By BILL GIRDNER 06/17/2008 I have this image of my mom, sitting in the late afternoon sun on the front step of my little house in Carlsbad. I was walking back from the beach, a block and a half away, after a swim. I waved and then called out.
She recognized me then. She was drinking a little bit of red wine and had just finished a smoke.
She was so happy with the trees and new plants that had been put in the front yard, and she talked about how beautiful they were with a simple and pure enthusiasm.
She had lost the ability to focus sufficiently to read a book or a newspaper, or even watch TV and make any sense of it, but she could still carry on a good conversation with her kids. She laughed at my little jokes.
We had just come back from a short stay in Pasadena. She had gone to the pub, had dinner and a couple glasses of wine, and the waitresses loved her. This little, gray-haired old lady, breaking down physically, but with a sweet smile and a discipline about conversation and charm, that was on call whenever new people were met.
Born in Paris, she grew up during World War II, lived through the German occupation, and had an inner toughness that belied her frail figure. Paris
She met my dad after the war when they were both part of a camping club that took trips into the countryside around Paris. Her nickname, I heard many times during my life, was "sac-a-pattes." Or sack-on-feet, based on what the backpackers following her up the trail would see.
Story goes that I came along and my dad decided the bohemian life was not the way to go for a family, and we all moved back to the U.S. We eventually settled in Pasadena where my mom had a full time job raising three kids.
She and my dad threw great dinner parties and often went out on the weekends to visit friends. Mom always had a little make-up table and another image I have of her is sitting at that table, as seen from the hallway leading into the master bedroom, having finished with the make up, in a form-fitting dress, putting her hair up into a dark "chignon," a swirl of hair pinned up on top of her head. The beautiful Parisienne.
But mom did not like the constraining life of Pasadena and, when the last of the kids took off for college, my mom followed the next day, walking out with nothing but a suit case, headed for the beach.
And there she lived for many years.
When my sisters moved to San Diego and started families, she followed and ended up in a condo in La Jolla, close to the kids. Nick and Alli, two of her grandkids who were also twins, would get off the bus on their way home from school, come and visit with her for a bit, before catching the next bus.
At Christmas time, they would bring a small tree by her place and help her decorate it. Last year, Nick, who was and remains legendary for his thrift, got the idea of taking the branches cut away from his family's big tree, taped them together and constructed a serviceable tree, and then took it down to "Granita," as the kids called her, to decorate.
She spent some time in the hospital a couple years ago, and since then, I would call every day and drive down and see her on Saturday for dinner. Spending time with her took the same patience that one would need with a child. Everything was slow, and she could do very little herself. But her emotions were crystalline, clear and pure. And it became a great pleasure to be with her.
On Friday after midnight, I saw that one of her home helpers had called on my cell phone, and I figured it was trouble. The helper has a little song, instead of a ring tone, with the words "life is short" in the refrain, and that song will forever remain associated in my memory with the words that followed when Bes picked up: Bill, your mom passed away.
Mom had had a massive heart attack and sank down into the arms of her helper. Mom closed her eyes and she was gone.
The paramedics arrived quickly but could do nothing.
Since then, the only place I have been able to find any peace, the only place I can get away from the hurt, is in the ocean. On Saturday, I swam in the ocean off Carlsbad, out in front of the beach shack she loved so much, clean, cold water swirling around me, tumbling, white breakers, limitless sky, the pelicans gliding in formation overhead. It gave me a respite, a little bit of calm.
I couldn't sit still and I couldn't rest and I couldn't sleep, so I stayed at the beach until early evening. On my last swim, before going back to the shack to cook my traditional ribs, I stood in the ocean, the water boiling around me, watching the horizon and said quietly the same thing I always said to her when I dropped her off on Saturday night. "Bye bye, Mom, bye."
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For 30 years I've been playing a little game at the supermarket. I estimate the bill by counting the number of items in the cart, and multiplying.
Thirty-some years ago, I multiplied by $1. Thirty things in the cart, $30, more or less.
Four years ago, it was up to $2. Thirty things in the cart, $60, or pretty close.
This year I started multiplying by $3. This week I had to multiply by $4.40.
That's not a ruinous inflation over 30 years, but it's pretty alarming inflation for the past 6 months.
It's an indication of the vicious economic tailspin the country is suffering, a cost runup that falls most heavily on the poor.
Even more than gasoline prices, food prices demonstrate the disastrous economic stewardship of the Bush administration.
Now it's the Fourth of July weekend: the most patriotic holiday in a country whose people, perhaps more than any other in the developed world, pride themselves on their patriotism. For millions of Americans, me included, backyard barbecues will be a big part of this weekend's celebrations.
Corn on the cob? U.S. corn prices have quadrupled in Bush's second term - and one-third of that corn will not feed people, but will be stuffed into cars' gas tanks.
Chicken cost $5.29 a pound at the supermarket last week. Regular chicken.
That's insane.
Why is this happening?
The national debt has increased by $3 trillion under President Bush.
When a country runs a $400 billion annual deficit, it is inevitable that the government will inflate its currency, to make it easier to pay down the debt.
