A Master

Oh. Mah. Gah.

Ian McKellen is a god of theater. Though we literally had the worst seats in the sold-out Royce Hall, I feel fortunate to have been there, in the presence of tangible greatness. He was riveting, and the rest of the cast was incredible, too. I cannot say I recall a single false note during the entire three-and-a-half hours' traffic of the stage.

After the show, a lady in the restroom stall next to me remarked to a friend, "They found all the humor in the text. That's something not every production does. ...And it's the humor that makes the tragedy even greater" True on all accounts.

How does one become a "classically trained actor," anyway? And is age 36 too late to start?

The Stats

420,424 acres burned
1,155 homes destroyed
881,500 people evacuated
(Info per Los Angeles Times)

So many friends affected -- either evacuated or on alert to do so. Walking the edge, they are -- the wind could shift and their fortunes along with it. The wind has abated, but the humidity is still non-existent. Cooler temperatures are a welcomed relief. The particulate-laden air is with us still, coating everything from bookshelf to bathroom sink to lungs.

Lord, in thy mercy, hear us.

I'm Burning Up, Burning Up for Your Love

Picture from space. Welcome to my homeland. We call it Hell roundabout this time every year. The Santa Anas are fierce and erratic. Tomorrow is on tap to be 98 degrees and uber-windy. Not nice. Not happy. Not calming.

Such unpredictability leads to illogical and seemingly impossible fire movement. Fortunately we are in too much city (who ever thought I would be thankful for that?) to be in too much danger. But many friends are in harm's vicinity, so our prayers are profuse tonight. We are all breathing in the thick, smoky ashes of acres and homes.

In high school, I read Joan Didion's "Los Angeles Notebooks" (from Slouching Toward Bethlehem), and it burned itself into my whatever-cortex-it-is-that-texts-and-ideas-burn-themselves-into. I had the distinct pleasure of inflicting it upon my AP students today. May they be as entranced as I was, and may they recall her immortal words every time the winds kick up.

And may the lives and homes and loved ones of so many -- from San Diego to Ventura -- be preserved and protected. This does not promise to be a fun night.

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from "Los Angeles Notebooks"

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather." My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.

"On nights like that," Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, "every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen." That was the kind of wind it was. I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom. The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushers through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best know of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about "nervousness," about "depression." In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable. In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn. A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy. One cannot get much more mechanistic than that.

Easterners commonly complain that there is no "weather" at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland. That is quite misleading. In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire. At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines. The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964. In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains.

Just to watch the front-page news out of Los Angeles during a Santa Ana is to get very close to what it is about the place. The longest single Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957, and it lasted not the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November 21 until December 4. On the first day 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles an hour. In town, the wind reached Force 12, or hurricane force, on the Beaufort Scale; oil derricks were toppled and people ordered off the downtown streets to avoid injury from flying objects. On November 22 the fire in the San Gabriels was out of control. On November 24 six people were killed in automobile accidents, and by the end of the week the Los Angeles Times was keeping a box score of traffic deaths. On November 26 a prominent Pasadena attorney, depressed about money, shot and killed his wife, their two sons and himself. On November 27 a South Gate divorcée, twenty-two, was murdered and thrown from a moving car. On November 30 the San Gabriel fire was still out of control, and the wind in town was blowing eighty miles an hour. On the first day of December four people died violently, and on the third the wind began to break.

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, © by Joan Didion.

Madeleine Rereading Update

I have now completed the entire time quintet, and I just finished A House Like a Lotus. What a delight to reread that one! I have such fierce memories of certain events and conversations in that book, but other things I had forgotten utterly. It was a pleasure to rediscover.

I'm still trying to decide what my next one will be. Perhaps my all-time fave, And Both Were Young, though I did reread it about five years ago, along with Camilla. Perhaps some from the Austin series. It's been a while for those. I'm not quite ready to broach the poetry or the spiritual non-fiction yet. My soul needs story just now.

In the meantime, I'm reading Jodi Picoult's Salem Falls. I needed a fairly light read for school. I'm not far enough into it to know what I think of it yet.

A School Funny

Just got home from Back-to-School Night. You college professors, thank your lucky stars that you don't have to do this. I mean, it's fine to meet parents and all, but really, we end up teaching two full class days in 12 hours' time. It's exhausting. It's voice-depriving. And we still have school tomorrow.

Today one of our school board members was visiting campus. Halfway through 5th period, I hear someone walk up the metal ramp to my portable classroom, try the door, and leave. Background needed: my classroom door handle hasn't worked properly for a year and a half. It's latest trick is not opening when one pushes the handle down, so one must pull the handle up instead. I have a sign posted right by the handle that says "Pull Up," with a handy little arrow indicating the direction one should pull.

