA, Los Angeles Times Magazine Publisher Penn Jones has left the Los Angeles Times Media Group to pursue other opportunities. An aggressive search for his successor is now underway and, in the interim, Associate Publisher, Nora Gervais will be your primary liaison. She can be reached at 213-237-6134 or xxxxxx@latimes.com.
I’ve just gotten a sneak peak at the coming June 7th “Music” issue and it’s shaping up really quite nicely. Please know we’ve now extended the close-date to you and your clients through tomorrow, Friday 5/23. The weekly LAetcetera will publish this Sunday 5/24 and then suspend publication for the foreseeable future while we revise the overall LA planning calendar.
As always, thanks for your interest and continued support. JTO
This is a kind of big deal for me: the same story that's up for an LA Press Club award is the finalist in the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. To me, this is a big deal. I'm really, wow; I'm happy.
My husband, who likes to interface with my writing social life about as much as he likes paying taxes actually asked, "When are the awards? Maybe we should go."
They're in Tuscon, on June 26. I've won several AANs in the past, but have never attended the annual convention... no, wait, that's not true. I attended when it was in Portland a few years ago. It draws thousands of folks from hundreds of papers around the country. I think we'll go this year.
Anyone else going?
For anyone interested in the pieces up for Arts Feature, here you go:
ARTS FEATURE
Chicago Reader: Life Without a Script by Anne Ford
LA Weekly: No Exit Plan by Nancy Rommelmann
The Pitch: A Picture of Hope by Jason Harper
* So I just read the other two articles. "Life Without a Script" is about actor T.J. Jagodowski, who these days can be seen in, amongst other vehicles, the Sonic commercials (he's the blond one). I just watched a few on YouTube; they -- and he -- are wonderful. Here's one now!
circulation 50,000 and over
This is making me smile a whole lot more than I want to admit, esp. the part with Clinton. I hope it does you, too, because if it doesn't, well, I'm not sure we can be friends xx
Know of any here in Portland? For a married couple, friends of ours. Very reliable and solvent. Ballpark rent: $1100 - $1200. Let me know.
One of my favorite novels of the past year was Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. It took me a little while, nearly 100 pages actually, before I fell into it, and then, to my surprise, just kept falling and falling. Most successful novels (successful in the sense that, I like them) do not gather ferocious speed at the three-quarter mark, but this one did, throwing me into the abyss where you could only fall and watch, fall and watch. Not a lot of writers can do this sort of controlled madness -- the first I recall reading was Jane Bowles, who just let the whole thing spool out until you were, sometimes and unfortunately, untethered from the story. Anyway, I wound up loving Netherland, whose end had me holding my breath and then crying from the realness of it all. The last book to do that was Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, which I cannot recommend strongly enough, and which, I've just realized, also threw me at the beginning, though in that case, only for the first page or two.
O'Neill writes, in the Atlantic, about Flannery O'Connor, one of the very greatest of twentieth century fiction writers. She writes with a controlled, even cold savagery, writing which O'Neill describes as:
Or (upon the arrival of refugee Poles at a farm):
She began to imagine a war of words, to see the Polish words and the English words coming at each other, stalking forward, not sentences, just words, gabble gabble gabble, flung out high and shrill and stalking forward and then grappling with each other. She saw the Polish words, dirty and all-knowing and unreformed, flinging mud on the clean English words until everything was equally dirty. She saw them all piled up in a room, all the dead dirty words, theirs and hers too, piled up like the naked bodies in the newsreel. God save me, she cried silently, from the stinking power of Satan!
The narrating third person hovers in an almost miraculous fusion of proximity and comic distance. With O’Connor, there never seems to be space between the words and their creator’s sensibility. You almost never catch a whiff of authorial self-consciousness. About how many writers can this be said?
You can read the rest, which includes a review of Brad Gooch's new biography Flannery, here.
A note on why so little blogging: I am writing, and I am also often on Twitter, posting what would have gone here. Why? It's fast. Join me? http://twitter.com/NancyRomm
This time, LA Press Club. LA Weekly dominating in all categories. Editor Jill Stewart writes, "C’mon down for the awards on June 14. Let’s go drink wine until we’re too relaxed to move."
B8. Entertainment News or Feature
*Scott Foundas, LA Weekly, Forgiven
*Scott Gold, Los Angeles Times, "Enough About Me"
*Randall Roberts, LA Weekly, Port in the Storm: Heath Ledger
*Nancy Rommelmann, LA Weekly, No Exit Plan: Laura Albert
*Ella Taylor, LA Weekly, "Sacreligulous: Bill Maher's Cross to Bear
I have a new essay up at LA Observed, about Dan Baum, the author who last week posted the narrative of his firing as a staff writer for The New Yorker... on Twitter. A clip:
"Telling the story of losing your job in 140-character posts on Twitter is a whole lot of things, none of which seems like a remotely good idea for a teenager fired from a fast-food gig, much less a national magazine correspondent," Allman wrote, concluding that Baum's "meticulous, microscopic story of losing a job he loved seems the work of a man under a tremendous amount of pressure, using the Internet as a therapist."
I wrote Allman back saying, I bet there's a method to Baum's madness; that his post-Katrina book, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans, had been released in February, and maybe he was using what weapons he had in his arsenal to promote it, a position Baum verified when he commented on Allman's post:
It's a gimmick, yes, and I hope it sells books, sure. But it's also galled me a bit, as a reporter, that the New Yorker pulls a veil of secrecy over itself to rival the NSA. I mean, it's a very good magazine, but it's just a magazine.
Din's sister Hillary was in town last week, and while conversing at the kitchen counter, Din mentioned he'd found a $50 bill the week before on the street, something he hadn't thought to mention.
