Venus at the Freeway

Last week we spent a few days in Orange County, visiting dear friends and family. I went with a secret intent: I would replace painful memories with happy ones––or something like that. As long-time readers of this blog know, I spent many years going back and forth to Santa Ana tending to my elderly mother, who resided in an assisted living facility in the very neighborhood we were visiting. It was an arduous and poignant tour of duty, as the care of our elders often is, but I had not realized until after my mother’s death six years ago how deeply I would miss her. Now I braced myself for sadness as we headed into the very streets I had once driven with her. On our best days, she would be licking an ice cream cone and commenting on various sights with childlike wonder as we passed them: the black, off-kilter cube of the Discovery Museum, a lazy cat on the porch of a fancy house in Floral Park, a candy-red convertible gleaming in the sunlight. Those are the days I wanted to remember, consoling myself with the fact that she did experience joy sometimes in the midst of bleak stretches.

As I drove up to the junction of Santa Clara and Main, I glimpsed a familiar white statue from the corner of my eye: Venus in all her kitsch plaster glory emerging from her clamshell by the parking lot of an old motel near the freeway and traffic lights, oblivious and incongruous. I remembered how my mother, in the passenger seat beside me, always recognized this statue and called it to my attention, delightedly announcing that she knew where we were, which was almost home. Her pleasure in the statue brought pleasure to me then, and now the memory made me smile. I parked my car at the motel and took the above picture of Venus, and there was something sweet about it and something absurd. I let go of the sad good-bye parts that all the days contained and held onto that smile. For a moment, I could almost hear my mother’s voice, and I felt a little lighter, and who is to say a small current of happiness isn’t still floating in the air there?

There was refuge and laughter too with our friends, Mike and Donna, who live in a house nearby. The comfort and familiarity of this kind of friendship seems a miraculous thing to me: nearly fifty years of kids and adventures and loss and change, but the thread remains intact. We reminisce, and order Thai take-out, and Donna has baked a chocolate birthday cake for Monte using his grandmother’s legendary recipe, from scratch. And one night, we try out their new cedar hot tub in the backyard, just four old people lazing around in the delicious warmth, and far above the cypress trees a shooting star sails by.

The next day, in Laguna Beach, we revisit the site where we once lived on a bluff above Pacific Coast Highway, a trailer park that is no longer there. It was at the edge of a schoolyard and a state park for which the parking lots today are crowded and busy in a way we never witnessed. The park is developed in the style the state seems fond of, and I do mean “developed”, with kiosks and interpretive exhibits, restroom facilities, tables, and lots of signage. In the lobby of the headquarters by the parking lot, a sad taxidermic display featuring a wizened mountain lion, bobcat, coyote, and other unfortunate locals, proclaims: Many Things to Many People, and I suppose that’s true. I felt wistful and mournful, but then we focused on our gratitude for all the years of living here in its prior incarnation, and we left.

We drove onward to South Laguna, and time with Kia and Fariba, another beloved duo with whom we once were young, and they were kind and gracious, and we laughed a lot, amazed and thankful to be sitting together in our old people forms as the sky turned scarlet and the sun dipped over Catalina Island.

Of crucial importance on this trip was the opportunity to reconnect with my sister and my nephew, and that’s a story in itself, but it was good. No tragedies or drama involved, just walking through the old part of her town, choosing pastries, browsing in a book shop and a thrift store, and finding our way to the beautiful peaceful garden of a spiritual center, replete with a labyrinth. Like walking the labyrinth, my family relationships have involved turns and detours, but on this blue sky autumn day, I had a full circle feeling.

I wrote this to a friend the other day before I realized that I was also talking to myself:

You created a different kind of life, and over time you filled the hurt and hollow places with love. And you learned to mother, and came to understand what an active and expansive verb that can be. I think there needs to be some kind of retroactive settling in all our lives, an emancipation from the tyranny of linear time in which we accept the joy and the opportunities we have found and know that those who loved us are at peace and would be glad for us.

And so I met my ambiguous goal in Orange County: I revived happy memories, created some new ones, and didn’t feel sad. Love, as always, is the most potent force.

It’s raining now. I picture Venus at the freeway naked and wet, eyes downcast, her cryptic half-smile signifying nothing, the clamor of traffic all around.