Now, I know -- quite well, in fact -- that people do not read signs, because almost daily, a student or I have to get up, interrupt our class, and open the door for some illiterate who can't work the door. Today was no different. The handle was jiggled, the footsteps retreated down the metal ramp.

I said under my breath but to my class, "Read the damn sign! Pull up!" Then I asked a student to go open the door and see if it was important.

My student opened the door, waited for the parties to walk back up the ramp, politely inquired as to the need, and proceeded to explain: "See, the sign says you have to pull up." My class and I were laughing silently yet hysterically.

Then in walked the principal and the board member.

I immediately began showing off my class's strengths. We discussed their performance on today's PSAT, and then I invited them to ask questions of the board member. They asked some wonderful questions. Why is the sound system we purchased for the gym still not installed after two years? (Hem, haw, electrical issues, we're still working on it.) What does a board member do, exactly? (Makes school policy, has to be voted in, goes around and visits campuses like I'm doing now. That's it? was the follow-up question.) Does the student board member have an equal vote? (In a word, no.)

I have to say, I was incredibly proud of this AP class. They asked their questions respectfully but honestly. They demonstrated thoughtfulness, but they were not afraid to ask their legitimate questions. After the principal and board member left, we had a good laugh about my student's comment regarding the door sign. I thanked him and complimented him on his very polite and respectful handling of the situation. After all, if the principal and school board member can't read a sign and work a door, we are in dire straits. I'm glad my class could remind the powers that be that they are accountable to more parties than just the voters.

Incidentally, I started to tell one of our A.P.s about the visit, and she replied, "Oh, yeah, I heard." I smiled and asked what she had heard. Apparently when the principal and board member left my classroom, they had no sooner reached the foot of my ramp before the board member turned to the principal and asked, "So what's going on with that sound system?"

Rebellion, Part 2

So meetings at school have been tense and frustrating lately. This is not the atmosphere to which we are accustomed. New administration and new district personnel have dramatically changed the tenor of our working relationships. I'm sorry to say it is affecting morale; it is affecting my morale, too. Hence, rebellion part two.

I'm finding it difficult to leave a meeting without being angry, exhausted, toxic. Today's all-day staff-only meetings were no different. The good thing that came of today, however, was the coming together of our oft-contentious-of-late department. Together we confronted the administration on some of their vaguenesses and ambiguities and mealy-mouthed doublespeak. We've learned that we have to get things in writing from this administration; today we learned it's also okay to have things spoken in front of twelve witnesses who are taking notes. :-P

If the administration wants to turn this into an us-and-them situation, it's nice to know that we can still pull together and be an 'us.' This has not been a given over the past couple of years.

I shall continue to attempt to practice the law of attraction (The Secret, as some call it -- I've never read it nor seen the video). It's silly, but I make myself little mantras to breathe throughout the day. They are more for myself and my mindset than they are for the universe, of course. I consider them small prayers.

In other news, my cutter (the second one) is more than a cutter. She is in therapy, thanks be to God, but I'm beginning to grok what a former teacher of hers said to me a couple of weeks ago -- that she is the unfortunate offspring of parents who should have never procreated together. Really, the situations she describes are astonishingly ridiculous. I think it's what St. Paul had in mind when he admonished fathers to 'provoke not your children to wrath.' I believe this student will come out on the other end strong and wise, but it will be in spite of her parents, not because of them. I will seek to be a quiet refuge, a listener, a space-giver, a sounding board.

I've been enjoying rereading Madeleine's time quintet, as it's now referred to, whilst brushing my teeth. I'm now on House Like a Lotus, one of my all-time adolescent-hood favorites (after And Both Were Young). All those intense junior-high and early high school feelings return to my heart so quickly, as if it hasn't been decades since then. Well, Madeleine always said that we are every age we have ever been, and lord help us if we forget what it was like to be each of those ages. It makes me long to see Greece and sad to think about all the devastating fires of the past few months. I feel the same about New Orleans and NY's World Trade Centers. I suppose my sadness is partially motivated by selfishness -- I never got to see them -- but not entirely, I hope. I mourn the destruction -- needless, in every case.

Rebellion

I'm finding it difficult to consent to spend any time over the weekend working on school stuff, be it grading, planning,...what have you. Instead I'm willfully parked on my ass watching the gorgeous 37" flat screen HDTV we splurged on. It's been football heaven, among other things. And all the new seasons of old faves have begun, and that snarfs up weeknight time. And I feel guilty. And my guilt makes me even more rebellious and determined to sit on my ass and not allow school to take over every realm of my life.

...And I get farther and farther behind in grading, planning,...and what have you.

My quest for a healthy balance is still a quest.