"He used to find money all the time when he was a kid," said Hillary.
I asked Din how this could be; he said, because he looks.
I decided to try it. The next day, I found a dollar.
Yesterday, I found a five.
Which makes sense: With the exception of children, nearly everyone carries cash, and some of that cash is going to go missing.
I have not turned into the equivalent of the crazy lady on the beach with the metal detector; I'm simply paying attention.
Eyes open and good luck. Let me know what you find.
Because it was sentimental.
Because it was formulaic.
Because no one who ignores their child for twenty years comes back and gives the sort of speech Mickey Rourke gives in Atlantic City. I really wanted to yell at the TV, "Bullshit."
Because what were they doing with Marisa Tomei's character?
One charming scene: Rourke's first foray behind the meat counter. Pure joy.
I will counterbalance this with a movie I very much enjoyed, and if you missed, you might check out.
Why is it, every time I put on a pair of sunglasses, any sunglasses, six hundred dollars or sixty cents, I instantly become nauseous? My husband just tried to give me the most gorgeous pair that are just a little too small for him (though he looks incredible in them, like Steve McQueen), whereupon I tried them on and immediately wanted to hurl. Quickest gift return ever. I looked for some info online, but nothing. Anyone know?
It's funny how life/the mind works. I have a meeting this morning with someone who's asked me to do what may be some important writing, in a venue that will be quite an honor for me. In anticipation of our meeting, I looked over some old work, some previous blog posts, so that he and I might hone in on what I can best do for him. Then just now, I open an email from a friend, asking for stories about Alzheimer's, which her mother has, and I thought, I have one, which I wrote for the LA Weekly, for their A Considerable Town column, where I once regularly contributed. And I realized, this is exactly the sort of column I might produce for this new editor; that I love writing these snippets of the world we pass and which passes us every day, and taking a moment to record them.
I've never whole cloth reprinted a story on my blog, but I am today.
My daughter Tafv answered the door to Daphne, who was crying hard, saying she thought her daughter had been murdered.
“It’s been so long since I’ve seen her,” said the 74-year-old woman, weeping and holding out the key hanging from around her neck.
I was out jogging, and my husband was at Trader Joe’s, so Tafv, 14, walked Daphne across the street to where she used to live with her grown daughter. She led Daphne up the many stairs, and tried the key in the front door while the woman told Tafv that she thought her daughter’s body was probably inside, and that they needed to call the police. The key did not fit so, at Daphne’s suggestion, they went to the side door; it did not open.
“Maybe we should try the front door,” Daphne said. Tafv suggested that instead she should come to our house and have some tea, which is what we’d done when we found Daphne a month earlier, wandering down the street in the dark.
We hadn’t seen Daphne in six months. For five years before that, we’d seen her daily, gardening, or taking her car on as many as a dozen short trips a day, so many we’d joked she was a “grandma drug dealer.” When we’d seen her again that first time after she moved, I noticed she’d become frail. I’d asked her if she was okay. She told me she’d come to see her sister and began a convoluted story about how her sister had written to her and invited her to visit.
“No, no, that’s not right,” said Daphne, wringing her hands. “I wrote her letters. But she didn’t answer them.”
We brought her inside our home. She did not know us, but settled comfortably with a cup of hot tea and told us how she’d been a nurse for 30 years, and about her three daughters, and how they’d fussed at each other as teenagers. She was lucid and delighted to chat about the past, but about the present she was uncertain, and she knew it.
“I never thought my mind would be affected,” she said, and again asked about her sister, who does not and never did live across the street.
That time, I’d gotten an ancient phone book from her purse, and phoned people with her last name. I eventually reached her ex-husband, who said Daphne was suffering from dementia, and gave me the address of the group home where she’d been staying, a few miles south. I drove Daphne there; she thanked me and told the attendant what a nice girl I was. When her daughter came home from work that night, she told us Daphne had been going downhill rapidly; that they’d had an electronic monitoring bracelet on her, but that she’d ripped it off.
When I came back from running, Daphne was still crying, standing by her old gate with Tafv and my husband, saying we needed to wait for the police. Somehow my presence convinced her it was okay to come inside our place for tea. We chatted, though less this time; she seemed more frightened. Tafv and I then drove her back to the group home, where in the lobby, she told the nurse, “They are such good neighbors.”
On the drive home, Tafv said Daphne had said to her, “This is no way for a person to have to live.” We talked about Alzheimer’s, how it can happen to anyone, and I told Tafv I was very proud of the kindness and responsibility she’d shown.
I know Daphne will show up again; that she somehow remembers the name of this street and gets the cab drivers to bring her. But we are moving at the end of January, and while I suspect some flare of self-preservation will tell Daphne to knock on our door, there will be nobody here that she knows.
New article just posted on Food Dude's site, in which I talk with Dave "It's Impossible for Me to Give a Bad Interview" Machado, about food, real estate, back taxes, and those annoying food fundamentalists. About that last:
“That’s what makers me crazy about Portland and the bloggers,” he continues. “They get all fundamentalist, about authenticity and food. It’s like, where do you think that food came from? Where do you think a dish in Italy came from? It came because some Portuguese explorer put in tomatoes or fava beans. It was a result of trade and commerce that you get cuisine. You didn’t get cuisine in a vacuum; you got cuisine because people brought you products.”
I tell him, don’t get me started on provinciality, as though we should only eat foods from within ten miles of here. That I’m a little more curious than that, actually, curious about coffee and chocolate and chiles and other things that do not grow in the 97_ _ _ zip code.
“You get to a Luddite way of dealing with the world,” he says. “People become fundamentalist about food; you want to say, stop; stop. Stop. Be a little more open.”
Machado's downtown restaurant and bar Nel Centro opens later this month
