This comes after 2.5 days with the neices, 3 and 7, the girls that I dearly love and dearly love to give back to mommy and daddy when I'm about to snap. They are angels, of course. They do nothing truly sinister, they just do the not listening and not responding, but I ascribe a lot of that to T.V. damage. It's amazing, though, when children throw tantrums, and like, really inconvienent tantrums, bent on making you look bad and out of control in front of a large crowd. I'm kind of a crazy aunt, a mash up of Santa Claus, the lady that teaches them to time/space travel in A Wrinkle in Time, and my own mom. I was really obsessed with my neices for a while, and now I'm finding it acceptable to think about having my own kids, but I'm still really scared of that feeling I get when I'm absolutely finished with children, and I'm like, if you don't bring me that pitcher of beer I'm going to beat your grandma to a pulp. And you can see how competetive I am. Kids would be the most humbling experience ever, and...I'm in no hurry to step off of the soapbox.

This post was supposed to be about how for my entire life I have always had a soft spot for the American dream of the 1950s, but not as it is commonly referred to or remembered, and therefore not really accurate, but something to do with not having a lot, but keeping it polished. Living in Long Beach for the past ten months has brought me ever so close to very poor neighborhoods, you know, the 'hood, and I was driving through my hometown of Whitter, not 20 miles from here, and I was looking at these houses and neighborhoods that I would normally "ick" at, and I was thinking how there were sparkly and enviable compared to the 'hoods that I now encounter. I mused aloud to Todd, in true over-priveledged white girl fashion, "why don't they even hose off their driveways, or pick up the trash that is on THEIR property? I mean I know I've passed the SAME trash WEEKS apart..." and he said, "it doesn't occur to people to do things if they've never been taught that they should do them..." and it reminded me of when my friend Charlie was doing social work where he said that he would go into certain low-income families homes and teach them how to do chores, shop for groceries, and care (bathe, feed, clothe) for their children.

This kind of thing fascinates me. I've always had a small idea in my head that if you have a meager living, you should take pride in that living. Is that only because of some statistics, like -- white, middle class, married parents, consistent beliefs, no financial or physiological crises growing up...etc? Or it is residual American Dream syndrome? Give me a patch of ground with a stucco house and a lawn to mow, and though it's not much, I will mow it and scrub the toilettes and pay taxes and it will be mine and I will wave to my neighbors. (As I'm writing this at 11:33 pm a stabbing just occured about a block away, Todd got it on the scanner, alerted by the two helicopters circling alarmingly close to our buildings.) I have an obsession with the post WWII era tract homes of southern California: cookie cutter boxes, sometimes with dutch accents, green lawns and white cement driveways. In older parts of the Southland there are Spanish/Medditerrainian style stucco houses, the ones from the 1920's with pine floors and arched doorways. I love when every once in a while I see the metal T bars of an old washline, and my heart sinks and years for a time that I don't even know really existed.

It's not that I really believe that was a simpler time in any other way but this -- noise. I can't stand all the noise of the modern world and gadgets. I despise the sound of a cell phone ringing, espeically when it's mine or my husband's. I hate the sound of traffic, and I hate the so called "white noise" of eletronics or fans. I hate this new noise of helicopters, almost everywhere in the 'hood. I think of life when there was less noise and more waving and more faith in the idea that if you went to war and killed the enemy you could come home, you might come home, and get a box and it wasn't much but you could keep it clean. You could pick up the trash.

Long Beach is an old town. The suburbs are old. Somehow, every post war development got spliced and diced, so that one lot now houses four residences on average. More people, less space, more trash. After what I see littering all these streets I will no longer swim in the oceans around here. The stagnancy of the Long Beach breakwaters is nauseating, even though the reports show that it is a cleaner beach than its ritzy OC and LA counterparts. The people. Is that what I'm trying to reconcile in my head? That the trash is there because there are too many people crammed in too little a space? That can't answer it all. Why was the American idea of pride stuck in my head so that when I was small, under five, I knew that if I had one Barbie, one cheapie Barbie with one bathing suit, it would be okay -- if I kept her nice and clean and cared for. That's just it. A small person, okay, a young person, doesn't think of those things, I must have been told them. So maybe they aren't told these things. Why? Why? Why? I want to trace the string back in time and see the flow chart.

(The white person stabbed was in a gang called somethng like, The Crazy Smokers, and his moniker was Bad Ass. He got stabbed by what he described as a crack head transient, black. For some reason I don't buy it. Not when your name is Bad Ass. Scanners are nerdy.)