When Bush took office, the euro was struggling to maintain parity with the dollar. Now a euro is worth $1.60.
Sixty percent depreciation of the dollar, all by itself, would drive the price of a gallon of foreign gasoline from $2.50 to $4.
At least half of that $3 trillion has been squandered, and simply stolen, in Iraq. The inflation and depreciation through which Bush is financing his war is economically laying waste our own country.
One trillion dollars is a million million dollars. That's enough money to make everyone in Cleveland, St. Louis, Charleston and Salt Lake City a millionaire.
It's enough to pay off the mortgage of every American family who lost their home to foreclosure in the past year - and to buy them another home worth more than the one they lost.
It's enough to buy every resident of Planet Earth 31½ lbs. of chicken to barbecue on the 4th of July - at $5.29 a pound.
Bush has put our nation in thrall to a dying business - oil - while obstructing or ignoring the businesses of the future, renewable energy. It is as though, in the Internet age, Bush decided to bet all of our farms on the Mergenthaler linotype machine and the telegraph.
Leave aside, for the moment, the government-sanctioned torture, the illegal wiretaps, the hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed, the war veterans dumped in filthy hospitals, and left without any medical care at all, and our national disgrace and loss of influence worldwide.
Leave aside the sale of the National Park system to oil and gas companies, the toleration, indeed encouragement, of industrial air and water pollution, the corruption of the Department of Justice, and the millions of people losing their homes to corrupt mortgage companies and banks.
On the price of bread and butter alone, George W. Bush is the worst president since Hoover, and the most corrupt one.
And what, pray tell, are the hot issues in this year's presidential campaign?
None of the above.
The campaigns, so help me, are fervently focused upon which candidate is the most patriotic: which one loves America more, and which one loves God more.
Now, the classic wife beater insists, to his wife, to her family, and eventually to a jury, that he loved his wife. He loved her when he beat her, he loved her when he raped her, he loved her when he shot her, and he loved her when he killed her.
It makes no difference whatsoever whether a wife beater claims that he loved his wife.
And it makes no difference whether George W. Bush, or John McCain, or Barack Obama claims to love America more. What matters is what they do to it.
If 300 million Americans continue to allow these men to ignore reality, and to stuff us full of meaningless tripe about patriotism and God, and if we allow our newspaper, radio and TV reporters to let them do it, then we will deserve whatever we get.
I don't know about you, my fellow, patriotic Americans, but I do not deserve it.
Happy Fourth of July.
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It's either the economy or old age.
Clearly, something is driving me mad - or madder than usual - because I see plots everywhere.
Take Verne Troyer (insert joke about easy portability).
In case you missed it, he sued a guy who somehow got possession of a video he created "depicting him and his girlfriend at the time engaged in various explicit sexual and intimate relations together."
Take a moment to allow the concept to percolate through your brain.
Apparently the guy with the video is the same guy who distributed the Paris Hilton sex tape. For good measure (and maximum publicity), Troyer is also suing TMZ, one of the major sources of, um, "news" about the trivial famous.
Boy does this beg a lot of questions.
(By the way, for those of you who don't know, Troyer is the small actor who portrayed "Mini-Me" in the Austin Powers movies and now gets kicked around in another film called "The Love Guru.")
Let's start with the phrase that leaped out at me: "girlfriend at the time." This guy is a babe magnet?
OK, I'll admit to having absolutely no babe magnetism myself, so I'm not an expert on these things. Maybe women are lining up to get a turn with Mini-Me. That's possible - but it leads to the next questions: why videotape this performance and why leave the tape lying around for someone to "steal" it from his house?
Here's where I'm imagining a plot. You've got an actor co-starring in a film called "The Love Guru" that could use a bit of a bump at the box office and suddenly he's in a sex tape?
Coincidence?
Did anyone (aside from her immediate family) care about Paris Hilton before she had a sex tape stolen from her that she sued over?
Was Verne Troyer prominent on TMZ before this?
See what I mean?
The TMZ report, by the way, implies that the woman in the video might have been the plotter/would-be celebrity. But how many of you now know her name? How many of you know the name of the guy Paris Hilton had sex with?
My plot is more plausible.
One last question: what sort of people are going to want to watch this video?
I'm not sure I want to think about that.
Now on to another plot: gun possession.
A few weeks ago I exhibited my paranoia and cynicism after the California Supreme Court decided to allow gay marriage. It seemed the perfect Republican strategy to get out the right-wing vote.
I suggested an anti-abortion ruling by the Democrats to counteract this move. We didn't get that, but we did get a pro-gun ruling.
It's the perfect way to outrage liberals and it was a 5-4 vote so it can be squarely blamed on Republican president judge choices.
The playing field has now been evened.
Stay tuned for news reports on gay people with guns they can use for self-defense.
ORIGINAL GUN INTENT. If you've read the gun control ruling, District of Columbia v. Heller, you know that it's all about twisting and trying to make sense out of a pretty-poorly worded sentence and trying to completely ignore the stuff about militias.
But let's not get into that debate.
Instead, let's think about this from early in Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion. "The Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding."
Apparently original intent is a lot less important when you have a different intent in mind.
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