In Memorium, with Tea

This is my great-uncle Davie.

He is holding a postcard that his brother Izzy sent him in 1943--back when Davie was in training before serving in World War II.

Davie is one of those people you can't describe in just one word. Or maybe you can, but it would be in Yiddish, and what little I do know is transliterated from the dirty jokes he used to tell and retell at family gatherings over the years. This is the man who dispenses $2 liberally, so freely in fact that for much of my childhood I imagined him with his own little press in his basement. No one I knew had them, or spent them, so in my mind they had no monetary value whatsoever; they were Davie-money, like monopoly money, except better.

I saw Davie this weekend while visiting Los Angeles in a whirlwind trip that involved a family memorial service and twelve full hours at Disneyland. Thankfully, not at the same time. But it struck me as appropriate to have a literal roller coaster weekend surrounded by people who had, in one way or another, made my life what it is now. Whether they contributed DNA or sent me birthday greetings from halfway around the country or mailed me an espresso machine when I started college (smart thinking, cousin Shannon) or grew up with me in Davis or were game enough to make the drive to meet my loving and loud extended family (my boyfriend has, indeed, turned in his WASP card, as his brother said)--there was a lot of support emanating from everyone. And yet, we were there because someone had died. Not just someone; it doesn't feel right to leave out her name (even on a blog), because, just like every other iota of her being, her name is just too colorful and vibrant to leave out: Cippy Stambaugh.

There are at least a thousand words I could dedicate (and will dedicate) to the woman who, shortly after my 21st birthday, presented me with a Corona at 11 am at a family gathering, then gave me a painting she herself had created, and later mailed me one of her favorite stuffed animals as a good luck charm. The stories my family retold about her--hot-air ballooning, tromping around New Zealand in her 70s, untying her bikini top at a public pool to make a point--she was, in every possible sense of the word, a character.

So I'd like to raise a virtual toast (in Cippy's case, a toasted piece of bread) not only to the woman herself, but to her brother Davie, to my grandmother Saralee, to all the brilliant and brave souls of their generation who still want so much for their color, emotion, and legacy to be recognized. I recognize you.

2010 Thoughts

My mind is a vacuum, and this is what it has sucked up: the Proposition 8 trial here in San Francisco, the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, my parents' kitchen cabinet, which crashed off their kitchen wall in the middle of the night, The Big Rewind by The Onion's Nathan Rabin, the brand-spanking-new KALW News Digital Magazine, love, and the fact that I'm in it, the upcoming Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt, Mormon comic Elna Baker, my father's broken arm, my great-uncle's 2002 Volvo, Disneyland's "Give a Day, Get a Day" program, this band, this show, this hope...

Hyperlinked-out? Perhaps, but it feels appropriate to approach this new decade with acute hyperactivity. Four internships? Okay. Seven more school applications? Okay. One class? Wait--yes, that's right, California education has no money; neither do I. And yet still there's this ever present need to be insanely active, and not in the sense of actual mobility, but in the sense that what I do and what others do is so important that all of our movements should be chopped up into one-sentence status updates that are checked obsessively on the hour. That this forum that I had intended for my own thoughts must still conform to an online format; that all posts have direct messages, and that eyes not be bored with sentences with too many clauses or paragraphs with too many sentences. I break lots of rules too much of the time, which is ironic, because at this point I'd just like to know what the rules are.